Today’s walk is 32 km (20 miles), starting at the provincial border between Urfa and Diyarbakır, and ending at the village of Tokaçlı.

The temperature is 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), and the crosswind so strong the bus is shuddering and the bus door won’t open until the attendant rams his shoulder into it.

When I step out of the bus into the freezing wind, all I can hear is my brain yelling at me to “go! go! go!”, not “stop and take a photo.” I usually take photos of the road signs at provincial borders, but I glance at the sign and decide not to today. To keep from getting blown over while I walk, I lean hard to the side. I gaze out at the windswept plain. It is barren, just like I feel inside.

I’m not bored, though. I only feel bored when I am looking for distraction. If I were looking for distraction I would be tremendously bored, since for the next six hours I will do nothing but walk on this windswept plain. But I’m not looking for distraction. I know from experience that there is nothingover the next hill. There’s only another hill. So I empty my head and bang out the kilometers.

A man who I think is a shepherd waves me over to a small stone shelter next to the road. I eagerly head in his direction.

“Roj baş,” I say as I duck into the door and hide from the wind. Greetings.

“Roj baş,” he smiles and says back.

He motions me further into the shelter and invites me to sit down for tea. I sit down next to the stove and warm my hands.

When my eyes adjust to the darkness I notice there is another man standing near the door. The shepherd introduces him. They are friends. The friend and I greet each other. Roj baş.

The friend is brewing tea. He points to the kettle. “It’s not ready yet,” he says. “Give it a few more minutes.”

A random thought flashes through my mind: Where are the sheep? I didn’t see any sheep outside. Aren’t these guys shepherds?

I take a closer look around the room and see a half-dozen automatic rifles leaning against the wall.

I didn’t know shepherds carry automatic rifles.

I look at the shepherds a little closer. They are wearing camouflage fatigues and headscarves.

Wait a minute, a voice in my head tells me. These aren’t shepherds.

I stand up. I don’t know where their loyalties lie. I don’t want to. I tell them I’d like a rain check on the tea and that I really must be going.

We shake hands, say our goodbyes, and I head back out into the wind.

Thursday, 7 March

Today is the last leg of my walk into Diyarbakir. I hop a bus to where I left off yesterday so I can walk the 30 kilometers back into Diyarbakir.

I climb down off the bus and take out my writing stuff. The clean whiteboard I used to use for my daily dedications is gone now, crushed by the other things in my backpack. I discarded it about 300 miles ago. Now I write my daily dedications on scraps of paper.

A memory has popped into my head and I dedicate the day to Bill Munn, a friend of mine from my teenage days. I stand by the side of the road and write the memory on paper so I can type it into my computer later:

When I was 15 I lived in Visalia, California. On Saturday mornings a bunch of us would ride our bicycles to Rocky Hill, one of the foothills of the Sierras.

By the time he came to a full stop he had pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, lit it, and started puffing away.

I notice that while I’ve been writing in my notebook I’ve been standing in front of a police station. I figure I have mere seconds before the cops show up to find out what I’m doing. Sure enough, three of them appear as I close my notebook. They greet me and pat me down. They check my documents and rifle through my notebook.

“Who is Bill Munn?” they ask, pointing to his name on the page, perhaps suspecting that he is a spy higher up in the organization.

“An old friend of mine.”

They eye me suspiciously and hand the notebook back to me. I say thanks, turn around, and begin my walk for the day.

Six hours later I walk into Diyarbakir. I stop briefly to take a photo of the city limit sign: Diyarbakır, population 875,000.

Over the past 7 days I have walked from Şanlıurfa to Diyarbakır. 185 kilometers, or 115 miles. I suspect I am tired, but I also suspect that if I were tired I would not know it. So now that 77% of the walk is done, I will be taking 3 days off.I will be visiting a school, and I’ll also have two days of napping and eating. I might try to catch a movie too. I don’t watch too many movies these days.

Friday, 8 March

I spend the day at Rekabet Kurumu Cumhuriyet Fen Lisesi, a science-focused high school in Diyarbakır. I am a guest of Nazile Çelik, one of the school’s English teachers. She is a friend of my hosts in Diyarbakır.

This particular school is pretty competitive. The students have to pass a special exam to enter, and then once they’re in, they not only go to school during the week, they also take 4 hours of additional classes at private study schools on Saturdays AND on Sundays. Chess, table tennis, and volleyball seem to be the most popular extra-curricular activities. Almost half of the students want to be doctors.

Visiting schools is exhausting for me, but it is, hands down, my favorite activity on the trip. If I had the invitations, and the endurance, I would spend every single spare moment of this trip visiting schools. I don’t care if they are primary schools, middle schools, high schools, or universities. I LOVE visiting schools.
The students get excited, and I get confused and overwhelmed, and in the hallways a million people talk to me at once and I don’t know who to focus on. But once I get in front of a class and start talking with the students the rest of the world falls away. It’s just me and the students in front of me.

Saturday, 9 March, and Sunday, 10 March

I spend one of the days touring Diyarbakır with four students of Nazile Çelik: a young man named Diyar, and three young women named Esgi, Esra, and Aysel. We climb around on the city walls, visit the city’s four-footed minaret, and relax with a hot cup of menengiç, a hot drink made with terebinth berries, in one of the old town squares.

I spend part of the other rest day helping my host with the ironing. Some people, like my host, hate ironing. I love it. It brings me peace.

I spend the rest of the time sleeping and eating. My host asks me if I want to go out and explore. I say no, I do enough of that these days. I just want to rest, thank you.

Monday, 11 March

On the walk today a man asks me, “What’s this region was called?”

There are a couple possible answers to that question, and for those answers wars have been fought, and are still being fought, and people give, and take, lives.

I don’t want to get involved. It’s not my fight. I just want to finish walking across the country. So I answer the best I can: I smile and say, “I don’t know, you tell me.”

He smiles back and declines to answer, too.

The day is sunny and warm with big blue skies. There is no wind. Rolling hills as far as the eye can see, with a change in the ground cover now. West of Diyarbakir the land was covered with rocks and was used only for grazing. East of Diyarbakir it’s the opposite: no rocks, and all farming. Mostly wheat, barley, and lentils. Fresh green sprouting grasses cover the rolling hills. Last time I saw a wheat field was in December and it was brown.

I stop for lunch at the Ortaçlar Petrol in the village of Köprübaşı (“Bridge Head”). Lunch is two ice creams, a bag of nacho cheese Doritos, and some water. Doritos enjoy a large distribution network in eastern Turkey; you can find them almost anywhere.

İsmail and İshak, the owners of Ortaçlar, ask me to make sure I mention their gasoline station in particular. So the next time you find yourself in need of fuel in Köprübaşı, 20 kilometers east of Diyarbakır, be sure to stop by Ortaçlar Petrol. Ask for the fill-up special, and tell them Matt sent you.

My walk’s 1,000th mile matches exactly with the middle of the Tigris river. I stop briefly to note that to someone in a less utilitarian, more poetic mood, the combination of rolling the odometer to 1,000 miles while crossing a river considered by many to be the cradle of human civilization would probably be more significant. I resume walking across the bridge. Two more days of this and I’ll be ready to move on to the next town, Silvan.

Tuesday, 12 March, and Wednesday, 13 March

I can see a few mountains have started to appear in the distance. In about a week I’ll start the climb up onto a higher plateau, and I’ll finish the walk on that plateau.

On one of my breaks I stop at a gasoline station for some tea. They ask me about federalism in the USA. In my Tarzan Turkish I try to answer questions like, “In America, are the state governors appointed by the President, or are they elected by the people?”

As I walk back out to the road, I reflect that in western Turkey, when I would tell people I was heading east, they would almost invariably pantomime machine gun fire. Now that I’m in the east, I am answering questions about federalism.

When I reach Silvan, my destination for the day, I snack on peynirli kol böreği and çay. While I eat someone explains to me that the Bible is broken. I thank them for the information and hop a bus back to Diyarbakır.

Thursday, 14 March

As the bus leaves Diyarbakır I pull out my notebook and pen this:

There was a squirrel. He was out hunting for nuts. He saw a nice big one down in the well of a tree. He grabbed the nut. He tried to pull it out, but the nut was too big. It, plus his hand, wouldn’t come out together. So he had to make a choice — let go of the nut, or hold onto it and starve.

But the soon-to-be-new-friends are waiting for me, and so I’ve got to say goodbye, at least for now, to the old ones. Thank you Diyarbakır, it’s been real.

The day after moving to Diyarbakır, I hop a mini-bus back to Siverek to begin the three daylong legs of my walk toward Diyarbakir. The plains now are windswept, the winds high.

As I start my walk out of Siverek, a group of about eight 10-year-old boys runs up to me.

One of the boys jumps up and down, gesturing wildly and pointing at me, his face contorted in anger. He yells, “Syrians are not welcome here. Move on!”

I turn my back on him and face the other boys. I take off my sunglasses.

While the angry boy jumps and screams, I chat with his friends and introduce myself.

“Where are you from?” one of the boys asks.

“I am an American,” I say.

Upon hearing this, the angry boy calms down a bit and pushes to the front of the group. He introduces himself as “Ronaldo.” Ronaldo is a famous Portuguese footballer.

“Nice to meet you, Ronaldo,” I say. I hold out my hand. He shakes it. Then I shake a few more hands before turning around and continuing to walk.

By now the angry boy has calmed down enough such that the expression on his face says, “I should still be angry about something, but I’m not sure what now.” Before I get too far away he catches up to me and reintroduces himself using his real name.

The boys fall away as we pass a soccer field. A group of men is sitting on the sidewalk drinking tea. I say hello to them. They nod at me, and one of them strikes up a conversation:

Man: Where are you going?

Me: Today I am walking towards Diyarbakır.

Man: Are you hitchhiking?

Me: No, I am walking. On foot.

Man: Are you riding a bicycle?

Me: No, I am walking. On foot.

Man: (after a pause) Are you taking a car?

Me: No, I am walking. On foot.

The man looks at me with a surprised look that says, “You’re crazy!”

I smile and wave and resume walking.

At the beginning of the walk, I wanted people to understand what I was doing. But it’s been six months, and even I barely understand what I am doing. All I know is that I have to do it. So I’ve stopped caring what other people think. I just want to bang out the kilometers and be done with it.

A couple hours outside Siverek, two men pull over on the other side of the road. They are driving a rusty old Datsun. The front bumper looks like it’s about to fall off onto the pavement.

“Do you need a ride?” they call out to me.

“Thank you,” I say, “but I am walking.”

The driver jumps out of his car and crosses over to the median strip to say hello.

I too cross over to the median strip. The man and I shake hands.

“Where are you from?” he asks.

“I am an American,” I reply.

“Excellent.” He leans in and looks both ways. “Do you have any information?”

“Information about what?” I ask.

He leans in further, raises his eyebrows, and says cryptically, “You know, information. I am a Turkish agent.”

I look closer into his eyes and notice that they are not connecting with mine. My instinct tells me this man is crazy. I feel my protective shields going up. I tell him in English that I cannot speak any Turkish. The conversation grinds to a halt. I don’t want to talk to crazy paranoiacs, especially not in this area. I just want to walk.

He hands me his business card and reminds me that he is a government agent and I should call him if I have any problems. As I cross back to my side of the road, and he to his, I call out thanks in Turkish and assure him that I will do so. As he and his friend pull away in their rusty old car, I turn his card over and take a look. His cover: dried nuts salesman. So that’s what spies are doing these days, I smile, as I crumple up his card and stuff it into my pocket.

I start walking again. I leave Urfa like a bat out of hell. My first thought—Oh shit! I want to finish this up by the middle of April and I still have one-third of the country to cross without injuring myself!

I pull a calculator out of my pocket. How many kilometers will I need to walk each day in order to meet my goal? I punch a few numbers into the calculator, and breathe a sigh of relief. It’s doable, but I’m going to have to walk twice a much as I’ve walked in previous months. There will be a lot of wear and tear on my body and I will be very tired at the end of the month.

