Thursday, 30 August – Kuşadası
At 10:30 a.m., at the walk’s starting point in Kuşadası, I stepped off an overnight bus from İstanbul. The other bus passengers scurried to taxis or cars driven by loved ones. Car doors banged shut. Cars sped away. Even the bus driver pulled away in his bus. I stood alone in the parking lot not knowing what to do next.
A voice in my head said, “Welcome to your new reality. It’s going to be like this for a while.” Another voice chimed in, “You are not of this world now, get used to it.”
I wandered around the parking lot aimlessly for a minute or two, and then sat down on a bench in the shade. I pulled out my phone and texted Elif, a friend of mine back in İstanbul, “Arrived in Kuşadası, see you in Denizli in three weeks.”
I stuffed the phone back into my pocket and focused on walk operations, logistical things I’d need to do: “I’ll need to put my feet in the sea before the walk starts, maybe I should head down to the sea now.”
The shoreline was about 3 kilometers away. I stood up and began walking. It was hot. I remembered why I was starting on 1 September, and not earlier: In July of last year a friend who lived in the area had posted on Facebook that her car was covered with tar from the road melted by the summer sun. I didn’t want to walk in that kind of heat.
Kuşadası is a tourist town, with a permanent population of about 70,000, swelling to as much as half a million during the summer months, depending on how many cruise ships are docked at the port. Walking through it is a little like walking through the cantina in the movie Star Wars, a place filled with thousands of people just passing through from distant galaxies. People who will be gone in a few days. People like me.
I reached the sea and noticed that because of the cruise ship docks I was still about 30 feet above the waterline. So I turned left and began walking south along the coast, looking for a place closer to the water.
One or two kilometers later I spied a narrow gravel road about half a kilometer long heading toward the water. I walked down the road to a dirt embankment rising about 3 meters above the water.
I pulled off my boots, dropped my pack, and eased myself down the rocky embankment into the ankle-deep water. The water was cool and clear. I took a picture of my feet in the water.
A family walking by on the gravel road above watched me as they passed. I smiled up at them sheepishly. It’s probably perfectly normal to take a photo of your feet in the water, but for some reason I was ashamed to be walking across the country. Friends back home had told me it’s a great undertaking, but I thought, Normal people don’t do stuff like this.
After I took the photo I climbed back up the embankment to the gravel road. I dried my feet with my socks, put my boots back on, and eased into my pack.
Finding a place to sleep on the first night had been a major fear. Maybe, I thought, I should tackle that next. Get it out of the way.
I walked a few steps and scanned the area. A couple hundred meters away I saw a man and a woman sunbathing on a dry grassy area with a building nearby. I thought I saw a few places to camp on the grassy area. I walked toward the couple. I couldn’t tell what the building was, maybe an old house.
The man, about 55 years old with matted salt-and-pepper hair, looked like he had lived a life in the sun without sunblock. The years had not been kind to him.
The woman looked to be in her mid-20s. She was reasonably attractive, or perhaps I was just lonely. She had seen me coming, but the man had not, so as I drew near I called out in Turkish, “Merhaba!” (Hello!) The man looked up. “Merhaba!” he called back and waved me over.
I wondered if I had stumbled into a situation where I would be the third wheel. Were this man and woman together? I felt like a lost little boy stumbling onto the adults at a late-night party. I was wearing baggy knee-length shorts, a sweaty black t-shirt, and was wearing my oversized backpack.
As I approached them I blurted out in my very bad Turkish that I was looking for a place to camp that night, was it okay for me to set up my tent on the grass nearby? The man answered immediately in English that of course I could stay, no problem, and he waved his arm across the realm to signal that I could camp wherever I liked.
He motioned to me to take a seat in one of the empty lounge chairs next to the two of them, and he asked me if I wanted something to drink. I was hot and thirsty. I told him that an iced tea would be great if he had some. “Sure!” he said, jumping up from his lounge chair. “Peach or lemon?”
“Peach,” I said, and he disappeared into the building to get my iced tea. I turned to the young woman. I had since gathered that she and the man were not together. My eyes settled briefly on the strings of her bikini pressing against the flesh of her hips. I quickly looked away. Keep it in your pants, Matt! You have a job to do!
I focused my eyes on her face and asked her, “What brings you to Kuşadası?”
She replied that she worked for a cruise line and had come from Moldova with her Moldovan clients. She told me the boat was docked in the nearby city of İzmır and she had a couple days of shore leave. She had decided to spend those days sunbathing by the sea.
The man brought back a can of Lipton peach iced tea. I thanked him and took it. The can was warm, but I kept my mouth shut.
I could see through the open doors and windows of the building that this was not a house but an empty restaurant building. I didn’t see a stick of furniture — no tables, no chairs, no cash register. Just a large, cavernous, empty shell of a building surrounded by large windows that looked like they hadn’t been washed in 30 years.
