![]() In fact, their branches have this tendency to shoot straight up into the sky. Poplar trees, as you might know, are not particularly expansive. I wish I had a photo of the goat to offer you – alas, we were mainly focused on keeping our rickshaw upright at the time and didn’t snap one – but what I can offer is the mental image of yours truly huddled below a stand of poplar trees in the Anatolian countryside, not unlike that goat. So was this goat, but still he stood on a bench next to a house, pressing himself lengthwise against the wall, in hopes of obtaining even a modicum of shelter beneath the narrow overhang of the house’s roof. ![]() ![]() It was pouring, the post-monsoon clouds wringing out the last of their reserves, and we were all bitterly soaked. I saw a goat in India once, as we were descending the hills of Meghalaya on the first day of the Rickshaw Run. I counted out every 500 meters, watched the clock, and tried to keep to every line of the directions.īut things went wrong again at a strip of poplar trees, when the rain picked up and began to blow sideways. I sensed when I’d missed a big oak tree the guidebook said I should see, retraced my steps, and sure enough, there it was, down a different path. The sense of direction was pure bliss, and I took things slow and examined every step. It was as if the rain itself had washed away the magic of this path.įrom the turbë, I had a single half hour in which I knew where I was and where I was going. Where was my shepherd in the woods ? Where was my clarinet-playing bakkal owner ? I was fuming – and if we’re being honest here, in tears. It was only when going back down a hill I’d already tried, when I’d decided I would just walk the road as far as it took me, that I came to the junction mentioned in my guidebook and the quite unmissable turbë. Instead, I cursed the skies, my guidebook – whose pages grew wetter until I was practically peeling them apart – and mostly myself, for insisting on doing this trek sans GPS. Instead, I turned what should have been an hour’s walk to the turbë into two and a half hours, not least because I kept stopping to scrape the mud off my shoes. Instead, I walked in circles, or what felt like them, in search of the day’s first major landmark – the turbë, or tomb, of an early Ottoman saint named Selim Baba. I wanted to walk for miles in the misty showers breathing in the scent of juniper trees, which were also making their first appearance on the trail that morning. I wanted to put on my black rain mac and swathe my backpack in the folds of its built-in neon orange rain cover. It also happened to be my first day of rain in Turkey, and I wanted to welcome its presence. Thursday morning, I woke early, caught a dolmu ş (minibus) from Dominiç to Çukurca, and began walking, determined not to lose my way again. My warm hotel room and hot dinner there were little consolation from what was a running theme this past week on the trail: I kept getting myself fantastically, hopelessly lost. ![]() It began the night before, really, when I came off a mountain to find I was ten kilometers away from Çukurca, the village I had been aiming for.Ī farmer on a blue tractor informed me of this fun fact, directing me to the nearby town of Dominiç instead. Thursday was not exactly my finest day on the Evliya Çelebi Way.
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