Urfa, with a population about 600,000, one of the oldest cities in human history, is considered to be the hometown of Abraham but there is no room in my schedule for visiting historical sites—not even Urfa’s iconic Balıklı Göl (Fish Lake). The story with Fish Lake is that King Nimrod had Abraham burned on a funeral pyre, but God turned the fire into water and the burning coals into fish. This pool of sacred fish remains today. No one eats these fish. Legend has it that if you eat one of these fish you will die.

Tourists flock to Urfa for this and other “cradle of civilization” sites. But I have a job to do, and I will not be able to see any of it..

I think of a friend, Yonca from Istanbul, and dedicate the day’s walk to her. On Twitter Yonca goes by @epithetankgirl. March is going to be my busiest walking month yet, so all month I’ll be needing the inspiration of, for example, indestructible tank girls.

I stuff the calculator back into my pocket and resume walking. My goal for the day is the airport about 35 kilometers outside the city.

Around 10am, I stop at a gasoline station for a mid-morning snack of a bag of potato chips and a candy bar. A group of farmers squatting on the pavement, also taking their mid-morning break, invites me to join them for tea. I squat down next to them.

“What are you doing?” they ask me.

“I’m walking across Turkey. I’ve been on the road for six months,” I say.

“Where do you sleep at night?” they ask.

“Sometimes I stay with friends,” I say. “Sometimes I camp on the side of the road.”

“Like a spy,” says one of the farmers.

“Yes,” I reply, “like a spy.”

Further down the road, I come across a young man, a shepherd named Şahin. He walks with me for about a kilometer, which is unusual, because shepherds are usually busy managing their flocks.

“What are you doing out here?” Şahin asks.

“I’m walking across Turkey. I’ve been on the road 6 months. I’m walking towards Diyarbakir.”

Şahin’s face lights up. “That’s great,” he says, “what a grand adventure! I will probably live my entire life right here, just a few kilometers from my village, watching these sheep every day. I wish I could do something like that.”

A few kilometers later, I run into another young man on the side of the road. He asks me, “What are you doing out here?”

“I’m walking across Turkey. I’ve been on the road 6 months. I’m walking towards Diyarbakir.”

“That’s impossible,” he says, “you can’t do that.”

“I have been walking for six months,” I repeat.

“That’s impossible, you can’t do that,” he repeats.

“Okay, thank you,” I say, as I wave goodbye and continue walking.

Life is so much simpler now that I am not trying to respond to everything people say or to defend myself. All I’m thinking is—17 kilometers, 18 kilometers, 19 kilometers, 20 kilometers. Put one foot in front of the other. Put it down. Pick up the other foot. Put it down in front of the first one. Repeat until you’ve crossed the country.

I reach the airport and wait by the side of the road twenty minutes for a minibus to ride back to Urfa.

For the next month or so, I will have no deep philosophical moments of reflection. It will just be wake up, walk, shower, sleep. Repeat each day until I reach the end of the country. The process will have about as much emotion as clearing the table or washing and drying a dish. I will strip things down to the bare minimum I will need for the day and then strip them down again.

This is not a cultural experience. I do not care that I am walking through the cradle of civilization. I have a project, and I need to get it done.

Saturday, 2 March

I wake up in Urfa. I take the bus to the airport, where I ended my walk the day before.
There is almost no tree farming or agriculture other than ground crops and grasses for sheepherding. So green blankets the rolling hills for as far as the eye can see. There is not a tree in sight. The villages are far apart. From what I understand it is like this from Urfa all the way to Diyarbakır.

I walk 30 kilometers further. I take the bus back to Urfa.

Sunday, 3 March

I wake up in Urfa, board a bus, and ride 60 kilometers to where I left off yesterday. There is nothing in sight but rolling hills covered with green grass, and a blue sky above. At the spot I stopped yesterday I tell the bus driver to let me off the bus. He looks at me, puzzled. His face says, Why in the world would you want to get out here? When he sees my increasing urgency he pulls to a stop and opens the door and I climb off.

Today, if I walk 32 kilometers I’ll end up in Siverek, a small town of less than 10,000 people between Urfa and Diyarbakir.

Before I walk I dedicate the day to Mary Baba. Tomorrow is her birthday. Mary is my aunt (my mother’s sister). Her birthday actually isn’t until tomorrow, but I won’t be walking tomorrow — I’ll be moving on to Diyarbakır.

“Mary,” I write. “I have a photo of me at the Euphrates river the other day. I’ll drop that in the mail to you.”

I am again in the middle of nowhere, but in Turkey, people appear even in the middle of nowhere. I begin walking.

A couple hours later I meet two men on the side of the road. I greet them and ask them if everything is okay. They tell me they are looking for their horse. I wish them the best of luck and continue walking.

A few hours later I come across a truck stop with a cafe. It’s probably the only food place I’ll see today so I stop for lunch.

I order the ground beef with eggs. It looks like it has been around for about 37 years, but I’m hungry, and I LOVE the stuff, so I cross my fingers and hope for the best.

While I am eating it occurs to me I ought to start a travel cuisine blog called QuestionableTruckStopGrub.com. I chuckle at myself. After all, there aren’t many people around today to laugh at my jokes. If I don’t laugh at my own jokes, who will?

After lunch I begin walking again, facing traffic as always. Once or twice a day a driver suggests to me that hitchhiking would be so much easier if I would cross the road and walk with traffic, not against it. I thank them for their concern. If I were hitchhiking I would probably have picked up on that idea on my own by now.

I walk for a few more hours and reach Siverek, midway between Urfa and Diyarbakir. I hop a bus back to Urfa, glad that tomorrow I will be moving on to Diyarbakır.

The TV was playing in the dining room while I ate, and as is usually the case on TV news someone was crying about something. I watched closer. A Turkish mother was crying about her dead son.

Fat drops of rain were beating against the window now. I realized that I had a long, tedious day of walking through deserted areas in the rain ahead of me.

I hunched over my tahini feeling sorry for myself like a poor, old man hunched over crying into his bowl of soup.

Then there was that mother crying on television! “God, life sucks so much!” I said to myself.

“Hold yourself together!” I said back to myself. “Do not start crying into your soup! That’s going to look really bad. Do not go there!”

Once I finished breakfast, though, and got out on the road and started my operation for the day, I got caught up with executing the routine of the day.

On the way out of Gaziantep I passed the stone camel caravan, like me, walking east out of town.

As I walked out of town, breathing exhaust fumes and trying not to get hit by cars, I thought, “Sometimes walking across a country is boring scut work.” I briefly likened it to sitting in a cubicle answering emails. Then I thought, “Yeah, but the difference is I don’t mind this particular variety of scut work.

East of Gaziantep it was mostly rolling hills, green grass, rich but rocky soil, and olive and some other kind of trees I could not identify. I had learned a few weeks ago that southeastern Turkey and Iran supplied more than half of the world’s pistachios. I wondered where they were growing all those pistachios. Duh! I looked around and realized those trees I couldn’t identify were pistachio trees.

At the end of the day I took a minibus back to Gaziantep to meet up with Tomas and stay at the hotel another night.

On Friday on the climb into Urfa I ran into what seemed to be road construction. I didn’t see any machinery moving at the moment so I figured the entire crew was on break, and I kept walking. A cop car car came down the hill from the direction of Urfa. It stopped in front of me, and three policemen got out to greet me.

“Is everything okay,” they asked.

“Yes, thanks,” I replied, everything is fine.

They looked at me uncertainly, as if they had something to say, but didn’t want to say it.

“Are you going to Urfa?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“You should get into the car. We will take you there.”

“Thanks,” I replied, “but no, I need to walk.”

One of the officers repeated, “You should get into the car. We will take you to Urfa.”

“No,” I repeated, “thanks, but I will walk.”

The three of them gave up and climbed back into the squad car. They turned around and drove back towards Urfa, driving the wrong way on the highway.

I thought to myself, That’s dangerous. What if someone hits them? Then I noticed there were no cars in either direction. It was normally a busy road, so I thought that a little strange. I hitched up my pack and continued walking up the hill.

I continued walking up the hill toward Urfa another two or three kilometers. I wondered again, Why this uncanny lack of traffic? Then as I entered the city limit I saw a road block about 200 meters ahead and the cops who had greeted me earlier were parked there with a long line of traffic behind them. It slowly dawned on me that they must be waiting for me, and I thought, “This is not going to go well for me. The cops have lost patience with me. They are not going to allow me to continue walking. I’m going to have to do this last part later. As soon as I reach the road block they are going to make me get in the car.”

So I stopped to take a picture of the city limit sign before the cops could stop me.

When I arrived at the roadblock, all the cops said to me was, “Hello! Welcome to Urfa.” One of them got on the radio and I heard him say, “Okay you can blow it up now.” Then came the deafening blast of dynamite behind me where I’d been walking.

Why, I wondered, hadn’t they told me they were dynamiting? I would have gotten in the car immediately and come back later to complete those kilometers. As it was, the cops and that string of cars had had to wait all that time for me to walk to the city limits!

The cop on the radio turned to me and said, “Okay! Now you’ve got to get in the car! We need to take you to the station.”

This time I got into the police car and we rode into the precinct station. I sat in the precinct station for a little while, drinking tea and watching television while the cops took photocopies of my passport and residence permit, and faxed them to another office to make sure I wasn’t a terrorist.

I didn’t know whether I was free to go or not, so after about ninety minutes I finally asked them. They said, “Yes, of course, you are free to go.”

So they gave my passport and paperwork back to me. I took my paperwork and shoved it in my back pocket and pulled my backpack on and walked out to the main road and asked them, “Which way do I go toward the city center now?”

They said, “We’ll drive you to the bus station.”

I told them, “No. I need to walk to the bus station.”

They said, “No, no, no, no! We absolutely insist. You must get in the car and we will drive you to the bus station.

I had turned down enough rides from the cops that day, and I figured I would just come back and walk this leg later. So I got into the back of the police car and they drove me to the main bus station.

When we arrived, I said, “No, I need a local bus because I need to go back to Gaziantep tonight.”

They said, “No, we’re taking you to the main bus station because the local buses are not trustworthy.”

I repeated, “I need a local bus back to Gaziantep.”

They insisted, “No!! You need to take one of the main buses here at the main bus station and go on one of the main roads back to Gaziantep.”

So at the main bus station, I opened the car door and entered into a sea of men and women in colorful baggy pants and dresses dancing and banging on drums. However, I had told the cops I would buy a bus ticket right away, so I paid no attention to the festivities and just walked up to the ticket counter and bought a ticket for the next bus to Gaziantep.

Ticket bought, I finally looked around to see what the commotion was about. The dancing men and women had come to the station to see off their young men who were going into the military to do their mandatory military service. Urfa was one of the intake points.

The part of southeastern Turkey that I was entering now–Gaziantep and Urfa—was the area people in the west had been referring to when they pantomimed machine guns and warned me that all the people “over there” were terrorists. But all I was seeing here so far were people who wore more colorful clothes than they wore in the west and, yes, their language was different. But they were here at the bus station seeing off their sons into mandatory service for the same country that the people of the west served. I’d seen no machine guns yet. And the police with the string of cars at the roadblock into town had sat and patiently waited and stopped a dynamiting project for me, a foreigner, while I refused to cooperate with them.

I knew I was entering another world now and in order to survive I had to remember I that I was never going to understand what was going on in any given situation or what the loyalties were. I was just going to walk through and not try to pretend that I understood the world around me.

So during that day’s walk, a few miles east of Gaziantep, I pulled out my cell phone and called Tomas, an Italian Couchsurfing hitchhiker I had met a couple days before in a cafe.

Tomas answered: “Hello?”

“Hi Tomas, it’s Matt Krause from Couchsurfing, remember me?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“I’m looking for a place to stay tonight. I know it’s kind of short notice. Do you know of anything?”