I asked the man his name. “Murat,” he said. Murat made me a little nervous. He had offered me a place to stay, a chair, and some tea, but I sensed that his offers weren’t coming from a place of hospitality or kindness. He had a hungry look in his eyes that said, I have a need. Business is slow.
The three of us sat on our lounge chairs making small talk. Strangely, the chairs faced away from the sea.
After about an hour the young woman got up and left. She had to go back into town to meet some friends, she said. So she left me alone with Murat, the two of us sitting in our lounge chairs facing away from the sea, I, “sipping” from my now-empty can.
Later that afternoon I needed to leave to go meet Orhan, a friend of a friend of mine. I stood up and told Murat I would be back later that day.
Orhan was a local TV celebrity, and as I walked the few kilometers back into town to meet him I recognized his picture on posters at bus stops. He picked me up in his car at the city center and took me for a short tour of Kuşadası, then we stopped at a grocery store to pick up a few things for lunch.
From the grocery store, we went to Orhan’s home, where his wife prepared a delicious lunch of köfte (meatballs), sigara boreği (deep-fried cigarette-shaped pastries filled with cheese), a cold soup of squash and yogurt, and çoban salata (tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers). We ate lunch and a dessert of cold watermelon while sitting on their balcony overlooking the sea, enjoying as much of a conversation as my rusty Turkish would allow.
After lunch, Orhan dropped me off back at Murat’s place where I went for a swim in the bay.
After swimming and lounging in the shade with Murat, I pitched my tent. A new camper had arrived, a university student named Göksel who was setting up his camp nearby. Göksel was hitchhiking south along the Aegean coast in order to walk the Lycian Way before school started again.
After our tents were set up, Göksel and I walked into town and drank a couple beers. Then I headed back to camp while Göksel continued touring around Kuşadası. For him, 9 p.m. was way too early to turn in.
That night the palm trees above me blew gently in the sea breeze, the Aegean waves lapped at the shoreline, and the salt air blew gently through the mesh roof of my tent. I began to relax with the exciting thought of living a nomadic life for a while, and I slept one of the most peaceful sleeps I’d slept in years.
Friday, 31 August
The next day, the day before the walk began, Murat and I sat in the lounge chairs most of the day while Göksel did some sightseeing in town. Neither of them seemed as impressed with me as I was. Murat was just happy to have a customer of any sort, and Göksel had his own adventures to think about. The day before, the Moldovan woman had not seemed very impressed either.
Around mid-afternoon Murat suddenly sat up on his lounge chair, turned to me, and eagerly asked, “Would you like some dinner? Could I fix you some chicken?”
Chicken sounded good, sure, but never had I seen anyone get so excited about a poultry dinner. Since I seemed to be the only customer Murat had seen in awhile I said, “Yes, that sounds great.” Murat sprang up and ran inside to call some domestic help for the evening.
Later, a woman arrived to help Murat grill the chicken on an inside grill. Murat asked me if I wanted salad. I told him yes. There was no refrigerator, of course, as the whole building was empty. He went into the pantry, brought out some wilted greens, and began chopping them up for the salad. To drink, he offered me the choice of either a beer or juice. I chose the juice, and he brought me a can of warm fruit juice to go with my wilted salad and half-cooked chicken.
I stared down at the plate of food Murat had just placed before me. Should I complain or should I trust that all would be well and dive in? I dove in. After dinner I retired to my tent and fell asleep.
Saturday, 1 September
On the big day, Saturday, 1 September, I woke up with my alarm at 6 a.m. I wanted a shower. It would be my first shower in a couple days and might be my last one for some time.
I broke camp and crammed everything into my backpack. I asked Murat where the shower facilities were. He pointed in their direction. When I got to the facilities I found no running water. I brought that to Murat’s attention. “Oh, you want running water!” he said. “Yes, that would be nice,” I replied. “I’m sorry. There isn’t any. You can use the buckets in the restaurant vestibule,” he said.
The vestibule floor was made of stone with a drain pipe in the middle. A small plastic pitcher sat next to the water bucket, presumably to use as a ladle. I tasted the water first, to see if it was salt water from the sea or freshwater. It was freshwater, so I picked up the pitcher and gave myself a sponge bath.
After I bathed and dried off, I pulled on my best black T-shirt (gotta look nice for the start of my walk!). I asked Murat what I owed him. He waved his hands and said I could pay him whatever I thought it was worth. I rummaged through my wallet, found 50 lira, and gave it to him. He looked disappointed. “Just 50 lira?” he asked. “Sorry, that’s all I have.”
It was 6:40 a.m. The sun was peeking over the hills to the east. I left Murat behind and headed for the cruise ship docks, the official start of the walk. The sea and the sky were a clear blue. No one was out yet. I had the road to myself. I had been preparing for this for almost a year.
—
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.
