A Song of Ascents

"I lifted up mine eyes unto the hills." (And for those of you who recognised the reference, you must be paying attention during the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy! {You have no idea how much I miss the Lenten services, and how much I look forward to my time in Lebanon!!!} Or you just really love the Psalms.)

The past two days, from Anamur to Gözce, the road has been relatively flat and parallel to the coast line. That changes tomorrow, as the Taurus mountain range once again descends directly to the shore. My GPS app doesn't show contour lines for altitude, but just looking at the constant tight curves is enough to tell me I'll be going up and down all day tomorrow.

When I set out from Bozyazı this morning, I had thought I might attempt the 40 kms to the next town of any size. When I fell asleep sitting on a bench in the sun during a break, I realised that plan was overly optimistic, especially given what my map was telling me about the last half of that distance.

The first few raindrops started falling around 2:00 PM, but it was another hour before it started to *really* rain. By then I knew I wouldn't be continuing on to Aydıncık, so the next time I stopped at a petrol station for a break, I asked about lodgings in that town. They told me what I very much did not want to hear. Nothing until Aydıncık, 25 kms away. And, as noted above, a very hilly 25 kms.

Following the "rule of three" outlined in Brandon Wilson's book (when unsure of directions, ask three different people), I asked again when I stopped at a shop to buy an energy drink. (Nasty things, but given the shocking lack of coffee in Turkey, I need to get my caffeine fixes somehow, and I can't spend all day drinking tea.) They repeated the bad news, so steeling myself for a long wet walk in the dark, I set off. On my way through that town, I spotted the municipal office, so on a whim I turned in. If there truly was nothing for 25 kms, perhaps there would be a dry room where I could bunk down for the night.  The municipal workers confirmed the lack of accommodation in town, but said the next town over, 4 kms away, had hotels that were not hideously overpriced. After giving me several cups of hot sweet lemon tea "for energy," they wished me a good journey.

By 5:00, the sun broke through a gap in the clouds on the horizon, so the last half hour of my walk in the rain was full of light, with a double rainbow making a complete arc. It was a good way to end the day. I'll be setting out early tomorrow, and with the good forecast I may wind up camping out again. While it's not as comfortable as a hotel room, it means I don't have to keep pressing on for hours after dark if I'm nowhere near a town.

And now it's time to say my prayers and retire for the night.

Great Lent on the Turquoise Coast

This has been tougher than I expected.

I spent the first week of Great Lent in İstanbul, attending services and visiting churches and museums.   I probably walked more than most tourists do, but my pack was in the hostel rather than on my back.‎  There are also plenty of restaurants that offer Lent-friendly fare, one of which was just around the corner from the hostel. I also prepared my own meals a few times: a half tin of beans mixed in with some lentil soup made for hot, delicious, and nutritious. 

I caught the bus to Antalya on the evening of March 1, but at some point on the ride, the bottle of fuel for my penny stove fell out of my pack. I only discovered that as I was packing up to start walking again on Tuesday, and I was unable to replace it until just last evening (Mar 13). All the packets of soup I had bought in İstanbul have been dead weight for almost two weeks, but what made the loss worse is that restaurants have been few and far between for the last four days. It's nice to have a hot meal at the end of the day, and a hot cuppa to start the day off.

The beautiful scenery along the coast has been some consolation, although the seemingly endless row of resort hotels around Alanya was less pleasant than the richly pine-scented sea air in the hills and the vast groves of citrus and bananas I passed. Every standing body of water has its own colony of frogs, and I've seen turtles sunning themselves several times. Lightening-fast lizards skitter away as I approach, and even the stray dogs I've encountered have been friendly.

One aspect of Great Lent that I treasure is the beauty of the services held throughout the week, but I haven't been to church since leaving the City. There was an Orthodox parish about 100 m from my hostel in Antalya, but they only have service four days per week during Lent and Monday is not one of those days.

It's not just restaurants and churches which are in short supply. After leaving Alanya, I've slept outside in an abandoned campground, in a petrol station as the honoured guest of the Kurdish man working the graveyard shift, and on a rickety metal cot in a room at a truck stop restaurant. The past two nights I've found legit lodgings, complete with mattresses and showers, but the next few days of walking are looking ‎pretty sparse on my GPS.

The weather has been quite nice, so unless there's rain overnight, sleeping rough is a good option. Apparently this part of Turkey gets 300 sunny days each year, so we've had about a month's worth of rain in the past week. It's been warm enough that the rain has been refreshing rather than miserable.