“Probably. Tonight I’m staying in the attic of a friend of a friend’s place. You might be able to crash there.”

“Have you stayed there before?” I asked Tomas.

“No.”

“Have you met the host before?”

“No.”

The connection sounds kind of tentative, I thought. But I sleep in ditches by the side of the road. Beggars can’t be choosers.

“Can I join you?”

“I think so,” Tomas responded. “Meet me in the square downtown at 5pm.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and stuffed my phone back into my pocket. “Good, that’s taken care of.”

I continued walking.

A few kilometers later, a village appeared on the horizon and I spotted, at its edge, a collection of tents with people milling about. Cool, a market, I thought, I’ll drop in and take a look.

I came to the outskirts of the village and began walking towards the market.

I noticed that the women wore bright colors — purples, reds. I generally didn’t see Turkish women wearing robes that colorful.

I noticed lots of children running around unattended. Huh, that’s different, I thought. At most of the Turkish markets I see, there aren’t a lot of children, and the mothers generally hold the ones present close.

I noticed lots of men sitting on the ground in small groups. Huh, that’s unusual. I almost never see groups of Turkish men sitting around at a market, especially not on the ground.

I noticed the tents were empty, save for a few bunks and some scattered bags of clothes. Huh, that’s unusual too. Most of the markets I see have tents overflowing with goods for sale.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I looked around closer at the women in robes, at the children running around, at the men sitting on the ground outside empty tents.

I wasn’t standing in a market. I was standing in a refugee camp.

I looked around some more, wondering if it was always this easy to walk into refugee camps.

A truck pulled up on the road a hundred meters away. Some men got out of the cab and began pulling temporary fencing from the back of the truck. I guess this is a new camp, I thought. They haven’t even put up fencing yet.

I resumed walking. Another quarter-mile and I had left the village and its new refugee camp behind. Back out onto the open road. Only mile after mile of gently rolling hills and row after row of pistachio trees. And the occasional Syrian family making its way to the camp I had left behind me.

After the day’s walk I hopped a bus back to Gaziantep. I met Tomas on the square. We picked up my backpack from Mustafa’s office nearby. We went back out onto the square and met Sara, an Italian exchange student who had helped Tomas find the attic where he and I would sleep that night.

“Where is this place,” I asked Sara. “Is it far from here?”

“I don’t think so,” Sara responded, “but I’ve never been there.”

We wandered up and down streets, in and out of blind alleys, and finally found the place. It was behind a locked gate. Sara tried a bunch of keys on a ring full of them, and finally found the key that unlocked the gate. It popped open into a small courtyard. We entered the building and climbed the stairs to the attic. Tomas and I dropped our packs onto the attic floor.

I looked at Tomas. “You hungry?”

“Yeah, I’m starved.”

“Let’s go eat, then,” I said.

We descended the stairs and found a nearby restaurant for dinner.

That night as I fell asleep, I worried about Tomas. It was cold in Gaziantep, and especially cold in that attic. My sleeping bag was toasty warm, having been designed for sleeping on snow and ice. But Tomas had only a summer bag. It was going to be a cold night for him.

The next morning, I woke up to see Tomas sitting next to a glowing space heater, cupping his hands and breathing into them.

“Are you okay?” I asked. Mist came out of my mouth as I spoke. “It was kind of cold last night.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Tomas answered, shivering, “just trying to warm up.”

“Come on,” I said to Tomas, “Let’s get out of here and go get some breakfast.”

It was my day off, and I was looking forward to a leisurely breakfast in a warm restaurant followed by some sightseeing. Besides, back in Osmaniye I had promised İlgi that I would introduce foreigners to şalgam whenever possible.

“Have you tried şalgam?” I asked Tomas as we descended the stairs.

“No, what’s that?”

“It’s a local drink, it’s delicious.”

After breakfast we wandered around the city sightseeing, knowing that we had only a few hours to give to a city that had taken thousands of years to create. Later that day, Tomas’ phone rang. It was Sara. We would need to clear out of the attic later that day. The owner was coming back and would need the space.

“I guess we’ll need to find another place to stay tonight,” I said to Tomas. “Any ideas?”

“No. You?”

“No, none. I guess we’ll have to look for a place. But first, let me introduce you to şalgam. Come on, there’s a shop across the street. They’ll have some.” We crossed the road and entered the shop. I ordered two şalgams.

Tomas grimaced as he took a sip of his. “Is there something wrong with this?”

“No,” I said, “it’s supposed to taste like that. Drink it fast, it’ll be easier that way. Besides, we should start looking for a place to stay.”

After drinking, and grimacing, his way through şalgam, Tomas and I walked around Gaziantep looking for a cheap motel to stay in. The shadows grew longer and longer, and then the sky dimmer and dimmer, and we had inquired at almost a dozen places, but they were all too expensive, or full, or, if they fit into our budget, didn’t have hot water, which was kind of a deal breaker since it was so cold outside.

Finally, we found one which fit our budget AND had hot water. And, to make it even better, the manager took pity on the two homeless strangers wandering around the city looking for a place to stay, and he gave us an especially deep discount. We went up to the room. The water was hot and the sheets were clean.

Before leaving Gazientep on the commuter bus to began my final day of walking back into Gazientep, I met Mustafa and some of his colleagues at a bakery for a breakfast of katmer. Katmer is a favorite breakfast food in Gaziantep. I had never eaten it so I entered the bakery with curiosity running high.

Mustafa called out to the man behind the counter that he wanted a couple servings of katmer and tea for everyone at the table. The katmer arrived in moments. Starved, I swallowed down my first serving in a few bites astonished at the sugary sweetness. Katmer is a pastry piled high with thin layers of phylo dough. Each layer is sprinkled with powdered pistachios and white sugar, slathered in sweet cream, and then the process is repeated on the layers after that.

In other words, if you want to start the day with a sugar buzz, eating a couple servings of katmer is the way to do it.

Since I was the guest and it was my first time eating katmer, Mustafa and his colleagues insisted that I eat a lot of it. Two servings was not enough, so Mustafa turned to the waiter and waved at him to bring us more. I wondered, do they really want me to eat a lot of katmer, or are they just using me as an excuse to eat katmer themselves, or both?

Four servings of katmer later, our little group broke up as abruptly as it had formed. Mustafa and his friends scrambled off to work, and I, hands shaking and head buzzing from all the sugar, stumbled out to the main highway to begin my final stretch back east into Gazientep. I boarded a bus and headed back to the place I had left off the day before.

The day’s walk was pleasant, most of it a very gradual downhill slope on a curvy road for 30 kilometers. Hills all around me. The bright sun reflecting off patches of snow still on the ground. And lots of rocks. Rocks, rocks, everywhere.

I came upon a small plastic water bottle filled with a yellow liquid. I had seen hundreds of these on my walk. For months I had been wondering why people, all across the country, on long inter-city drives, were filling water bottles with apple juice and then throwing them out onto the shoulder.

This time, being much closer to one of those bottles, I paid more attention, peering at the bottle and finally realizing, “Oh, hey, I’ll bet that’s not apple juice!”

I don’t know why it took me 4-1/2 months to figure out.

Later in the day as I walked into Gaziantep, 61% of the way across Turkey, I met up with the Silk Road camel caravan statues carrying loads of spices west out of Gaziantep. I snapped a photo of the caravan. I remembered that my mom was having knee replacement surgery the next day, and I thought it might inspire her to get up and walk on that new knee if she saw the photo! If people could walk from China, I could walk across Turkey, and my mom could walk on her new knee.

I spent most of my three days at the Osmaniye Ogretmen evi catching up on administrative stuff, doing laundry and taking care of personal needs, and visiting with friends.

One of the first things I did during my long weekend off was to get some new shoes. It’s not easy to find my size here in Turkey, but I walked into a store in Osmaniye and lo and behold, they had not just a few shoes in my size 12 ½, but a bunch of them, and at great prices! I usually had to buy my shoes from a website called giantman.com.

I took an evening and went to dinner with İlgi, Dilara, and Mutlu. What I love about the typical Turkish dinner table is that before the main course even arrives, the table is filled with food, and that evening the array included two salads of lettuce, carrots, and tomatoes; bread; a mound of yogurt made from buffalo milk with walnuts and honey on top; a plate of greens; a plate of four toppings—hummus, yogurt, a carrot salad, and an “American salad” (something I’m not a big fan of because of its high mayonnaise content); a plate of chopped onions with parsley and balsamic vinegar; and some plates of things I could not identify.

For the main course we had two different kinds of kebap: Adana kebap and beyti kebap. It was another food orgy.

Then after dinner we watched a football (soccer) game on TV, Mutlu and I bonding over the fact we were both Fenerbahçe fans. Well, anyway, Mutlu was a Fenerbahce fan. I couldn’t care less, but had fun bonding.

Monday, 14 January

The next day I packed up my stuff, checked out of the Ogretmen evi, and grabbed a bus to Gaziantep to meet my new couch surfing host, Mustafa, a tax inspector for Gaziantep province.

I found his office and waited next to his desk for about an hour while he finished up some work. When it was time to go we walked out to the parking lot. Mustafa picked up my backpack and grimaced at its weight, commenting on how much I was carrying. He tried to shove it into the trunk of his car but it was a tight fit. Eventually, together we got it crammed into the trunk. Then we loaded into the car and took off towards his home.

Mustafa and his wife lived on the outskirts of town. My room was not in his apartment but was in a nearby apartment occasionally occupied by his in-laws who were out of town. He told me he didn’t want to have any sign that anyone had stayed there. So I was a surreptitious guest in this very nice apartment with a big kitchen and a couple of big bathrooms with a couple of big showers but I could leave no trace that I had been in the apartment—no water rings in the kitchen or anything.

Still, Mustafa was a very gracious host. After he made sure I got settled in okay, he went across the street to his home to greet his his two young sons. Then he came back to find me and we went out for döner and rice at a nearby restaurant.

Before bed I looked at the map to see where in Gaziantep I was, and how I would get out to the highway the next morning to continue my walk. I discovered that the road I needed to walk on the next day was at the northern edge of the city and Mustafa’s place was on the southern edge, so I would have to commute about an hour on public transportation to get to the beginning of my walk.

Tuesday, 15 January

I got up about 5:30 a.m. so I could commute and then begin my walk by 8. Mustafa came by to say hello before I hopped a minibus for my commute back to work.

Shortly after boarding the bus to the northern edge of the city, a truck driver from Syria tried to board. He was heading back to the border and had only Syrian currency with him. The driver would not accept it, and he told the Syrian guy to get off the bus and find a currency exchange. I called out to the Syrian guy to get back on the bus, I would cover his fare. People do me favors on the road all the time. I was happy for the opportunity to help out a fellow traveler. It was the least I could do.

I got off the minibus where I had finished walking before the weekend, and started walking back towards Gaziantep. Within a few minutes my cell phone rang. A journalist from Sabah, one of the national papers in Turkey, was on the line. He was doing some fact checking for an article he was writing about me. I was happy to help him check his facts, so I stood by the side of the road and answered his questions, speaking loudly into the phone so he could hear me over the din of truck traffic.

But my main job for the day was not to pay Syrians’ bus fares or talk to journalists. It was to get a particular climb out of the way, from a valley floor to a village called Atalar a couple thousand feet above.

Midway through the climb, I stopped for a late-morning breather. I perched on a highway turnout bench and took in the scenery. This was a beautiful climb, offering a panoramic view of the fertile green valley below, sprinkled with tiny villages and farmhouses. I squinted and could make out the ribbon of road leading back to where I had begun the walk that day.

At my elevation there were still traces of snow along the sides of the road, and rocks, so many rocks. Rocks everywhere. This was the rockiest place I’d ever seen. The mountains were covered with baseball-sized rocks. Rocks had been piled along the sides of the road to get them out of the way, and they lined the green fields where it looked like attempts were being made to farm inside walls made of the rocks. I wondered how the farmers got any farming done with all the rocks around.

