I left off in Gaziantep

First it should be noted that in retrospect I am feeling very strongly that stopping there was one of the most important parts of this trip.

It helped me to have a vision of where a large part of my family comes from, and the environment that they lived in for generations.

Also, through my Dervish endeavors it helped with a centering in the kind of self growth I want to be focusing on; slowing down, working with my mind, and exploring the fundamental threads of the world that connect all the places I am traveling through.

Oh and most importantly, it was easily the city with the best food yet. They call it the kitchen of Turkey for a reason…

Anyways, moving onward, and westward, to the coast, I found myself excited to return to the water

I spent the first night in Mersin, a small port city on the coast of the Mediterranean, looking south at the eastern tip of Cyprus. It was a funky port city that reminded me of a Turkish Everett. I was stopped by women on the street corners and watched more than one fight break out on the street. One man selling falafel told me it was the Gotham city of Turkey… I moved on quickly.

My next stop was in Antalya, a beautiful coastal city, a little further west.

I arrived in the cover of night, and when I woke and walked the streets, I let out an audible and involuntary ‘holy shit’ as the view smacked me in the face.

This perfect clash of mountains rising directly out of the sea was entirely unexpected. A juxtaposition I couldn’t get enough of, spending most of the first two days wandering along the coastline of the bay.

On the third day I got rocked by a sickness.

It was the first real bout of sickness I have been hit with on this trip, and it knocked me out for a solid three days.

So much for ‘no such thing as too many dürüms’.

Fortunately, I was stuck in a mediterranean paradise, but unfortunately it cut into my time in the region (I am on a time constraint of getting to Bosnia by the 25th, which I will go into more later). I had to bail on plans to visit ancient ruins around the city, and northward, in Cappadocia. I was a little dispirited to miss out on these adventures, but I made the best out of my time, getting out a little during the days to see as much of the city as I could.

Then, as they always do, things worked out.

In my first two days in Antalya I had met and made friends with a Dutch guy named Hugo who had left on my third day there to go see the ruins I had intended on going to. A few days later, just as I started to feel better, he returned.

We were both headed north, towards Istanbul, and had similar destinations on the way in mind, so we set out together.

By trains, buses, and thumbs, we made our way slowly up the coast.

We passed through Aydin on our way to Selçuk, where we explored the ruins of Ephesus, an ancient city built in the 10th century BC.

The entrance fee was about 50 euros, which we both decided was too much, so we bushwhacked through the foothills above the ruins, looking down into the ancient city and finding our own lesser ruins in the surrounding area. It was an epic adventure of bushwhacking, stumbling upon hidden treasures, and enjoying the foothills of coastal Anatolia.

(these photos, more than most do it 0 justice, but I blame that on our distance from the site and the limited zoom on the lens I brought)

After as much kebab barbecue as we could eat, we hit the bed, exhausted from the day, and mentally preparing to do it again in the morning.

The next day we continued north to the city of Çannakkale, a quaint Turkish city sitting on the Dardanelles strait. We chose Çannakkale because it is only a 30 minute bus ride from the ruins of the famous city of Troy, a kind of ‘bucket list item’ for both of us.

The ruins of the ancient city fit perfectly into our Homeric fantasies. Troy sits atop a hill, with a sweeping view across fields of farmland and out to the beach and the sea. It was easy to imagine hoards of greeks pouring over the fields below from their ships on the beach.

A small oopsie.. I forgot to bring my camera… But in my defense, the pictures wouldn’t have done it justice anyways. In lieu of this, I have pictures of homeric statues from the town nearby, behind them you can see the same sweeping farmlands.

Hugo said, “The thing about pictures of ruins is that when you show them to people, they are just pictures of piles of rubble. The real magic in these places is to see the space and feel the air and let your imagination fill in the rest”

I love that sentiment. It is never about the old piles of rock, as much as it is about imagining what they once were.

This is especially true about Troy as it is the oldest ruin that we saw, with the first iteration of the city being built around 3,000 BC. That’s old. For reference, Cleopatra was born in 69 BC, which means we are closer now to Cleopatra than she was to the creation of Troy. For more reference, when Xerxes and his persian army marched to Greece in 480 BC, Homer’s stories were already so famous that he stopped at the same ruins to experience this place he knew from the same stories we still know today.

Mind bending.

From Çanakkale we worked our way north again to Tekirdağ, a city on the coast of the sea of Marmara, and halfway between Çannakkale and Istanbul.

In the Tekirdağ bus station, Hugo and I split ways. He was headed to the Istanbul Airport, and I was headed into the city itself.

It was sad to see him go, I have never had such a like minded companion to share the road with. We shared a sense of calmness, letting the road take us where it would, agreeing that bad situations are a mindset and everything would work out if we let it. We played guitar and sang in bus stops, and hiked through abandoned cities of unfathomable age, and through it all we simply had a lot of fun together.

But thus is the nature of the road, and I was excited to continue on to Istanbul, where new adventures awaited, and a bridge from Asia into Europe.

I will leave you there to save you from my ramblings, and to give Istanbul a full post, which it deserves.

All the best