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.

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.) 

Hitchhiking to Mordor

Since we weren't brave (or suicidal) enough to try to cross Siberia or even Ukraine in winter, first we were naturally headed south, to Turkey. With European passports, we were allowed to stay there 3 months without visas. The plan was to spend winter there (and in Iran and maybe also Georgia) and to continue east in spring, when we would decide it is warm enough we might not freeze to death.

I have hitchhiked in Turkey two or three times before, and Vojta once. It has always been the best country for traveling. Drivers have always stopped very quickly for us, they have been very patient - they have made a lot of effort to understand our broken pseudo-Turkish, and they have been incredibly hospitable. On my past journeys, we were invited for tea and a Turkish-English dictionary chat, for a meal or even for sleeping in somebody's house so many times that we never felt we had not enough social contact or a poor diet. I sometimes felt that even if our backpacks and all the money were stolen, in Turkey people just wouldn't let us be hungry or cold.

This time, though, we were starting our trip a couple of months after a military coup, in the middle of the purges among Turkish journalists, writers, professors (and soccer referees (!)), short after some terrorist attacks and in a growing tension between the government and the Kurdish separatists (or pretty much anyone whom the government designated as a Kurdish separatist).

I somehow couldn't believe that Turkey, this country I liked so much, could have lost its mind overnight and could suddenly be teaming with crazy cops arresting random hitchhikers at will. Vojta wasn't much worried either. Some of our other friends were, though. They were asking whether we were sure we wanted to cross that country. With every new terrorist attack (that happened pretty much every two weeks), a wave of purges or a government's decision to toughen the regime they were questioning our plan (and eventually our sanity) more and more. 

I was still more afraid of cold (it was kind of more material at the freezing beginning of November) than of a dictatorship, and Vojta seemed not to care at all, so we didn't change our mind. 

A slow start and a secret gathering of people going to China

When we started thumbing on a particularly cold Monday evening, the plan was clear: 

1. speed through Europe before we turn to snowpeople, and get to Turkey as soon as possible

2. ...
3. profit.

The first part showed not as easy as such, though. We were waiting on a Prague motorway petrol station for three hours, wearing our winter clothes prepared for later, jogging few meters back and forth to make our limbs a little bit warmer and staring at our backpacks covered in hoarfrost. 

When we had drunk all our tea, another hitchhiker showed up. His name was Faker and he was going from the UK home to China. Of course, there is no better place for a gathering of people hitchhiking in November to China than on the Czech D1 motorway in Prague. (Yep, it goes east.) He had been hitchhiking someplace downtown for 2 days already, with no success. Here it seemed equally vain but he was apparently very happy to have met us. 

After another hour or two, we gave up and went home, with our new colleague along. My boyfriend wasn't particularly glad we were still in Prague and there was more of us, but he was nice and didn't kick us out (it would be a sad goodbye). 

We found out that Faker was thinking of going through Pakistan or Afghanistan. I wished our friends could hear him. Compared to this, our horribly dangerous plan to go to Turkey seemed suddenly something like an afternoon walk to the park.

The next morning, we sent Faker ahead to reduce the number of hitchhikers on the road and to scare the drivers less. It probably worked because when we got back to the gas station, he was already gone.

Soon we had our portion of luck too and got to the east of the country, and then to Austria. Here, it was a bit less cold. And it was raining. The weather had probably decided to test thoroughly whether we were 100% sure this trip was a good idea.

Well, we didn't run away.

However, when we crawled into our tiny tent (big enough for one human and one dog, but light to carry, you know...) in a wet Vienna city park that night, I felt very little victorious for somebody who had finally started making something like a plan of their life happen. (Omg, have I really dreamt for 15 years about living in a tent with no shower and no wifi? And what if we fall ill? What if we get a cabin fever? What if something happens to my family when I am in the middle of nowhere? What if I miss my boyfriend too much?) And yep, there was a couple of what-have-I-dones when a stronger gust of wind or rain woke me up.

In the morning, the testing went on - we waited in the rain the whole day. I was happy we at least had all the time in the world. We eventually made it to the next petrol station after Vienna, direction Hungary, and the next day the curse seemed finally broken. However, it was still cold. I couldn't care less about the Turkish president and all his politics - I just wanted to get south.

In a few more days two Turkish businessmen gave us a ride in Bulgaria - we were finally going to Istanbul. Mehmet and Bulent (these were their names) invited us for a meal, made us a hotspot so that we could try to contact Couchsurfers, and when they learned we were traveling with only little money, even bought us subway tickets in Istanbul before we even noticed the subway. The good old Turkish hospitality seemed totally unchanged.

