Turkey by Motorcycle: Two Months Between Dark Canyon, the D915 and Cappadocia’s Balloons

Turkey by Motorcycle: How We Crossed the Border With No Plan at All

Turkey by motorcycle was never really the plan, at least not at the start. In fact, we reached the border the way we reach most borders these days: at the very last minute, without a fixed idea of what came next. After the Balkans, and a slow winter in Crete, we were ready to push east on Falkor. Our goal, eventually, was the Silk Road. First, though, we had to get there.

Getting there meant island-hopping across the Aegean on a string of ferries. We slept on marina docks in Athens one night, then finally found a seat on a tiny boat, the kind that only carries one or two cars and a couple of motorcycles, from Chios to Çeşme. We booked it forty-five minutes before departure, after a chance conversation with a Greek rider on the quay. That is often how our best days start.

This article is both the story of that crossing and a practical guide for anyone dreaming of a Turkey by motorcycle adventure of their own. Below, we walk you through the roads that stayed with us the longest: Dark Canyon, the legendary D915, the alternative track through Köprülü and Tazi Canyon, and of course Cappadocia. There, we ended up staying three weeks longer than planned, riding Falkor between hot air balloons at sunrise. If you already know our journey, you might remember our time crossing Russia on our way to Kazakhstan, or our days on the Pamir Highway. Turkey came before all of that, and in many ways, it set the tone for everything that followed.

Çeşme surprised us immediately. After months in Greece, the clean streets, modern buildings and gleaming cars felt like stepping into a different world entirely. Afterward, we spent two quiet days in nearby Alaçatı, still half asleep before the summer season. Meanwhile, we were adjusting to a country that would turn out to be roughly nineteen times the size of Switzerland. The stray dogs we had been warned about were everywhere. However, they were gentle, and within days they stopped feeling like something to fear. Overall, this first taste of Turkey by motorcycle already felt different from anything before it.

Turkey by Motorcycle: From Ancient Ruins to Turquoise Water

Our first real stop, Selçuk, sits on top of what was once one of the most prosperous cities of Asia. This is Ephesus, home to a temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis. The site is vast, so we spent close to four hours walking it with an audio guide. Afterward, we tried an unexpectedly immersive digital experience, one that projects the reconstructed city onto the walls of a nearby building, included in the entrance ticket. From there, just thirty minutes on foot from the town center, the ruins of Ephesus remain one of the essential stops for any first-time visitor to Turkey.

Pamukkale’s White Terraces

Next came Pamukkale, the white travertine terraces that look, quite honestly, like something out of a fantasy film. Entrance costs around 35 euros, including the ruins of Hierapolis, with the thermal baths as a small extra. We spent an entire day walking barefoot across the white formations. We also went swimming in the same thermal pools where, legend has it, Cleopatra once bathed. Because we arrived early, we had most of the site to ourselves, well before the tour buses caught up.

Bozburun and Fethiye: Family Connections at the End of the World

From there, we turned toward Bozburun, chasing a family connection, the uncle of a friend living at what locals call the end of the world. The road past Marmaris narrows into a single winding line through pine forests. Eventually, there is simply nowhere else to go. We were welcomed with tea, homemade pasta, live Turkish songs and a sunset from a self-made restaurant-museum. Its owner spends his evenings watching The Godfather on a cathode-tube television. Then, in Fethiye, a friend of a friend named Serkan opened his home to us for two days. He also took us to a free thermal spring near Dalaman, and drove us out to the postcard-blue waters of Ölüdeniz.

Kaş: When a Week Turns Into Ten Days

Kaş became one of those places where time seems to stretch. A week-long Workaway exchange at Can Mocamp turned into daily meetups with a French van couple we had just missed in Crete. In addition, we went on an underwater dive through a canyon and a flooded tank. Memorably, a small octopus hitched a ride in a diving vest for thirty-eight minutes before biting a finger on the way out. If you continue south along the coast from here, the multi-day Lycian Way hiking trail follows the same coastline all the way to Antalya.