After resting for about 15 minutes, I stood up from the bench and walked back out to the road to continue my day’s work. I thanked god, and knocked on wood, that I could walk for hours and not stop. I realized that many people are not able to walk that much.

By mid-afternoon I reached Atalar. The hill had been climbed, my kilometers for the day had been walked, and I was ready to go home. I flagged down a passing bus and rode it back to Gaziantep. Mustafa had a delicious dinner of köfte and pilav waiting for me. After dinner we had tea while I uploaded photos onto the web and he studied for a tax law exam. I smiled at the “odd couple” image: a tax accountant cooking dinner for a cross-country walker, in an apartment the walker wasn’t supposed to be in, the two of them quietly drinking tea while one played with his computer and the other read a thick book on tax law.

The next morning I crept out of my frost-covered sleeping bag and with stiff, blue hands slowly began to break camp. I shook an icy crust off my tent, and the tent’s fabric crunched as I stuffed it into my pack. I was having a hard time finding a source of inner strength to get started that morning, to shoulder my backpack, to place one foot in front of the other and get to work. Finding that inner source usually took only a few minutes, and by the time I had broken camp I’d felt it.

But this morning, camp was broken, and I still wasn’t in touch with that strength. I stood there in the brambles, my hands on my knees. I dug around for an image or a thought, anything, that would get me up onto that road walking.

I thought about my friend Aly in Istanbul. She had been a staunch supporter of the walk since before Day One, and in fact had written an article about it for Outsider magazine. She had talked me through many a low moment on the walk. I could hear her voice now telling me, “Matt, man, you’ve got to do this!” Then the strength came. When I climbed up onto the road and realized I had the strength to continue, I took the white board out of my pack and dedicated the day to her.

Then I brushed the dirt and brambles off my pants, and started walking.

The spectacular views as I descended the mountains into Gaziantep province soon distracted me from my doldrums. I was awed as I looked down on the sweep of the lush green plain below me, with its covering of farms and villages. The busier toll road had disappeared somewhere into the hills, so the air was quiet now and I could hear nothing but my footsteps.

Around mid-morning I approached the day’s main town, Nurdağı. As I neared the town, I spotted the cold, square government buildings of the Jandarma post at the edge of the city. As I walked past the post’s front gate I waved hello and nodded to the guard. I was just being polite and friendly—I wasn’t planning on stopping.

As I walked past the gate, the guard followed a quick “good morning” with more small talk. “Where are you headed?” “It’s awfully cold out!” “How heavy is that pack?” With each comment I would pause, turn around halfway, and answer before continuing. His curiosity, and his questions, continued and warranted more attention than a quick “good morning.” So I stopped, turned, and started walking back towards him. He got really nervous. A look of panicked uncertainty crossed his face, and he waved his gun and called out to me, “No, no, continue, continue!”

Other soldiers, hearing the commotion, started to appear at the gate. They were curious, calling out questions over the driveway that separated me from them. “Hello, good morning, where are you from? Where do you sleep at night? Do you like Turkey?” I wasn’t sure whether to approach and talk to them, or heed the advice of the first guard to keep moving. I thought of news footage showing Iraqi civilian drivers with their brains splattered over the back seat after getting shot in the head by nervous US soldiers at security checkpoints. I decided to keep moving. Better to seem rude than to get my brains splattered all over the road.

A few minutes later I came upon the local police station. I decided to stop by and see what kind of reception I’d get there.

I walked up to the guard booth at the front gate and said hello to the two policemen inside.

“Good morning,” the first policeman said to me, a huge grin crossing his face as he looked up from his paperwork. “It’s a little cold out, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s a little cold, but it’s warming up. The sun’s out.” I looked at the second policeman and said, “Hello.”

He responded with a curt, “Hello.” As cold as ice.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“My name is hello.”

The first policeman said, “His name is actually Ali. Ha! Ha!”

The first policeman invited me in for tea. The second policeman quickly put a stop to it:

“No,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “keep moving!”

I think it was the first time ever in Turkey that someone had said to me that no, I couldn’t drink their tea. I sensed this was an interpersonal conflict and didn’t want to get involved. I had avoided getting my head blown off a few minutes ago, and I didn’t want to get arrested. So I said goodbye and kept walking further into the village.

I figured I would just keep walking and blow right through Nurdağı. Zero for two in this town, I thought. Just keep going. You don’t need them anyway. But then I saw yet another set of government-looking buildings and the naughty part of my personality came out, the part that loves being a bull in a china shop. I stopped. No, I’m not done with this town yet,

I walked up to the buildings and picked the nearest one, which turned out to be the local Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Government Administration office. I walked through the front door. There was no reception area, so I stuck my head into the doorway of one of the offices and called out, “Hello! How’s it going? What’s up?”

Before I could even focus my eyes on the room, someone grabbed my hand and pulled me in. He told me to put my bag down, sit, rest.

While I sat resting on one of the chairs saying hello to the four or five men in the room, someone thrust a cup of tea in my hand. Within minutes the office was full of curious workers wanting to find out who this foreigner was who had just walked in wearing that enormous backpack. I was the center of attention, and word was quickly spreading through the building that a visitor had arrived.

The conversation quickly turned to a debate about where they should put me up for the night.

“How about the office?” one man asked no one in particular.

“No, it’s unsatisfactory,” said a second man.

“How about the town hall?” volunteered one man who had just stuck his head in the door.

The chatter continued. How about this? How about that?

I stopped them. It was barely 9:30 in the morning. It was too early for me to quit for the day.

“Thanks, but no,” I said to the group, interrupting the debate. “I need to keep moving.”

“Have you eaten?” someone asked.

“Take him to the cafeteria!” someone else suggested.

“It’s closed!” said another.

“Order him some take-out!”

Three men lunged for the phone. It’s nice to be so warmly welcomed, I thought, but you don’t get many visitors here, do you?

Within minutes I was eating a chicken wrap and drinking ayran.

Then we stepped outside for some photos, came back in, and friended each other on Facebook. At that point I felt it was time to go, so I said my goodbyes. I could see they were disappointed to see me leave, as it meant going back to their paper-pushing and number-crunching.

The town was small, so within a few minutes I was clear of it and back out on the open road. I smiled to myself and thought,

This was what I loved about this walk. Sometimes I walk up to a Jandarma base and I’m told to move on. Sometimes I walk up to a Jandarma base and I’m ushered in and fed more food than I’d ever seen. Sometimes I check in at a police station and I’m told to keep moving without being offered a sip of water or tea. Sometimes I check in at a police station and spend the next two hours watching TV and eating dinner with the cops. Sometimes I walk into offices where I am stared at like a space alien, and sometimes I walk into offices where I am met with an overwhelming explosion of hospitality as if I were a gift from God. What happens in one situation never provides any indication of what will happen in the next.

At the end of the day, I stopped to wait for the bus back to Osmaniye out in the middle of what I thought was nowhere. Up pulled a car. The driver was none other than the son of the man who fed breakfast to Joy Anna and me at the gasoline station the day before. He gave me a huge bag of peanuts, waited with me by the side of the road until my bus came, and then insisted on paying my fare. I hopped in the bus and headed back to Osmaniye and the Oğretmen Evi for my days off and planned to visit with my new friends, Ilgi, Dilara, and Mutlu there.

The next morning, after staying out with my new friends relatively late the night before, I got up early, shouldered my backpack, and said goodbye to Osmaniye. It was time to move on. I was to meet Joy Anna on the road for that day’s walk. She had joined me for my very first day four months ago. Now, here I was, more than halfway across the country, and she was joining me again. I was happy to be seeing her. It was a reminder that I was making progress across the country, and I suspected that if we knew each other better, she would recognize that I was a different person from the one who started the walk.

That day we would begin our walk by climbing out of the Çukurova plain into the Nurdağları mountain range (Mountains of Heavenly Radiance). We would end the day half way between Osmaniye and Gaziantep. Like we did on that first day, Joyanna would flag a bus back to the city, while I stayed behind and set up my tent for the night.

The air was cold, but the sky was clear and sunny. It had snowed a bit the night before, just enough to leave a light dusting in the shaded areas. I put my sweater on under my coat and donned my wool hat and gloves. I had foolishly left my scarf in Osmaniye in an attempt to lighten my pack, not thinking about needing it as I headed into higher elevations. I dug some clean long johns out of my pack and tied them around my neck instead.

Joy Anna and I began the day’s walk with a climb. I labored under the weight of my pack, cursing myself for not having lightened it more before I left Osmaniye. I tried to breathe normally enough to not interrupt the conversation with Joyanna. Joyanna pulled out her camera mid-conversation, crossed the road, and took a photo of me climbing the hill. She ran back across the road smiling and held up her camera to show the photo to me. In the photo a tall, fit, angular man was confidently carrying a large pack up a steep hill. The man in the photo did not look like he was breathing hard and trying not to fall over.

Gradually the terrain smoothed into a plain where we walked for most of the rest of the day.

After we had been on the road for a couple of hours, Joyanna and I stopped for breakfast at the Öz-Al Petrol station and restaurant. The station had been recommended to me by Mustafa, an on-line follower from Gaziantep whom I would be staying with, but hadn’t yet met. Mustafa had commented on Facebook that we should stop by and say hello to his uncle and cousin at that particular station. His uncle owned the station, Mustafa told me. I marvelled at how many people’s uncles owned gas stations.

Mustafa’s uncle treated us to a delicious breakfast. The sucuklu yumurta (sausage cooked with eggs) was some of the best I’d ever tasted. I noticed Joyanna seemed mildly uncomfortable at the station, for reasons I didn’t understand, so I ate quickly and politely declined Mustafa’s uncle’s offer of tea. I grunted as I pulled my pack back on, muttering to myself that this Couchsurfing was fun, I was meeting some great people, but it was making me soft and weak.

A couple kilometers down the road, Joyanna and I came upon a brand new bridge to and from nowhere; it was simply sitting on the dirt at the side of the road, parallel to the main bridge. Joyanna and I looked at each other puzzled. Why was this extra bridge here?

“Oh well,” I shrugged, “it never hurts to have an extra bridge.”

“That’s right, you never know when you’ll need it,” Joyanna responded.

We walked on.

I was enjoying having a friend to walk with during the day. For a couple of weeks I’d been very comfortable—sleeping in people’s houses, having dinner with friends, shopping for pepper spray. Tonight when Joy Anna got on the bus I would be alone again. My mood began to sink.

I thought of a Doors lyric:

People are strange, when you’re a stranger.
Faces look ugly, when you’re alone.

Snow crunched under my foot as if I needed reminding that the weather was freezing and the terrain inhospitable.

The hills began to pinch themselves into a narrow canyon. The climb steepened. Two highways squeezed through the narrow pass: the intercity freeway, and the local road I was on. Usually the two were at least a few kilometers apart.

I knew we would not clear the pass before the day ended, and that I would need to bed down for the night soon. I turned to Joyanna and told her I needed to look for a place to stay that night. I scanned the surroundings, and noted that the presence of two highways was going to limit my options since I wanted to find a spot away from the prying eyes of passing drivers. I looked at the few gullies nestled into the rocky slopes. They were covered with thorny raspberry bushes. There would be no soft beds of pine needles that night.

I spotted a small area that was out of the direct line of sight of passing drivers on both highways, and was almost large enough to accommodate my tent.

I pointed to the area and said to Joyanna, “There you go, I’m going to camp there tonight.”

Joyanna looked at the site and then back at me. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I think I’ll be able to make it work just fine.”

“Okay,” she said. We said our goodbyes and waited by the side of the road a few minutes to flag down a bus. One slowed down for Joyanna, she hopped on board, and I scrambled down the slope and began gingerly tamping down prickly berry vines to make a place large enough for my tent.

The next day was a work day. I was getting used to my new routine: get up early, take the bus to work, walk for 6 hours, take the bus home.

