Sunday, 2 September
At 5:15 a.m. the wail of the muezzin’s call to prayer from the loudspeakers of the minaret rising over me stirred me out of my sleep. Not only was sleeping next to a mosque safe and convenient, the mosque came with an alarm I couldn’t ignore. I pulled on my boots and stumbled about 20 meters (22 yards) to the little outhouse in the mosque’s garden. Then I knocked down my tent, brushed off the dirt, and stuffed it into my pack. All was quiet. There was no one to say good morning to. I figured most of the adults in the village were probably already on their farms tending to their fig trees since no one came to prayers that morning.
I felt a momentary stab of self-pity. Here I was on the second morning of my big cross country event that was going to take months of my life and there was no one around to share it with. I hungered to hear a simple “Hey, Matt, safe journeys on your second day!” or “Bravo! You made it through the first night!”
I let the feeling pass, pulled on my pack, and walked out to the main road a few hundred meters away, and began walking east towards the sunrise. A few hundred meters later, once I started to feel the call of the day’s adventure was stronger than the pull of my warm sleeping bag, I stopped, pulled off my pack, and, for the second time of the walk, I pulled out my small whiteboard, a black marker, and my camera. I scrawled “Today is for Mason Waters,” photographed it, stuffed everything back into my pack, and resumed walking.
About 200 meters later, I realized I was hungry. I looked at my watch. It was 6:30, time for breakfast.
I spotted an outdoor tea garden up ahead on the left side of the road. Outside was a dusty handwritten sign advertising gözleme. Gözleme, a popular food in Turkey and a favorite of mine, is a layered flatbread stuffed with a choice of crumbled white cheese, mashed potatoes, or spinach. The place seated only about twenty people, and I was their only customer. I asked the owner if he was open. He was. The morning air, though still crisp and fresh, was starting to warm up, so I took a seat under one of the shade trees and ordered gözleme and çay (tea).
I was hungrier than I thought, so I greedily tore into my breakfast, scraping the plate to make sure I got every last crumb of gözleme.
When I finished I pushed back from the table, feeling smug and proud of myself for being probably the only person in the world who dared take on an adventure of this magnitude.
At that moment two other men breezily stepped into the tea garden wearing backpacks. I could see by their freshly-pressed t-shirts, cargo shorts, and white Nikes that they were not locals.
I greeted them and invited them to sit down with me for breakfast. They ordered çay and gözleme too. I asked what they were doing and where they were from. One of them spoke a little English; the other spoke none, and neither of them spoke Turkish, but we did the best we could to find words we all knew. I asked them what they were doing and where they were from.
One was named Darek and the other was Piotr. One was a Catholic priest and the other was a diamond-tipped industrial saw blade salesman. They were two Polish guys who were best friends on an extended walking pilgrimage from Poland through southeast Europe, east through Turkey, south through Syria and Jordan, and finishing in Israel. Their operational model was that they would work at their regular day jobs during the year, and then during their two to four week vacation they would leave Poland and walk a portion of the journey. They had already been engaged in this project for some years and had been through Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, and northwestern Turkey. The year before, they’d walked from İstanbul to İzmir. This year they were walking from İzmir to Denizli.
The previous night, they told me as we sipped our çay, they had slept in a large, steel ocean shipping container.
I looked at their backpacks and was amazed that they were so small. I wanted to compare weights, so I stood up and walked over to their packs, asking if I could pick them up and look at them. My own pack weighed about 18 or 20 kilos (40 or 44 pounds). Their two packs together weighed half of what my single pack weighed. I asked them what was inside the packs, and they rattled off a brief list of the main contents. I realized I was carrying a lot of equipment that they didn’t have. For example, they carried sleeping bags, but no tent. I thought, man I have a lot to learn.
At that time, September 2012, Syria’s civil war was heating up, and I asked them if they were going to have trouble walking through that country. They didn’t seem too worried. They said that because they were walking only two weeks at a time, they would be walking into Syria in five years, and by that time Syria would probably have its problems sorted out.
I sat back down and ordered another tea. Darek and Piotr gave me tips for life on the road, and I told them a little about the country. They finished their breakfast and asked the owner of the restaurant to take a photo of us. Then the three of us shouldered our packs and walked back to the road together. Though we would be walking in the same direction, I let them go ahead first, pretending I had business to tend to before setting out. They took off down the road, and I followed a few minutes later so I could see them off in the distance. I felt a mild sense of comfort being able to see them ahead of me. After about an hour of walking I couldn’t see them anymore.
—
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.
