Sleeping Rough
My general plan for sleeping is to start looking for a good camping spot towards the end of the day so that as it gets dark I’m all set up. One problem with this plan is that sometimes I say to someone something like “Hey, can you help me?” and they say Yes Yes and give me some tea and I hang around hopefully but then a bit later something changes and it turns out that they can’t help me any more. Then it’s dark and I’m on my own again and that’s not always perfect. When I was approaching Istanbul and so sort of in the middle of a massive stretch of urban spread that happened. I walked on for a bit until I found a bit of nicely mown grass which was in the middle of a massive intersection. There was a tree which provided a bit of shade from the surrounding street lights and I reckoned that the cars (which were visible in all directions) couldn’t see me if I didn’t put my tent up. I wasn’t worried about not putting my tent up because I met these two Polish hitchers on the border who didn’t even have a tent with them, just roll mats, so I knew that tentless sleeping was a legit option. There’s a fine line between camping and sleeping rough, and I think if you don’t put your tent up you cross that line but I’m not a snob so I plopped down my sleeping bag, shifted my neckerchief over my eyes and went to sleep. Not very much later two people who weren’t dressed as policemen woke me up by being next to me. It seemed that although I was quite well hidden from the passing cars, I was quite obvious to passing humans. They asked me some questions which I artfully managed to say “Anlamiorum” to, which means “I don’t understand”, and then one of them got out his wallet and flapped it around and said “Police. Passaport.” I was just on the point of getting my passport out (from inside my sleeping bag – oh how cautious I was) when it occurred to me that he might be doing that thing you see people do in films where they just pretend to be police and in fact aren’t. And blow me, he was. I asked him for his ID again and he waved it more frantically than the first time. On the third ask he shook my hand and walked off. So I decided that I shouldn’t sleep there, packed up my stuff and walked on.
Devotees of this blog will know that a while ago Rory said that I should try sleeping in a graveyard and although I think he’s a bit weird it certainly occurred to me that tonight would be a good night for it. And blow me, I then walked past a massive graveyard. Due to it being in a big city, real estate was sparse and the graves were absolutely crammed together with no space to walk between them and as a result I ended up sleeping on a grave. It was a surprisingly comfortable night – totally dark, no passing strangers, a double bed with non-spikey and quite squidgy greenery. And, most importantly, I wasn’t woken up by a grieving widow in the morning. Still, I prefer the tent.
Istanbul
I had organised a place to stay in Istanbul with a couchsurfing guy and I had a kilo of flour in my bag and 6 lira in my pocket. All I needed now was to meet up with Lucas. You remember Lucas, he was biking to Tanzania and I met him in Austria. Well he took the long route and I took the short route and it looked like we were going to get to Istanbul at the same time, but I’d failed to meet him the day before and now we didn’t have a plan. Lucas just said, slightly hopefully, “If we don’t meet, I see you in Istanbul I think.” And indeed I did see him, while I was walking along some little street in the city centre, heading towards Couchsurfing Omer’s house. He said something like “Ah, there you are.” And then when I called Omer to say that there was two of me and one of me had a bike and a single dreadlock he said “Ok, no problem”. Well I made loads of pancakes, did a bunch of computering and no sightseeing. Rested, ate, climbed a building, had about five Couchsurfing strangers write to me to say I could come and stay with them if I liked, met someone who lived on the Asian side who said I could stay with her, hitch-hiked across the bridge (can you believe that you’re not allowed to walk across even though there’s a pedestrian section of the bridge? Apparently it’s because people killed themselves by jumping off too much which is a totally ridiculous reason. If you’re planning on killing yourself please do it by jumping off a motorway bridge in front of a load of traffic and wear a shirt saying “Open the Pedestrian Road Across the Bosphorus”. Maybe then they’ll see sense.), made it to Margarita’s house, kept going the next day and several days of city later, and I was out.
Tea
There’s a right way and a wrong way to drink tea in Turkey. The right way is to have two teapots, the bottom one with hot water and the top one with superstrong tea in it, and they sit on top of each other. You also have a little vase-shaped glass with no handle to drink it from and normally you have two lumps of sugar with it but sometimes you get to choose how much. Huge amounts of sugar are not frowned on. The wrong way is to not have any. Occasionally I have tea with a tea bag or from a glass which isn’t the right shape but it’s rare. The full two-pot apparatus can be found in pretty unlikely places. Yesterday I met a couple who claimed that they had broken down and needed 200 lira which they didn’t have and had been waiting for two days. They had, in their car, the double teapot, gas cooker, quantities of tea, a box of sugar cube and at least two glasses. I’ve been given tea by cherry-sellers by the side of the road, by countless security guards of factories and such in their little security boxes, road construction crews, cafe owners, cafe customers, all kinds of shop owners and petrol stations. Some petrol stations have urns with two taps (water and tea) where you can have free tea because, presumably, to deny the thirsty motorist their tea is something close to a human rights infraction. On the days when I’ve counted I’ve had: 14ish (lost count), 12ish (lost count), 7 (very hot day and this doesn’t include the coke which the homeless guy bought me), and yesterday, 15. One day I’m planning to have a day when I accept every time someone offers me some tea but that will be a hard day I think.
