Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Cold months in a Couchsurfing paradise

The thing I was afraid most before our trip were neither car crashes nor perverts, but cold. I had been once on a week-long hitchhiking trip in February - and it was tough. So I had kind of prepared mentally for three months of freezing under bridges (or being soaken and grilling wet socks on small campfires under bridges).
The reality couldn't be more different.
The hospitality of Turkish people is just too difficult for a cold European mind to imagine.

 

At a refugee's home


The real cold started - if I don't count the journey from Europe to Turkey - when we left the Black Sea cost and turned inland. However, we spent almost a week in people's homes, warm and cozy. Then we arrived to the south where it wasn't freezing at all.
As for the Lycian way where we spent the following month, it rained there much less than I had feared. And we didn't really need to dry our socks or anything else on campfire.


So I was all the time waiting for the tough days to come - and they were somehow still not coming. But I was pretty sure they would come, at some point. So I was once again mentally preparing for frozen socks, wet sleeping bags and stuck tent poles when we were occupying the flat of our Iranian Couchsurfing friend in Antalya before hitchhiking back north. (Let's continue with the tradition of changing people's names in order not to get them into troubles, and call our friend Fahshid).

Such a preparation mainly consisted in drinking vodka with Fahshid and his roommates, listening to Iranian pop songs the guys played on guitar, building a new roommate's cupboard, cooking Iranian maccaroni and talking about philosophy, inspiration, literature and life in exile. (Our friend, originally a scriptwriter and poet, had recently ran away from Iran in order to be free to follow his spiritual path, forbidden in Iran, and to be allowed to travel. And he was still looking for a job and was not completely used to living in Turkey - not only because Turks drink too much tea.)

Eventually we said goodbye to our refugee friends and started hitchhiking again.

Are you hungry?


We first needed to go to Ankara in order to arrange visa for Iran, where we wanted to continue after Turkey and Georgia. We knew we would need to stay a couple of days in Ankara. We didn't really want to come to the embassy with our backpacks and covered with mud, so we contacted several Couchsurfers and asked them if we could stay at their place.

Here I should finally explain what Couchsurfing is, for those who are not familiar with the concept. Briefly, it's a worldwide online network of people who host travellers at home and are hosted by others when they travel themselves. If you, as a Couchsurfing member, wish to be hosted by another member, you read their profile and ask them if they can host you on a particular day, and explain why you want to stay with them. However, the network is nowadays so extended that it doesn't work that easily. Out of 10 people contacted, 7 usually don't answer because they are inactive, 2 answer that they can't host you and if you are lucky, one is available. In Europe, you usually have to ask lot of people a long time in advance, otherwise people already have plans and are not available. So I hardly ever couchsurf when I hitchhike in Europe because I can't plan long enough ahead.



In Turkey, though, it is different. People kind of don't mind to add you to their plans at a last moment - and their friends and family are hardly ever surprised when you pop up out of nowhere at their family dinner, party or even at school and tell them you will actually stay at their place.

So when we contacted (at a last moment) Couchsurfers in Ankara, three people answered us that they were busy - and that we could come anyway, though. We eventually decided to stay with Dogan, a hippie traveller who was now preparing for his university exams. When we were talking with him over a messaging application in Vojta's phone, we were already on our way to Ankara.

Dogan asked us, just by the way, where we were and where we were going to sleep that day. When we told him we were near the city of Afyon and were going to camp near the motorway as usually, he told us he was going to ask some of his friends if we could stay with them instead.

Five minutes later, we had a number of a girl living in Afyon. Dogan warned us her English was basic. So I, still reluctant to believe our luck, composed this message:
"Hi Neriman. Your friend Dogan gave us your contact. We are travelling by hitchhiking (otostop). We will be in Afyon today. Could we come to your home?"


An answer came:
"Of course. Are you hungry?"


One hour later, we were already at her house. Neriman's friend who could speak English, a Turk from Germany called Kaan opened the door for us. We were welcomed by a group of neurophysiology students. They were absolutely not disturbed by the fact that we appeared at their doorstep in the middle of the exam period without knowing anyone in there, almost without notice and without speaking their language. By some magic, they very quickly made a huge dinner for us.

For the rest of the evening, we were speaking in our pseudo Turkish and through poor Kaan who had to become interpreter. We were fortune-telling from a coup of coffee, talking about Kaan's studies and Neriman's hitchhiking trip to Europe (she hardly ever could find Couchsurfing and she had been scammed in Czechia. I was ashamed.).

Nobody cared that we had known each other for less than three hours.

Czech meals in Turkish style


In Ankara, we were drowning in a sea of visa bureaucracy.

First we found out that the embassy actually operated at the European working week, not the Iranian one (that has its week end in Thursday and Friday). We had come on Friday night, so we gained two free days (yay). Then we didn't have our paperwork ready on time because printing passport-size photos was an achievement as difficult as landing on Mars. So we had seen a museum, Ataturk's two pairs of socks and Ataturk's stuffed dog but we still didn't have our visa.


That's why we stayed at Dogan's place more days than expected. He didn't mind at all even though he had to work and study and had almost no free time. We, however, had quite a lot of free time while we were waiting for the embassy. So we resumed our tradition of cooking typical Czech meals.

