This leg is about 120 miles long, so it’ll take me a couple weeks to walk it. I’ll probably be passing through this area around late December and early January, meaning this is where I am likely to be for Christmas, my birthday, and New Years Day.

In describing the previous section, Silifke to Osmaniye, I blew right past the Cukurova plain east of Adana. Perhaps that’s because the plain looks like it has lots of warehouses and peach trees, and I’ve pretty much been walking past warehouses and peach trees 5 days a week for the last 6 months getting ready for the trip. In my description here I won’t backtrack all the way to Adana, but I will start by not short-changing Osmaniye, the end of the previous leg and the beginning of this one.

Osmaniye

The city of Osmaniye, where the flats of the Cukurova plain turn back into mountains

Osmaniye is a city of about 190,000 people. The area is watered by the Ceyhan River, and they grow a lot of peanuts. When I reach Osmaniye I’ll be over halfway across the country, having completed 716 miles of a 1305-mile journey.

Osmaniye sits at the eastern edge of the Cukurova plain, next to the foothills of the Nur Mountains. Once leaving Osmaniye it’ll take me a day or two to climb up into the Nur Mountains and onto the rolling hills east of them. The elevation of those rollers fluctuates between 2000 and 3000 feet, with a few spikes to 4000 feet. At that point I’ll be closer to Syria than to anything else — the highway is 10-30 miles from the Turkey/Syria border.

Road west of Gaziantep

Back in the hills for the next 600 miles, and I'm cool with that

By the way, “Nur” means “Holy Light,” but the mountains also go by the name of “Gavur Mountains.” “Gavur” means “infidel.” The mountains don’t seem to care whether you think they are holy or infidels, they are there either way.

One more thing: Osmaniye and the Nur Mountains mark the point at which my imagination of what this trip will be like runs out. The first half of the journey, from the very beginning at Kusadasi right up to Osmaniye, has sea and some Roman ruins. I’ve spent enough time traveling around Turkey to know what to do with those things. Sea: “Oh wow, the water sure is nice, let’s go for a swim.” Roman ruins: “Oh wow, that’s really cool, and old.” But beyond Osmaniye there isn’t any sea, and very few of the ruins are Roman. If I were to make a map of “This is what Matt expects from the trip,” I would just draw a line at Osmaniye and east of it write, “Here there be monsters.” Fortunately, one of the skills I want to improve on this trip is peeling away imagination to embrace reality, so seeing my imagination run dry dovetails with that just fine.

Rolling into Gaziantep

Rolling into Gaziantep

Birecik on the Euphrates

Birecik on the Euphrates

About a week or two out of Osmaniye is Gaziantep, a city of about 1.3 million at 2800 feet elevation. Gaziantep, one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, has plenty of olive orchards and vineyards, but it is most famous for cranking out an insane quantity of pistachios. In fact, the Turkish word for “pistachio” is “antep fistigi,” “Antep nut,” Antep being Gaziantep’s older name.

Incidentally, since Gaziantep is only 30 miles from the Syrian border, it is closer to the Syrian city of Aleppo than it is to the Turkish city of Adana.

About three days out of Gaziantep I’ll hit the small town of Birecik, where I will cross the Euphrates river.

The Euphrates is dammed many times in Turkey before it reaches Syria. A few miles to the northwest of Birecik the Euphrates is dammed by the Birecik Dam, but Turkey’s main dam on the Euphrates is the Ataturk Dam, further upriver about 40 miles to the northeast of Birecik.

For about a month after crossing the Euphrates I’ll be walking across the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, the cradle of human civilization. I am excited about that. More on that in the next installment.