Walking in the Mountains

On the day I celebrated the one-month anniversary of my arrival in Turkey, Bruno and I hiked in the foothills of the Ala Dağlar Mountains. A sheep dog followed us. We walked through the quiet village of Çukurbağ with its red-roofed A-frame wooden homes that reminded me of a ski post in the Alps. A few women in loose flowery pants and headscarves sunned themselves in spacious gardens, and a few men drove past in tractors. We wove up the hill and cut through the fields of steppe grass, past the sheep, up, up toward the mountains. The snow-capped summits, fresh air, and empty space called us there, ever up.

When I walk, I think. I daydream. I ponder silly things. I reflect. I connect experiences. I’m reminded of other things that make me think, ponder, and reflect.

On this day, as we meandered up and down the silently beautiful foothills, I was reminded of the walks we’d done only a few days earlier, in Cappadocia. That region is a day-hiker’s dream, with no less than a dozen valleys to explore (that you can connect together to length and loop your walk, if you want). Many of them hold ancient cave churches visible only by the tiny doorways and windows carved into the face of mushroom-capped and elf-hat-shaped fairy chimneys. All of them offer overflowing natural beauty.

I had loved walking in Cappadocia. It was probably my favorite aspect of my time in a place where choosing a favorite is a huge challenge. It wasn’t just the fairy chimneys or the churches. It was that every step forward offered a new angle on the landscape. It was the vineyards poking out of pale, chalky earth. It was the tortoises we encountered on the road. It was the trees in full spring bloom. And it was, above all, the fact that we were free to enjoy our walk in peace.

I thought back to our hikes on in Africa. In three years of travel through the continent, I can probably count them on one hand (ok, maybe two). You need a guide, or you have to pay a fee, or it’s not safe, the locals would say. There was always some reason that we couldn’t walk freely. Often, to be honest, we didn’t want to hike in a place. If the hike involved passing through villages, we knew without a doubt that we would be harassed, begged to, or scammed. Walking is supposed to be relaxing and meditative, but it rarely was in Africa.

I thought, then, about my past month in Turkey. I’d really enjoyed myself, so far. This country was growing on me, getting into my skin in a big way. I thought about how it seemed to be the perfect country for a traveler. I wondered if it might become one of my favorite countries of the forty-one I’d now traveled to.

It wasn’t just that I could walk here, without a guide, without paying a fee, without worrying about my security, or without being harassed by the locals. It was that Turkey really has the whole package. It’s got the incredible natural beauty. I’ve seen snowy mountains, rivers, giant blue lakes, geological oddities, rolling hills, steppe grass, and pine forests, and in a day or two, we’d add sea and beach to that list. The map of Turkey even shows a desert and a salt pan. The variety – and vastness, for Turkey is huge – of landscapes means that your bottom jaw barely reconnects with the upper jaw before dropping yet again.

Turkey also has a fascinating and complex history that I’m still struggling to make sense of. It wasn’t just the Byzantines and the Ottomans here – there’s a whole slew of characters involved, from the Hatti and the Hittites to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, and the Seljuks. And there’s a historical site seemingly at every intersection to match.

Its culture is no less complex. The women wearing long sleeves, ankle-length skirts and headscarves holding hands with their mates as they strolled in the park; the young hip generation in Istanbul born from farmers in Anatolia; the [long and meandering] call to prayer coming from mosques that, here, sit empty most of the year; the fact that tourism has reached Turkey with a bang yet the locals still speak no English.

Now that I had been in Turkey for a few weeks, I was starting to understand some of the seeming cultural inconsistencies and to place customs and sites in historical context. I’d had to work hard for it, but things were finally starting to reveal themselves to me, just like the Turkish language that I was slowly picking up on out of pure survival. And with each layer I peeled back, I continued to find Turkey just as intriguing, but more and more appealing.

The sheep dog led us back down the hill toward Çukurbağ. A few people waved at us as we passed. Merhaba, we replied with genuine smiles. We’d just been on another successful hike in Turkey, one where we were neither pestered nor threatened, one where we’d been left to our own devices, one where we’d been free to explore the countryside at our own rhythm and to ponder those that had walked these paths before us.

As I walked past the friendly locals of Çukurbağ, and thought of all the other laidback, relaxed, and open people we’d encountered in Turkey, my meandering thoughts connected: It seemed there was a direct correlation between how much I liked a country and how walkable it was.

A country I can walk in is a country I like, I decided. And I’ve already walked a lot in Turkey.