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Sometimes the adventure starts slowly. Other times, like this time, it can happen the first night.
I was cycling in the remote valleys of the Anatolian Steppe in central Turkey. I was following the faint trail of neglected monuments left over 2,500 years ago by the Phrygian civilisation whose leading man was the legendary king Midas.
Now it’s a poor rural backwater, crumbling and depopulated. Its big sheep and goat country, and to protect the flock from wolves the shepherds have huge and aggressive sheepdogs. I’d been warned about them, and so I always carried a stick and a dog ‘pepper spray’.
Whenever its warm enough, I prefer to sleep with just a mat and thin blanket, rather than a tent, as I like being connected to the nocturnal world around me. This time, as it turned out, maybe not the most sensible option.
Anyway, this first night was like jumping into really cold water; a bracing, ‘out of body’ experience, which after the initial shock, left me with a warm afterglow and set me up for the rest of the trip.
.... So my first night camping.
Where to begin.
Firstly, to go back. It was an exhausting day. An eight-hour coach ride, and then a hard 40-kilometre cycle along a dual carriageway with juggernauts thundering past, and lurching towards me as they waved and tooted. The hard shoulder was either wafer thin or slightly wider but heavily rutted and the only way to drown out the danger was to put on some good music, and trust to fate. I shared the hard shoulder with a jovial farmer driving a tractor. He’d overtake me on the uphill and wave and shout encouragement, and I’d do the same on the downhill. Finally, at about 5.30pm, I arrived at the tiny village which marked the start of my route.
I needed to find a place to camp as the sun sets quickly this far south, and I only had about half an hour. I took the bike off-road, stuffed all my kit in my rucksack and pushed it up into the hills. Just before dusk I found a terrific spot. The rock here is called ‘tuff’. It's volcanic ash that has been compressed and it forms these interesting craggy escarpments. I set camp on the flat base of one of these with a towering rock face behind. In front was a large standing stone which gave me protection from the light wind and cover from being seen by anyone in the shallow valley below.
It’s always a relief to find a good camping spot and now after the exertions of the day it felt great to finally sit still and take in the sight and sounds of the landscape. As the sun set the valley turned from pink to purple, and the first stars came out. I could only just make out the movement of a large herd of goats, but because the bowl shape of the valley reflected and amplified sound, I could clearly hear their bells and their bleating, and the guttural coaxing of the shepherds. I felt like I’d stepped back into another world; timeless and gentle. My adventure had started.
Exhausted, I lay down on my mat and with its reflective surface facing up and my body radiating heat from the day, I closed my eyes and let myself slip into sleeps warm embrace.
A little later I woke into a strange world of darkness slashed by beams from the searchlights of a handful of shepherds moving slowly through the valley constantly calling their large herd of goats - sometimes gently, sometimes angrily, sometimes whimsically. Search beams circled around me and then, heartstoppingly, right at me and over my head, but because of the angle of the valley and my discrete location, I remained hidden. Dogs were barking – invisible, sometimes distant, sometimes very near and I’m ready, with a stick in one hand and the ‘pepper spray’ in the other, to jump up and fend them off. This went on for a couple of hours, reaching a crescendo with the muezzin’s call to prayer. There are so many villages in this area each with its own mosque and electronic muezzin, but all slightly out of sync and, with the sound echoing and reverberating around the valley and off the rock face behind me I felt like I was being circled by a choir of muezzins. Mirroring the frenzy around me, the sky above was a chaos of stars. Some were shooting, streaking across the sky like a reflection of the sweeping searchlights in the valley below.
Eventually, exhausted by the day and overwhelmed by the stimulation, I crumpled into a fitful sleep.
It may have been after a minute, or an hour, but it felt shockingly sudden, and I was jolted awake by this light, this blinding light, that came at me and then this loud blast of a shotgun at my side, very close. I jumped up and shouted out ‘Salaam Alaikum’, ‘Peace be with you’. Voices replied – two shepherds, armed with shotguns out for a night of hunting. With gestures and a few words of Turkish it was clear that they were after rabbits, not tourists. They laughed at the near miss of shooting me and went on their way. And between the now distant shots, I tried in vain, to get back to sleep.
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