You can’t really prepare for a 20,000 kilometre bike trip.

I mean, yes. Kit lists. Bags of spare parts. Visa prep. Route building. Which lights. How to handle electronics. Spreadsheets that make you feel in control until you leave the laptop behind. Charlotte and I let go of our flat in London. And our jobs, shortly after. We hugged our families and set off from Chamonix on the 15th of March. We’d prepared everything we could. The rest was a year of finding out.

It had just snowed the morning we left. The road was clear but the forest was white. Winter very much still here.

Moving wasn’t always straightforward. Puglia had crosswinds strong enough to keep us on the drops for hours, just to hold a straight line. Weather in the Balkans meant pushing harder than our legs wanted, or stopping earlier than our schedule allowed. Always at the mercy of whatever was coming in next. Albania started with mountains. The Epirus were not subtle about it.

By the time we reached Thessaloniki, the bikes were carrying the mileage too. A shifter broken, needing to be ordered and shipped ahead to Istanbul. A thru axle cracked. A bag lost somewhere on the road. Another one bitten into by a dog. Three days in the city fixing what could be fixed and ordering what couldn’t. The show had to stay on the road.

Crossing into Turkey, a group of old men nursing cigarettes and ouzo watched us from the Greek side of the border. Staring at our cycling kit as if they’d never seen anyone in a pair of bib shorts.

On the other side, we stopped for soup at a roadside cafeteria. Asked the waiter if he knew anyone who could host us in a town down the road. He left the room, came back with instructions: meet his friend Inan, at his sweet shop. Two hours later we arrived. Cheese halva, a tour of the town, dinner, drinks. A perfect introduction to what was coming.

The Anatolian Plateau was rolling green hills, tiny towns, a single mosque per village, the call carrying far across open land five times a day. Hours would pass without seeing another person. The wind carried manure constantly. The smell of the plateau.

But it kept giving something back.

Deep into a bonk, sixty kilometres past our last food stop, we knocked on a door. An old couple answered and seemed genuinely offended that we’d been allowed to get that hungry. Tea, bread, honey, vegetables from the garden. They didn’t stop until we were full. A police officer on holiday looped back on the motorway to hand us ice-cold tea through the window. A shopkeeper waved us in out of the snow without being asked and kept us sheltered through the night.

You can plan for a lot of things. You can’t plan for any of that.

We’re resting up before the push towards the Black Sea and the Georgian border. A new country ahead, but a month in Turkey behind us worth looking back on. It’s been a good one.

A note on the lights. The Knog Blinder 1400 up front and Blinder R-150 and Blinder X at the rear have been with us through all of it. Bad weather on the plateau, unlit Turkish tunnels where the traffic doesn’t slow down, and the chaos of Istanbul. Staying visible wasn’t optional.

Follow the rest of Nicholas Belissent & Charlotte Decau's journey on instagram.