Out of Istanbul, meeting Günseli

Those first steps felt drunken. Not sloppy drunk, no, drunk like that feeling of being eighteen and sprinting back from the pub because running drunk feels like flying at ground level. Weightless. I soak in it because I know that by day’s end I’ll feel anything but weightless. The weight of the pack will compress my spine a little, my shoulders will pinch, my feet will swell and turn tender. But to begin with — blissful, sober, drunkenness.

The sun shines all day but the wind bites. I sit down for 5 minutes, in full sun, and pretty soon I’m shivering, pressed onward. East of Istanbul, where Pendik comes down to the water, I turn off the shore to escape the frigid howl and fall into a patchwork of bustling streets. If you don’t look up at the sooty apartment blocks that crowd out the sky, it has the feeling of a bazaar. I imagine the apartments having arrived like UFOs, settling into a hover directly above the stalls of the busy market, and everyone simply pretending nothing’s changed, going on as before. Beneath each apartment block the muddle of stalls (now shops) remain, and the streets heave with energy. The crowd occasionally, begrudgingly, parts to admit a car or a scooter, but otherwise they rule the street. The towers are welcome for now at least, in that they shut out the wind.

The day offers its highlight in the form of a girl who barely reaches my waist asking, nay demanding, that I take her photograph. As is almost always the case, I find myself wishing I had a different lens on the camera, but we make a go of it anyway and she’s thrilled. She becomes bolder, begins harassing her friend to have her photo taken too, but her friend isn’t so keen and hops on her bike, giggling. From a window two stories above a woman cloaked in a Khimar looks on and laughs.

I ask the first girl her name, “Günseli! Günseli!” she says. We part ways, or so I thought. About half a kilometre down the road, I hear the rapid patter of feet and that same shrill shout of “fotograf!”. I turn to find not one but two girls bearing down on me. Günseli at full sprint, and another friend she’s just pulled out of a back alley, peddling hard on another little bike, this time with a rattling pair of training wheels. “Fotograf!” she yells again as she points at her friend. They both vibrate, barely able to stay still for a second, no sympathy at all for my using a 45 year old Soviet copy of a 67 year old lens¹, with pretty finicky manual focus.

By evening my spirits are still high but that weightlessness is long gone. I feel like a sack of bricks, heavy and hurting. The winter weight has reached new heights this year. After 35 kilometres I call it a day and surprise myself by opting for a bed for the night, wild camping in Istanbul has been consistently unpleasant and I want a good nights sleep to mend these aches.

I don’t imagine I’ll have any more luck this year than last crossing Turkey’s mega bridges so, assuming Osmangazi Bridge is off limits, I’ll be heading as far as İzmit — the eastern extremity of the Sea of Marmara — before I can turn south into the heart of Turkey. But first, sleep.