Snow, frost and Snow (by Orhan Pamuk)

From Istanbul, we were speeding still more east. We wanted to see the ruins of the ancient Armenian city of Ani, on the very eastern border of Turkey, before the place would become unbearably cold (which might happen very soon). I also really wanted to see the city of Kars which happened to be just next to Ani.

If you have been to Turkey, have you ever been to Kars? (And have you ever heard about it?)

In Snow, one of my favorite novels, by Orhan Pamuk, it is described as the end of civilization, a once prospering border city that turned into a decaying godforsaken hole in the middle of nowhere that nobody cares about anymore. There is some kind of poetry in it. For some reason, I'm attracted by ruins and abandoned and forlorn places. (Whereas the top tourist destinations make me feel lost.) And the fact that a novel I like is set in a particular place is a definite reason to want to go there.

So, I needed to go there.

Mentioning Kars to our Turkish drivers had a similar effect on them as mentioning Turkey to my Czech friends. They always gave us a sympathetic or suspicious look as if we had said we were going to Mordor, and told us "çok uzak!" (very far), or "çok soğuk!" (too cold). Sometimes they even told us it was dangerous, probably because it was far and cold.

But when you have been hitchhiking a few thousand kilometers for almost two weeks to see a place, you just don't back out, do you.

As we were travelling along the Black Sea cost, the stories about the dreaded cold seemed more like horror fairytales told by southerners who take on their down jackets and gloves every time the temperature drops below 30°C.

As for the new dangers of Turkey, the most suspicious thing was that we hadn't been offered free food for a week. Still no cops who would wish to arrest us, and the only person with gun we had seen so far was a friendly shepherd who dropped by our camp to say hi when we were camping (probably) on his property. He didn't even kick us out. (And then Kolya the truck driver invited us home when we had expressed our doubts about putting up our tent on the top of his truck filled with cement, so everything was normal again.) For quite a long time, we didn't meet anybody we would share a language with, and our Turkish was too poor for even a little complex conversation, so we didn't happen to discuss politics. We were only learning about new terrorist attacks and new arrests when we turned our slow internet on.

As for my other fears, everything was still ok. Also, traveling with Vojta was easier than I had expected. Last time, I was the only one to speak with drivers - Vojta only learned two words in Turkish which he then randomly mixed together, and stubbornly refused to try harder. This time, he was sedulously studying the language every day with an app, and was very quickly able to communicate.

Hitchhiking on the north coast was easy, even though a bit slow because we had to find our way through many lively cities and towns on the way. This changed as we were approaching Georgia. The coast was suddenly less crowded and sometimes it seemed that no one was going our way. Not far before the border we turned east to the mountains - and prepared for cold.

No cold was coming, though. In the mountain town of Artvin where we were camping behind a sport hall there still was no less than minus 4°C at night. 

However, that didn't change the fact that still nobody was going our way, and if so, it was only a couple of miles, which seemed like nothing on the mountain serpentines. We were becoming a bit nervous because we had managed to find a Couchsurfer to host us in Kars that day. Finally, a truck overloaded with wood stopped for us. (We had been in doubt whether to wave at it since its speed was some 40 km/h, but it was the only car that appeared in a couple of minutes.)

The truck slowed down to 20 km/h, climbed to the altitude of the tallest Czech mountain (there was snow) and broke down. After some time, the driver managed to repair it and we went on. In whole, we had made some 100 km in 4 hours. From time to time, the driver was stopping to repair the truck. We eventually learned that he was going up to Kars, but we found an excuse to get off earlier because we were worried we would show up at the Couchsurfer's house in the middle of the night. It was late in the afternoon and we found ourselves on a snowy field near the town of Arhadan (which looked as desolate as the field). The famous cold had finally reached us.

Fortunately we got a ride quite quickly and reached a Kars suburb just before dark. There was snow. (Orhan Pamuk's novel didn't lie in this.)

We dropped by a petrol station for bathroom and were immediately offered tea by the owner.

So far, Kars didn't feel much like Mordor.

We were drinking tea, maintaining a dictionary conversation (We come from the Czech Republic. We hitchhike Turkey. Turkey beautiful. Yes. Here cold. No problem. Czech Republic cold.). Our vocabulary gained a new word: snow. Meanwhile we found out that our Couchsurfing host actually was in another city that day and couldn't host us. This meant we were going to have an opportunity to get a bit more familiar, or even intimate, with the Kars cold at night and to fully enjoy it. (Thank God(/s) it was only November.)

