coasttocoast.sitemynet.com

After waking up, Anil and I do a photo-trip through the village. The houses stand free but are surrounded by high walls around the courtyards, so there is not much to see. From a high dry dung heap I take a general view of the place.
We clean the room, we used, very well and lock the door of the building with the padlock. We pass through the village to thank the muhtar or others. We do not see many of them but we thank the one we see.
Outside the village are a low and a higher höyük of which I take photos. We can see the target for this morning already. About 10 km to the south is a town called ALPU, the road is straight and flat and we see it every step we do.
We have a rest near the bridge half way and as we come closer there is more activity in the fields and on the road.
The last kilometers are marked by a long pipe that is laid next to the side of the road. They work on the welding of the joints and the testing of the welding. This is done by radiation. So when we come to the end of the work area we see a large sign standing next to the road. We see it from the back side. We read the front and see that it tells us: 'RADIATION! Keep out!' At that point we cannot take it very serious anymore and take a photo of it.
ALPU became much larger in the last 25 years and we walk between ugly houses towards the town center. It is not so clear too what the center is. At some point we are stopped by a police officer with one star on his shoulder and he asks us to come and drink tea with him. He brings us to the Emniyet station, the security police. In the garden we drink tea together and speak with him and his men. We tell him we want to have a haircut and a shave and he brings us to the barber. We leave our backpacks in the police garden.
After remodeling my coconut we go to a restaurant for lunch. One portion of kasarlı-pide is not enough and a portion of köfte follows.
Douwe buys a disposable camera and fruit and I buy a film.
We pick up the backpacks after first using the State Toilet in the police office, an opportunity you do not want to miss. The toilet is next to a dark cell for prisoners; it is empty.
We leave town around 13.00. It is very warm.
The road goes south where the sun shines straight in our faces and it is no fun. Finally after more then one hour and without any water in our bottles left we come in GÜNELİ.
This village is completely closed on the outside; the walls of the courtyards form a long wall without windows or entrances.
The way-in is between the same type of courtyards, everything seems closed. Not a very friendly looking place. As we ask where we can find water we are shown to a place near the mosque in the center of the village. The tap is in the garden of control-post of animal health. Some of the windows are broken and the grass stands high, the garden is a mess, but the water comes from the tap. Under the trees we have a long rest because it is too hot to continue. I lay out my wet laundry what always gives comments of my companions.
As time comes to leave, we walk around the village. At some point Douwe finds a mobile phone. It is still on and no code is needed. We play a bit with it but we do not take it. We place it at the corner of two walls, so that it is easily to see. After that we continue to the main road.
A short man, with Asian features, comes to speak with us, what we do etc. in the end we say that we found a phone and he is very happy; he was looking for it. In the morning he had placed it on his vehicle but had forgotten it and had driven away. The phone fell off at some point. We explain where we have placed it and we separate.
We walk on up hill, it is still very warm. We have to pass a ridge with as the highest point 1284 meter but we will stay a 500 meter lower than that. Before the top a car comes up from behind and stops. First I do not look back, but then the driver uses his horn, so I and Gürkan turn. It is the man of the telephone and as a way to show his gratefulness he brings us a glass pot with green beans. Thanks, but the pot is heavy and no one wants to carry it. So in the end I do, I put it in my photo-bag.
We walk and walk and there is no end to the road. Our day-target seems to be unreachable. At some point we think to see a minaret but it is not.
The boys have some complaints, Gürkan walks not easy at the moment, Anil has seen better days too.
It is almost getting dark but no HAMİDİYE in sight. We are now in a critical situation, we need a decent rest, a place to wash ourselves and especially water. We have to reach a good place before dark.
We sit next to the road and have again a rest and we decide to find transport to the next village. A tracker with machine parts in the back comes along. We ask if we can come with them to HAMİDİYE. That is OK with them and we can climb in the back. But that is easier said then done, since we became walkers but no climbers. It is amazing how stiff one gets from days long walking. We load the packs and finally manage to climb on the farm cart. It is an uncomfortable sit, but it is short. We cross the highway SİVRİHİSAR - ESKİŞEHIR this way. In HAMİDİYE we get off the chart again and see on the other side of the road the YUNUS EMRE ÖĞRETMEN LISE, a training center for new teachers. Since the holiday just started it is almost empty, but all the staff is still there. They sit outside and we walk to them and introduce ourselves. They are at first not very enthusiastic but when I show my teachers card from Bilkent University they become helpful. We can stay the night in their rooms. They offer tea and we sit outside and talk with them about our walk and other things. They have al kind of language teachers, so Douwe has to speak French and German with them. I escape here again.
The building we stay in is from the Atatürk period and without being ungrateful I can say that when he died, this building died too. There are many things that need improvement and repair, like the toilet and the missing shower, but the school did not want any money for our stay and it is a bed and a large room. I share my room with Anil. There is a third empty bed. The room has a large balcony over the length of the whole building and double windows to keep in winter the cold out. The door of the room has a small peephole in it, so just like in prison, the staff could see what was happening inside without opening the door. This was in the past but not for us!
We cook the green beans because we do not want to carry the heavy pot any longer and we eat pork from a tin that Rado had given me as a gift from Slovakia. We charge our mobile phones and speak with the families at home.
After some talk in our beds we turn off the light and sleep...

