Lycian way in winter - a hobo guide

How to fail walking 500 kilometers in a month and to enjoy it a lot

Have you heard about the Lycian Way? It's a long walking path that follows the south-western coast of Turkey. It's definitely worth walking. It goes through the mountains and many Antiquity ruins, it is rather touristy, there are fancy hotels in almost every village, sometimes it is difficult to find, it is always stunning and the official guide says you shouldn't walk on it in winter. We did walk on it in winter, had little money and camped every day, so we didn't use any of the hotels. (We "chose" the toughest winter in the last I don't know how many years to make the experience more intense.) 

It was amazing. This is how it went and what we found out. (Internet is full of articles about this path, but they mostly talk about going there in warmer weather and using all the expensive tourist infrastructure. So I hope this post might help somebody who would want to travel like us.)

At a snail's pace

Do you usually walk 25 km per day even with a heavy backpack? Forget it. 

I usually don't read guides or descriptions of a place I am going to because I don't want spoilers. Also, the Lycian way was for us a place where to survive winter on a year-long hitchhiking trip across Asia. That meant we couldn't really plan what equipment co carry - we just had to carry all we had (including heavy winter clothes, for south Turkey mostly useless) - and we didn't have to catch any plane or bus so there was no point in detailed planning anyway.

So before we actually set our feet on the path, I thought it was going to be an easy walk along beaches and through villages, with some mountain every now and then. When we started walking, I realized that there were only mountains, though. You either go steeply up, or down. The way hardly ever follows some road, dirt road or even a path. You usually just walk through rocks or shrubs in a direction you just can't guess without the waymarks. And you sometimes lose the waymarks and must look for them. (This was actually happening to us pretty much every ten minutes, so our walking actually meant looking for the way. We always found it, though. Eventually.) 

The official smartphone application for navigation would probably help a lot, but it costs money - and this is a hobo guide, right? (Same goes for the official guidebook. Which also is quite big and heavy. But there is a nice map in it.) We at least had a smartphone with Android offline maps, though (Cheating, I know. Sorry. However it's very handy and on a long trip it eventually might save money). We also had a Wikitravel guide (good if you get lost) and an unofficial free diary by some people who walked almost the whole path.

All this means that you are slow because you must constantly watch where you are putting your feet and where the waymarks are. Since it's winter, you also have few daylight. Walking with a headlamp is out of question - unless you have an airport spotlight, you get lost immediately and will be eaten by wolves and men-eating goats.

All in all, we would walk some 15 km a day (except the days we squatted in abandoned houses since it was raining, or had barbecue on the eternal fire for the whole day because it was awesome).

Sun, rain and snow - and squatting

Websites all over internet advise against walking in winter because of bad weather. We found that the path was still quite walkable. (We avoided all the big mountains higher than 1500 m of altitude, though. It's usually possible to walk on the road instead.) Even though we started in mid-December, there were many days when I was sorry I didn't have shorts with me. It was sunny, but still not too hot. Almost the whole December was just perfect. 

In January, the weather spoiled a bit, though. There still were days like in a fairytale. But there also was quite a lot of days with a parade of all kinds of bad weather. I was very happy we had some waterproof clothes, rubber bags for the most important stuff in the backpacks and a good tent that survived some hail storms. A large raincoat, possibly with a hump for the backpack is super handy too. (Also, you may look like a nazgul with such a raincoat and that's cool.)

Even when it was raining for several days in a row, it was quite easy to survive (and to stay at least partially dry) without using hotels. 

Along the way, there are actually loads of free hotels - if you use your imagination a bit and aren't too fond of luxury. We would set up the tent in abandoned houses under construction, gazebos, on terraces of hotels or shops closed for winter... Once we squeezed under a roof covering a tomb. (The ancient inhabitant didn't come to complain even though we celebrated the Christmas eve in there, so everything was fine.) Another time we even found a completely abandoned shepherd house with a functional fireplace. 

