A year of travelling is a long time, and there are moments when you feel defeated. The travel schedule can be exhausting, and there is no comparable frame of reference to your ordinary life. I often think about home, imagining a typical week and the passage of time over that week, of how long I’d spend sitting at a desk at the office, or riding the subway, or grocery shopping and cooking tomorrow’s lunch, and try to imagine what I’d be doing right now if I were at home. Maybe I’d be on the computer, or reading a book, or doing nothing much. I certainly would not be riding a 12-hour bus to the next town on a Wednesday, or negotiating the price of a dormitory bed with the hostel staff at five in the morning. Nor would I think nothing of spending five hours in a café playing backgammon with a couple of Turkish university students. Life is short.

But when you’re travelling, life is long. Unless you’re visiting a country with some kind of job or volunteer work or task to do, you’ve got to find ways to fill the time. You can go sightseeing, but that lasts only for an hour or two, so what now? It’s only 2 PM. Most towns don’t perk up until the sun goes down.

After weeks of sightseeing, buses, trains, border crossings, and hostel staff, what should be considered a “vacation” starts to feel like an immense chore. My spirits were flagging a little bit as I reached the Goreme Valley. I’d had a busy day exploring the Goreme open-air museum with the Dutch guy I keep running into in every town I visit. He had an overnight bus to Istanbul leaving at 8 PM. We ran into some Canadians we’d met in Selcuk who had plans for the evening that involved an open bar and five-course meal, costing about 60 YTL (50 bucks or so). Too rich for me. With the Dutch guy leaving and everyone else I know having other plans, I was left with nothing much to do for the evening, and not much energy to be bothered.

I retired to my hostel. In Goreme, the thing to do is stay in a cave hotel. Mine was a small, musty dormitory room with heavy blankets and almost no air circulation and very little light. It was the sort of room that offers no compelling reason to stay there except for sleeping. You couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t even sit. The hotel itself was virtually empty (it was low season), and the entire town was dark.

Restlessness took over me. I wandered into the town and into a crowded bar, which I quickly left, not being in the mood. I went back to my room, got into bed, and thought about things. Today wasn’t fun. What’s so great about volcanic rock formations? I could just look at photographs of those. This hotel sucks. There’s nobody here. Can’t meet people. And if I did, what would we do? Go to a bar and drink? Is that all I know how to do?

I was feeling depressed. I know that feeling when I see it. And the next day, I had an overnight bus to Istanbul, so I had the whole day to kill. And now I’ve “done” Goreme, seen all the sights I wanted to see. Tomorrow would be the worst and most boring day of my entire life.

At breakfast the next morning, I met a British lady who was living in Turkey. She had a long braided ponytail and a t-shirt saying “NOT IN MY NAME”—an anti-war slogan, apparently. We talked about my travel plans. I told her I was off to India next, and she’d been to India five times, and told me all about the place, and also about some of the other places she’d been like Columbia, Sri Lanka, Iran, and so on. Her enthusiasm for travel was endless; she’d been on the road for almost 19 years, stopping to work for a few months in each place before heading off to another destination, sometimes doing humanitarian/UN work, other times teaching English. Talking with her, I began to feel the pangs of anticipation coming back, the feeling of looking forward to the next place. I was excited again.

She gave me simple advice for nights like the previous one: when you start to have more of those nights than the good kind, it’s time to go home. And the truth was, I’d had weeks of great times punctuated with a boring night or two. Hardly a cause for concern. I felt good.

With newfound resolve, I decided to take a day trip to the underground villages of Derinkuyu. At the bus stop a guy sitting on his backpack began talking to me. He asked if I was going to Derinkuyu and I said I was. So we sat on the bus together. He smelled rather bad (or as my pal Dave would say: “He smelled rather poorly”) and looked to be in shabby condition. His backpack was like a large, dirty duffel bag that he strapped to his shoulders. He looked like neither his clothes nor his person had been washed in weeks.

His name was Raphael, from Australia. His English was with an Aussie accent, but it seemed either that English wasn’t his first language or he was a little slow. I didn’t press him on that.

We began the usual gambit of fellow-traveller questions. Our conversation lacked rhythm. His manner of speaking was peculiar to me: he seemed to think everything over thoroughly before talking, and only when he decided on what to say did he say it. I started in on how I was going to India and how I was a bit nervous about going there, India being a tough place and all. As I spoke, I became aware that I was bragging about this. He hardly said anything, and waited for me to finish talking.

Then I asked him where he’d been before Turkey and he said “India.” He did not offer this fact while I was discussing India. He’d been for five months “this time”, as well as to Pakistan, Iran, the “stans”, not to mention Eastern Turkey. Wow. Did he find it difficult? How did he get around? Any trouble?

“No,” he said. “Most people will give you a ride for free.”

Wait. You… hitchhiked?

“Yes.”

This guy hitchhiked across India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey. Suddenly my travels felt so mundane, riding government buses and staying in touristy hostels, drinking beer with people from Germany and California. This guy was one of those rare creatures we see in the wild, the Serious Traveller. I was merely a dabbler. But how does one get the idea to hitchhike across that part of the world? I suppose it’s cheaper that way. I had so many questions.