In the evening, after I had rested up from my walk during the day, I met with Ilgi again. With her, was her colleague Dilara, and Dilara’s husband Mutlu. The three of them decided they needed to test my şalgam-drinking skills. They laughed sinisterly amongst themselves, knowing what I was in for. Me, of course, I had no idea.

Popular in southern Turkey, şalgam (pronounced shawl-gum) is a non-alcoholic drink made of salted and spiced red carrot pickles, flavored with fermented turnip. I had heard about it many times (“It’s an acquired taste”), but I had never tried it. Tonight would be the night.

Ilgi, Dilara, and Mutlu quickly found a small deli that served şalgam. They ordered two glasses, one for me and one for Mutlu. I smelled mine. It smelled awful. I scrunched up my nose and took a sip. It tasted even worse. Mutlu gulped his down and wiped his lips. He looked at me with a big smile and asked what I thought.

“I hear it’s an acquired taste,” I said.

While I was nursing my şalgam, my new friends asked me if I carried a gun to protect myself while I was walking.

“Absolutely not!” I said. “There’s no way I would carry a gun. Finding food and a place to sleep depends on my getting people to trust me very quickly. If I carry a gun that isn’t going to happen.”

The three were shocked. Dilara said, “Okay, but at least we’ve got to stop and get you some pepper spray.”

Ilgi motioned at me to finish my şalgam quickly so we could go. I gulped it down, being careful to keep it off my tongue as much as possible, so it would be gone before I had a chance to taste it. I slammed the empty glass down on the table.

“You like şalgam, huh?” Ilgi asked.

I smiled and said, “It’s an acquired taste.”

As for the pepper spray, I didn’t want to carry pepper spray. I figured that if I were attacked, I would probably accidentally spray it backward into my own face. But at least they weren’t making me buy a gun, and if I had it in me to accept the “drink şalgam” challenge, I could certainly get out of buying pepper spray. Plus they seemed to be having such a great time teasing the foreigner. I didn’t want to spoil the fun. So I followed them down the road on the search for pepper spray.

Ilgi, Dilara, and Mutlu excitedly agreed that I looked exactly like Süleyman, a friend of Mutlu’s who ran a gold jewelry shop, so during the search for pepper spray we stopped by the shop so they could compare us side by side. The three of them laughed and agreed again that Süleyman and I looked exactly alike. Süleyman and I looked at each other. I saw no resemblance whatsoever. Süleyman obviously didn’t either.

“Do you know where we could get some pepper spray?” Dilara asked Süleyman.

“Try the army surplus store around the corner.”

The army surplus store did indeed sell pepper spray, but I declined to buy it, telling the three that I needed to walk without carrying guns or pepper spray.

Ilgi, Dilara,and Mutlu seemed to realize by then that I was a lost cause and that there was no way to weaponize me.

After a month of Couchsurfing, I started to settle into a routine: Walk three days into a city, take a day off, walk three days out of the city, move on to the next city, and then repeat the pattern. “Turn off your brain and just keep repeating the pattern until it’s done,” I told myself.

One of the friends I made in Osmaniye, İlgi Çelik, taught at a middle school in Tüysüz (translates to “hairless”), a small village just outside Osmaniye. She knew I had a day off coming up, and invited me to come visit her students.

I got up early, walked to the main road, and hopped on the the service bus İlgi and the other teachers rode to the school. The kids all seemed to arrive at school at once, and while the teachers held their morning meeting in the schoolmaster’s office, the kids waited and played unattended outside in the hallway. I didn’t know humans were capable of creating as much noise as those kids did! I looked around at the other teachers in the room, expecting one of the teachers to open the door and shush the kids, but none of them seemed in the least bit bothered. I was already feeling out of place. There I was, a middle-aged man who walked alone on country roads with only the whooshing of cars, the roaring of semis, and the chirping of birds for my white noise. I will never last a day in this place, I thought. Those kids will eat me alive.

The teachers’ meeting over, llgi took me to her classroom. Mid-sentence in her introduction of me the students began cheering wildly. They exploded with energy, pulling one of the kids down on the floor and piling on top him in a wriggling, screaming mosh pit. I laughed to myself and realized I wasn’t going to need to entertain them, they were perfectly able to do that for themselves. All they needed was a thin excuse, and I was that day’s thin excuse.

When they finally settled down I told them some stories about my walk and invited questions. Ilgi asked them to ask their questions in English for language practice, but they were too shy, so they asked their questions in Turkish and I answered in Turkish. When I needed to speak English, İlgi translated my words into Turkish.

There were three boys named Yusuf in the class, and during a break from the Q&A they came to me and asked me to take a photo of them standing together. The largest Yusuf was a gentle giant who almost never spoke, and the smallest Yusuf, probably half the largest Yusuf’s weight, had the biggest personality in class, never shy about anything including asking countless questions in English and coming out from behind his desk to stand at the front of the room when he did it.

After a couple of times having to walk from his desk to the front, he planted himself right in front of me asking his barrage of questions, one after another. Some of these questions I knew were asked only to control the platform from which he worked the room. Any platform would do. I knew the type. We were kindred spirits in that regard! As much as I wanted to think these kids would remember me because I had a story to tell, I knew they would probably remember Yusuf’s performance more. I was just Yusuf’s prop.

At lunchtime Ilgi steered me into the teachers’ lounge where I met and chatted with the other teachers and staff members. Then when I’d finished my cup of tea a staff member from the kitchen, Meryem Abla (meaning big sister), read the tea leaves for me.

Back in class after lunch, I didn’t realize how tired I was until I took a turn at the blackboard to solve a simple fractions addition problem. I had no brain power left. At Tarsus American School I was thinking it would be fun to be a teacher and it was too bad I hadn’t become one. Now, even though I’d really enjoyed interacting with the kids, I thought, “It’s a good thing I’m not a teacher!” I was more tired than I was after most days walking.

On Tuesday evening, my next day off, I visited a local radio station with Alperşan, one of the university students I was Couchsurfing with in Osmaniye. Alperşan was a DJ with a night show on a local radio station. He asked me if I would come along and record some jingles for his show. Ever the ham, I said, “Of course!”.

So I sat with a microphone near Alperşan while he did his show, which was called “On the Air With Alperşan.” All I had to do was drawl in the deepest of voices several times on cue, “On the air with Alperşan.”

While we were getting the studio equipment ready for the recordings, one of the other DJs launched into a graphic story about a woman he had been “with.”

Later we realized one of the microphones had been left on.

Oops.

After my day of walking with Baris on my birthday, I still had one leg I needed to do to reach Adana. I decided to wait with that because life was so active in Mersin, and I had invitations and social calls I needed to make before I moved on. So I took few days to do that.

Ayse and Rustu had invited me to spend some time at their home in the country. On Saturday they had a dinner party and I got to meet some of their friends. I also got to meet their dog Bugday who became my close buddy for the next couple of days.

While I was with Ayse and Rustu, I visited a children’s chorus that Ayse was involved with. The group, Umut Isigi, or Light of Hope chorus, were kids of about 8-10 years old. I enjoyed being their audience of one while they serenaded me with Turkish songs in clear, enthusiastic voices.

Sunday, 30 December

I stayed the night with Rustu and Ayse, and the next morning I got up and spent a little time out on the porch swing basking in the sun and enjoying the view of the green expanse of countryside. Then Rustu, Elida (their 15 year old daughter), and I dug into a huge breakfast Ayse had prepared for us.
After breakfast I spent more time lolling on the porch swing, this time joined by Bugday who shared his sloppy tennis ball with me.

Tuesday, 1 January 2013

I passed New Year’s Day back at Melih’s house doing emails, an update on the walk so far for my sponsors, and various other administrative tasks.

I’d been on the road for four months and had walked across 53% of the country. I’d walked a total of 1109 kilometers (689 miles). That’s an average of 277 kilometers (172 miles) per month. Months before the trip I planned on 300 kilometers per month, so I was pretty close to my target.

These were the numbers broken down by month:
Sep: 399 kilometers (247 miles)
Oct: 238 kilometers (148 miles)
Nov: 165 kilometers (102 miles)
Dec: 302 kilometers (187 miles)

As is obvious in the numbers, I’d hit it pretty hard in September. November, the month with two trips to Istanbul, was very light. December was actually right on plan, even with large changes in my traveling style and more social activity than in the three preceding months combined.

Money spent so far in all four months was over-budget. My total was US $3979, an average of US$995 per month.)

Monthly numbers:
Sep: US$737
Oct: US$1303
Nov: US$1143
Dec: US$684

Those numbers included everything I’d spent including warmer clothing, internet data plan, new cell phone, two trips to Istanbul, food, lodging, health insurance, and residence permit. Everything.

All the months were over budget. December was pretty close to budget, but even it was too high.

I was liking the Couchsurfing method I’d started in early December. Physically, it was more comfortable, since I slept in a bed or on a couch. I could take showers and do laundry on a regular basis.

I commuted to work in the mornings, and returned to the same home in the evenings. Since I was based out of a given place instead of moving to a new location each day, I made much closer friendships. Emotionally it was much richer.

The conversations were more substantive, too. Traveling old-style (pre-December), I had the same conversation over and over (What is your name? Where are you from? What are you doing? Where are you going? Why?) With Couchsurfing, since we had more time to get to know each other, we talked about other things too. Politics, history, professions, money, life, philosophy, girls.

I’ve always kept close track of my weight. I wondered how walking 20 kilometers per day and not being able to always control my diet would affect my weight. For 10 years my weight had never gone far from 84 kilos (185 pounds). I regularly went 5 kilos (10 pounds) over or under that, depending on what I’d been eating and how much exercise I was getting. But my weight wasn’t changing much on this trip. It was staying at 84 kilos, +/- 5 kilos.

Language-wise, the Couchsurfing community was heavily oriented towards English. In December I spoke way more English than I did Turkish. But I wasn’t out here to learn Turkish, I reminded myself. I was out here to walk across the country and show it to people.

Still, the question stuck in my mind, still unresolved. So I asked my online followers: What were their thoughts? Some people said I should dive deeper into Turkish, some people said don’t worry about it. Others said, “Whatever feels right.” It was inconclusive, so I decided only time would tell.

Another question that gnawed at me during the couch surfing experience was “Am I experiencing the country or not? Is my experience couch surfing an authentic experience?” It wasn’t what I had set out to do. It wasn’t what I had pictured as an authentic experience.

I decided that in traveling you only get to experience a very small slice of the population in front of you. That slice might be farming based peasants or economically upscale students at an expensive private school or it might be the Couchsurfing community. If you want to have an authentic Turkish experience, any experience you have inside the national borders of Turkey will be a completely authentic Turkey experience. Even if you are sitting eating a waffle with American tourists while sipping a coffee from Starbucks, it’s completely authentic because it’s happening in Turkey. If a foreigner decides what is authentic and what isn’t, he is asking Turkey to be something it is not. I stopped my thinking and analysis there, and walked the couple blocks to Burger King for dinner.

The next day, Thursday, I traveled by bus from Mersin to Osmaniye, my next Couchsurfing stop. On the way into Osmaniye, I spied through the bus window a highway sign for Halep, the Turkish spelling for Aleppo, which was exciting for me because it reminded me that the trip was shifting into another gear. Osmaniye, with a population of about 200,000 people, is about 28 miles from the Syrian border, closer to the border than it is to any major Turkish city. For a few days I would be staying at a college student bachelor pad. I was not expecting an elegant place, but it did have a lot of rooms, so I would have one to myself.

As the bus pulled into Osmaniye, I realized my attention was about to become focused on Osmaniye, and before it did, I had a thought I wanted to commit to paper before I forgot Mersin. So I pulled out my notebook and penned:

Occasionally someone asks why I don’t mention his or her name in my website. Now people may wonder why I don’t mention them in this book.

If I don’t mention your name, or the times we shared, in my website or in my book, it might be because some memories are just for me.

Sunday, 6 January

Sunday morning was gray and drizzly as I took the bus to Mustafabeyli where I’d ended the day before. On this stretch I would be completing my walk into Osmaniye.