===============================================
statistics
from starting-point = 167 km
to end-point = 301 km
walked this day = 26 km
total km = 196 km
groupmembers = 5
===============================================

Day 12, June 12th, Saturday: sunny and very warm

HAMIDYE - ÇİFTELER

We wake up early before the remaining people in the school are awake yet. We pack our backs and go out. I show Anil how to leave a room after being a guest. I fold all the blankets and place them as nice piles with the pillow on top at the feet end of the bed. Army times?
The same I do in the boy's room, they left the room in a very bad state. I do this because I do not want to spoil it for possible next guests in the future.
A path brings us to the road again and we start to walk straight south. It is a busy road with many trucks and busses passing al the time. Usually every trucker uses his horn or wave when they pass. Interesting bus-drivers never do so.
We walk for about 1 hour and come to MESUDİYE, which has a different name on the old map, TAŞLIHÖYÜK. We walk through this place and look for the teahouse. We cannot find it and ask a villager, it seems to be outside between the village and the highway. We find it but it is only 09.00 and Saturday. The owner is an old man and not too fast. He just start to prepare the tea and it takes endless. Anil and I use the time to walk through the village. The houses near the road are well maintained, but the further one comes from the road the worse their condition becomes. That is the part I want to see! Well plastered houses do not show their construction method at all. Some nice half broken down houses are photographed.
Back in the teahouse, the tea is still not ready yet. Finally it is done and we drink two cups and leave, we lost lots of time in here.
The next target is MALMEDİYE, a larger village. Nothing exciting can be said about the kilometers between the two places, except that just before the place the boys have a look at race horses in a field. They speak to the horses and try to though them. Just at that time the owner arrives in a very over done Jeep. He is an old man with clearly too much money and a too well impression of himself. He makes the usual jokes about our trip and invites us for a drink, he want us to come in his Jeep, something that is impossible. We walk! He will wait for us in a teahouse in the town center. We continue but take a back-road through a silent and primitive area. We end up in a large bakkal where we eat ice-creams, eat snacks and drink. By the time we go one the horse man stands impatient on the street waiting for us. He brings us in the teahouse and we are the show-off pieces he needed there. We drink a soda and stay polite a few minutes in our chairs. Then we go. A few meters further we enter a lokanta. Here we have a warm meal, tea etc. After this lunch it is still that hot, so we do not want to walk yet. We find a teagarden and drink tea and cola. Douwe sleeps on a bench and I also drift away...
At about 15.00 we start again and want to be in ÇİFTELER before 17.00 to post our extra luggage in a courier serves back to Ankara. It is less then 12 km, but it is really hot. We walk over the straight asphalt road and our hats fly sometimes off when the truck are passing very close to us. Gürkan's right leg hurts him more and more and he walks always at the very end of the group. We have a schedule of 1 hour walk and 15 minutes rest. That looks not much walk and a long rest, but the opposite is the reality! We rest under a small tree, the only tree in between MALMEDİYE and ÇİFTELER.
We come close to ÇİFTELER and I find a dead pile of hair and some bones next to the road. First I think that we have here a killed dog, a sad traffic victim, but it is a fox. The hair is grey and only the tail is still intact. So there comes the knife and off is the tail. I check it for flees or other small blood suckers, but nothing attacks me, so these parasites must have left the corpse a long time ago. The tail is attached to my backpack and we march on towards ÇİFTELER.
