Life's Not So Bad Here.
Fethiye, Turkey– Taking a break from the break I was taking in Ios, Greece, I’m on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey flailing around until I hit the next war zone. Turkey is a kind of paradise for this sort of travel. Bound by Greece, Bulgaria, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia with ferry service to occupied northern Cyprus, Ukraine and Russia, Turkey is the navel of my world. You can go from war zone to thigh slapping Australian backpacker antics with a 24 hour bus ride in more than one direction. Today I went hiking and swimming with a couple of sisters from Los Angeles and two local guys both named Volkan. I called our adventure “The Tale of Two Volkans” as we set off for the day, which turned out to be amazing. We drove to some tiny hamlet further east and hiked down a small mountainside to a secluded cove and dove in a very warm, very salty sea. One of those days where life doesn’t get much better. 
On the famished hike back up to one of the Volkan’s car, we discovered fruit, all types of fruit dangling from all these trees. We each grabbed a bunch of grapes before stumbling on shriveled blackberries, ripe figs, sour pomegranates etc. It was a garden of eden scenario to the max.
Don’t know where this road is leading, likely Iraq or Georgia. Got to keep it going though. Good times, bad times, I know I’ve had my share.
Whenever I’m here in Turkey, I always think back to a chapter in Robert Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth called “Strategic Hippie Routes” which is about his trip in the 90’s to Kashgar, Xinjiang and meeting a frugal backpacker along a (then) new post-1979 hippie trail. This was long before Kaplan went of the deep end with his mil groupie books post-9/11 and was one of my early inspirations in these here travels. Read that book.