This past week (14 – 21 November) was the religious Bayram holiday in Turkey so we had a week off school. Bayram was described to me as being the Turkish equivalent to Christmas, in the way that most people that celebrate Christmas will try to make it home to family. In the coming weeks before Bayram my friends Kaspar [Denmark] and Justin [Iowa] and I made plans to go somewhere but of course we hadn’t sat down and solidified a travel itinerary, let alone any sort of general plan of action. We knew that we wanted to go EAST. We knew that we wanted to do something unconventional and stray off of the normal tourist path. But mostly I think we knew that we wanted “to establish worldly connections and learn foreign culture and language through immersion” (to quote my mission on www.couchsurfing.org). Undoubtedly, we were all hungry to experience Turkish life outside of Istanbul.
So vacation finally rolled around and we went to buy bus tickets somewhere to find that every single travel agency and bus company had been fully booked – from this we learned quickly that when piecing together any travel plans in Turkey during Bayram it is imperative so reserve tickets weeks in advance.
We had to find alternative transportation if we hoped to have a vacation not in Istanbul. I may have suggested that we buy used bicycles and pedal as far as we could, but this may have gotten shot down quickly as an unrealistic tactic. Then the topic of hitchhiking to the East came up and we did some internet research (amazingly, we found much information on past foreigner’s hitchhiking experiences in Turkey and found most to be positive – http://hitchwiki.org/en/Turkey). It was decided. The next morning we located some cardboard for a sign and bought a fat black marker and set out for a journey On The Road, just as Jack Kerouac once did. Our University is conveniently located near to one of the two transcontinental bridges, and we got picked up within five minutes of sticking our thumbs out with a sign saying Doğuya doğru gitmek istiyoruz : We would like to go East.
To cut a very long and epic hitchhiking story short, we ended up making it to Hatay, which is about halfway across Turkey. Hatay, also referred to as Antakya, is around 1,000 km from Istanbul, the southernmost province, on the Mediterranean Sea, and nestled right next to Syria. To backtrack for a second, we hitched from Istanbul to Bursa to Eskişehir to Ankara (Turkey’s capital) to Adana to Hatay in about three days. I guess being a foreigner on a hitchhiking excursion here is advantageous – most of the Turks that picked us up let us know that had we been Turkish they would not have stopped. We never had to wait longer than a half hour by the road before we got picked up. Each time we hit the road we also brought along a cardboard sign displaying in Turkish where we hoped to go next. I think this also helped our cause because it exhibited the fact that we can speak some Turkish, and none of the drivers that picked us up could speak English.
We arrived at Hatay at five in the morning after bumming rides from a chemical engineer, a religious couple, a student, and an insurance salesman, among others. And, although we were all excited to reach our destination (we determined halfway through the voyage that Hatay would be where we’d go) we all agreed that it was the hitching journey that provided the most interesting aspect of the trip. It was a good feeling knowing that we were injecting a little piece of spontaneous wonder into each stranger’s routine.