The name sign of the town is placed well before the first building and that is highly frustrating. A few factories are on the right side, but no houses yet. A compound of the electricity company is guarded and we ask the man for drinking water. He has his family there and they offer gözlıme what Douwe accept and eats with taste. There seems to be no need to hurry: there is no courier serves in town. To give the box to a bus heading for Ankara is also not possible: there are no busses straight to the capital. One has to travel first to Eskişehir first and then change busses for Ankara. If you trust the busdriver and the system; you can give it with a bus, but then there must be a person on the other side to receive the parcel.
We had rushed in to be on time and now it was all for nothing, a bit demoralizing. We have one more rest at the beginning of the line of houses. Nobody wants to walk anymore and we have no idea where we can camp, there is no suitable place for it. The morale is at freezing point and it is time for some practical thinking. Since I'm married with a Turkish teacher and I have a card for the Öğretmen Evi I can invite my friends here for a night in such a house. I phone my wife to ask if there is an Öğretmen Evi and if so, if there is place for all of us. She phones later back, yes there is place but where are we? We are at the beginning of the Atatürk Bulvar (where else?) just under the bridge. Again phoning and later again to me. The man of the house will come and take us.
A short while later a man on a red Mobilette arrives with an old man on the back. The house is not far away and the old man will bring us. We have to walk with him. He knows about everyone in town and shouts around that we are foreigners and that we are on our way to ANTALYA. This repeats many times; he cannot stop!
After a not too short walk we come to the teacher house. First we get a cold drink in the garden. This garden is at the same time a teagarden for the whole town. We go to see the rooms and I share a room with the Çavuş. There is one shower for all rooms on the corridor. The rooms are a bit cramped, but the bed is fine and we have an extra bed for our stuff. When un-packed in a small room our outfit smells not so fresh anymore! In a tent you do not notice it that so clearly!
We think of leaving some clothes in the house. It is ok for the caretaker and we will give a box in the morning.
In the teagarden it is forbidden to drink beer. But that is what we want to do. He promises to bring us in the evening to a bar. Strange enough I did not see any bar. We all want to shower first. That is the first in days, after the hamam in Ilica. The shower works well and runs by an electric heater and not by sun energy. Those last always finished their hot water by the time I need it. It is a good feeling to feel clean again. After everyone had his shower and we sit for a while in the garden and ate a tost, than its time for the beer! With the caretaker of the teacher house we walk through the town. There are no bars visible from the street. This town has a nationalistic council and they don't like bars and drunks.
The bar we are heading to seems to be hidden. First we leave the street and disappear in a narrow alley. There is a dark doorway towards stairs. Here he rings a bell and we go up stairs through a toilet block. Behind it is a door and he knocks on the door and it opens. Just like a spy-film.
The bar, if we can call it like that, is as many other beer-drinkers-places in Turkey a more or less empty space with tables and simple chairs. In a corner plays a TV. There are almost no customers in the bar. Beer in bottles.
We drink two beers and eat French fries and are happy for a moment. The caretaker wants a beer as a reward for bringing us to this 'special' place and after that well earned beer he goes back to work. Everybody is tired and we leave the bar after 20.00 and return to our rooms.
When we arrive at the teacher house the garden has changed a bit, it became the center of entertainment for the whole town. The dark garden is full with people and there is very loud arabesque music, not my favorite type!
All people visit the toilets near our rooms, but I'm tired and sleep very soon....
===============================================
Statistics
from starting-point = 189 km
to end-point = 280 km
walked this day = 26.0 km
total km = 222.1 km
Team members = 5
===============================================