It was quite helpful to have a smartphone with a data card in order to check the weather forecast, so that we knew about the great floods in advance and could find a nice squat in civilization. We didn't have to stay on one place for more than two nights, though.

When it's snowing, however, it is a good time for a break until the thaw. You simply don't see the waymarks and have no idea where the path is. I should mention that in the lower parts of the way, it snows very rarely. It happened to us once and even the locals were surprised. (When I say locals I mean goat herders with whom we were stuck. We were camping near their house when the snow came - and since we were blocked in the mountains, they allowed us to lie around their fireplace and watch Black Sea folk dances and a program about pig hunting in their satellite TV the whole day. And they were giving us food. It was one of the best experiences from the trail, so I'm quite happy we were stuck there.)

The (lack of) supplies

If you look on the map, you might think that since the path goes through many villages, you will run into a grocery store every day. 

Except that you won't.

Locals probably don't need shops much because they make many groceries themselves. If they need something more, they go by car to town. So in the villages (especially between Fethiye and Kınık) the shops are only meant for tourists. Which means that in winter there are none, are closed (most often) or there is a nice surcharge on everything except bread. 

As a result, we started running out of food the second day. What we missed most was bread. Eventually, each of us would have half a loaf for every meal. First we would have bread with cheese and olives and spicy peppers, then bread with peppers and then bread with bread. (For dinner, there would be bulgur with an instant soup cooked on campfire, yay.)

The third day we found an old lady who was selling frozen bread.
The fourth day, we discovered that we hadn't bought enough frozen bread and that half a loaf was kind of few.
Then we found an open tourist store and bought six loafs of bread. It was still few but we couldn't fit it anywhere, so it ended up tied to Vojta's backpack.
Then we ran out of bread again and when we were asking for a store, a man gave us a loaf for free (and said it was a right thing to do since he was a Muslim).

Then we arrived to a big village full of greenhouses and bought 3 kg of tomatoes. The next day, some nice people gave us 3 kg of oranges, and we again had no room for it, so it was hanging in plastic bags all around us. 

Later, my mum came to join us for a week and when she was leaving, she bought us loads of food. The only problem was that we still didn't have any room in our backpacks, so the food had to hang outside in plastic bags again. We weren't hungry anymore but it took Vojta 30 fucks more than before (and he had used to swear a lot even before) to pack his backpack every morning.

A week later, we finished all the food, so our backpacks were lighter again and we were hungry again. Fortunately, after Kınık the path goes way more often through big villages or small towns with shops, so we weren't hungry too often. We also started adding peppers, onions and chili peppers to our bulgur. Sometimes we replaced bulgur with red lentils, which was way better than just bulgur with an instant soup. (Cooking on fire is not a problem anywhere except the centres of the towns. We had a gasoline cooker but we would use it only when we were squatting because normally we would be able to make a campfire even on the rainy days.)

One more thing worth mentioning is that there are orange trees growing everywhere. In winter, they are full of oranges. The thing is, though, that there are two kinds of oranges - ones are sweet and the others are very bitter and sour. You can never guess from the outside which one is which, so it always is a surprise.

Antiquity ruins. And tombs

There are loads of them. Everywhere. Usually you just walk through them. You can find a tomb on a parking lot, in somebody's garden, on a pasture or on the side of a new road among pieces of rocks, sand and other construction waste. 
The path is designed to go through some of the largest and most beautiful old Lycian cities. It may be useful to stress that to enter them, or to enter some parts of them, you must pay an entrance fee. Usually it is between 8 and 20 Liras (2016). However, the ticket booth is not always totally easy to find and there is not always a person inside, especially if you come at night. (Vojta was always eager to find it, I was less.) 

