When you think about Turkey as a country to visit, then it is probably the beaches and the palm trees that will come to your mind. But Turkey is much more than that and it is actually filled with huge mountain ranges with unbelievable potential for winter activities. Yet, Turkey still has only two handfuls of resorts for such sports as skiing and snowboarding. We visited three of these, two from the eastern and one from the western side of Turkey.
We arrived to Istanbul early in the morning and continued our journey with a domestic flight to Erzurum in eastern Turkey. Erzurum is next to Palandöken ski center and is located on a huge mountain plateau over 2000 meter above sea level.
First thing for a hungry traveler in Turkey is of course to find a decent kebab place. We found ours from the center of Erzurum and the durums were great. Durum is a wheat based flat jack with some similarity to tortillas and they fill them with all kinds of meat and vegetables. Really good eating for a very nice price, one costs you a little bit over a euro. We recommend that you top this with “Ayra”, a sour milk drink which is a very common drink here in Turkey.
After a good meal it was time to go get the lift tickets and a place to stay. We drove up to the Palandöken's main lift and started asking for help. All of us were stoked about all the snow and everything we saw, and it truly was a disappointment when the lady from the counter told us that the lifts are closed due to Universials. Universials are like the Olympics for the University students from across the world. It's held in Erzurum every year. So, it was a no go, and we decided to find a hotel from Erzurum and to come up with some new plan.
We found a hotel after maybe two hours of asking and driving around the city. It really is a good way to find decent priced hotels by going from door to door and asking for the price. We found the nice 3 star hotel for 150 TL, which is like 70 Euros per night, and the price was for the whole room. We searched the web for some nearby ski centers and found that there was one 150 kilometers from Erzurum. We figured that it would be worth it to go check it out in case we could find any good skiing from there.
Next morning after the breakfast we started our engines and turned our 4 wheeler towards the Sarigamis ski center. It really is a wise choice to spend a little more money on renting a car rather than just trusting the local transportation in these countries, because it really doesn't work at all. If you have any luggage, you can immediately forget getting on any bus, because they all are packed
We drove for two hours and I fell asleep. When I woke up everything looked different. The view was so similar to Lapland back in Finland that it really was a little confusing wake up for me. We got to Sarigamis at around noon, and the runs looked pretty mellow from the down station. We met the manager of the lifts and he was nice enough to give us free passes and to welcome us to his place.
After the first chair, things started to look more promising as the top part of the resort seemed to be a little steeper. We found some nice tree runs, which we filmed for the rest of the day. The runs were short, maybe 200 meters long, but the snow was good. It was the first actual powder skiing on the trip for us. The only bad thing was that the temperature was -15 degrees below, not good if you have wet gloves. Anyway, we got some really nice runs and footage, so it was time for some after ski. Not much of an after ski scene here as it seemed to be more like families having a soda and a café rather than young people, disco music and beer. Anyway, it was a good ending for the day, before the long drive back to Erzurum for the night.
In the evening we thought that we would drive back to Sarigamis the next day, but in the morning we decided to do something else. We bought flights to Istanbul as it seemed that the last week's snowstorms had hit better in the western side of Turkey. At around 3 o'clock we arrived back to Istanbul and we walked straight to the car rental counter. We wanted to use the same company as in Erzurum, but the guy behind the counter turned out to be a total asshole, so we changed the company to a better one, haha.
We got out of the airport at around five and started driving towards Bursa, which is the biggest town near Uludag, the resort we were heading to. I never could have even imagined how bad the traffic can be in Turkey. It took us a 4 and half hours to drive to Bursa and it is only 200 kilometers from Istanbul.
Uludag is in the end of one of the many big mountain ranges in Turkey. The next morning, when we were driving up the serpentine, a little fear started to lurk in to our minds as the snow level didn't seem to rise at all. Thank god it was only because we thought that we were in higher altitude than we really were.
After an hour drive, we finally arrived to Uludag, and there was a lot of snow. All the fear turned into joy and in our minds countless lines were drawn into the side of the mountains circling the Uludag ski center.
We searched for a parking spot, and quickly put on our gear and headed to the ticket office. The funny thing was that the guys from the lifts guided us to this one specific hotel to purchase our tickets, at that time I really didn't know why. Finally, we got the tickets in our hands and we were off to scouting the lines for the next day's filming. UIudag ski resort, as many others in Turkey, is filled with blue and red runs, but between those you can find nice steep runs for tree skiing.
Potential for even big mountain skiing exists, but due to the snow conditions at that time it was out of the choice. We went through the whole area and pin pointed a few spots. On our way back to the main village we shot some short pillow lines in the trees.
After some nice riding, it was once again time to find a hotel. At the moment I have totally lost count of in how many hotels we have been already. Anyway, we looked up a few, and Blumi found one for 100 Euros per person. Not cheap, but as skiing is a very high society and expensive sport in Turkey, the price was pretty ok. It even came with full board including all drinks, sauna and everything, so it was pretty suitable for three Finnish guys tired from five weeks of traveling. We chilled, took a sauna, had few beers, ate well and went to bed early to have the energy for the next day's filming.
The next morning the lift manager told us that it is ok for us to just go there and film, and that we don't need lift passes or anything anymore to get into the lifts. He told us that he is going to call the lift guys and tell them that we are here to film and that they need to give us a free entry to the lifts. Well, it didn't work as nicely as it sounded. In Uludag, all the lifts are owned by the hotels and different hotels have their own color coded lifts. So our guy was just a lift manager to this one hotel and we had no idea which color lifts we could use. Well, with some patience and Blumi's well-developed people skills, we managed to get in to the lifts that we needed.
Next we headed to the tree runs we had spotted the previous day and the snow was amazing. We all did maybe a dozen runs with a few jumps in every one and it was a wrap. It was easy to hike up after every run, because there was a lift line just next to them. And with all the trouble with the lifts it felt wiser to just hike up the runs rather than use the lifts for it.
After filming we only had to take some scenery footage and we were off to after ski. At first, we thought that it would be nice to spend one night partying in Bursa, but as we had to return our car the next day, we decided to drive back to Istanbul. The traffic really is a mess here and especially in the Istanbul area, and you have to drive all the way around the other end of the Marmara Sea to get to Istanbul. There are multiple ferries going across the bay, so it was an easy choice to use one of these to skip the 2 hour round tour around the bay. The ferry costs us about 30 Euros with the car, so it was totally worth it.
We arrived in Istanbul at one o'clock at night and found a nice hotel just 2 kilometers from the airport, where we had to drop our car the next day. Now I am writing this story from the lobby of this very same hotel and soon I have to go wrestling with some Turkish wrestlers, scary huh. In my next post you will hear how everything went in Istanbul.
Until then, peace out and see you soon.
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