To everyone who’s been following us on our journey – thank you so much for all your support. This is a really quick post to say that we’ve made it back home in one piece and will start the mammoth job of editing all our material and start posting more stuff again soon – stay tuned and thanks again!

Once more we are travelling west along the North Anatolian Fault, and our destination is the Mudurnu valley- a beautiful, peaceful landscape of mist-filled mountains and serene lakes and valleys created by the fault line.

En route we stop off in Bolu. In the main street we are somewhat surprised to come across street sellers preparing and selling fleshy pink mushrooms, which at first glance look like prawns rather than funghi.

We wind our way up into the mountains, and as we drive through the thick forest around Lake Abant we feel we have to stop off at one of the road-side barbecues and try these strange looking wild mushrooms for ourselves. They’re hot and salty, with a rather strange spongy, firm texture. Not unpleasant, but definitely an acquired taste.

In 1967 an earthquake in Mudurnu valley measuring 7.1m killed 894 people and destroyed 5,000 houses. This was the penultimate earthquake in the series we have followed from east to west starting in 1939 in Erzincan, occuring before the Izmit and Duzce quakes in 1999.

What is becoming apparent to us as we travel further east along the North Anatolian Fault is the sheer scale of the area and number of people affected by it’s presence. We have driven for days across an expansive and much changing landscape, and whilst the urban connubations are few and far between, there are small villages and towns littered everywhere- each with their own individual character and way of life. Many of these places have experienced earthquakes caused by the fault line, and live in the shadow of the possibility that they will happen again soon.

We are now at Niksar – a bustling town which has been settled for many centuries by everyone from the Hittites to the Romans to the Ottomans. Today this can still be seen in the architecture, and the town has the feel of somewhere that has been established for a long time. There is still a number of traditional wooden Ottoman houses here.

Again, the abundance of agriculture here is in evidence – not only fruit and vegetables are produced here, but also delicious honey and walnuts, for which Niksar is famed.

In 1942 Niksar and nearby Erbaa experienced an earthquake of 7.0m causing 3,000 casualties. This occurred immediately to the west of the rupture zone of the 1939 Erzincan earthquake, following the trail of earthquakes from east to west along the North Anatolian Fault Line. Once more there is little evidence of this cataclysmic event in present day Niksar, and it seems consigned to being another footnote in the long history of the town. As we head off into the sunset, we are again reminded of how in time people can recover and rebuild after these traumatic events.

Big maps and small maps.
Big maps have lots of detail, but inside a car they are like trying to put up an umbrella through a letterbox. Small maps don’t stop you seeing out the windscreen, but mean there are lots of times you don’t appear to be going anywhere and lots of roads that should be there that aren’t. The one thing you can guarantee is that whichever map you need at any given time, you’ll have the other one on your knee and the required one underneath the barbecue in the bottom of the boot.

Rogue bags.
The rogue bag is the thin end of the wedge as far as the discipline of packing goes. One of these and the whole house of cards comes down. The next thing is you have piles of random stuff without homes that won’t go in anywhere. Much effort is needed to eliminate these and stop them creeping back in after they have been stamped out.

Dogs.
Now, let’s be sure that we aren’t misunderstood here. We love dogs. A lot. An awful lot. However, some of the snarling beasts that have seen us on our way past their gates as we trot out on our early morning run have not been of the variety that you want curled up on your slippers of an evening. On the plus side, they have given us a reason to canter just a little bit faster.

Towels.
A breeding ground for a plethora of communicable diseases, these are often found spread out like damp ghosts in the boot in a vain attempt to dry them.

Receipts.
You feel like you should keep them, although you’re not sure for what. Wedged together and generally indecipherable, they simply serve to remind you that the Euro is much stronger against the pound than you would like.

Shoes.
Same shoes, different day. We only bought along two pairs of shoes each, and we can safely say that we are all fed up of them. Couple that with the distinct lack of clean never mind about matching socks and you have a rather distasteful below ankle situation.