A nice thing for travellers (and probably a nightmare for historians) is that nobody bothers you much at these places. In winter they are not crowded (except by sheep), so you can stay pretty much how long you wish (even the whole night), eat your breakfast in ancient parliaments, swim in rivers that go through the cities and yell "this is Sparta" in amphitheatres. A couple of times we came very late and there was no flat spot for the tent except next to the ruins, so we slept there and payed the entrance fee when we were leaving. Nobody seemed bothered. (However, we always made sure not to leave any litter and not to damage anything.)

Mosques, key to civilization

You might be asking how could one stay clean in winter without using tourist services. Especially if you are hiking with a backpack heavy as hell and you sweat.

There is actually quite a lot of options. Since winter in south Turkey is not very cold (it's very rarely freezing at night) and there is a lot of fresh rivers, it is best to swim in the estuaries on sunny days. You can bathe in the sea and then to wash the salt out in the river. We did so twice, in Olympos and near Kınık. In winter there are few people on the beach, so you don't need to worry you shock somebody with a European swimming suit. (There is a trick, though - most of the rivers between Olympos and Demre are salty.) 

If you are lucky enough, you also can find a working beach shower. Most of them are off in winter, though. We found one, near a hotel that was being repaired. When you are deep in the mountains, not on the beach, you can use water from springs.

This is all nice, but what if it is cold, raining for several days in a row, you are using all your energy to keep your gear dry and it is out of question to undress outside? (If it's cold and rainy long enough, you may realize that human is a filthy creature generating all kinds of muck.)

You are lucky to be in a mostly Muslim country, though. Mosques are your saviour and a carrier of civilization. There always is water (cold), a sink and a toilet. (Contrarily to my expectations, usually not a scary one.) They have roofs. They are in every village. And they have minarets, so you can see them from afar. It means that you can clean your teeth, wash your gear and your socks several times a day, if you like.

Sometimes, they even have functioning power plugs, so you can charge your phone. (If you are charging it long enough, you even may watch the imam singing the prayer call to a mike. If you are charging it too long, the imam may switch the power off.) If they also had free wifi, I would consider converting to Islam.

Once we even found a mosque with a shower. It didn't work but it still was a room that you could lock and that didn't have any wind inside. You can then heat water on a camping stove and mix it with cold one. One army cooking pan of very hot water can make two bottles of normally hot water, and that is enough for turning a filthy goblin to a clean and civilized homo sapiens. 

There also are Couchsurfers living on the way, and if you're a Couchsurfing member and not as useless at time management as I am and you ask to stay in their place long enough in advance, they may answer you. At least I suppose.

As for laundry, we had an unfair advantage - my mum came to join us and then flaw back home, and we were twice staying with her in civilization with a laundry machine. Except for that, we would use remote springs and taps on hot days. We would then dry the clothes on our backpack or by just wearing it wet (there is nothing like taking off your T-shirt on an abandonned dirtroad and then jump behind the shrubs three times because all the inhabitants of the nearby village decide in the very moment to go, one by one, to the next village on motorbikes).

Hospitable people, business people and scammers

I was surprised how touristy the Lycian way actually was. There are hotels and restaurants even in the most remote villages and they are advertised even on the most unexpected places. It happened to us several times that we were balancing on a steep goat path in the middle of nowhere, looking for a waymark, and we found an advert on the rock instead. Some people or maybe even whole villages make their living by selling services to walkers.

This is very nice for fancy tourists, but if you don't actually want to use any tourist services, it may complicate your life. Especially because people often offer you things and it is quite difficult to distinguish who is simply hospitable like people in Turkey usually are, and for whom you are just a walking wallet and is trying to manipulate you into buying stuff you don't want.

Even though we would normally only buy groceries, it happened to us once that a hotel owner was waiting for us at a beginning of a village. Somebody whom we had met in the mountains nearby had called him we had been on the way, and he probably wanted our money so bad. He was very friendly and was pressing a taxi, a hotel and a restaurant meal on us even though we had told him clearly we didn't have budget for such things. We were unfortunately out of supplies, so we needed to buy bread from him, though. He wasn't willing much to tell us the price in advance. Eventually he invited us for tea and then made us pay for it. (The amount was way too high.) We actually lost not much, but the whole situation was creepy.

