For those of you reading this in the Midwest, you may know that trekking in Turkey Jon and I are eight hours ahead of you. That means that while you were catching some sleep before waking up to Thanksgiving and all the wonderful food and family it would bring, Jon and I were walking the trail and talking about all the food and family we would not be tasting or seeing. Not that we don't love our family, but food definitely won out as far as quantity of talk time. It seems that when you are walking from literally sun up until after dark as we did yesterday, it may be expected that the conversation would drift to caloric consumption.
İ started it off by talking about all the food I could not wait to eat while home for a bit around Christmas. Cracker Barrel, Culver's eggnog malts, Honey Nut Cheerios (which is something I have never craved before)...they all sounded so wonderful as we made the largest elevation gain of the whole trip over the morning hours. We were keenly aware of what was going on back home though, and the conversation inevitably turned to traditional foods of this American holiday. Turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, pie of all sorts, etc, etc (foods that for many of you will be haunting your kitchen as leftovers for days to come). Oh, what a joy it would be to taste any of these things right now!
Of course, it was not in the cards for us to have a traditional meal, but Jon and I are thankful to have made yesterday the hardest fought day of our trip so far and made it to the coastal town of Finike around 7pm so that we could check our aching feet and muscles into a cheap hostel and eat a Turkish Thanksgiving feast all our own. Two huge salads, several loaves of bread, a Turkish pizza, chicken casserole, a big plate of kebabs and a cold beer each was our wonderful late night meal! Looking for ice cream bars but coming up short, we polished things off with a packet of cheap convenience store cookies to take the place of pie.
Now we have a good rest day under our belt and will be heading out tomorrow. Tomorrow marks day fourteen of our walk, and we are basically down to the last 5 days. We have moved nearly 175 miles thus far. Though we now do not plan to finish the whole thing, we should be making around 250 miles by the end if things continue to go well. As cliche as it will sound, I thought I would write down the mental list I made in my head yesterday of the things I am thankful for over the coarse of the past two weeks:
-Safe flights getting into both Egypt and Turkey
-A friend like Jon to travel with as we get along with almost no problems
-A body that, save the aches and pains expected with a trek like this, has held up amazingly well
-The great weather (it has not rained once since getting here)
-The amazing hospitality of the strangers we have run into while passing by their farms and through their towns - and I want to say a bit more about this one to illustrate what I am talking about.
On day seven of our trip we woke up and walked about two miles into a town called Gokchoren. Our map told us that there was a market there where we could buy food, and we were counting on it as we were down to two apples (which had been given to us for free by a man the day before) and what amounted to a few slices of cheese. As we got into town, we flagged down a passing car and communicated what we were looking for to the middle-aged man in the drivers seat. He told us in broken English that there was no market. We must have looked crushed as he then reached into the back seat and handed us a loaf of bread! We thanked him many times and he drove off.
Our conversation turned to how we would be very hungry but could walk a day on the little food we had now that we had this loaf to split. However we still needed to find someone who would let us fill our water bottles. As we continued to walk down the road, a boy came out to the end of his driveway. He greeted us and invited us into his mothers home for breakfast, without knowing how much we could use the food. We accepted and were welcomed in where they filled our water bottles and sat us down for fresh goat cheese, olives, homemade bread, jams, eggs, and tea. We communicated the best we could but I like to think they understood how grateful we were. We payed them for the meal and they let us take more bread as well as olives and some goat cheese with us.
We walked over 30km that day and by the end were hoping to pass a place where we could buy a soda to enjoy after a long days walk. As we neared a place we thought might have a market, I approached a man chopping wood in his yard. I asked about a market and he informed me again that there was no market. He then asked me what I was looking for. I said Coca Cola. He stood silent for a second, and then motioned for me to wait. The man called for his wife and she came out with a half-gone two liter bottle of the stuff. After taking the bottle from her, the man poured himself a small glass and then handed me the rest of the bottle and motioned for me to take it.
That night, sitting around the fire, Jon and I ate a meal that was composed completely on the kindness of the strangers we had met along the way that day. Blessings like this have been an almost daily occurrence in our lives since heading out. Yes, yesterday I was especially thankful for the kindness and giving spirit of the Turkish people.
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