The Silk Road

This is the view from the 5th floor restaurant of our hotel, where we ate breakfast this morning. I have included it because it shows a typical Turkish medium size town. Note the minarets on the mosque from which the population is called to prayer from loudspeakers several times each day. Gail counted nine minarets visible from the window.

Most of the housing is apartments and there are quite a few trees planted around town. Every town seems to have new apartment developments on the fringes and the whole country seems to be one big roadworks. In two years time when all the current roadworks have been completed this country will have a state of the art road system. But what they will do with all those roadworkers and all the machinery when they finish could be a problem.

We continued south alongside Lake Tuz again and slowly a range of snow clad mountains ahead of us got larger and larger. It was a strange feeling to realise that we were riding the route of the thousands of years old Silk Road. The trade goods are now on trucks instead of camel trains, and were on a motorcycle not a horse, but it still felt very special and the scenery of the lake and mountains must be just the same as it was back then.