However, this was our only awkward experience. Usually people respected our refusal (we were also quite lucky that most of the hotels were closed for winter). And we met many people who simply were hospitable or wanted to just talk with us.

We were offered coffee at some point and as we were chatting with our hosts, we got three huge bags of oranges. A lady called us from her doorstep at night when we were passing by just to give us several pieces of delicious traditional bread with herbs. A mayor of a village let us camp on his balcony when we asked if we were allowed to camp on a village lawn. He also invited us home for tea and we ended up eating apples and sunflowers seeds with the whole family. In the morning, his wife gave us bread and olives. Goat herders in the mountains let us stay day and night in their house when we were blocked by snow. Even though we had refused to buy a meal from them before the snow came, they were feeding us all the time for free (we eventually payed them because otherwise we would feel like assholes, but they hadn't asked for the money). A guy invited us home for tea when it was raining even though we said we wouldn't stay in his hotel. From time to time, people would give us bread or fruits or just stop to talk with us a bit...

And there was Salim the Fishman, our adoptive grandfather. When we were passing near his cabin on the beach, he invited us for tea - and we stayed two days. He let us go fishing with him. He was cooking for us and we made barbecue together. He let us stay in his cabin and use his bucket shower. We went with him to a tea bar on the neighboring beach. We did shopping for him in the town. He didn't want anything from us except our company. He is a thoughtful man and we talked with him about a plenty of things (in English - he had learned it from walkers). When we finally left, we missed him.
He loves having people around. He even asked us to tell our friends about him. So if you happen to walk on the Lycian way, don't forget to drop by for tea! He lives on the Andriake beach near Demre in a house he made himself from wooden pallets that some survivalists had left behind. (He also owns a house in a village but he doesn't like leaving the sea, so he stays on the coast all year long). 

In conclusion, we eventually found out that it had been too bold to think that we would walk all the way from Fethiye to Antalya in one month. We eventually got from Antalya to Demre and with my mum from Çıralı to Kemer. All in all, it was something like three quarters of the marked 550 km path. (We would have been glad to walk the last quarter too but we had to do visa paperwork for our further travels.) 

However, we enjoyed the walk a lot. We had seen loads of ancient tombs, columns and amphitheatres (and slept near one of the tombs). We had met a couple of nice and interesting people. We had found out we actually could walk a long time with a bag weighing oh-my-God Kilograms. We had lost some weight (and Vojta said he had acquired some new muscles, but I didn't, so I think he's been lying). We had squatted both in abandoned village houses and in luxury hotels under construction. We had had a hovercraft full of eels. We had survived a couple of storms and eaten tons of oranges (even though some were the bitter ones, not meant for eating). We had found ourselves a spare grandfather. And in the end, we still weren't fed up with the path and realized we would like to come back at some point.

Turkey: Political conversations with and without dictionary

Titles may sometimes lie but this post will really mainly be about politics. However, don't expect any brilliant analysis, scandalous discoveries or 1000 elephants. It's rather something like a pub talk. My friends sometimes ask me how things are now going here, and whether Turkey is now more dangerous than before for a foreigner. So imagine that you are a European friend of mine (if you aren't), we are sitting in a bar or in a pub over a pint of beer and you ask me: "you've been now two months in Turkey, so what do people say there?" And this is what I answer. It's mostly a random collection of anecdotal evidence, moreover collected by somebody who doesn't speak Turkish. It doesn't pretend to be something any more sophisticated.