When I got off the bus in Mustafabeyli I stopped in at a market near my starting point to pick up some bread and cheese for the road and began a conversation with the store owner, Cevdet Aksu. I downed three cups of tea and chatted with Cevdet while he took care of the Sunday morning rush of people buying bread and newspapers. I took comfort in the fact that Sunday mornings are pretty much the same whether you’re in Manhattan or a small village in southern Turkey — carbohydrates and newspapers.

Cevdet Bey had three children: a 23-year old daughter, a 20-year old son, and a 12-year old daughter. The son was a student at Korkut Ata University in Osmaniye, the same university my Couchsurfing hosts went to.

Between customers Cevdet bey pulled up Facebook on the computer near the cash register and asked me for my profile. I typed my username into the search box, and Cevdet sent me a friend request right there on the spot.

I was starting to find something quite comical, now on the last few days while entering the eastern, Kurdish half of Turkey. The population here were crazy, almost maniacal Facebook users. Even before Cevdet, when I would walk into a market to buy water and a bag of chips, attendants at the counter would have Facebook open while they worked.

The view on the walk that day was spectacular, even though it was a bit cloudy. Osmaniye is the extreme edge of the Cukurova plain, and the mountains, visible since Ceyhan, were closer now and in clearer view. I was happy to be entering the rolling, mountainous territory that I loved.

My birthday!

I dedicated the day’s walk to Elif Başak Kurkcu, another guardian angel who tirelessly herded me through hallways and up and down stairs at TAC.

I celebrated my birthday by walking. I did have company. Baris Aydin had noticed me on the couch surfing website. He contacted me and asked me if he could join me for a day of walking. Baris was from Denizli but now lived in Adana with his wife and daughter. He worked for a cruiseline and had a few days off before he had to fly to Miami to get on the cruise ship. Of course, I said yes!

Baris was no stranger to traveling long distances solo. He had ridden his motorcycle across the United States twice, the first time from Florida to California, the second time returning from California to Florida.

I was still commuting to work from Melih’s place in Mersin. Baris met me there and we hopped a bus to Tarsus and began our walk east out of Tarsus to a village called Arikli which was our destination that day. I was walking the Tarsus to Adana stretch. Arikli is a village about 25 kilometers east of Tarsus on the way to Adana.

I enjoyed having Baris on the walk that day. Even though he had done his travels by motorcycle, the process of doing a long solo journey, no matter what mode, was similar, and we could share our travel experiences and feel understood.

Along the way we stopped at a gas station for supplies, and when I told the attendants what I was doing they said, “Wow! If we had the money we would be walking across the country, too!” I saw Baris stifle a knowing grin. This happened often—people’s eyes glazed over and looked dreamy as though they thought I was doing something really exotic when most of what I did, walking along the highway and stopping at gas stations day after day for food, was pure scut-work. Besides, they spent more money not doing what I was doing.

Baris also commented on that irony as we walked.

During the walk Baris and I crossed the provincial border from Mersin province to Adana province that day, my sixth provincial border crossing so far.

That evening, after Baris and I said our goodbyes and I had rested from the day’s walking, Merve, a friend I’d met from couch surfing, came to get me, a full shopping bag in hand. She had been concerned that I might be alone on the evening of my birthday. We walked to the beach, and as we sat in the sand visiting she pulled two bottles of beer and some chocolate bars out of her shopping bag. This became a routine until I left Mersin a few days later. Merve became a good friend and someone I admired because she represented what I loved most about Mersin.

Mersin as it is today reminds me of what Ellis Island in the United States used to be—a welcoming haven for refugees from war-torn countries. We’ve romanticized the Ellis Island period of history in the United States but we don’t much welcome refugees these days. Turkey, and particularly Mersin, does.

Merve was Kurdish and originally from a small town near Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey. In the southeastern part of Turkey the Kurds are the majority population—between 65 and 70%. During the establishment of Turkish borders in the south, there was no provision made for a separate country for the indigenous Kurds who then populated southeastern Turkey, spilling over into the surrounding border countries of Syria, Iraq, Iran.

In the 90’s, the Turkish army was conducting military operations in the area due to a pretty violent civil war with the Kurds who were demanding a separate country and government. During this time, one of the tactics of the Turkish military was that if there were a small town or village suspected of harboring rebels or having rebel sympathies, the military would burn down the town.

When Merve was about 10, the village where she and her family lived was burned to the ground, and with it, the family home where Merve was born. The family witnessed not only the destruction of their home but the death of Merve’s brother at the hands of the soldiers. Having lost everything including their son, the parents picked up the rest of the family and fled to Mersin to begin again.

As in many typical immigrant stories (including those who fled to Ellis Island in the U.S.)—the first hurdle facing an immigrant family is for the father and/or mother to earn some money to put a roof over the heads of the family and some food on the table.

Merve’s father found odd jobs at construction sites. This led to his starting a construction business. Twenty years later he had a contractor business where he bought up plots of land and built apartment buildings on the land. This became a successful family business. Dad’s company still buys up plots of land and builds apartment buildings; Merve and her siblings sit at a desk in the ground floor of the new building and sell the apartments. When the apartments are sold in that building, Dad has finished another building so they move on and sell the apartments in the new building. The family had morphed over the space of 20 years from nothing to owning a pretty big construction company.

There are a lot of stories like Merve’s in Mersin. It’s a crossroads (as Ellis Island was). If you are from a small village that has just been torched or bombed and you want to move your family to a place that’s not so big you are going to get lost, but big enough to find some labor or construction work to do within a few days so you can put some food on the table, Mersin is a good city for that. If you can reach Mersin you can begin to escape the orbit in which people are just trying to survive and are in fear for their lives. Mersin has many such refugees.

The people who left their old country and ended up at Ellis Island, people we admire and who are our heroes, were like any other refugees today. We’ve lost the notion that the same process still goes on. Humans leave one place and go to another. Of course there’s a reason for them to leave their original home in the first place, and it takes some courage. It almost takes some catastrophe as huge as a home being torched in order for things to be so bad one wants to pick up and go somewhere else.

I had spent a few days leapfrogging ahead and walking east, into and out of the nearby city of Adana. But Melih wanted to walk another leg with me, so the day after Christmas we hopped a bus to Tarsus. We rode to the main intersection in Tarsus and got off at the Nüsret minelayer display. The Nüsret is a ship which mined the Dardanelle Straits in World War I and helped the Turks stop an Allied invasion. From there we began our walk west back to Mersin. But first we dedicated the day to the pink-booted Oya Zaimoğlu, one of my guardian angels in Tarsus.

This time we planned to walk a shorter 20 kilometers rather than the 30 kilometers Melih’d had to walk the last time he walked with me.

Neither pretty nor idyllic, the area we walked from there to Mersin was a semi-populated, heavily industrialized area with lots of smog and narrow shoulders and busy roads filled with trucks rumbling by belching exhaust fumes.

Later, after Melih and I had stopped for lunch and began to enter Mersin, I felt a bit of deja vu when we approached some acres of neatly trained, manicured orchards behind a steel fence, and I thought, Oh wow, they train those trees like they train peach trees in Reedley. As I’ve said, “You can take the boy off the farm, but you can’t take the farm entirely out of the boy!” Then I saw the huge sign on the fence—”Unifrutti of Turkey.”

I quickly snapped a picture of the sign and the orchards on the other side of the fence and posted it for my dad. I knew this name, Unifrutti, since I had heard my dad speak of it often. Luis, a good friend of my dad’s from Santiago, Chile, worked with Unifrutti in establishing the nursery and these orchards for the Turkish Government, and with the help of the Turks in the area Luis was responsible for planting these trees. My dad knew Luis from working with him on cooperative projects over the years between their respective agricultural companies in Chile and Reedley. Strange the connections we can find with what we know even in the remotest of places.

As we threaded our way through through the various neighborhoods on our route through suburban Mersin Melih said, “Matt, come this way just a bit. I want to show you something.”

I didn’t know what to expect. Melih’s face was expressionless. I followed him down a side street about two kilometers off our route until we came to a walled-off neighborhood. To enter this area we had to go through turnstiles where guards stood waiting to check our I.D.s.

We passed groups of men coming toward us as they exited the turnstiles through which we had entered. The buildings were dark, hollowed out storefronts that had seen better times. None of them seemed to have electricity. Prostitutes stood outside the doors laughing and making loud, crude comments to each other across the street. I realized Melih was showing me a darker side of Mersin.

My skin crawled. We had only been inside the gates for 1 or 2 minutes, but I turned to Melih and said, “Melih, I’m not going to last even ten more seconds. I’ve got to get out of here.” Melih saw how uncomfortable I was. “Sure,” he said, and we left.

That was my first and last foray into the underbelly of the sex trade in Turkey.

It had taken a huge amount of open-mindedness for me to sleep at the side of the road. It had taken a lot of acceptance to be kind to people trying to convert me in the villages when I wanted to make friends.

Mersin was pulling me in with lots of great food, but it was also forcing me to dig deep and take my own advice to see the world as it is, not as you think it is.

You are not of this world, I reminded myself.

Melih and I walked back to the main road and finished the day’s walk into Mersin. That day, plus the sections I had already walked, into and out of Adana, put me at 51% of the total distance walked. I’d walked more than halfway across Turkey! It was an honor to clear the halfway mark with someone who had become such a good friend. And to do it one day after Christmas, and a couple of days before my birthday. A great way to mark the holiday week!!

Oh, the food in Mersin!

After subsisting for a couple of months on gas station junk food, whenever real food was presented to me I gulped it down unquestioningly. And Mersin was full of good food. In fact, during the time I took off for the holiday season, I developed some food related rituals. In the mornings I would cross the street to the bakery and buy a box full of enough pastries to feed two people for three days. This was my breakfast.

After my carb-heavy breakfast, and the nap that inevitably followed, I would schlep myself down the street to the künefe restaurant for dessert. Then I would schlep myself back to Melih’s for another nap.

After my nap I would lug myself downstairs to lunch at the hummus restaurant below Melih’s apartment. In Istanbul there’s very little hummus. But in Mersin, which is nearer Syria and the Middle East, there’s a lot of hummus.

The restaurant staff got to know that when I came in, made eye contact, and held up one finger, it meant one order of hummus, and mere moments after I took a seat, they would set before me a huge bowl of hummus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with spices and garlic sauce. Moments after that they’d bring a basket of bread. I broke off pieces of bread to sop the hummus bowl clean. And because I was in the habit of eating all the bread that was presented to me, I ate all the rest of the bread too when the hummus was gone. If there was anything else like parsley or fruit garnishes on the table I ate those, too.

After lunch at the hummus restaurant I would walk back to the künefe restaurant for the second time in about six hours and chow down on yet another dish of künefe for dessert. Then I would go back to the apartment for my nap.

By then Melih was just finishing up his work for the day and was hungry for dinner, so we would walk to a nearby restaurant for tantuni (the flatbread stuffed with flank steak and vegetables).

Yes, Mersin was veritable orgy of food!

When the food parade was not enough, Melih and I would go to a nearby hamam, which is a Turkish bathhouse where you can get scrubbed down with a sponge until all the dead skin is gone and you walk out pretty raw. I opted to skip the scrub-down because I didn’t want the intimidating guy dressed in a bath towel scrubbing my skin raw. So while Melih volunteered for this service I would just lay on the marble in the steam room. That felt really good. For months I had been walking by the side of the road camping in weird places like abandoned pear orchards, and here I was in this hamam with abundant water, steam room, swimming pools, and hot showers. It was great!

But I had a job to do, so the food orgies and the hours whiled away under luxurious streams of hot water could not last forever. I still had a country to walk across. So I lived the life of the hedonist only on weekends and during the few days off I’d planned for this time of the year. I would never have completed a day in my walk being weighted down with carbs like I was during my days off.

Thursday and Friday, 20 and 21 December

On Thursday it was back to work, and I took the bus to Adana where my host Utku Tansug had arranged to have me speak at the mountaineering club, CUDOSK (Cukurova Mountaineering and Nature Sports Club). I stayed in his home that night.