Tolls.
Yet more paper, closely related to the receipt (see above). We’re not really used to these back home, but when you are driving long distances across Europe and want to use half decent roads they are a necessary evil, and they do certainly add up. Greece may be the crucible of modern democracy, but there doesn’t seem anything fair about the road charges around the capital. So much so that protesting locals have been known to set fire to the toll booths. We could have easily helped them start the fire with this sheaf of toll tickets we accrued in a few days around around Athens.

Ratchet Straps.
It’s a love/hate relationship with the ratchet strap. On the one hand, they are amazing at keeping all manner of things pegged down on the roof and stopping you littering your smalls all over the Autobahn. However they are also equally brilliant at taking chunks out of your knuckles as you try and undo them on a chilly Icelandic morning.

Cay (Turkish Tea)
We actually love this, and the generosity of the Turks at dishing it out at every available opportunity (we’ve been given it at every petrol station, in corner shops and by random people in the street) is admirable. However, we do find that it means we have to make one or two more comfort breaks that we otherwise would, often leading to us being offered more tea, and so the cycle continues…

Dog/Tractor.
The best game ever ever in the history of everything to play on any drive is Dog/Tractor. Brilliantly simple yet endlessly entertaining, the rules are easy. Every time you see either a dog or (you guessed it) a tractor, you shout out “Dog!” or “Tractor!”, depending which of them you have spied. Whoever spots the most dogs and/or tractors wins a treat at the end of the day – choosing where to camp, having their tent put up for them, extra ice cream, something like that. However, on our current trip this game has been somewhat sabotaged by the sheer numbers of both dogs and tractors we have seen, rendering it almost impossible to do anything else but spend all day shouting about dogs and tractors like a stuck record. Pah.

Lists.
The paper trail continues. Lists provide some sort of way of trying to be organised in the shifting sands of things to do, places to go, people to see. This is a good thing. And you get to use some nice pens as well – thick ones for crossing out and orange ones for highlighting things of urgency. However, lists do have a rather annoying habit of having to have two things added on the the bottom for every one thing that gets crossed off the top.

Rain.
There we were, with visions of ourselves swanning around the Peloponnese in our shirt sleeves pretending not to gloat that the clocks were about to go back in Blighty. However, it was not always to be. We have had more than our fair share of rain along the way, often from countries which frankly should know better. Harumph.

Thank you for listening to our little moan. We feel much better now.

We expected the huge mountain ranges and the wide open spaces in this part of Turkey, but what we didn’t reckon on was just how much agriculture would play a part here. This is a much greener and less arid part of turkey than further east, and it is a hive of farming industry. The hard shoulder of the newer stretches of road are given up to cheerful tractor drivers, ferrying about fantastic juicy fruit and vibrantly coloured vegetables.

Whilst much of the work is done by less mechanised methods (and it does look like hard graft), farming here is on an impressively large scale. Vast piles of produce line the sides of the roads, and as you travel down the road you get the impression each area has its own specialism. First it’s swedes, then it’s giant cabbages, followed by an abundance of apples.

In fact, since 1980 Turkey has been self sufficient in food production – only one of seven countries in the world to achieve this. Despite the agricultural industry slowly increasing since the 80s, it has been declining proportionate to the overall economy. The government are encouraging agriculture and investment in this part of the world by issuing loans for agriculture with negative interest. That, along with the ambitious Southeastern Anatolian Project (a series of 22 hydro-electric dams) will hopefully ensure a bright future for the farmers in this area. This is one of the conundrums of living on the fault line. A seismic landscape is mountainous, but where you have mountains you also have fertile lake beds, valleys and an abundance of water. And hence the benefits of fault line living can outweigh the disadvantages.

The weather is suitably broody as we head in a loop south from Erzincan, where we reach the Karliova triple junction – an area of unprecedented seismic activity where the Anatolian, Eurasian and Arabian tectonic plates meet. Many of the small rural villages in this area have experienced large earthquakes in recent history. The landscape is open and dramatic, the long, sweeping mountains a testament of the regions seismic past.