“Did you make it to Sri Lanka?”

“No.”

“Aha!” I thought. Got ya. As people tend to do when they meet someone far more interesting than themselves, I began trying to make myself appear more than a total novice. I said something along the lines of “I’d like to try some challenging places like that too. But I’m not about to go to Afghanistan or anything.”

“Why not?” he asked.

Oh man. Tell me you didn’t hitchhike across Afghanistan too…

“It’s not that dangerous. You just read the newspapers and pay attention to the political situation, and when things aren’t busy you just go in.”

He did! He spent two weeks in Afghanistan, not only in Kabul but in other places. He was confused at how I might find that a strange thing to do.

“I’m not about to go to Baghdad,” he said. Good to know.

We arrived at Derinkuyu, a fascinating series of underground caves shaped into a little village, where people lived for months at a time while their real village was under siege. Raphael very much wanted to worm into the very narrowest, darkest passages, unimpeded by such things as claustrophobia or discomfort.

I pulled out my camera. “Take your pictures,” he said. He wasn’t taking any. Didn’t even have a camera. The more time I spent with him, the more I began to feel like the strange one. Why did I need pictures of everything? I have a memory, don’t I?

And why don’t I visit Pakistan and Iran? How bad could it be? Millions of people live there, for God’s sake. I began to realize that travel is a skill, and I was still learning. Raphael was a master. He had no tourist accoutrements whatsoever. No modern synthetic-fibre’d clothing or state-of-the-art backpacks or expensive hiking boots. He dressed simply. He could fit in anywhere. And he didn’t travel to show his friends his pictures or brag about where he’d been, just as he didn’t speak without thinking first about what he would say.

We left the village, and he asked me if I wanted to stop for tea. But it was Ramadan, and drinking tea in public during the day would be impolite. So we shook hands, and he wandered across the street with his backpack over his shoulders, stuck out his thumb and began hitchhiking, hoping to reach Antalya by sundown.

Antalya is yet another Mediterranean paradise, with sprawling beaches cut into cliff rock, palm-lined boulevards, and of course, many Turkish men trying to huck their goods. I arrived in the early evening at my hotel, the Sabah Pension in the Antalyan ‘Old City’. After passing a quiet evening with a plate of lamb kebab and a borrowed Lonely Planet guide, I went to bed early to wake up at sunrise and walk along the waterfront and take a picture or two:

I quickly took a standard “Turkish breakfast” (boiled egg x 2, feta cheese, tomato + cucumber salad, olives, bread, Nescafé) and walked out into the cool morning air while the sun slept, towards the Hadrian Gate at the entrance to the Old City.

A shoe-shine man stood next to the gate, and tried to lure me over to his stand.

“Hello my friend, where you from? Come here please.”

Pointing to my sandals, I offered him a glance that said “oh ho ho, good sir, but the un-shoelike nature of my footwear has thwarted you!” and continued on. But he persisted.

“Yes please, it’s no problem. Come here, I show you.”

With such a stern manner did he say this—as a command rather than a request—that in my early-morning stupor (Nescafé offers a meagre caffeine kick, after all) I did exactly what he said.

This proved to be a grave mistake. In Turkey, as anywhere else where tourists are regularly accosted by street merchants, it is usually the correct move to ignore anyone trying to strike up conversation using any of the following intro lines: “My friend…”, “Hello sir, where are you from?”, and that Turkish peculiarity, “Yes please…”. You’ll note that none of these lines can be responded to with “no”. Their aim is to get you talking, and where there is talking, so begins the selling. Just walk away.

But I didn’t. Instead I wandered over to his shoe-shine stand. It was little more than a metal foot rest with some creams and brushes scattered around it. He kept talking, and without looking down, scooped up some paste with his finger and tried to apply it to my sandal. I anticipated this, and moved my foot out of the way.

“No no no no, it’s OK sir. Just to test. A test.”

I told him I didn’t want any.

“Where from? France? Belgium? Ahh, Belgium! You from Belgium, yes?”

And with a bit of legerdemain he quickly thrust his finger out and smeared my sandal with the paste before I could move.

Now I was angry, and told him to wipe it off at once.

“OK sir,” he said, and reached for a cloth. But his hand veered away from the cloth and instead grabbed a wire brush, and he began scrubbing the paste into the leather. I was livid, but powerless to do anything, lest I walk away with a single paste-encrusted sandal. So as he scrubbed, I continued to scold and berate him for being so rude.

“Is this how you make your money? Ripping people off?” I said.

“No, it’s OK, no money, no money!” he replied, as if he expected not to be paid. Hospitality has its limits, even Turkish hospitality.

When he finished with my right foot, he lunged forward with both hands to try to grab my left foot. I shook him off, and simply walked away. He offered no protest, and I offered no money, for it would be wrong to reward such rudeness, would it not?

