Friday, 14 September
The next morning I woke up, broke camp, and walked over to the station’s café for a breakfast of menemen (scrambled eggs, tomatoes, and green peppers) and bread. After breakfast, I went back out onto the highway and walked into Denizli.
With a population of 500,000, Denizli seemed a huge metropolis compared to the tiny villages I had been walking through. I felt like a country hick. How quickly I had adapted to my surroundings for the past two weeks. Even Aydın was a quaint little village compared to Denizli.
As I walked into Denizli, I felt under assault by a wall of noise. It seemed Denizli was one big construction site. Everywhere, jackhammers breaking cement and pile drivers drilling deep into the ground for god knows what. Traffic was heavy and drivers were busy honking their horns. Large trucks belched exhaust fumes as they lumbered by. I choked on the fumes.
My slowly-healing foot began to throb. My spirits had ended on such a high note yesterday, but now I was beginning to feel depressed, angry, and out of place. I projected this negativity onto the world around me. I imagined the truck drivers were laughing at me, a rube in from the countryside, sticking out like a sore thumb in the big bustling city.
I had been walking for a few hours with nothing to eat, so I was hungry. I stopped in for lunch at a roadside restaurant.
The restaurant was air-conditioned inside, but I chose to sit outside on the patio because I was hot and sweaty. It was comfortable enough out on the patio. There were lots of plants, and I was sheltered from the sun and the noise and the dust. I began to relax, my bad mood and my anger at the world beginning to subside.
A young woman came out to serve me. I observed to myself that most of the servers I had run across in the past couple of weeks had been men, and it was unusual to be served by a woman. This particular one was not only young, probably in her early 20s, but kind of cute too. She greeted me warmly as she handed me the menu, and while I ate she smiled at me and engaged me in a little flirty small talk.
By the end of lunch my mood had changed from Man, everything really stinks here, I hate Denizli, to Ah, that pretty young woman smiled at me, life is good.
As I finished lunch and shouldered my pack to go back out into the big bad city, I reflected on how little it had taken to change my mood from bad to good.
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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.
