Friday Feb 9th

Asalaam from Goreme! It seems like the time behind me keeps stretching out longer and longer like taffy, while the treadmill of time I’m on speeds up! It feels like a month ago that I was in Bursa when it has really only been two days. 

I just took a selfie with a Mexican woman, a Spanish man, a Japanese man, and a Chinese man. We spoke in four languages all told. Pretty cool stuff. Hostel living rocks

After typing up my blog post from the other day I immediately embarked upon a post-work hike. It was splendid. My usual strategy of finding the nearest dirt road/hiking trail/ non-street on Strava and following it pretty blindly panned out very well. After trekking through a somewhat desolate and gloomy residential neighbourhood situated on a cruel incline, my feet found dirt. Bursa is built at the foot of a giant mountain and in its expansion has spilled a considerable way up the slope itself. By the time I had exited civilization and entered the wilderness I was over halfway to the ridge I’d set my sights on. The trail I took wove through a sparse evergreen forest, the path completely covered with goat hoof tracks, dense to the point of a uniform texture. Pretty soon in I met an elderly goatherd with a small pack and shook hands after miming that I was going for an intentional walk and that I was not, in fact, miserably lost. I got to repeat this well practiced routine again later when I bumped into a man carrying firewood home on his pack horse. 

The hike was sublime. Up and down narrow valleys to cross a stream, rocky terrain, dirt roads, winding through tiny villages on the mountainside. The whole time I had stunning golden hour views of the dazzling natural sights and with a 90 degree turn of the head, I could admire the entire city of Bursa in all its glory. Nearing dark, I decided to take the next exit back into a concrete path. I got a delicious Tost sandwich with a local sausage that was delicious and headed back to the hostel, taking a rather early night. The next day was very chill, mostly centered around work and resting. In the evening I indulged in another local specialty, Iskender Kebab, which is lamb kebab drizzled in a hot tomato sauce, drowned in a goat cheese/ butte/ cream substance, doused in fatty oil, all served over sliced pita. Delicious fare. 

That night I caught my first of several (planned) night busses, from which I awoke this morning. The bus took me from Bursa to Kayseri, where I waited a couple of hours for the bus to Goreme, where I currently reside. I learned a lot of lessons from this bus ride.  The main one is that I react well to melatonin, and that I can take ibuprofen and melatonin at the same time for a good nights sleep. I also experimented heavily with pillow, backpack, and body positions, finding a few decent poses that seem to work. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of practice moving forward. The moral of the story is that I woke up today feeling a relatively average level of energy. 

Goreme is stunning. It is a town in Cappadocia, a famously beautiful region of Turkiye. It is as if the Badlands had a baby with Bryce Canyon and MesaVerde. Giant plateaus of rippling varicolored sandstone are punctuated by huge pillars, and every dozen or so feet seems to hold a window or a door to a cave house inside the actual stone. My hostel, the very room where I sit now, is in a cave! That is bananas. 

The other thing that Cappadocia is famous for is hot air balloons, which go up every morning around sunrise. Being in “Rome”, I had to splurge, and I’ll be waking up at 6 tomorrow morning to take one up for myself. So freaking exciting. Beyond that, I’ll be spending the whole weekend hiking pretty much nonstop, seeing as much of this dazzlingly alien landscape as possible. 

This is an incredible adventure that I feel that I’ve finally warmed up to. Sure, it’s not perfect and definitely not sustainable forever, but hey, this isn’t for forever. It’s wild to think that as of tomorrow, I’ll have been gone for four weeks. I don’t know if that seems like I’ve been gone a year or like I’ve been gone for a weekend, I just know that it feels incorrect. On the bus ride from Kayseri this morning I could not stop grinning to myself. Despite a decent level of morning grogginess and a frankly saddening proportion of hours spent in bus stations over the last 48 hours, I felt wave after wave of excitement and gratitude.