So what was a man with one polished shoe to do? With the bitter taste of the attempted con job still in my mouth, I went down to the beach and scuffed up the sandal real good. Take that, shoe-shine man.

I spent quite a few days at the lovely ANZ Guesthouse in Selcuk. The place sits just up the hill from the Selcuk bus terminal, behind a small carpet shop (”Ali Baba’s”). It’s operated by three Turkish guys, one of whom spent something like eighteen years living in Australia (and speaks English with a proper Outback twang), hence the Australiophile motif (”ANZ” = “Australia/New Zealand”). The ANZ is a fantastic hostel. The rooms are cheap and clean. For dinner they offer BBQed meats prepared by a pro chef. And the staff were some of the nicest folks I’ve met.

Mehmet was one such guy. He spoke not much English (and when he did, he somehow spoke it with “a Turkish accent”, his words), but he looked after all of us with the most sincere generosity. On my first day there he took me out for soup and Coca-Cola (old-fashioned glass bottle), and talked about small-town life, and about his girlfriend in Vancouver. They kept in touch by Internet, and hope to marry soon. I couldn’t help but fear that this girlfriend was, if not a fictional creation, at least some cruel woman giving him the run-around. What does a Canadian girl want with a small-town Turk who barely speaks English? But he insists they hoped to be married, and Mehmet is a good man, so I give him the b. of the d.

In talking with a few Turkish men they seemed to have a very practical approach to marriage. “If we cannot be married,” Mehmet says, “I marry someone else, it’s OK.”

Selcuk has many attractions, such as the ruined Greek city of Ephesus:

The highlight for me was the mountain town of Srince (shrin-JAY), home to the Selcuk wine industry:

Srince is one of those Mediterranean postcard dream-lands, where grape vines cling to Spanish-tiled rooftops, pomegranates hang at eye level from bushy trees, wrinkled old men ride around town on bicycles, and the rain always seems to fall elsewhere. I went up there via dolmus (taxi-bus) with a newly engaged Canadian couple from Calgary. We found a wine vendor in a three-piece suit who let us sample each of the fifteen or so flavours of fruit wine local to the region: apple, peach, cherry (regular and x-tra strength), blackberry, black mulberry, blueberry, kiwi, apricot, pomegranate…. All were delicious, and my Canadian friends and I picked up several bottles, to be drunk that afternoon over games of backgammon.

The most amusing sight in Srince came as we were having lunch in an outdoor restaurant on Srince’s main street, and a series of open-roof tour jeeps full of passengers made their way past. It is something of a local tradition in Turkey’s small towns to douse tourists with water, and while we were spared this fate, the tourists in the jeeps were not. Each of the restaurants on this strip had evidently prepared hours in advance for the jeeps’ arrival, and brought out enormous jugs—more like oil drums, really—of water, and with expert timing, launched litres of water into the air at the exact moment when it would provide the most thorough drenching to the helpless tourists inside. The final jeep in particular received an almost unbelievable dose; easily enough to leave them sitting in six inches of water when all was said and done. Our laughter turned into a cringe, not only in memoriam of all those poor digital cameras, but for the fact that drums of water can’t be all that easy to come by in rural Turkey.

The wine got us good and drunk, and that night I had a memorable conversation with two Turkish guys around my age, university guys who were in town to do some skydiving (”better than sex!”) at the local drop zone. One of them was an accountant, the other an aspiring mining engineer. The Canadian guy and I talked Turkish politics with these two, or at least what we knew of the subject. It was most enlightening. The common wisdom is that Turkey is torn between the secular, Euro-flavoured government of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the conservative Islamic movement which hopes for a thoroughly Muslim Turkey ruled by Shari’a law. The latter faction is currently in power after having squeaked out a victory in the general election on Jul 22, and the accountant guy gave me a sample scenario of how this result has begun to play out.

He took and passed a difficult exam to become a chartered pro accountant, fully qualified to step into a lucrative job in Turkey’s civil service. But when he applied, he was passed over for another, less-qualified candidate who happened to be a supporter of the AKP. He insists this is because he is a secularist who wants to work “for Ataturk”, and this government will always choose “one of theirs”. So he has been rejected as a gov’t accountant and has had instead to take a job with Deloitte and Touche, or as he calls it, “some fucking French or English”. He explained how the new prez won his power not with his ideas, but by giving the people simple things: roads, infrastructure, budgetary prudence. “Just like Hitler,” he says.

I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong, of course. But Turkey strikes me as one of those countries where everything people say about it is exactly true. For example, everyone says “Turkey is part European, part Asian”, which is not only literally true (Istanbul straddles both continents) but a more or less exact description of Turkish culture. And when people say Gen. Ataturk “created” the modern Turkish state, they are not merely suggesting he passed a few simple reforms through the Parliament or appeared as a head of state for a few treaty-signings. No, he single-handedly stirred Turkish nationalism after the occupation of Anatolia during WWI, leading to the Turkish War of Independence. He then shoved Turkey into the 20th century, giving them a Euro-style secular government and even a new language, for chrissakes. The guy really did create the country called Turkey, and Turkey is truly everything people say it is.