Most recently, the tiny villages of Basyurt and Ockular were hit by a 6.0m earthquake in the province of Elazig in the early hours of March 8th this year. The kurdish village of Ockular was largely destroyed, experiencing over a hundred aftershocks. There were 51 deaths in the area, many of which were blamed on the regions mud brick houses.

Further into our journey we visit the city of Bingol which was struck by a 6.4-magnitude earthquake in 2003 killed 177 people, including 84 children whose school dormitory collapsed. It’s hard to believe that many of the buildings we see here can resist an earthquake of this kind of size in the future, or that newly buildings are constructed in such a way as to be resistant to damage.

Later on we visited the town of Karliova which had been hit by a 7.1m earthquake back in 1949. Today Karliova is an energetic, friendly little town, showing little evidence of it’s turbulent past. Our aim with this project was always to see how everyday life is affected by the on-going threat of earthquakes. Realistically these places only come onto the radar in the event of a disaster, but for us it’s a privilege to see these people going about their everyday business.

Following the North Anatolian fault westwards, in line with the series of earthquakes that are slowly moving in the same direction, we stopped at the city of Erzincan.

Sitting firmly on the fault line, in 1939 Erzincan experienced seven tremors, the largest of which measured 8.2m on the Richter scale – the largest earthquake in Turkey in modern times, killing 33,000 people.

The damage to the city was so extensive that the city had to be completely abandoned and the city we now see today was founded a little further to the north. We couldn’t find any remains of the old city.
Erzincan also suffered a second major earthquake in 1992, measuring 6.2m in which 498 people lost their lives. As ever on this trip we are amazed at the tenacity and strength of people living on fault lines.

We’ve decided to take advantage of being so far east and drive a little further north towards Armenia and Georgia, into the spectacular Kackar mountains. This area once belonged to the Kingdom of Georgia so it feels quite different from the rest of Turkey. Map reading can be a bit tricky as lots of the places still have Georgian names as well as their Turkish ones.

We’re now in the highest part of the mountain range created by Turkey’s fault lines and it shows. Wooden villages are perched precariously on the steep mountain sides and you ain’t no one in Kackar without an elaborate winching system (or telepherique as they call it up here) to get your Ocado bags up to the front door.

The locals are super friendly, if somewhat bemused. They normally only get the occasional Austrian hiker and were keen to show us some trails. No doing we said…where we go, Lottie goes.

Hurtling towards Iran and we’ve been keeping a steady eye on Ahmadinejad’s antics. Unfortunately in the past few weeks his inappropriate comments at the UN and the ongoing nuclear debate mean British-Iranian relations are at a pretty all time low. The official FCO policy is that it’s fine to go into Iran as a tourist but it’s hard to pass off as a tourist in a car like Lottie stuffed full of suspicious looking gear (like our BGS seismometer – strangely branded Houston Space Agency). As elsewhere the issue of earthquakes in Iran isn’t without its own set of political complications. After many of our own mini summits we’ve decided not to go to Iran.

So Erzurum is as far East as we’re going to travel.

The East West divide is stark in Turkey. The government are trying to combat that by improving the road system on a grand scale, and every time we look out of the windows there’s another dam like the one below being built to produce hydro electricity.

If you’re looking for a tax haven, Eastern Turkey could be for you. There’s nowhere for your yacht but you won’t pay a penny out here.

Despite the government incentives the landscape is still virtually pristine but the area seems overlooked by most tourists. It’s a vast, open and beautiful place a million miles away from the bustling streets of Istanbul. If you’re into your DIY, there’s lots of opportunities here for a nice fixer-upper.

Lottie has been battling with the foggiest fog and rainiest rain we’ve ever seen in this rugged hinterland. It’s a totally different Turkey than we imagined and although we’re sad not to be going to Iran this equally intriguing place is going some way to compensate. And lest we forget why we’re here…yes you’ve got it it’s all down to the fault lines. And the town has experienced major earthquakes in 1859 and as recently as 1983.