Off the GPS: A Hidden Backroad Made for Turkey by Motorcycle

We had marked Köprülü Canyon on the map long before crossing into Turkey. Camping above its bridge, then walking to the viewpoint the next morning, did not disappoint, even with the tour buggies stopping in convoy. A little further, at Tazi Canyon, we tasted our first gözleme, the savory Turkish crepe usually filled with spinach and cheese. It would become a daily ritual for the rest of the trip. Rather than backtrack the way we came, our GPS found a small alternative track heading northwest toward Lake Beyşehir. Mostly gravel, it cuts through spring-green forest, until a rockslide forced Falkor to thread a path between boulders, centimeter by centimeter. In the end, it turned out to be one of the most rewarding backroads of the entire crossing, one we would not have found without letting go of the direct route.

A Night in Konya, Home of the Whirling Dervishes

That same evening, we reached Konya, the historic home of the Mevlevi order and its whirling dervishes. As luck would have it, we arrived on a Saturday. Two hours later, we were sitting in the gallery of a circular hall built specifically for their Sema ceremony. We watched dancers spin without pause to live traditional music, on the final night of Ramadan, with the whole city glowing around us.

Lake Tuz: A Different Kind of Silence

We convinced our van friends to make one more detour before Cappadocia: Lake Tuz, Turkey’s great salt lake. It is crossed by a single gravel road through fields, with wind strong enough to feel like kitesurfing. The landscape is so pale and pure that it felt like a small preview of Bolivia’s salt flats. Flamingos lined the shore at sunset. Despite a nervous night with barking sheepdogs nearby, we still slept like babies.

Riding Turkey by Motorcycle Through Cappadocia’s Balloons

Cappadocia is the kind of place where everyone says wow, and then keeps saying it. We arrived under a torrential downpour, and ducked into a cave hotel that turned out to leak straight onto our pillows. At that point, we had no idea we were about to stay nearly three weeks longer than planned. Everything here feels larger than life: the rock formations, the balloons drifting just above our heads at sunrise, the quad bikes buzzing past, the dogs, and the caves carved into the landscape itself.

Three Weeks of Valleys, Caves and Family

With three full weeks, we explored Ortahisar, Ürgüp, Avanos, Uçhisar, Çavuşin and Göreme. We also hiked through the Red, Rose, Love, Pigeon and Ihlara valleys, until our legs gave up before we did. In addition, we tried our hand at pottery in Avanos, and soaked in a free thermal pool near Selime. Meanwhile, Vins’s mother flew in to join us for two weeks, walking through a landscape she had dreamed about for years, a rare and precious kind of reunion when your family lives far from the road. We chose not to fly in a balloon or rent a quad, since Falkor was already our way of experiencing it all. However, we did descend eighteen floors underground into Derinkuyu, once home to as many as twenty thousand people hiding from invasion, its tunnels deliberately narrow to slow down anyone chasing them.

Hatay After the Earthquake: A Different Side of Turkey by Motorcycle

Leaving Cappadocia was hard, harder than we expected. Next, we headed south into a very different Turkey, near the Syrian border, through the region devastated by the February 2023 earthquake. For nine days, we stayed with Merlin, a Workaway host who had run a campsite for fifteen years before the earthquake pushed him to close it. We helped him clear branches and debris, while he shared his skills in carpentry, electronics and boat building. For the first time in two and a half years of travel, a land border sat this close and remained completely closed to us, a strange and humbling realization about the privilege our passports carry.

Gaziantep: Turkey’s Capital of Gastronomy

From there, Gaziantep, known locally as Antep, gave us our first true taste of the Orient: ancient caravanserais, copper bazaars, and enough pistachio-based sweets to last the rest of the year. Nearby, Antioch, the historic Silk Road city we had hoped to explore, had been almost entirely leveled by the earthquake, a sobering contrast to Antep’s still-standing walls.

