In the last couple of days Mark has been cycling east through northern Turkey on a road which runs roughly parallel to and about 50 miles south of the Black Sea coast. ....
When I looked at the GPS tracker this morning, it was fairly clear that his route was virtually following the North Anatolian fault which I wrote about a couple of days ago. The line of the fault is quite visible on the image above. It is also clear that the terrain in this part of Turkey is very hilly and the going will be tough! 
Earlier today he passed close to the town of Calkara on the road which runs east - west on this map. Apart from the small area of flat land immediately around Calkara, the rest is verging on mountainous. Added to the relief is the problem of the temperature. I searched around a bit on the Internet and came across this temperature graph for the small airfield at Calkara....
It shows the temperatures over the last week and you can see that they peaked at around 32 degrees most day at noon!
By this evening the tracker and the map are showing Mark overnighting near Niksar. Now, maps are fine but it is difficult to get a real impression of the landscape from maps. However, some more 'surfing' has been quite productive... Wikipedia has quite a lot to say about Niksar 
and I found a lovely set of images by Dick Osseman of which these are just a sample...
and I found a lovely set of images by Dick Osseman of which these are just a sample...
Finally, there is a short video (of variable quality) on You Tube which gives a flavour of this city (the section on Niksar commences after about 30 seconds). It's amazing what you can find out using the Internet. Half an hour ago I had never even heard of Niksar!
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