30 September through 7 October at Charly’s Pansiyon
I stayed at the pension for over a week, sleeping by the lake, taking showers with hot water every day, doing my laundry, and eating the traditional Turkish breakfast served on the deck. If it rained I had the option of sitting inside in the dining room, looking out the bay windows that surrounded the dining room.
One of the things I enjoyed the most at Charly’s was the leisure of sitting on the deck listening to music with my headphones. Through the entire month of September, I hadn’t used my headphones. While walking it was important to be aware of my surroundings, and I couldn’t unplug from my environment at all.
I did get an “earworm” that wouldn’t go away for several days while at Eğirdir — America’s “Horse With No Name.” I don’t like that song, but the lyrics came out of nowhere, and I let them in because they felt right.
I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert, you can remember your name
‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain
During my stay, I met a number of people passing through the pension, several of whom were British. One was a woman named Carla who stayed at the lake three or four months of the year. Carla had been coming to the lake for years, not as a guest, but paying her way doing odd jobs such as food prep, clearing tables, making beds, and vacuuming. In return, İbrahim allowed her to stay at the pension and eat for free. The rest of the year she would go back to her family in England. Like me, she spoke English and pidgin Turkish.
Another, a young woman in her late twenties, a born-again Christian missionary, was taking buses from one Turkish city to the other. One day she joined me as I sat in the sun on the deck. During our conversation, she asked me, “What religion are you?”
I said my usual, “I’m a Christian, of course!”
She said, “Do you believe in God?”
I said, “Yes, I believe in God.”
She asked, “Do you believe that Jesus was his divine son?”
I said, “No.”
She said, “Well, then, you are most definitely not a Christian! And you should stop referring to yourself as one.”
I was slightly bemused by that conversation and thought, Well, if I stop referring to myself as Christian then what am I? I was used to referring to myself as Christian because where I was walking you were either a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew. My Turkish was not good enough to explain to people what I’d have meant if I said that I was none of those things and that I was just “spiritual.”
I’d had these kinds of conversations with the Muslims in almost every town along the way. I felt like I had been pummeled by a bully every time. The “not only am I deeply religious, but I am also right” spiels were the same no matter whose mouth they came from.
There was another group who were regulars at the pension, and that was a group from an elite military training center for commandos a couple kilometers away. These were not your garden-variety infantry. They were in this area because of the mountains and the lake where they could train in different terrains. I was able to watch them jump out of helicopters when they practiced lake landings. There are also some high and craggy mountains around the lake that are covered with snow where they could train during the winter.
During the day, the travelers cleared out of the pension to take their day trips and the deck of the pension became a lake-view internet cafe for the commandos. They came in during leave hours in the afternoon to hang out on the balcony and drink tea or beer and check their Facebook and email their wives and girlfriends back home. Some of them must have had agreements with the pension owner, though, because apparently they had girls closer by who came in to join the commandos for a drink, and before you knew it couples were disappearing into the available rooms together.
The commandos had to be back on base about the time the foreign travelers came back from their day trips. So the pension had this 24-hour circulation of groups of different people I watched as they came and went.
Also during my days at Eğirdir, I did some walking around the town. There was a little square where I became a regular. As much as I enjoyed Charly’s, I sometimes felt out of place surrounded by the foreign travelers there. I felt much more at home surrounded by the Turks in the village who spoke Turkish and ate Turkish foods like kaşarlı pide, a flatbread with cheese, for lunch.
One day as I sat in one of my favorite restaurants munching on my kaşarlı pide, I was jolted out of my comfort while watching TV. This was the time the Syrian border was starting to become destabilized, and on TV the talking heads were discussing the Turkish parliament debate taking place that day on whether to authorize the Turkish government to make incursions across the border into Syria. I knew I would be walking close to that border in a few weeks.
Another time I took a mini-bus into a nearby village to a farmers’ market, the Pınar Pazarı. This was one of the biggest farmers’ markets I’d ever seen and one of the highlights of the area. I had trouble not grabbing handfuls of olives out of the tens of thousands of olives heaped colorfully on trays that were arranged down long tables, and I could barely resist sticking my fingers into the powdery red spices mounded in cloth sacks with their tops rolled back. There were fresh vegetables, fruits, butcher shops, restaurants, clothing for women, home goods — and tourists.
But most of the time I spent the week at the pension lounging on the patio, listening to music on my headphones, and answering more questions from the 4th-graders.
The other travelers didn’t understand this. When they spotted me lolling around on the deck wearing my headphones during the day they would invite me on their day hikes. They were having the trips of their lives, following in the footsteps of St. Paul and soaking up the great history of the area. How could I just sit on the deck doing nothing?
The hotel staff and Carla and İbrahim would also come out and ask me, “Are you sure you don’t want to do some of the activities?”, “Are you sure you want to sit here all day and do nothing?” For me, though, this was my holiday from walking through the country visiting places, and all I wanted to do was sit on the deck and listen to music on the headphones, soak up the sun, and watch small whitecaps sparkle on the lake.
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In 2012, Matt sold off or gave away almost everything he owned. He strapped whatever was left to his back, flew to Turkey, and walked across it. Every foot, from one end of the country to the other. Along the way, he slept in mosque gardens, dined with strangers, and stumbled into refugee camps.
This is the story of that journey. We’ll be publishing one chapter each week from his book. If you would like to read the whole thing at once, you can purchase his book titled Heathen Pilgrim: Walk Across Turkey on Amazon.