Church
Church in Turkey is called Mosque and it’s slightly different. I went for the first time yesterday having been too intimidated before. I thought I’d probably stick out a bit and do all the wrong things so I checked with someone who spoke English and found out the protocol. Thing one which is very important is not to be a girl. If I’d made that mistake I would have been very obviously out of place. The next thing is to wash loads of parts of your body which you don’t normally wash, such as your feet and your forearms, before you go in. Since you put your socks back on after the foot wash it doesn’t stop you smelling gross but possibly has some other health benefits. Then you take your shoes off when you go in, pick a spot and surreptitiously copy the person next to you. It’s pretty straightforward – you listen to the guy reading the Qu’ran for a while, then you all line up in lines and he carries on reading. Then everyone does a series of bows and kneels and then it’s over. I don’t think it lasted longer than 15 minutes. There’s something quite nice about it being all men – I didn’t get the impression that anyone was there just to meet girls for example.
Turks
I was given some statistic beads a while ago. There are 33 of them on a bracelet and if you want to make statistics about cars which go past you, for instance, you can count 100 of them with three rounds of the bracelet (and you have to remember to add one more). I mention this because I said before that about 1% of cars which went past me beeped and waved and I know that as soon as you heard that you thought “I wonder what the sample size was”. I’m in the hills now with less cars around and more friendliness, making this the friendliest place I’ve ever been to by a stretch. Yesterday, in a sample of 33 cars, 6 beeped or flashed their lights to say hello and one stopped to give me a lift. The people I meet often take a photo of me with them. They take me by the arm if they’re walking somewhere with me and they tell me that my eyes are beautiful. That is what we would have called Legendary Service when I was at Starbucks. However I have only really come across men. The women are there, going about their business, but they don’t generally offer me tea or wave at me as they drive past or, often, smile at me when I smile at them. Women just don’t really feature in street life I think.
Bogs
Ages ago I remember Reg saying to me – if you accidentally get poo on your hand, you wouldn’t just wipe it off with a bit of paper, you’d wash it with water. His point was (and he’s half Turkish) that there is more logic behind the Turkish system of post-poo clean-up than behind the English system. I thought about that for a long time and I couldn’t see why he was wrong. Then I met Lucas who said “And you clean your ass with water, yes?” He’d been to India. It turns out that anyone who knows anything prefers the Middle Eastern way. When I got to Turkey I was confronted with the traditional hole-in-the-floor style bog, but instead of pink sandpapery loo roll, there was just a teapot of water. Avoiding as much detail as possible, the answer to Reg’s 15-year-old riddle of why we wipe and don’t wash is that you get your fingers covered in poo which is gross.
Mum
Mum is coming out to walk with me in about a week. She’s something in the region of 69 now. I’m sure you’ll be anxious to find out if she’s capable of walking further than Abi.
Thank the Lord you had your whit about you with the police(who were not) grave yards are very peaceful glad you went with Rorys advice and you managed to sleep,its amazing that you and lucas managed to meet up what great timming ,It’s good to hear you are happy to go to different churches,Oh and if I drove passed you I would toot,flash and smile,cos you always make people smile,it was nice off you to share the poo subject from lucas,and theres me thiking it was all about a hole in the wall and a monkey and teeth!!!!!and may I just say don’t let mum do to much walking as she has offered to help me paint the new house,Take care my friend with love and preyers alison/xx
ps how is the tent holding up?
If you’re headed for Tarsus (birth place of P(s)aul then you might pass through Iconium (Konya), but probably not Lystra (19m south of Konya) or Derbe (north of Karaman). Before you get to Tarsus you may have to pass through the Cilician Gates (now called Gulek Bogazi).
In Lystra Paul healed a crippled man and the crowd went wild wanting to sacrifice an Ox presuming Paul to be Hermes himself.
I think you’re walking through what used to be a prime place for Syriac Orthodox Christians. Its unlikely that you’ll find so many nowadays as they’re a bit of a persecuted minority but (if they’re who I think they are) they claim to speak the same aramaic that Jesus did and their churches are fabulously coloured.
hi mikey
i like the bit about the bog in the floor(toilet and poo)
so was emilys but aswell as that emily liked when u sleped in a graveyard
tim
More quality blog action from Learboy. I would quite like to come and walk with you, but I have (almost) banned myself from flying so I don’t know how easy it would be to get to you. Maybe train, but it would cost qutie a lot. I like your method really, but I’d be a bit behind.
I was enjoying a lovely cup of tea as I was reading, which I think helped me enjoy the tea section. It’s a tasty and refreshing beverage, I can see why our turkish cousins are into it.
I went to the Lear family gathering the other week, though most had left already. I showed off to your olds that I could get this blog on my normal looking phone. Blogs are good.
Help, that sounds like a challenge. I am not trying to walk further than anyone. though I have been doing a bit of practising in the Alps. But Lumpy determinedly went SLOWLY.
Can’t wait to TRY and find you
Huge love mum
Well Mikey, I think you’ve just about done everything I suggested to you (‘cept the wild and strange mystical experience) – well done you! Glad the graveyard thing worked out well; you can imagine how guilty I would’ve felt if it hadn’t.