We started this tradition already in December, when we had been Couchsurfing in Kayseri with Emircan, a student who badly missed his Erasmus exchange in Europe. We had decided to make an "international" evening and cooked a potato soup and potato pancakes. However, we couldn't find the right spices, so we had just put some random spices in there.


Here in Ankara we had more time to look for the right ingredients, but we didn't find them anyway. So we just put there some random stuff again and again it worked quite well. (Our host didn't complain.)

Like this, Czech meals Turkish style were born. We then cooked them many times, assisted by our different Couchsurfing hosts, and infiltrated the Turkish cuisine. (Much later we found marjoram - the ingredient we had been looking for - in Georgia. It made Vojta so happy that he bought the whole stock of it the shop had.)

"I'm in Lithuania but you can stay in my flat anyway"


From Ankara, we hurried to Istanbul (with spare passports because the ones with the Turkish entry stamp were at the embassy) to meet up with Huan, my boyfriend. He was flying there to see us. We planned to stay at another Couchsurfer's place the day before his arrival.

We started hitchhiking one day in advance, so it seemed that we were finally (after more than a week in people's homes) going to camp again. We hitched a ride with a guy who was going directly to Istanbul. So I was trying to explain him in Turkish that we needed to be dropped before Istanbul so that we can find a good camping spot. It meant a lot of work with our dictionary. When I finally told him the elaborate heap of words and he understood what I meant, he just told us that it was too cold and that he was going to take us to his flat.

So we didn't camp that day.


The day after, we stayed with two girls, a lawyer and a medical student. Like Neriman from Afyon, they had travelled to the Czech Republic and just like her, they had bad experience from there. (This time it was some idiot who called police at them just because one of them was wearing a hijab.) So I was ashamed once again. (I know, there are good and bad people in every country. But why the heck had the good people we met here encountered the bad ones in our country?)





Then we spent a week-end with my boyfriend. When he had flown back home, we moved to Yasemin, a flight attendant whom we had met down south at the Lycian way. We had talked with her some 20 minutes but it was enough for her to give us her contact and to invite us.

We visited Bursa with her and her boyfriend and from there, we went back to Ankara to meet Dogan again and to collect our Iranian visa.

And this was the moment when I thought that the fun was really, really over and we were going to sleep in snow again every day on our way to Georgia.

And again, I was wrong.

It seemed that some Couchsurfing miracle was happening. People we contacted in the last moment were always answering us and telling us we indeed could stay with them. So we met a distance cyclist who was planning to go to Georgia in the summer, a thoughtful English teacher who had read many Czech novels and could play folk songs on her traditional instrument and a girl interested in meditation who knew loads of Czech bad words. And we were slowly approaching the border with Georgia without using our tent once.


In one of the cities on the Black sea coast, we contacted a friend whom we know from our journey to Kars. She couldn't host us but she told us she was going to find somebody else for us. And she did. Very soon, her friend Mehmet wrote me on Facebook:
"Hey guys, you can stay at my place. I'm now in Lithuania, so I won't be there, but there are two French Couchsurfers. They will open the door for you." Even though we had been in Turkey for almost three months, we were amazed and surprised again.

In the flat there really were two French Couchsurfers. That's how we met Sam and Simon.

They are two brothers (out of five or so) from Brittany and they have been travelling on bikes for almost half a year already. They want next go to Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia and back home. Also, Sam's birthday is on the same day as mine. (I find it nice because there are not many people born that day. Except that Putin's birthday is three days later, but I don't find that nice at all.)

And Simon is eighteen. When I was eighteen, I hitchhiked to the neighboring Slovakia and I thought it was cool.

They travel on a similarly hobo budget as we do and they don't have Turkish internet in their phone, so they usually ask random people if they can sleep in their houses. And the people always say yes. Actually, they had met Mehmet, our host, in an internet café downtown and he had invited them to his place. The following day he was leaving to Lithuania and had told them they could stay at his place how long they would need.




However, the guys were not in their best mood now. They had been stuck here for 10 days already, waiting (in vain) for a code they needed for their Iranian visa. They had ran out of ideas for entertainment, including hitchhiking to Batumi and building an igloo, and were bored. We tried to cheer them up a bit by taking them to the meeting with our friend.

When we arrived back home, another three guys with big backpacks popped up in the house. They were looking for a person none of us knew. (It was probably some Mehmet's roommate who was not there either.) However, they spoke English and were also hitchhikers, so we had a nice chat with them.





In the morning, we cooked our last zelňačka (a Czech cabbage soup) in Turkey. The following day we left the French guys and were finally hitchhiking to Georgia. It was one week later than expected and with only 10 days of our 3 months visa-free stay in Turkey left.



Despite all the horrible things our Czech friends had been telling us about Turkey and despite all the horrible things that were probably really happening in the Turkish government, Turkey had become something like our second home. We had got used to drinking litres of strong tea, conversations in our gibberish and the fact that the hospitality would always surprise us. We had noticed that helping to unknown people was just normal here - and we had also been pushing couple of cars with a dead engine, and sharing food with strangers over the three months - but we had never got used to how easily would people take us home.