The reunification and bus to Adana

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I woke early to try and get on the road to catch Spider. I sent him an email with the story.

With a hand-drawn map of how to get to Adana I set off for Nidge. I rode along the realtively flat ground making good time. But at the same time I was racked with thoughts of where the hell Spider was, how did we loose each other, and how hard had we stuffed up to get in this position so early in the game. My words of a few days ago echoed in my head 'if we can get the first few days through with plain sailing we'll be laughing' well things dont always work out the way one hopes.

After a long day of riding and thinikng each sign post, tree, barrell, turkish person was Spider I coasted to the outskirts of Nidge. I pulled into an orchid grove and struck camp. Probably not an ideal spot for sleeping as it was between the highway and a rail line. I had a feed and just before getting to sleep got a SMS from Spider. He told me where he was and what he was doing, well at least he was alive! I fell asleep feeling a bit better but still wondering at how we had stuffed up.

Had an ok sleep that was reguarly disturbed by the apocolyptic, earth rocking effects of trains rumbling by in the night. Note to self, don't camp 10m from a well used rail line again.

Took off in the morning for Nidge with the single thought of finding Spider. Left my gear at a nice old blokes store and went to a hire car shop. Hmmm, too expensive, taxi instead. We rocked down the highway and in 40 minutes had covered the same territory it had taken me almost all day to ride through. Off in the distance I spoted something in red and moving slowly. Red being an uncommon colour out here I started to get excited. Sure enough as we got closer Spider materialised! Happy days. We were both mega stoked to see each other and had a quick road-side debrief. (It seems he pulled into a school leaving his bike outside where he thought I would see it. I didnt, and continued to the next main turnoff and here we missed each other. Dang!)

We drove back to Nidge and put the gear in Abdullahs shop. He plied us with tea, and gave us a smashing lunch of kebap and salad. What a top guy he turned out to be. Absolutely wouldnt take payment from us.

After a chat we decided to hump a bus to Adana. For a couple of reasons. To get out of the freezing weather, make a bit of a fresh start, and more importantly to enable us to get to Beruit for New Years Eve!

So thats what we did.

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Photos

Good tea good times
A brief respite from the trials