Although my time in Turkey has been wonderful, I am very much looking forward to arriving in Cyprus. After a day in the (self-declared) Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, I'll cross back into a country where churches are numerous. My plan is still to spend a week in Lebanon, where I hope to celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation. Then it'll be back to the airport in Cyprus before hopping a flight or ferry  to Haifa and the last eight or ten days of walking.‎ It would be wonderful to arrive in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but we'll see how it goes.

I'll try to write updates more frequently, but even when I do have WiFi I've been too exhausted to think. There are several dozen photos waiting to be sorted through and uploaded as well. Perhaps I'll be able to do some catching up once I reach Lebanon...

Onwards!

In 1901, Hilaire Belloc set out on an epic walk from Toul (in France) to Rome. He chose his path by drawing a straight line between the two points on a map, and attempted to adhere to this direct path as far as possible. (His account of this journey, "The Path to Rome," is one of the e-books I read while I was waiting for my foot to heal all those months ago in Italy.) One of the choices he made was to walk at night when it was cooler, and sleep where he could during the day.

Back in December, I had expressed a certain fondness for walking at night. The past few days have seen me struggling during the day, only to be revitalised once the sun has set. Tonight I intend to take advantage of the almost-full moon and cooler temperatures and hit the road an hour or two after midnight. Traffic on the D-400 is practically non-existent after 9:00 pm and I have spare batteries for my headlamp should I need to change them.

From all of the above, it should be obvious that the ferry companies no longer offer a direct connection to Cyprus from Alanya. This is what I'd expected, based on the experience of other pilgrims in the past few years, but the (out of date) information on the company websites had given me some hope.‎  ‎And yes, I am once again planning to go to Cyprus by boat rather than to Tripoli. After consulting with an old friend in Lebanon, I decided it was better to fly into Beirut. The divisions in Tripoli run deep, and have led to several outbreaks of violence in the past few years. It's calm at the moment, but it's just too close to the Syrian border for my liking.

Taşucu is 247 kms away by road, so in another eight days or so, I should be booking passage to Cyprus. Because I'm unlikely to have WiFi access very often, my updates until I arrive in Taşucu will be sparse.‎ My physical progress may be tracked online at http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0sldYqR7VeaqhcOYWdCqxfiUxvX7hlgrb  The GPS tracker I'm using updates my location every hour while it's turned on and I'm moving, but the website only displays the past five days of activity. Kinda cool, but I can't imagine anyone apart from my immediate family checking it out more than once.

This isn't the update I'd hoped to be writing, as there are a few noteworthy observations from the past week which I simply haven't had the energy to write up. At least I've got a physical notebook to scribble in. Perhaps I'll do a post-facto update, or else just leave the Mediterranean coast of Turkey as an enigma to my readers.

Alanya At Last!

Since ‎leaving Antalya, I have been walking progressively slower each day. I'm covering the same distances that I normally do, but it's taking me hours longer. Today it finally dawned on me that by taking the bus from İstanbul to Antalya, I didn't give my thermostat a chance to adjust to the new climate. People freezing in North America may hate me for saying this, but daytime highs in the low 20s Celsius are uncomfortably warm for me. (The overnight low of 11 or 12, on the other hand, is an ideal temperature for me.)   By 2:00 pm I was toast, so I spread my foam pad out in the shade of a palm tree and had a good long nap. When I woke up, it was noticeably cooler, and I was able to walk more quickly than the 3 km/h I'd been averaging earlier. I still took plenty of breaks, but I felt much better at 10:00 pm than I had at 2:00.

When I checked in, the desk clerk kindly looked up the ferry schedules for me. He found conflicting information - either the ferry to Cyprus leaves daily at 9:30 am or the next boat is at 2:00 pm Monday. (Kinda reassuring that even a native Turkish speaker finds the website confusing.)  Either way, I think I'll spend two nights here so that I can determine whether there's a church in town, and if so, get to Liturgy in the morning.

And now, good night!

I'm Tired...

...but it looks like I may be able to catch a ferry in Alanya after all. I should arrive there Saturday, and if the information I was given this morning is accurate, I hope to be Cyprus-bound Sunday afternoon. (And if the ferry company simply hasn't updated their website, it's another 170 kms to the next port east.)

If all goes well, I'll post a real update Sunday.