Nemrut Dağı, Malatya and the Road Toward the Black Sea

Nemrut Dağı promised ancient stone statues at the summit. Instead, it delivered a wall of cloud, thunder and hail so intense that we sheltered for two hours in a guard’s cabin, drinking tea. Once the storm cleared, the statues felt even more mystical for the wait. On the way down, we warmed up with a Swiss cyclist couple nine months into their own journey. Then, again, with Swiss van travelers who handed us hot tea when Vins could no longer feel his hands.

Malatya and the Road to Kemaliye

Malatya gave us one well-earned night in a hotel with a spa. Afterward, the road toward Kemaliye rewarded us with rollers, the bird, not the surname, lining the electrical wires the whole way.

Dark Canyon: The Best Kept Secret of Turkey by Motorcycle

If you take away one road recommendation from this entire guide, make it this one. Dark Canyon, near the village of Kemaliye, is barely eight kilometers long. Under normal conditions, it takes thirty minutes to ride. We, however, spent an hour and a half there, unwilling to leave. The village itself, all wooden houses clinging to the mountainside, felt closer to Nepal than to anywhere else we had seen in Turkey. There, we found a family-run guesthouse with a garden of elderflower and fresh fruit, Falkor parked at the top of the steepest driveway we have ever climbed.

The road hugs the edge of a gorge as the river below carves through the rock, passing through a striking number of tunnels blasted straight into the cliff face. Nothing about it is technically demanding: the surface is good, and the pace is gentle. Still, the light at the end of the day, pouring straight down the gorge, makes it one of the most photogenic rides in the country. The next morning, we shared breakfast with fellow riders and our hosts, who for once sat down and ate with us instead of serving from the side.

The D915: The Most Legendary Road for Turkey by Motorcycle

Vins had been researching the D915 for weeks before we ever reached it. Yet on the day itself, our GPS quietly rerouted us around the pass entirely, avoiding what both apps flagged as dangerous. An hour in, we noticed, and nearly gave up on riding it at all. Because we had left early that morning, though, we had just enough daylight to backtrack to the coast. Instead, we approached the pass from the north, near Lake Uzungöl, despite three separate locals warning us away from what they called the road of death.

What we found was a gravel track climbing through a green, wild valley that felt remarkably like the Swiss Alps. Patches of snow still clung to the slopes, raptors circled overhead, and the switchbacks were built on solid, well-packed earth rather than loose rock. Past the summit, a high plateau opens up before a wind farm marks the final descent toward Uzungöl. Google Maps insisted the road was closed the entire way down, colored red on the screen. Nevertheless, the surface had clearly been resurfaced recently, and gave us no trouble at all.

We ended our two months the way we like to end most chapters, slowly. A last night among the tea plantations of Ardeşen, watching pickers work the slopes above the Black Sea, a long lunch at the top of Rize, and a small riverside campsite run by a woman whose warmth felt like the perfect final memory of a country that had, without us planning any of it, become one of our favorites so far.

Budget, Timing and Tips for Riding Turkey by Motorcycle

Turkey rewards travelers who slow down and follow local advice over app-generated routes, and it remains, overall, an affordable country by European standards, with entrance fees at major sites the main real expense.

The Hard Moments We Don’t Always Show

What We’ll Remember Most From Turkey

Two Months of Turkey, in Photos

Why Turkey Deserves More Than a Quick Crossing

We arrived in Turkey planning to pass through on our way to the Caucasus and Central Asia, and we left two months later having barely scratched the surface. Between the Aegean coast, the underground cities of Cappadocia, a road through Dark Canyon we still think about, and a mountain pass everyone told us to avoid, Turkey turned out to be far more than a corridor toward the Silk Road. If you are planning a similar route, our next chapters covered the transit through Russia into Kazakhstan, the Mangystau desert, and eventually the Pamir Highway. For the full day-by-day account with every stop mapped out, our complete diary lives on Polarsteps.

You can also follow how this journey began in our Year 3 chronicle, or see where it led by Year 4 in our Pamir to Taiwan recap. If you are curious about the gear that got us through, our Insta360 camera review and Carpuride W702 Pro review cover what we actually used on the road.