Then on Friday I walked east from Adana to Yakapinar on the Cukurova plain where I would be walking for four or five more days. I dedicated the day to Pinar Seydim, the guardian angel at Tarsus American College who kept everything organized so I didn’t ever have to think about where to go or how to get there. I wanted to make sure each member of the guardian angels team at Tarsus was acknowledged as I owed them big time for their help.

For a few days I stayed at Utku’s house in Adana, skipping the Mersin to Adana segment of the walk for now. Melih and I had become good friends by then, and I planned to return to Mersin later and walk that segment when Melih could do it with me. Also, I wanted to be in Mersin for Christmas.

Saturday, 22 December

This morning I woke up at 6:30 a.m., my normal wake-up time for a work day, and lay in my sleeping bag for 15 minutes flirting with the siren who sang to me each morning. She whispered softly into my ear, “Oh, this sleeping bag is so warm and fluffy and comfortable, you could just stay here all day, yes, couldn’t you?”

I had heard this song many times in the past few months, and was starting to realize it was not going to go away. It was not a sign that something was wrong, it was just a sign of a conflict that was never going to go away. So I told myself what I told myself every morning when the siren sang to me like this: This kind of comfort will not last and when it is gone, I will need to be, too. So get out of bed! Must get to work.

Today was a 20 kilometer walk east from Yakapinar (aka Misis) to Ceyhan, a city of about 100,000 people between Adana and Osmaniye. I dedicated it to Bade Turgut, the guardian angel at Tarsus American College who brought me brownies that I’ll never forget and guided me tirelessly from classroom to classroom. Thanks again Bade!

As I walked I could see the mountains east of Osmaniye. It would be another week or so before I climbed into those mountains and left the Cukurova plain behind. I had a string of holidays (Christmas, New Year’s, my birthday) and a few social calls to make in Mersin before then.

So it wasn’t a straight shot to those mountains. But they were there, looming behind the clouds. I had seen them. I love mountains. I miss mountains. I was looking forward to climbing into those.

One of the features on today’s walk, midway between Yakapinar and Ceyhan, was Yilankale, or Snake Castle.

The castle was built on top of a high hill in the 11th or 12th century by the Armenians, and was probably used by the Crusaders too.

There’s another hill right next to the one where the castle was built. Much of that second hill has now been carved away to supply a cement factory but I could see that the hill partially blocked the castle’s sight line across part of the plain, even before the cement factory. So as I approached I was wondering what the castle’s occupants did about that blind spot.

Then at the end of the day I went back to Utku’s to meet with people as was becoming my habit now that I was couch surfing.

Sunday, 23 December

I stayed three nights in Adana with Utku and on Sunday I walked to the train station in the rain and took the train back to Mersin to Melih’s for Christmas and the holidays.

Monday, 24 December

On Christmas Eve, Monday evening, I attended a rehearsal for a Christmas program done by Mersin’s Nevit Kodalli Chorus. Nevit Kodalli was a Turkish opera and ballet composer born in Mersin. I went mainly because I had friends connected with this chorus, but I especially wanted to hear my friend Ayse Hanim from Tarsus sing a solo of Silent Night.

Tuesday, 25 December

My Christmas celebration on Christmas Day was meager. But having been in Turkey for several years I was rather used to that and appreciated the kind-hearted Merry Christmas’s I received from friends on that day as they went to work as usual. In a few places I would see decorated Christmas trees, mostly because generally people in Turkey like the idea of Christmas and the decorations and the lights. They just don’t celebrate the holiday. When I was married my wife always put up a tree and decorated it and loved sitting in the living room at night when it was dark, watching the Christmas lights shining.

Christmas morning I got up and worked on emails, photos, and the usual stuff. Toward noon, as I read my emails and the posts on the website I saw a greeting from an eight-year-old boy, Pryor Gibson. Pryor is a good friend and the son of some very good friends of mine in Seattle, George and Napua. They had posted a picture of Pryor holding up a drawing he had made for me of Santa and two reindeer. They had also written a note at the top of the drawing wishing me the “merriest Christmas ever.”

In turn I walked to a Burger King not far from Melih’s, took a selfie standing in front of it, and posted that along with a Merry Christmas note, telling him that I missed playing light sabers with him this Christmas and wished I could be there doing that now but I guessed I’d have to settle for something else. Then, to continue my Christmas nostalgia for things American, I ate a Whopper at Burger King for my Christmas dinner.

“You look wet, are you cold?” I asked after we took a seat.

“No, I’m fine. This jacket is actually waterproof.”

I sat down across from her, and as we huddled in the rain I learned that she was from Western Afghanistan,
“Okay, let me know if you get cold. Now, about your story. Let’s back up a bit. Tell me what you were doing before you decided to leave Afghanistan.”

She was from western Afghanistan, near the border of Afghanistan and Iran. When she was growing up, because the educational opportunities were better in Iran, her parents sent her to school at a regional city in eastern Iran. She was 16 at the time. In addition to the general studies there, she also did some technical studies like computer networking, and she earned various Microsoft certifications. By the time she was 18 or 19 years old she’d not only completed the normal high school curriculum, as well as mastering technical courses in computer programming and networking and earning various Microsoft certifications. When it was time for her to find her first job, it was quite easy. She was in high demand and went to work setting up and running the computer systems for a company in Iran.

I asked her again about her age at that time, figuring that I had misheard. It would normally take about ten years to get the kind of education and experience she was describing. So I asked her about it.

“No, no, I was nineteen at that time,” she told me.

I realized that I was sitting across from one of the smartest people I knew.

One of her first jobs was setting up and running the computer systems for a company in Iran. She did that for a couple of years. Then she returned to returned to Afghanistan in 2001 or 2002, shortly after the U.S. invasion, to take a job with the U.N. setting up computer systems for the refugee office in western Afghanistan. She soon moved up into an administrative position in the refugee office.

“That was shortly after the U.S. invasion, correct?”

“Yes,” she continued. “The U.N. ran a refugee office in western Afghanistan. Shortly after the invasion, the U.S. was hiring Afghans to staff the local office. I applied. My main qualification was my technical computer experience.”

Setting up the computer systems took about six months, and then she took an administrative position in the refugee program.

I remembered that Rory Stewart book, The Places Inbetween. He had walked across Afghanistan shortly after the US invasion. That means about the same time he was walking, Anisa was working at the UN.

I realized I was sitting across from someone who had actually lived the events I had read about.

I thought of Ismail Khan, whom Stewart had mentioned in his book, a local war lord who was fighting against the U.N. control of the region. At the time of the US invasion, Khan controlled the borders of western Afghanistan. He had his own import taxes. He was basically running his own regional government when the U.N arrived to take over the administration of the whole country. Not surprisingly, Khan and the U.N. butted heads.

I wondered if she had run into Khan. So I asked.

“Of course, Ismail Khan,” she nodded quickly. A look of fear and disgust crossed her face.

“He attacked the office regularly,” she continued. “A couple of times while I was at work, he shot rockets at us. I’d be sitting at my desk, and rockets would explode outside or crash into the building walls.”

“Once some of his soldiers made it past the security gate. They stormed into the building, running around with their machine guns. I ducked under my desk and hoped not to get shot.”

I watched the woman sitting before me before me as she talked. Not only was she smart, she was brave. She hadn’t stayed away from her country that was a war zone. She had returned to it, taken a job there. Now I could start to connect her the story with my own images of refugees: people fleeing war. But in my mind, refugees were unwashed masses with blankets and no shoes, escaping the chaos in war-torn countries. This was a woman in her early 20s with a desk job, typing at a computer.

“One day some of the soldiers followed me as I walked home from work. They started harassing me, but some neighbors broke it up. However, then the soldiers followed me at a greater distance and saw where my family and I lived.

“I could deal with rocket attacks at work, but when they knew where my mother, brothers, and sisters were, that was enough. For months my family had been saying, ‘No, no this is our home. We want to stay here.’ But finally that became, ‘Okay, let’s leave the country. The time has come.’”

The refugee image in my mind includes dramatic midnight escapes, fleeing the country on foot. But that’s not what they did. They basically took one bus to Iran, and then another one to Turkey.

“We found our way to the eastern Turkish city of Van, where we lived for about two years.

“I got a job helping other refugees with their own resettlement. And then, after the big earthquake in 2012, my family once again did not feel safe, so we moved further west here, to Mersin. And that’s how I came to be here.”

By that time it was getting late, and the blown rain was starting to soak our table. We stood up, said goodbye, and I leaned into the wind and walked back to Melih’s apartment, all the while thinking, “See the world as it is, not as you think it is. Don’t ever forget that.”

The next day, Sunday, I woke up at my normal time, 6:30am, and knocked on Melih’s door to ask him if he wanted to join me again. He called out good morning through the door, but he sounded like he was in pain. Probably sore from yesterday, I thought. I let him go back to sleep as I laced up my shoes and headed out the door.

I hopped the bus and rode back to the flagpole in Arpaçbahşiş where we’d finished walking the day before and began my walk back into Mersin. It wasn’t a pretty walk-by-the-seaside day. Most of the time that day I walked past tall buildings and heavy traffic. It was a day to knock out the smelly, exhaust-filled kilometers. Nothing more, nothing less.

Mid-morning, as I was standing on the side of the road struggling to open a particularly reluctant roll of sandwich cream cookies, up rode five Turkish cyclists decked out in lycra and helmets. They pulled up next to me and stopped. I had not met them before, but they greeted me by name in English.

“Where are you headed?” the lead cyclist asked.

“Back into Mersin,” I responded. The roll of cookies popped open, and a few of them dropped onto the ground.

“Looks like you lost part of your lunch,” the lead cyclist smiled. She continued, “We’re going to Kız Kalesi to greet some Germans who are cycling to China. Have you been to Kız Kalesi before?”

“Yeah, I was there yesterday.”

“Of course you were. Well, good luck with your cookies. We’ve got to go, it was nice to meet you,” she said, as she clipped back into her pedal and started away.

As the line of cyclists pulled away, I thought, Wow, they knew my name. For thousands of years people have been crossing this country, and now I’m one of them. It’s quite a club, and now I’m in it.

When I got back home Melih was out of bed, but said he had been too sore and stiff to walk across the apartment, much less leave the house that day. I showered and rested, and then attended a potluck dinner hosted by one of the faculty members I had met at Tarsus American College. I was loving my new Couchsurfing travel method. People had been feeding me all the way across the country, but now they were friends I had met a week before, and here I was getting to see them again. What a treat!

Monday, 17 December

Since I had now finished walking towards Mersin, it was time for a day or two off before I started the walk away from it. As I rolled out of bed Monday morning, I decided that my first act of my first day off under my new Couchsurfing regime would be to walk across the street to a bakery I had seen, and buy a bunch of stuff.

The bakery attendant asked me how many people I was buying for.

“Two,” I said.

He took out a small bag and shook it open.

“I’m going to buy a lot,” I told him, “You might need a bigger box for this.”

He got a box and followed me around the shop while I pointed at things I wanted to buy. When the box was full, I told him, “There’s more. We’re going to need another box.”

I carried my haul back to Melih’s apartment, brushed away the cigarette ashes on the desk of Melih’s home office, and dropped the boxes down.

“Breakfast is served,” I said to Melih with a flourish.

I ate my half of the pastries in about three minutes, eyed Melih’s half and decided not to eat it. Instead, I went back to bed and slipped into a happy carbohydrate coma. This place is starting to feel like home, I thought as I drifted off to sleep.

**************

Though I was close to half way through the walk, I had yet to meet any of the “dangerous” people I had been warned about. Instead, I met a young man, a 17-year-old kid from Croatia who was staying with Melih for a few days while I was there too. He was hitchhiking to Iran. He told me that during school breaks while the rest of his friends were hanging out at the mall, he would walk to the edge of town, stick out his thumb, and hitchhike. A couple of months before this trip he had hitchhiked through Ukraine, Siberia, Mongolia, and into China. He had gotten to Shanghai and he looked at the calendar and thought, Oh, I better get back home—school’s starting again. So he hitchhiked back to Croatia from Shanghai.