A dictator nobody likes

After Kars, we wanted to quickly go south. At least that was the plan. But it's difficult to go quickly if there are so many interesting people and fascinating places on the way. So our fast traveling already stopped back at the Black Sea coast. We received the number of my friend's friend who lived in a city we were heading to (here I'm unspecific on purpose). I expected her to be too busy to meet us - she didn't even know us and we only started thinking about visiting her one day in advance. But I underestimated the openness of Turkish people. She told us she indeed was busy, preparing some project at her university club, but we could join her anyway.

Meanwhile, she found another friend of hers who could let us stay at his place overnight. 

When we arrived to the city, it was raining. Actually, it's not very appropriate to only say it was raining. It felt as if the whole world had turned into a giant shower stall. As we were navigating through the streets and then through the university campus, my boots turned to a swimming pool and Vojta drowned his phone. We were really happy we had a safe house and didn't have to hitchhike anymore that day. 

When we arrived to our destination, we looked like water ghosts and were leaving water tracks behind us. Nobody seemed to mind - our new friend came to get us at the main door, brought us to her classroom and introduced us to her colleagues. Nobody seemed disturbed or surprised we had shown up, and nobody asked what the heck we were doing there. Instead, we were offered clementines and asked whether we liked Turkey. (We did.) 

Everybody in the room was fluent in English - they all had done their study exchange in some European country. Now they were members of the club organizing activities for international students at their university.

When the club meeting was over, one of the members took us home. Let's call him Deniz. (I imagine an apocalypse scenario where Turkey becomes a dictatorship: the Ministry of Truth puts everybody they don't like in prison. But it still has some room left, so it plunges into the depths of the Internet, fishes out this blog and fills the free gaps in jail by protagonists of this post for saying mean things about the government. And that would make me very sad. Also, it's cool to change names of people because it feels like writing a detective story.) 

So, Deniz took us to his parents' home, we got a huge dinner and were watching the news. We actually do this quite a lot but thanks to our friend's occasional translation, this time we knew what the news where about.

After quite a long time, we could talk with somebody whose English was advanced. Deniz had spent several months in western Europe as an exchange student, and since he had been missing his life abroad, he had joined the international student club at his university. 

Except that there were very few exchange students this year. People were afraid. Three of them cancelled their planned stay after the terrorist attacks in Istanbul and for the next semester, no students at all were about to come. 

Deniz wasn't sure whether they were more afraid of the attacks or whether it was the overall political situation that worried them. He himself had been to three different cities or airports shortly before an attack happened there, but didn't feel particularly threatened. However, the political situation bothered him.

In his room, he had a picture of Atatürk in a fur hat. I found it funny but later I found out that almost everyone had a picture of Atatürk at home (with a fur hat or without). Also, many cafés, restaurants, shops and pretty much any places except for tents had their picture of Atatürk, the founding father of the modern, secular republic. (It later became a kind of game for us - find Atatürk in every house we come to.) 

Deniz also had a few caricatures of the present government members and other influential politicians. He disliked the government quite openly.

He wasn't happy some of them had got away with their corruption scandals (also by sacking and jailing journalists) and was worried by the toughening of the regime. He believed that many of the recently persecuted people had lost their jobs or had ended up in prison just because the government wanted to get rid of them.

As for the president, to him, it was an authoritarian and dictatorial populist. He didn't trust him. Deniz for example blamed the president for harshly criticizing Israel and at the same time secretly making agreements with it, and for using religion to appeal to traditional people (we've later heard this opinion once more). He also told us that he didn't know almost anybody who had voted for him. 

This was nicely familiar - in my network of acquaintances back home, there are also very few people who support the Czech president in force. Apparently, Turkey also has separate social bubbles. 

As we were talking, some politician in the TV was giving a speech about the worsening economic situation and the falling Turkish Lira (and was blaming it on the USA). He was also saying that the Cemaat, Fetullah Gülen's movement, was a threat.

