After an uneventful (read: nauseating for Ali) hydrofoil trip back to the Turkish mainland we backtracked from Tasucu to Silifke. We had a date with an Eurasian Congress and needed to cover some quick kilometers by bus to make it in time.
We successfully killed 7 hours in Silifke with the following ingredients: One Internet cafe. Two books: News from Tartary and Kim. One heavily moustached barber and two delicious kebabs. In no time we were nestled in the bus, staring at our personal TV screens watching what we aptly named ‘bus-cam’. ‘Bus-Cam’ is only marginally better than watching Turkish sitcoms (in Turkish). Thankfully, our bus-driver harbours no desire to become a script-writer. We passed the night away with incredibly boring episodes.
We and our bikes were dislodged from our bus, literally on the verge of the highway at the turnoff to Berek. Berek is histrionic marsh-land whose beach front has been converted into 5 star resorts. It pains us to say that our 2nd Eurasian Congress of Emergency Medicine was taking place at one of the said resorts. It was sickeningly flash.
Here are our random thoughts on ED conferences in resorts:
- If you take one handful of figs from every buffet sitting you can leave with a mighty big bag of cycling snacks
- Ultrasound is the bomb
- All-you-can-eat buffets of damn fine food can rapidly undo 6000km of cycling touring
- Sharing a wild Turkish dance floor with Judith Tintinalli, Joe Lex and Janet Alteveer is indeed an honour
- You can’t hear the call to prayer when you’re deep within a golf-course resort
- You can get away with wearing your only pair of pants, your only shirt and a pair of keens to a formal Gala Dinner when you’re a cycle tourist (at an Emergency Med conference)
Cycling Summary 72km
Tasucu to Silifke 13km
Sirek to Berek conference resort 25km
In and around Berek 34km
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