Saturday, 8 September 2012 About 3 hours out of Horsunlu, I started the climb out of the Menderes River Valley. The predictable pattern of farm after farm began to end, and the mile after mile of flat road began to give way to gently-rolling hills. About 3 p.m. I was...
About seven hours after I left Nazilli, I walked into Horsunlu, a small village with a population of around 2,000 people. Horsunlu is at the eastern edge of the Menderes River Valley. The river valley at that time of year is very beautiful. Figs and other crops are...
On the morning of my seventh day on the road, I walked out of Nazilli and stopped at a tea garden near the village of Hamzali to top off my water supply. The tea garden was tended by a hyperactive 15-year old named Halil who couldn’t stop talking about how fast his...
It was lunchtime when I arrived in Nazilli, (population about 120,000). I walked up to the first restaurant I saw and ordered a lunch of kasarli kofte. Once again, the cook recognized me — he had seen me in the local papers or on the local TV, he couldn’t...
I reached the town of Kosk (population 9,900) early, at only 10:45 a.m. I had planned to spend the night there but since it was so early I decided to keep walking right through Kosk. Once I passed through the town and had a broader view of my surroundings, I noticed...
I had been walking through the Menderes River Valley for a couple days, and I was starting to recognize the local patterns. The straight road where I was walking ran predictably about 100 miles through the valley created by the Menderes River. Parallel to the road is...
At 5:15 a.m., shortly before sunrise on September 2nd, the wail of the muezzin’s call to prayer over the loudspeakers of the minaret rising over me stirred me out of my sound sleep. Not only was sleeping by a mosque safe and convenient, the mosque came with a built in...
Back at the mosque, I pulled my sleeping bag and tent out of my pack. I marveled that no one was walking up to me and saying, “No, you’re not allowed to do this! You can’t walk across Turkey like this and sleep at our mosque!” I set up camp feeling like an imposter....
Saturday, 1 September 2012 (cont.) As I arrived I saw Joy Anna already at the docks, playing fetch with a mangy dog while she waited to join me for the first day of the walk. The dog was a stray she’d just befriended. Joy Anna was a 30-year-old American woman from...
Thursday, 23 August, 2012: I wake up in Istanbul a week before my self-appointed date to start the walk. The mid-morning sun is shining through the window, and I am already sweating in the humidity. I want to go back to sleep. I want the walk to be over. I wish my big...
Sometimes our clients ask us to sit in on their “real life” presentations. We love opportunities like that. Seeing our clients operate live, “in the wild,” helps us do our jobs so much better. When a client lets us watch them give a real-life...
People are like dogs. If you stare at one long enough, he’ll attack. When you are giving a presentation, if an audience member gets aggressive and starts challenging you, resist the urge to spend too much time looking at that one person. Address his questions, but...
The other day someone asked me for advice. He had wanted to give a speech that would last about 4-6 minutes, but instead the speech went for almost eight minutes. “What should I do?” he asked. “Slow down,” I said. Wait a second, shouldn’t I have told him to talk...
The other day, a few of a client’s employees went to a presentation skills training. The trainer told them 70% of presentation is body language, voice tone, etc. My client asked me if I agree. This is what I told her: That 70% figure is bullshit. It’s not bullshit...
You know the saying, “You never cross the same river twice”? That applies to speeches too. The other day I was speaking about my walk across Turkey. Because of a timing mixup, I ended up giving the same speech to two different audiences. To my surprise,...
Tuesday was one of the most scenic days of the entire walk. After I left the Jandarma Komutanligi (jandarma command post) I spent the day walking a two-lane road hewn into the side of the mountains rising above the Goksu river. The road rolled up and down between 500...
Tuesday morning I woke up shortly before dawn to the sounds of coyotes howling and yipping a few hundred meters away. They either didn’t know I was nearby listening, or they didn’t care. Early the night before a ferocious thunderstorm had passed through....
VIDEO Transcript: This wedding was very different from the dozens of Istanbul weddings I’ve attended. The Istanbul weddings I’ve been to are one-shot deals, where all the components — drinking, socializing, eating, dancing, and of course the ceremony...
VIDEO Transcript: Things can change very quickly out here on the road. I can hit the highest highs, and the lowest lows, all in the space of a couple hours. I spent most of the other day walking through the city of Denizli. Denizli is a city of half a million people,...
