Malatya to Kahta, Turkey

Monday 16 April 2007

It's a bright sunny morning despite the forecast and reassured by a local tour guide we make straight for the mountain road to Mount Nemrud, our fourth UNESCO site in Turkey. It's a long climb with magnificent views over the valleys, through fields of cherry and apple blossom, poplars coming into leaf and amazingly green cereal crop which seems too green and dense for wheat, but maybe that’s just Australian wheat.

After about 80kms the road leaves civilisation behind and ascends the north side of Mt Nemrut through a series of hairpins. The amount of snow increases rapidly but progress is good in the tracks of a snowplough until about 1850m when we run into new snow which has drifted across the road and its apparent that no one has been this way for a some days. Soon we are at a point where we can go no further, but unfortunately we can’t seem to go back either as we’ve reversed too close to the wall of snow on the uphill side and can’t turn. With one wheel skidding on the ice we are stuck and its clouding over. We try hacking the wall of snow with the wheel wrench but to no avail, its a metre deep and frozen solid, we try putting the car mats under the tyres but they just shoot out backwards, we try letting the tyres down but it doesn’t help either, we even take turns to push but fat lot of use that is. The more we side backwards the more the car gets embedded in the wall of snow and the more the wing mirror bends and the door panel gests pushes in. Running out of ideas we decide the only option is to burn rubber and hope that the heat will melt enough ice to give us some traction – its moments like these when you need a 4wd. Finally after what seems like an hour we manage to move two centimetres uphill which is sufficient to escape being frozen to death. We can now move the car far enough away from the wall of snow to be able to back down round the bend and reverse down several hairpins until there’s room to turn round. Then its back all the way to Matalya in an abortive trip reminiscent of that from the Swat to the KKH in Pakistan (for anyone whos followed the blog). Miraculously the car doesn’t appear damaged although we hope the car hire co doesn’t inspect it too closely (or read blogs). The GPS indicates we were less than 3km from the top.

Then it’s round the long (200km) way to the south side of the mountain as we are on a mission, despite the guide book saying the sites only open from May to September. We’ve established from taking to the National Parks man using our best French that the road on the southern side is clear. The long way round entails some 300km drive to Kahta which we reach by 7pm where we find a very comfortable hotel. Dinner is at a pide and kebab place nearby where we watch the baker making the bread in a wood fire oven, which is served by the metre.