Tuesday about 3:00 pm I started looking for a place to stay. It had been completely overcast the whole day. It would be getting dark early.
I stopped at a Shell gas station. They were nice and friendly, but didn’t have much in the way of desirable places to camp. I also wanted to get a few more kilometers under my belt that day, so I decided to keep going.
Out here in this area south of Konya there isn’t much in the way of groves of trees I can camp in. The terrain is not at all like it was two or three days before I got to Konya, when I could easily pull off the side of the road and have my choice of groves of trees to camp in.
I pulled into a village called Cariklar, about 25 kilometers south of Konya. By that point it was about 4pm and it was starting to get dark. I suspected that if I couldn’t make it work in Cariklar, I’d have to hop a bus back to Konya and stay in Konya.
As I entered the village I greeted a young man coming out of one of the houses. We chatted for a moment, and then I asked him if there was anyone at the mosque a couple hundred meters down the road towards the village. He said that if there wasn’t, there were a couple more mosques in the village proper (a couple kilometers further off the highway), and I could try there, too. The imam, he said, would be very helpful. I asked him what the imam’s name was. He said didn’t know who the imam was.
I walked to the first mosque. It was a very nice mosque with a huge garden that had multiple places to camp. I stood near the door and waited for someone to show up. It was getting cold, though, and dark, so after twenty minutes I decided to try one of the houses at the back of the lot and see if anyone was home.
Someone was home — a woman, preparing dinner, and her daughter. When I knocked the daughter answered the door while the woman stood in the background. There was no man of the house in sight. I knew what the answer would be before I even opened my mouth.
I told the woman that I had been walking, and that I was looking for a place to camp for the night, and would it be okay if I camped in the garden. She told me no, it would not be possible.
I continued the kilometer or two into the village proper. The village had two bakkals (corner markets). It was dark out by then, and I could not see much, but I estimated the village population was about 1,000 (in general, I am finding, one bakkal can support about 500 people). I stepped into the bakkal and said hello. The bakkal was very busy — children out of school for the day coming in for candy, adults getting off work coming in for bread and other household goods, etc.
I told the teenager behind the counter what I was doing, and that I was looking for a place to camp for the night, and I asked if there was anywhere nearby where I could camp. He and some of the other adults in the store commented on how cold it was getting at night. I told them it would be no problem, that in my backpack I had everything I needed for cold-weather camping. There was some chatter amongst the adults that I didn’t understand (I am having a hard time with the Konya accent). I asked again if there was a place I could camp nearby, and the teenager behind the counter told me that they were looking for a place.
That’s almost always a good sign. On this trip I’ve learned that when a group of adults says they are looking for a place, it means they have taken upon themselves the responsibility for finding a place for me to stay, and that if I am just patient, they will find one. In fact, the places they find tend to be better than the ones I would be satisfied with. At the end of the day, I just want a flat spot hidden from the prying eyes of unknown strangers. If that means a grove of trees outside in the cold, that’s perfectly fine with me. But when people tell me they are looking for a place, it usually means they are looking for a sheltered spot indoors.
I sat down in the bakkal, amidst the hubbub of people coming and going. A few of them chatted with me for a bit, others just bought their stuff and left in a hurry.
After about an hour sitting in the bakkal, the teenager’s father came in and took over the post behind the counter. The teenager and his father had a brief conversation, which I had a hard time understanding, but gathered was about my situation. The father said something and the teenager grabbed some keys from the wall and told me to follow him.
I grabbed my pack and followed him to a building across the street. He unlocked the door, pushed into the first room, and began rearranging some benches to create a path to the second room. It was a school for Koran classes, but the classrooms hadn’t been used in a year or so, and the rooms were cluttered.
The first room had a cement floor, but the second room’s floor was carpeted. One of the other teenagers who had come in behind us laid out some additional carpets and said the floor would be nice and soft. A few other teenagers grabbed a large trash bag and covered up a broken window.
The teenagers asked if I would be okay here. I told them this would be great, and I thanked them profusely. They asked if I was hungry or thirsty. I assured them I had already eaten and that I had had plenty to drink. I told them when I would be leaving in the morning. The first teenager said the bakkal would be open at that time, just stop by and say goodbye. They wished me goodnight, handed me the keys, and closed the door behind them. By that time it was about 6:30pm.
There was no light in the second room, but there was indirect light from the first. I set up my tent, took care of some other housekeeping details, and stretched my legs and feet. By that time it was about 7:00pm. It was dark, it was cold, and I had nothing to do. I was also extremely tired from the day’s walk, so I turned in early.
About 7:30pm there was a banging on the front door. I got up to answer. An older man wanted to find out who I was, and who had told me it was okay to stay there. That happens quite often — a village might be small, but communication is not instantaneous or tight. He was easily satisfied, and I closed the door (leaving it open a crack, though) and went back to my tent.
About 8:00pm the teenager from the bakkal and one of his friends came to check on me. They made sure I was comfortable and not in need of anything, and then they took their leave.
I stayed up until about 9pm and then fell asleep.
I got up at 7:00 in the morning, packed up my stuff, wrote a thank you note, and walked across the street to return the keys and say goodbye. Mehmet bey, the village mayor, in the photograph above, was there to greet me. We chatted for a bit and exchanged phone numbers. I asked him the village’s population. He said 1,200. I congratulated myself for seeing reality yet again hold up my “one bakkal per 500 people” theory.
Mehmet bey asked me what religion I was. At first he thought I was Muslim, because in my thank you note I used a phrase people say to me often (“Allah sizi korur,” god protects you). I told him I was not Muslim. He suggested that I convert. I thanked him for his suggestion and said we all love the same god. He liked that. He liked the thank you note and told me he would post it in a prominent place as a memento from the time a foreigner came to stay in their village.
At that point the bakkal became very busy with the day’s field workers stopping by for bread for their lunchtime, so I took my leave and headed out to the main highway.
On the road out of the village a man greeted me near the mosque where the woman had told me the night before I could not camp. He apologized and said that they actually had a spare room, and that had he been home when I arrived it would have been no problem. I assured him that it was not a problem anyway, that I had found a nice place to stay inside the village.
I reached the main road a few minutes later and began my day’s walk south.