Slippers and Socks.
It may sound obvious, but on a trip like this you miss your home comforts. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything especially luxurious, but rather something you would normally take for granted – maybe a clean T-shirt or some hair conditioner. Real luxury is to take this a step further – box-fresh slippers and a pair of new Icelandic Angora socks can feel like a weekend in a five star spa. Bliss.

Turkish Cotton Candy.
In this global day and age, it is really quite difficult to come across anything genuinely different. But as far as it goes, we can safely say we have never tasted anything quite like this candy from Ismit, which apparently is in the Guinness Book of Records (although we’re not sure for what). Surely invented by the Turkish Willie Wonka and defying all logic, when you put this in your mouth it’s crumbly like digestive biscuits with a bit of halva and the taste of candy floss. Confusing it may be, but we reckon it has to be the most
fun thing we have ever eaten.

Gaffer Tape and WD40.
Someone much handier with a spanner than us once told us that you only really one of two things to fix anything. Gaffer tape for things that move that shouldn’t, and WD40 for things that don’t move that should.

Mountain Equipment Jackets.
We expected that the time that we would be wettest and coldest would be out in the great wide open on some windswept broody crag in the middle of nowhere. However, we can tell you that on the ferry to Iceland around about the Faroe Islands is one of the windiest and wettest places we have ever been. The horizontal rain a stern test for our outer layers and the whipping wind equally asking questions of the permaloft coats and fleeces, we were seriously impressed by how admirably they coped.

Italian Pronunciation.
An ongoing source of discussion en route has been whether the voice of our Garmin is the bloke off ‘The Weakest Link’ – “Martin is the strongest link with the most correct answers. At the next roundabout take the third exit”. Even more entertaining has been the pronunciation of some of the more challenging Italian street names, occasionally sounding like a cross between Peter Kay and Trevor McDonald.

Jimmy Bo Crumpler Bag.
The search for the perfect camera bag is over, after 30 years of disappointment. Tough, waterproof and extremely usable, this bag can be worn over the shoulder or round the waist for the market trader feel. Either way, it’s big enough to get everything in with great access, but doesn’t drag you down when clambering up to a fault line.

Fishing Nets.
Whilst the tadpoling has been sadly lacking so far, these fishing nets have proved to be an unexpectedly useful form of support when wading Icelandic river crossings.

Mini wind-up torch.
This was a last minute buy in Decathlon. Cheap as chips but brilliant as it has no batteries and is very satisfying to wind up. Makes a nice noise,too. Because it’s so small it’s always in your pocket, so when it gets suddenly dark you don’t have to go rummaging in the bag for a torch which will inevitably be in the bottom of a bag ratchet strapped onto the roof anyway.

Roof lights.
We suppose originally these were intended for something exotic like lighting up the darkest corners of the bush on the search for lesser spotted possums. But we have to say that they have been absolutely invaluable in the deserted mountains of the darkest parts of North Anatolia.

Plastic Zip Loc Bags.
These are brilliant. Used receipts, cables and chargers, passports, loose change, stationery – all of them can be given a sheen of organisation with a Zip Loc bag. We’re even using one for a wash bag following several bids for freedom by the toothpaste.

Deckchair.
At the start of a trip we had two chairs and three people, creating a sort of impromptu musical chairs scenario most evenings. However, The Lord will provide, and we came across this wonderful little chair abandoned in a campsite in Denmark. Looks great and well comfortable, they don’t make them like this anymore.

Octopus.
On first inspection, this didn’t appear to be the most appetizing of dishes. But the proof of the tentacle is in the eating, and it was in fact a delight of melt-in the-mouth delicious butteriness and easily the best thing we’ve eaten so far.

Inflatable crocodile.
The most common piece of advice we received before we left was to travel light. Pack only essential items, and pare everything down the absolute minimum, as every bit of space and weight is critical. We ignored that and brought along this inflatable crocodile and it was well worth it.