Scenery between Mut and Silifke

This is a couple thousand feet lower than the Central Anatolia plateau, but plateau-like terrain shows up every once in a while, like in this area south of Mut, where white, sandy ridges with little or no shrubbery were reminding me where I had been just a few days...

Thank you for breakfast, Yunus

Monday morning on the road through a village called Karadiken I spotted Yunus and his family making yulafli bread. I stopped by to say hello and have a chat. Yunus is a farmer growing apricots, olives, and a few grapes. He and his wife, shown here holding one of their...

The Goksu river

I spent three days walking the Goksu river, a river that drains into the Mediterranean sea at Silifke. I took this photo Monday, the first of the three days.

Camp this morning (Monday, 3 Dec)

Sunday night (2 December) I camped in an apricot orchard south of Mut. I had hoped to make it a few kilometers further than this on Sunday, but I was just having so much fun hanging out with the cops, and there was so much food, and there was that hot shower, how...

Hanging with the cops, Palantepe edition

I stopped by to say a quick hello to the traffic cops just outside Mut, in a village called Palantepe. Like it did a few weeks ago in Icericumra, my quick hello turned into a couple hours hanging out at the precinct station. How could I resist, what with the cops...

Restaurant in Mut

I didn’t eat at this restaurant this time around, I just stopped in to say hello. My friend Christian and I ate here when we passed through Mut about 3 weeks ago. Left to right are Yusuf, Aytekin, and Burhan. They got a big kick out of my returning to say hello,...

Tea with Huseyin

Stopped for tea with Huseyin in Mut. Huseyin is a big fan of life in Mut, telling me that Mut is heaven. He sent me on my way with a pomegranate, and a request that I send him this photo via Facebook. Unfortunately, Huseyin, I lost the piece of paper that had your...

Stopped by the olive oil factory

Chatted with Ibrahim, Ramazan, and Fatih at Mut’s Tunasan Zeytinyagi Fabrikasi (Tunasan Olive Oil Factory). Ibrahim is a mathematics teacher at a high school in Mut. His school has 800 students, and this year 20 of them will get to take a field trip to Spain....

Geek post: repurposing a solar charger

Originally I got this solar charger for my phone, but it was never one of my “go to” tools. It took a full day to get half a charge, and that half a charge would only charge my phone halfway, and half a charge on that phone barely lasted half a day. So as...

In the news again, but why doesn’t anyone walk with me?

Yesterday, on the second day of my descent from Sertavul Pass, I stopped in for a couple glasses of tea and some chat at a village called Gecimli, a small town with a population of a couple hundred people. The owner of the tea garden mentioned to me that he had seen...

Ramazan, maker of breakfast for a hungry guy

This is Ramazan, maker of breakfast this morning for a hungry foreigner who showed up out of nowhere carrying a big backpack, speaking pidgin Turkish, and greedily scraping every crumb off of every plate like some kind of starved homeless person. There are 30 goats...