Up at 0600 and on the road early, made up the miles we didn't do last night and were well on course when we stopped for an early lunch at 11.30. Nice up until then, and the roads were empty, but then it rained again, followed by thunder and lightening, so we let it pass and chatted to the garage people and drank tea with them before getting back on the road.
Several hours later, and still on course for Samsun, we pulled into a petrol station and noticed that my bike was dripping oil - badly.
We tightened up everything we could think of but it continued. We were inspected by every other person who came into the garage, and they all ooohed and ahhhed at the dripping bike, but nobody could help. So we sent a few hopeful texts to mates who might have an idea but couldn't get hold of anybody, so we rang Mehmet in Istanbul, who told us to stick some more oil in then get to the next town (Kastamonu, 60kms distant) where he would get somebody to help us.
But then it all went really wrong. The bike lost compression and could only limp forward, oil was dripping out of the exhaust pipe and clouds of white smoke belched forth with every revolution of the wheel. We had to stop every 20 kms to tip more in, and it took ages but we got there eventually and found Mehmet's friend Ihsan, who turned out to be a non bike riding, non English, French or German speaking artist, and a very nice man.
We had tea with him, then followed him to a teaching college halls of residence where he found us cheap accommodation for the night. The only problem was that he was on the bus which we had to follow on bikes - one by now smoking, stuttering and banging very badly - and had to stop at every bus stop on way, and got stared at by the whole town who must have wondered what on earth was going on.
But good old Mehmet had already found us a mechanic for the morning and Ihsan will take us to him by the same bike/bus malarky. Hopefully it will be something simple and easy to fix but this has seriously delayed our progress across Turkey and we're not sure how to make the time up to get to the Russian border in time, which is a bit of a bugger. Oh and I broke my new camera this morning - but think I've managed to fix it ok.
