Mutlu, whose name by the way means "Happy," and I bond over the fact we are both Fenerbahçe fans. The Galatasaray and Beşiktaş fans amongst us, and you know who you are, well, you can go, you know. Photo courtesy of İlgi Çelik.
The main course hasn’t even arrived yet, and the table is filled with food. In other words, a pretty typical Turkish dinner. Left to right: a salad with lettuce, carrots, and tomatoes, bread, a mound of yogurt made from buffalo milk with walnuts and honey on...
One thing I love about this walk is how unpredictable things are. Yes, I may have planned out the route months before starting the walk, and yes, I may have spent hundreds of hours poring over Google Earth before I even left California. But as planned as many aspects...
This section of the toll road has a tunnel or two. Tankers and other trucks carrying dangerous materials aren’t allowed in the tunnels, so the free-access highway is heavy with tanker traffic.
In Turkey it’s pretty common for a smoother, wider toll road to run nearby the free-access highway, and usually the two run parallel within a few kilometers of each other, but sometimes they follow close to the same route, crossing back and forth across each...
I woke up this morning in kind of a low spot emotionally, wondering where the strength was going to come from to put on my pack and climb back up to the road and go to work. I do that pretty much every morning, wonder for a moment whether that day’s strength is...
Mustafa from Gaziantep, whom I haven’t even met yet, told us to stop by and see his uncle and cousin at his uncle’s gasoline station. At the station’s restaurant, Mustafa’s uncle treated us to a delicious breakfast. The sucuklu yumurta (sausage...
Joy joined me in Kuşadası for the very first day of the walk over four months ago. Yesterday she joined me again, this time for one of the legs between Osmaniye and Gaziantep.
I left my scarf in Mersin (I suspect), and so I improvised by tying some long underwear around my neck. Yes, it’s clean. Photo courtesy of Joy Anna Crow.