This was the first time we heard about Gülen and his Illuminati Cemaat on our trip. It wasn't the last time, though. I had come across Gülen's name in European media before. But I had had no idea how much of an issue it was in Turkey. Gradually, I found out that for many people he was the number one villain - the dark lord Sauron who was to blame for everything that went wrong, supported by the almighty USA. (If a UFO landed in the middle of Ankara or if the whole Turkey sank to the ocean, it would probably be his fault too.)

Deniz was way more moderate in his judgment. He agreed that it probably had been the Cemaat that had tried to make the coup d'état, but he didn't believe it was as powerful and as extended as some said. Deniz didn't particularly love the USA either, though. He was wondering what the interests of the USA in Turkey were and doubted they were particularly nice. 

Erdoğan is honest

The next day, we left our cozy nest and were again limited to conveņrsations about cold, hitchhiking that was çok güzel (very nice), Turkey that was çok güzel and some other things that were also çok güzel. As we were approaching the ancient Hittite city of Hattusa in central Turkey, though, we met a guy who decided that our vocabulary of 50 words was good enough for politics. (Especially at midnight.)

We had dropped by a small petrol station in the middle of nowhere and Vojta had gone brushing his teeth to the bathroom. I was waiting outside, and the shopkeeper invited me in and gave me tea. In the petrol station office, there was a desk, a small table and a necessary picture of Atatürk on the wall. After the shopkeeper and I exchanged all the three sentences I knew and a couple of other words, he asked me if I liked the Turkish government. At least that was what I understood after 3 minutes of searching in the dictionary. (It's hükümet.)

I didn't want to cause any international misunderstanding (especially not at midnight), so I asked him to repeat the question.

"Tayyip Erdoğan güzel?", he said.

I was quite tired at the moment. Earlier that day, we had been urban hiking for quite a long time, had ran away from a pervert (it was actually quite a polite and unagressive pervert, so we didn't have to run too fast, but it was tiring anyway) and eventually we had had a few beers with the following driver. I didn't think that discussing international politics in a language I didn't actually speak was a particularly good idea in such a mental condition. So I built a sentence (or let's better call it a heap of words) saying "I foreigner I Turkey politics no know".

Then I managed to ask whether the petrol station guy liked his president - he did. But I didn't know how to politely ask why. 

So, I have suppressed my curiosity and have never learned why the shopkeeper supported Erdoğan, whereas he has not learned whether I found him güzel enough. However, I soon had a chance to ask someone else.

The day after, we reached the archaeological site of Hattusa and spent a nice couple of hours there. In the evening, we went to the nearby village to buy bread. In front of the bakery, an elderly man asked us in English what were we up to. When we told him we were going to camp near the village as usual, he told us it was too cold and invited us to a tea bar. 

In the bar, a group of guests freed us a place near the heating and invited us to join them for playing cards. We didn't know their game but they were glad to teach us. Two aliens with backpacks were probably a nice attraction. Some of the men spoke enough German to explain us the rules, so we were then communicating in a mix of German, English and Turkish.

Our host (let's call him Murat - this time not because I would find it necessary to make him anonymous, but because I forgot his real name) and some of the others were from Antalya, the touristy city on the south coast. They all worked in hotels. In winter, they are technically on holiday because the hotels are closed, so they always return to the village they come from. They all agreed that the last season had been really bad - very few tourists had come as they were afraid of terrorist attacks and were also manipulated by western media.

Our new friend Murat mentioned a little bit mysteriously that the bad economic situation was probably caused by somebody who didn't wish Turkey well. He believed, though, that Erdoğan was going to deal with it. 

This was my second chance to find out why Erdoğan was güzel. 

Murat's answer was: "Because he's honest". He does what he says - contrarily to the western leaders. Germany, for example, has been saying for ages that it wanted to be friends with Turkey - but it has always said no to Turkey's wishes. Turkey had been waiting to join the European Union for decades, but nothing happened. The US leaders are wicked too. Everybody has been just leading Turkey around by the nose. But it's over now. Turkey is fed up with it now and it will find new allies, such as China.

