A Dog Attack Outside Istanbul
Travel photos rarely capture the dangerous moments — the uncertainty, the chaos, the situations where things nearly go very wrong. For Andrew, one of those moments happened on the road just outside Istanbul.
He'd been riding toward the city for days, coming in from quieter rural roads. As he got closer, the traffic thickened, the roads narrowed, and the whole energy of the place shifted.
Then the dogs appeared.
Stray dogs are common in rural Turkey and the Balkans. They run in packs, they're territorial, and something about a moving cyclist seems to trigger their instinct to chase. Andrew was descending a hill at around 15 miles per hour when a group of them suddenly cut across the road. Cars were coming toward him from downhill, a vehicle was pulling out ahead, and a concrete drainage embankment hemmed him in on the right. He had nowhere to go.
"I was basically trapped," he said.
He veered right, the dogs pressed in, and he went straight into the embankment. The crash left road rash across his ribs, hands, elbows, and knees, and bent his steel handlebars nearly 45 degrees.
Locals rushed over immediately. The villagers cleaned his wounds, bandaged him up, and did whatever they could. "They felt terrible," he said. But beyond the physical pain, the moment rattled him — not because of the injuries themselves, but because of how suddenly vulnerable he felt. There's no support vehicle on a trip like this, no rescue team, no spare bike waiting somewhere. When something goes wrong, you deal with it yourself, right there on the side of the road.
Still bleeding, he got back on the bike. He had roughly 20 miles left to Istanbul, and with his palms torn open, every climb hurt. "I was yelling expletives into the air most of the way," he admitted.
When he finally reached a hotel outside the city, he gave himself permission to stop. He spent four days in Istanbul — eating warm meals, sleeping in a real bed, and simply existing among crowds and noise and civilization. It wasn't sightseeing so much as decompression, a chance to mentally reset before continuing east into Asia.
