Wednesday, 6 March Today’s walk is 32 km (20 miles), starting at the provincial border between Urfa and Diyarbakır, and ending at the village of Tokaçlı. The temperature is 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), and the crosswind so strong the bus is shuddering...
Tuesday, 5 March The day after moving to Diyarbakır, I hop a mini-bus back to Siverek to begin the three daylong legs of my walk toward Diyarbakir. The plains now are windswept, the winds high. As I start my walk out of Siverek, a group of about eight 10-year-old boys...
Friday, 1 March I start walking again. I leave Urfa like a bat out of hell. My first thought—Oh shit! I want to finish this up by the middle of April and I still have one-third of the country to cross without injuring myself! I pull a calculator out of my pocket. How...
The next day, before resuming my walk, I went downstairs to the hotel’s breakfast buffet. I took a seat next to the window. A cold rain was beating against the glass. I was happy to see on the buffet a big bowl of tahini, an oily spread made from pressed sesame seeds....
Arriving home at Mustafa’s each day had meant I ended the day with a warm, home-cooked meal and a hot shower in a spacious bathroom, but all good things must come to an end. Mustafa’s inlaws needed their apartment back. They lived in Kilis, a city adjacent to the...
Wednesday/Thursday, 16/17 January Before leaving Gazientep on the commuter bus to began my final day of walking back into Gazientep, I met Mustafa and some of his colleagues at a bakery for a breakfast of katmer. Katmer is a favorite breakfast food in Gaziantep. I had...
Saturday/Sunday, 12, 13, January I spent most of my three days at the Osmaniye Ogretmen evi catching up on administrative stuff, doing laundry and taking care of personal needs, and visiting with friends. One of the first things I did during my long weekend off was to...
Friday, 11 January The next morning I crept out of my frost-covered sleeping bag and with stiff, blue hands slowly began to break camp. I shook an icy crust off my tent, and the tent’s fabric crunched as I stuffed it into my pack. I was having a hard time finding a...
Thursday, 10 January The next morning, after staying out with my new friends relatively late the night before, I got up early, shouldered my backpack, and said goodbye to Osmaniye. It was time to move on. I was to meet Joy Anna on the road for that day’s walk. She had...
Wednesday, 9 January The next day was a work day. I was getting used to my new routine: get up early, take the bus to work, walk for 6 hours, take the bus home. In the evening, after I had rested up from my walk during the day, I met with Ilgi again. With her, was her...
Monday/Tuesday, 7/8 January After a month of Couchsurfing, I started to settle into a routine: Walk three days into a city, take a day off, walk three days out of the city, move on to the next city, and then repeat the pattern. “Turn off your brain and just keep...
Saturday, 29 December After my day of walking with Baris on my birthday, I still had one leg I needed to do to reach Adana. I decided to wait with that because life was so active in Mersin, and I had invitations and social calls I needed to make before I moved on. So...
Friday, 28 December My birthday! I dedicated the day’s walk to Elif Başak Kurkcu, another guardian angel who tirelessly herded me through hallways and up and down stairs at TAC. I celebrated my birthday by walking. I did have company. Baris Aydin had noticed me...
Wednesday, 26 December I had spent a few days leapfrogging ahead and walking east, into and out of the nearby city of Adana. But Melih wanted to walk another leg with me, so the day after Christmas we hopped a bus to Tarsus. We rode to the main intersection in Tarsus...
Monday-Wednesday, 17-19 December Oh, the food in Mersin! After subsisting for a couple of months on gas station junk food, whenever real food was presented to me I gulped it down unquestioningly. And Mersin was full of good food. In fact, during the time I took off...
We met on a rainy evening in the park next to the seaside. It was a warm rain, but it was enough to drive all of the evening strollers out of the park, so we had the park to ourselves. A strong wind blew the drops sideways, but we found a pagoda sheltered by a tree,...
Sunday, 16 December The next day, Sunday, I woke up at my normal time, 6:30am, and knocked on Melih’s door to ask him if he wanted to join me again. He called out good morning through the door, but he sounded like he was in pain. Probably sore from yesterday, I...
Saturday, 15 December The next morning I got up at 6:30. Melih was still sleeping. I knocked on his door to wake him up. “Hey, I’m leaving in a few minutes,” I called through the door. “Do you still want to join me?” “Yes,” he called through the door, “I still want to...
Thursday, 13 December My short stay at TAC had been an emotional high, and as I walked away from the school I wondered what would come next. I remembered that now I was shifting into Couchsurfing. That should shake things up a bit, I thought. I wondered what it would...