Murat didn't seem to feel any bitterness towards us because we were from the EU, though, nor towards our country. When he was talking about the EU, he mostly meant Germany.

This is another thing that I noticed several times later on - nobody seemed to blame the Czech Republic for any evils of the European Union. Most people seemed to believe that our country was manipulated by and subordinate to the bigger and richer countries, including the USA. And there still was Milan Baroš who had played soccer for the Galatasaray team, which seemed to be way more important than the EU membership.) Also people way less into conspiracy theories tended to believe that Germany was the only state in the EU that actually mattered. To them, the EU also meant mostly Germany.

Unlike Deniz from the north coast, Murat was quite optimistic about the future. He trusted the government and believed it would soon reverse the economic decline.

Roads, Illuminati and America

Out of all the people we happened to discuss with, Deniz' and Murat's views were the most comprehensive ones on the two opposing sides - which is why I wanted to talk about them in more detail.

As for other people, I was surprised how much their opinions as a whole were similar either to those of Deniz, or to those of Murat. 

People like Murat were usually elderly (or at least older than us) and we spoke with them in a broken German, basic English or broken Turkish. (That's a pity because I couldn't talk with them properly, so the outcome may be oversimplified.) One thing they had in common was that they believed in better future and they were convinced that any economical problems of Turkey were caused by European and American manipulations. 

A driver explained me that thanks to the government in force, there were new roads, new jobs, new businesses and new cars in Turkey, and people went so well that they didn't need much to move abroad for work anymore. The fall of the currency was just caused by American and German political games. (Another girl then told us that this was mostly what the state-owned media had been saying.)

On the contrary, for an overwhelming majority of young, English speaking students, the president was a wicked dictator and their country was slowly sinking into hell. We met most of these people through different social media (but not all of them). They originally came from various regions (mostly west, but also the Black Sea cost or the Van province). Even though we mostly met them in big cities, they had diverse (but mostly tolerant) approaches to religion and came from both traditional and western-like families. They all said they didn't want the president to have more power but they usually didn't believe things would go as they wish in the future.

Some of them admitted their families strongly supported the party in power - and that they preferred not to talk politics with them since they were not very open to a discussion of this kind. 

Most of these people we met had had some of their university teachers sacked in the course of the purges. Even though they mostly believed that the military coup attempt really was organized by the Cemaat, they usually thought that Erdoğan had seized the opportunity to get rid of his enemies. They often stressed that some time ago, Fetullah Gülen and the president in force had been allies. 

Most of them (but not all) didn't see a military coup as a good way how to solve political problems. Even if one of the problems was a dictator-to-be. Only one person we met believed that the coup attempt had been an inside job, and also only one of these young people thought that the majority of the sacked and imprisoned people indeed had been involved in the coup. He knew some Cemaat members in person, and described how a gulf had been growing between him and them in their youth because of Gülen's teachings. (However, he too hated the president.)

As for the USA, we've met nobody who would really liked it - but after the first discussions at the beginning, we didn't talk about it too much. People who started talking about it themselves just differed in how much they disliked it. Some believed that the recent military coup attempt had been at least backed from the west. And I was surprised that some people (especially in the south) were also convinced - and saw it as a fact - that the USA had created ISIS. (By the way, a very important finding is that the Turkish name for ISIS sounds like "e-Shit").

In conclusion, it was striking how many people were willing to discuss these subjects with us and how open they were. Also, over the three months we spent in Turkey, there was not a single discussion in which anybody would be rude to us. 

I would also like to stress here (because I didn't find any better place) that nobody was hostile towards us based on our nationality or strange faces. As random hitchhikers, we didn't feel any less secure in Turkey than 3 years ago, and nobody has ever tried to punch us, call cops on us or arrest us because we were Europeans. (As for cops and security guards, when we were hanging around places they were guarding, they usually gave us tea and talked with us about life. Not about politis, though.)