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 many kilometers will I need to walk each day in order to meet my goal? I punch a few numbers into the calculator, and breathe a sigh of relief. It’s doable, but I’m going to have to walk twice a much as I’ve walked in previous months. There will be a lot of wear and tear on my body and I will be very tired at the end of the month.
Urfa, with a population about 600,000, one of the oldest cities in human history, is considered to be the hometown of Abraham but there is no room in my schedule for visiting historical sites—not even Urfa’s iconic Balıklı Göl (Fish Lake). The story with Fish Lake is that King Nimrod had Abraham burned on a funeral pyre, but God turned the fire into water and the burning coals into fish. This pool of sacred fish remains today. No one eats these fish. Legend has it that if you eat one of these fish you will die.
Tourists flock to Urfa for this and other “cradle of civilization” sites. But I have a job to do, and I will not be able to see any of it..
I think of a friend, Yonca from Istanbul, and dedicate the day’s walk to her. On Twitter Yonca goes by @epithetankgirl. March is going to be my busiest walking month yet, so all month I’ll be needing the inspiration of, for example, indestructible tank girls.
I stuff the calculator back into my pocket and resume walking. My goal for the day is the airport about 35 kilometers outside the city.
Around 10am, I stop at a gasoline station for a mid-morning snack of a bag of potato chips and a candy bar. A group of farmers squatting on the pavement, also taking their mid-morning break, invites me to join them for tea. I squat down next to them.
“What are you doing?” they ask me.
“I’m walking across Turkey. I’ve been on the road for six months,” I say.
“Where do you sleep at night?” they ask.
“Sometimes I stay with friends,” I say. “Sometimes I camp on the side of the road.”
“Like a spy,” says one of the farmers.
“Yes,” I reply, “like a spy.”
Further down the road, I come across a young man, a shepherd named Şahin. He walks with me for about a kilometer, which is unusual, because shepherds are usually busy managing their flocks.
“What are you doing out here?” Şahin asks.
“I’m walking across Turkey. I’ve been on the road 6 months. I’m walking towards Diyarbakir.”
Şahin’s face lights up. “That’s great,” he says, “what a grand adventure! I will probably live my entire life right here, just a few kilometers from my village, watching these sheep every day. I wish I could do something like that.”
A few kilometers later, I run into another young man on the side of the road. He asks me, “What are you doing out here?”
“I’m walking across Turkey. I’ve been on the road 6 months. I’m walking towards Diyarbakir.”
“That’s impossible,” he says, “you can’t do that.”
“I have been walking for six months,” I repeat.
“That’s impossible, you can’t do that,” he repeats.
“Okay, thank you,” I say, as I wave goodbye and continue walking.
Life is so much simpler now that I am not trying to respond to everything people say or to defend myself. All I’m thinking is—17 kilometers, 18 kilometers, 19 kilometers, 20 kilometers. Put one foot in front of the other. Put it down. Pick up the other foot. Put it down in front of the first one. Repeat until you’ve crossed the country.
I reach the airport and wait by the side of the road twenty minutes for a minibus to ride back to Urfa.
For the next month or so, I will have no deep philosophical moments of reflection. It will just be wake up, walk, shower, sleep. Repeat each day until I reach the end of the country. The process will have about as much emotion as clearing the table or washing and drying a dish. I will strip things down to the bare minimum I will need for the day and then strip them down again.
This is not a cultural experience. I do not care that I am walking through the cradle of civilization. I have a project, and I need to get it done.
Saturday, 2 March
I wake up in Urfa. I take the bus to the airport, where I ended my walk the day before.
There is almost no tree farming or agriculture other than ground crops and grasses for sheepherding. So green blankets the rolling hills for as far as the eye can see. There is not a tree in sight. The villages are far apart. From what I understand it is like this from Urfa all the way to Diyarbakır.
I walk 30 kilometers further. I take the bus back to Urfa.
Sunday, 3 March
I wake up in Urfa, board a bus, and ride 60 kilometers to where I left off yesterday. There is nothing in sight but rolling hills covered with green grass, and a blue sky above. At the spot I stopped yesterday I tell the bus driver to let me off the bus. He looks at me, puzzled. His face says, Why in the world would you want to get out here? When he sees my increasing urgency he pulls to a stop and opens the door and I climb off.
Today, if I walk 32 kilometers I’ll end up in Siverek, a small town of less than 10,000 people between Urfa and Diyarbakir.
Before I walk I dedicate the day to Mary Baba. Tomorrow is her birthday. Mary is my aunt (my mother’s sister). Her birthday actually isn’t until tomorrow, but I won’t be walking tomorrow — I’ll be moving on to Diyarbakır.
“Mary,” I write. “I have a photo of me at the Euphrates river the other day. I’ll drop that in the mail to you.”
I am again in the middle of nowhere, but in Turkey, people appear even in the middle of nowhere. I begin walking.
A couple hours later I meet two men on the side of the road. I greet them and ask them if everything is okay. They tell me they are looking for their horse. I wish them the best of luck and continue walking.
A few hours later I come across a truck stop with a cafe. It’s probably the only food place I’ll see today so I stop for lunch.
I order the ground beef with eggs. It looks like it has been around for about 37 years, but I’m hungry, and I LOVE the stuff, so I cross my fingers and hope for the best.
While I am eating it occurs to me I ought to start a travel cuisine blog called QuestionableTruckStopGrub.com. I chuckle at myself. After all, there aren’t many people around today to laugh at my jokes. If I don’t laugh at my own jokes, who will?
After lunch I begin walking again, facing traffic as always. Once or twice a day a driver suggests to me that hitchhiking would be so much easier if I would cross the road and walk with traffic, not against it. I thank them for their concern. If I were hitchhiking I would probably have picked up on that idea on my own by now.
I walk for a few more hours and reach Siverek, midway between Urfa and Diyarbakir. I hop a bus back to Urfa, glad that tomorrow I will be moving on to Diyarbakır.