After endless weeks and months of preparation for the big journey we have been planning for so long and telling all our friends about, we have finally put ourselves together and bought the tickets to fly to Turkey. We had been changing the plans so many times, trimming our gear list and postponing the departure day that it almost became unreal. At the end we realised that further preparation makes simply no sense – whenever we would leave, there will always be something to upgrade, new and better gear to buy or more things to get organized. Therefore we have decided that we have to leave at the end of April to manage to pass Turkey and Iran before the summer starts. The 23.04. became our official starting date – we bought the tickets for the flight from Hamburg to Ankara.

We gathered all the gear that we managed to buy so far. Now there was no way back – what goes with us will be on our bikes for the next months. It is a lot! But we know what we have and we know that we will use it all every single day.

To transport our precious bikes safely we had to spend long hours fitting them into our self made racks/cages. Both our bikes are equipped with S&S couplings, so we managed to pack them fairly small. It was a bit like puzzles – every part had to have the right place and there was not so much space available.

All we packed we could fit  into two 40 litres backpacks and two bicycle panniers. It is an unbelievable feeling to have so little and yet be sure, that it is enough to travel for a very long time in a nice and relatively comfortable way. Less is more!

After the arrival at the Ankara airport we had to spend almost half a day to unpack and put our beautiful bikes together.  It was a lot of work since we had to be sure, that every part is mounted correctly, every single screw tightened well enough.

The bikes were ready to go. So were we. Turkey – off we go!