This guy is young enough to be my son, I thought. If my son were doing this I would be much more relaxed if I knew somebody was taking care of him.

So as few resources as I had myself, I said, “You haven’t eaten yet so let’s go out to dinner.” So the three of us–the Croatian kid, Melih, and I–went out to dinner and had some tantuni.

Melih and I had arranged a small party that evening so we could get better-acquainted with the local Couchsurfing community. After dinner with the Croatian kid, Melih and I went to a nearby restaurant famous for the local dessert specialty, künefe, to meet some of the community members. There were ten of us: Stew, from Ireland, Ziad, a refugee from Syria, Milad, a refugee from Iran, Milad’s Turkish girlfriend, three other Turks, Anisa, a refugee from Afghanistan, and Melih and me.

Thirty percent of the people at that table were refugees, and none of them fit what I imagined a refugee to be: someone running across the border carrying blankets and then sleeping on the streets begging for money. Ziad, Milad, and Anisa weren’t carrying blankets, and they slept in their beds at home. They were more educated than I, and their English was quite fluent.

As the group broke up for the evening, a voice at the back of my head told me I needed to learn more about Anisa’s story. While the rest of the group had been chatty that evening, she had been fairly reticent, and the few words that she did say suggested she had a very unusual background.

So I asked her if we could meet again so she could tell me her story. She nodded yes, and we agreed to meet a few days later, on one of my next days off.

The next morning I got up at 6:30. Melih was still sleeping. I knocked on his door to wake him up.

“Hey, I’m leaving in a few minutes,” I called through the door. “Do you still want to join me?”

“Yes,” he called through the door, “I still want to join you. I’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”

Melih got up and got dressed, and we walked two kilometers out to the main road and caught the bus I had been on the day before. We rode back to the point where I had stopped walking the day before, a landmark called Kız Kalesi—The Maiden’s Tower, a small fortress/lighthouse rising out of the sea about a hundred meters off the shoreline.

When we stepped off the bus I ran over to a dumpster and touched it with my hand and ran back to Melih, who was now standing in the cloud of dust left behind by the departing bus.

Melih looked at me, a puzzled expression on his face. “Why did you run over and touch that dumpster?”

“Well, that’s where I finished yesterday,” I said, “And I’m walking across the country, which means wherever I stop one day, I have to start the next.”

“If you don’t, who’s going to know?” Melih asked.

“I’ll know.”

Melih and I took a few selfies with the Kız Kalesi in the background, and then we began the day’s walk.

The first ten kilometers went pretty smoothly. Melih walked with pep in his step, and for the first time I could hear lightheartedness in his voice.

The road took us through an area that, in the days of the Roman Empire, had basically been a Roman suburb. We stopped to climb around on an outdoor amphitheater, and later to take a photo of me standing in front of an old Roman aqueduct nestled between lemon trees. I marvelled throughout the day that in most other places sites like these would be hidden behind closed gates and entry fees, but here they were just scattered rocks and pillars farmers drove their tractors around.

We passed a new building complex. Melih pointed out the complex and said that he had designed the electrical systems for these buildings.

Between kilometer 10 and 20 Melih started to tire. I could see on his face, and in his gait, that he was starting to hurt.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“Yeah, but my feet are hurting a bit, and my legs are getting stiff. My back hurts, too.”

As we neared kilometer 20 I looked at my watch and noticed that it was 4pm. Man, I thought to myself, if I were by myself I’d be finished for the day by now but we still have ten kilometers to go! It would be dark when we finished. I was starting to get nervous.

At kilometer 22 we stopped for börek and çay. Melih took his shoes off. I could see he was starting to blister. I thought, Man there is no way he is equipped to finish this next ten kilometers.

I asked him, “Melih, are you sure you don’t want to pack it in? We could get a bus right now back to Mersin, we’d get home early. Why don’t we just do that?”

“No! I want to finish,” Melih said.

I pointed to the road behind me. “Are you sure? The busses are right there, we could flag one down.”

“No!” Melih insisted, “I want to do this!”

“It’ll be dark when we finish,” I said, hoping he would give in.

He smiled back at me. “No, Matt, I want to do this.”

“Okay then, let’s finish up our çay and then get back to it. Daylight’s burning.”

We gulped down the rest of our tea and crossed the road to finish the last ten kilometers of the day’s walk. For seven kilometers, Melih did okay, but for the final three kilometers, I was sure that every step was going to be his last. For about 30 seconds I would walk at what I thought was an incredibly slow pace, and then I would turn around and wait while Melih caught up with me. He was not talking at all, and his face was frozen in a grimace of exhaustion. I was afraid he was going to collapse.

“We’re almost there,” I reminded him. “Just a couple kilometers.”

It was late dusk when we entered the small town of Arpaçbahşiş with Melih still hobbling through every painful step and me turning around to wait for him every 30 seconds or so. We finally reached the flagpole at the municipal building which we had agreed on the bus ride would mark the end of the day’s walk. It was well past the time I would normally want to pull off the road and stop working for the day.

At the flagpole, I turned one last time and watched Melih trudge toward me. When he spied the flagpole, and even though he could barely walk, he found it within himself to skip through the final few steps. As he reached the flagpole he raised his hand and we did a high five. I said, “Let’s go home, Melih!” A look of relief crossed his face and he broke out into a huge smile and said, “Yes, let’s do that.”

On the minibus ride back into Mersin, Melih fell into a desperately-tired sleep while I looked out the window at the passing trees. I sensed that the day’s walk had addressed a deep need for Melih. I didn’t know what that need was, but a few days earlier at TAC the universe had made me a rock star. Maybe my job this week was to repay the favor, and help Melih find the rock star within himself.

The bus let us off at our corner in Mersin at 9 p.m. I shook Melih awake and we stumbled the last two kilometers back to Melih’s apartment.

My short stay at TAC had been an emotional high, and as I walked away from the school I wondered what would come next. I remembered that now I was shifting into Couchsurfing. That should shake things up a bit, I thought. I wondered what it would be like.

I arrived at the bus that would take me the 30 kilometers to the nearby town of Mersin where my first Couchsurfing host, Melih Mutluay, lived. I was feeling emotionally low. It would be hard to match the high I had experienced at TAC. But by that time I was beginning to learn: When you leave something great, just get to the next thing. You’ll find something great there, too.

I ate lunch at the bus station after arriving in Mersin, then sat drinking tea while uploading photos, updating my journal, and answering emails.

Then it was time to go meet Melih. I had looked up his neighborhood on Google maps and knew I had three or four kilometers to walk to reach his neighborhood. Most of the walk was along the Mediterranean shore, so I didn’t mind. On one side of me were palm trees and grassy parks, and on the other was the marina with its fancy boats and old men fishing. For weeks and hundreds of kilometers I had been looking forward to walking next to the Mediterranean, and here it was, finally.

Via messaging on Couchsurfing, I had arranged to meet Melih at 2:30 on the steps in front of the municipal arts theater next to the seaside. Melih had said his apartment was a five minute walk from the theater. At 2 p.m. I arrived at the theater, pulled off my pack, and sat on the concrete steps. It was December but I was wearing short pants and a t-shirt, sitting in the shade of palm trees. The plateau, where I had been two weeks ago, was now covered with snow.

I thought back to the times I had sat outside a mosque, hoping they would let me camp outside, and marvelled that for the first time on my walk sleeping arrangements for the night had already been made.

I had never met Melih face to face and had only an idea of what he looked like from a photo on Couchsurfing, which had been our only contact. Since I wasn’t sure who to look for, any male passing by was a Melih suspect, and it occurred to me that I might look a little weird, sitting alone on the stairs, smiling at every approaching man.

Melih didn’t have a problem finding me and spotted me very quickly, perhaps because I was the only foreigner stretched out on the front steps with a really big backpack. He was wearing old khakis, his hands thrust into the pockets of a red jacket he’d probably been wearing for several days in a row. His shoulders were a little slumped.

“Hi!” he said in a flat, monotone, “Let’s go back to my place.” He turned abruptly and began walking back to his apartment.

I hopped up to follow. But since I had to pause to pull my pack on, I had to hurry to catch him.

He didn’t seem very excited to see me, but as I followed him back to his place I was excited to see how easy Couchsurfing made it to find a place to sleep. So much for chatting up gas station attendants, I thought, hoping they’ll like me enough to offer me a place to sleep.

We went back to Melih’s small apartment.

It wasn’t a fancy apartment. In fact, it was kind of dingy. The shower was just a nozzle on the wall in the kitchen next to the washing machine. Under the nozzle was a plastic bucket for pouring water over yourself. The kitchen sink was full of dishes that had been dirty for weeks. Scattered crumbs and stray dust bunnies littered the floor, so I kept my shoes on as I walked across it. Melih’s desk was covered with stale cigarette ashes and overflowing ashtrays.

However, I reminded myself that for the last few months I had been sleeping in abandoned pear orchards. Plus I knew this was Melih’s first Couchsurfing experience, so maybe that explained his mood.

I set my pack down in one of the four rooms of the apartment, a room Melih had designated for couch-surfers–in this case me, and we went to have a meal and get acquainted.

Friday, 14 December

The next day I resumed my walk, this time Couchsurfing style. I woke up at 6:30am and walked a couple kilometers to the main road. I caught a bus for the 90-kilometer ride to Silifke, found a seat, and propped my red knapsack on my lap. At Melih’s the night before I had filled that knapsack with supplies I would need for the day: my iPhone, my camera, a bottle of water, a pair of gloves, and an extra shirt in case it got cold. I reached into the bag, pulled out my camera, and filmed a couple minutes of footage just sitting on the bus. I was almost as excited to be on a bus commuting to work like a normal person as I had been on the first morning of the walk back in Kuşadası. The woman across the aisle from me watched me as I filmed, looking puzzled, probably trying to figure out what was so interesting about sitting on a bus that it warranted filming.

I stepped off the bus in Silifke, pivoted, and began the day’s walk, 30 kilometers back towards Mersin. I figured that without a pack, I would be able to cover 30 kilometers, not my usual pack-carrying 20 kilometers.

Two weeks ago I had been walking through forests and river valleys. Now I was walking through a string of sandy beach towns along a road lined with hotels, shops, and restaurants for vacationers. The sparkling waters of the sea were 100 meters to my right, and the hills of the Toros mountain range to my left.

At the end of that day’s 30 kilometers I hopped the mini-bus back to Mersin and walked the final one or two kilometers from the main road to Melih’s apartment.

So that’s how it’s going to be for a while, I said to myself as I climbed the stairs to Melih’s apartment. Take the bus to work. Walk. Take the bus home. Repeat that process the next day.

That evening Melih and I sat in his apartment drinking a couple beers. Melih was silent for a moment, then looked me directly in the eyes and said, “Matt, I’d like to come with you on your walk tomorrow.”

I was surprised and happy to hear he wanted to join me, figuring that having company might be fun. But I was also a little nervous. I was aware most people do not walk 6 hours a day.

Melih smoked and was a little on the heavy side and got no exercise that I was aware of. So I said, “Well, I walk 30 kilometers. Are you sure you are up for that?”

He replied, “Whatever you do, I’m determined to do it too.”

A fire in his eyes told me that yes, he was determined to do it. But could he do it? I did it, but I was used to it. He wasn’t.

“Do you want to walk the whole thing?” I asked. “Or just the beginning or the end?”

“I want to do the whole thing,” he said.

“You’ll probably be pretty sore the next day. Are you okay with that?” I asked.

He said, “Yeah, I’m okay with it. What you are doing is a test for me. I want to do it.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll be glad to have you. I leave about 6:30 in the morning. Are you okay with that?”

“Yes, no problem,” he said.