We thanked the gas station guy for the tea and started looking for the city center. (It wasn't particularly difficult since the city wasn't too big.) The streets were covered in frozen snow and the air was acrid and full of coal mist. There were the same gloomy teahouses and the same cheese stores as in the book. So far so good. (At some point in Pamuk's novel, the roads out are blocked with snow and nobody can leave, so I hoped our experience wouldn't follow the book too much.) 

Downtown we bought bread, cheese and an English-Turkish paperback dictionary for 1,5 TL which made our life easier for the rest of our stay in Turkey (it has no battery that can go dead). We also found the historical center near the river. It was rather empty since it was outside the modern center, and mostly falling apart. (We actually didn't see any new buildings or construction sites anywhere in the city, which was quite unusual.) 

There was a couple of ruins "under preservation status" (the status probably consisted in the sign saying so). There was not a single shop selling kitschy stuff to tourists, which is very rare on places like this. Probably there really are only few people who come here just to wander around and look at the old Armenian and Russian houses. There also were no bars, barriers or booths for selling tickets, so we were free to explore anything we wanted. From the city castle (except for visitors of a restaurant on top, we were the only people there) the coal smog looked even romantic. 

We cooked our pasta there and went then camping to the historical baths on the river bank because we hoped it might be warmer in there (it was -9°C at the moment). In the baths, there was a huge frozen poo in the middle, so I immediately lost my doubts whether camping in there wasn't too rude. We put up our tent in the cleanest corner and tried to pretend the poo on the other side didn't exist. 

Hospitality at the edge of the world

The next morning, there were still no people (except some guys taking pictures of themselves on the bridge for two hours) and the area still looked romantic.

However, we quite early left for Ani. It was just 40 kilometers from Kars, but at the end of the world, so we were not sure if there would be cars to hitchhike. And our Couchsurfing contact seemed to be back in the city and agreed to meet us in the evening. 

We were lucky, though, and got there quite easily. 

I won't describe Ani much - I will just tell you it's one of the most amazing ancient sites I've ever seen, and the two weeks of hitchhiking in there were totally worth it. Plus, it's not touristy (even though there is a lonely booth for selling tickets with a lonely guy in it). And there are horses (living) and svastikas (on walls). That's it for spoilers - if you are into ancient ruins, go see it yourself. 

The place was so magical that we started caring about the way back to Kars only about one hour before nightfall. Behind Ani, which is a small village plus the ruins, there is a huge hole and behind that hole there is Armenia.

So, there were no cars going anywhere and we spent the remaining hour of daylight walking on the empty road. There was internet signal, though, so meanwhile, we were exchanging messages with Ayhan, our Couchsurfing host, and were telling him that we were only 40 minus the walked distance km from Kars.

After the night fell and we peppersprayed a couple of dogs who wanted to eat us, we arrived to a village and met a guy on the road. He was kind of disturbed by our presence and our plan to hitchhike all the two cars passing per hour. I won't reproduce our pantomime conversation in whole, but the meaning was a bit like this:

- WTF are you morons doing here?

- Hello. Here very beautiful. We go to Kars. We hitchhiking. No problem.

- Well, it IS a problem. It's dangerous and it's freezing in here and there are no cars and no buses here, only dogs and wolfs. You should take a taxi.

- No taxi, no money, no problem.

- OMG

- We friend Kars. We sleep in tent. No problem.

- You are crazy. Come for tea.

(To have a more precise picture, you can add some repetitions in your head and erase some more grammar.)

He kind of didn't let us go on, so we ended up in a house with two ladies and three little girls who were doing their homework. We were offered tea and Ayhan decided to drive all the bloody 40 km (minus the walked distance) to pick us up. Meanwhile, we were talking through our new dictionary with our hosts. The oldest girl was very smart and would always very quickly find the keyword her family wanted to tell us. We would then imagine the rest and answer with another keyword. It always took a long time, so we didn't run out of topics and there was no awkward silence (only an intellectual silence) before Ayhan came.

Ayhan actually is an archaeologist and a professor at the Kars university, and has himself done some of the excavations in Ani. He arrived with a girl called Emine. They took us to their cozy flat at the university campus, prepared dinner for us and then we spent the evening talking about excavations all around Turkey and old Russian buildings in Kars. The next day, they drove us to a good hitchhiking spot behind Kars and we managed to get back to the coast a day before snow came and blocked the mountain roads almost like in Pamuk's book.

We were still neither frozen, nor in jail.