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Four months on the road. It sounds like such a short time and in fact on a lifetime scale it actually is. But the events in the past months already
start to fade into various episodes with their unique thrills and horrors. Re-reading parts of our daily dairy results the realisation that we've simply forgotten many of the things that happened on our trip
already. "How could we ever forget" we say to ourselves.
Most of November we've spend in Turkey along the south coast. The high planes of central Anatolia had become real cold already. After having
seen central Turkey on our route to Iran we can only say that tourism has 'hit' the coastal regions hard. Traditional life has almost vanished starting from Alanya to the region around Izmir. A few beach pockets are
still preserved but mass-tourism will surely conquer them too in due time.
After two weeks of cruising the Turkish coast and parts of the inland we crossed the plain of central Anatolia just behind Antalya.
And yes it was cold immediately, but with the colours of autumn the region is simply incredibly beautiful. When snow comes we expect most villages to be cut from the outside world. In rural area's olive picking was
in full progress and wood was gathered in huge amounts to be sure to have a warm stove when it gets really cold. The latter we didn't realise until we saw the effects, quite a lot of houses are still heated by wood
and coal as we saw and smelled the incredible thick smog in the valley's of the bigger villages.
This month we also realised that we miss the space of our home. Living our lives in our small spaced mobile
home isn't always particular easy. Specially when it's too cold to sit outside with sunset round 6 pm making the evenings quite long. Bed time has shifted to around 10pm in stead of the usual 12pm at home. And then
we even don't getup that early. We hardly manage to get going again before 9am.
On average we didn't really drive that much each day. 2,5 hours of driving with an average radius of 150 Km is nearly a full
day for us. This including getting ready for leaving, doing the daily bread, vegetable and fruit shopping, having lunch somewhere along the road, finding our way, and searching for a suitable place to spend the
night before it gets dark. Stretching it we squeezed nearly 5 hours of driving out of one day, but the result was next to being 300-400 Km further, being completely waisted.
We read a lot of (English) books
and being out of reading material is a real nightmare. What to do in the evenings when you're sick of Yatsee, playing cards and all. Roaming the area in the evening (in pitch dark), making small walking trips
causing an avalanche of dog barking and suspicious looks of locals asking themselves what the heck is going on outside.
Past month we got our hands on the Saturday edition of a fresh Dutch newspaper (the one we
refuse to read at home), only 2 days old. Whow! what a treat. In the bigger cities we try to stop by at bookshops, but finding them isn't easy and collections are sometimes quite small. Somehow people don't seem to
read that much over here.
Our life at home also starts to feel kind of artificial, a life where nature is so far away in daily life. Simply getting water for drinking at home takes just a turn of a water tap,
while in the past months we first had to find water, make sure it's reasonably clean, treat & filter it (when necessary) and then finally drink it. It made us realise water is precious and takes time and energy
to get. A thing we easily forget in our daily life at home.
Another thing we actually never really experience at home is a sky full of incredibly bright stars. Total darkness at home is non-existent, there is so
much artificial light everywhere we've never bothered at looking up to stars at night. Now there isn't a night we don't look up in the evening and gaze at the huge amounts of stars above us.
Being back in
Turkey also immediately produces a contrast with the Arabic world of Jordan and Syria. Shopping is again more easy but also more expensive. What we somehow overlooked on our first month in Turkey now came to surface
immediately. The groups of Turkish men strolling around with hands on their back, checking things out on the way, discussing something important or just simply walking. Neither in Iran, Syria or Jordan we noticed
men doing this with such passion. Consequently the places where we showed up with our car caused many groups of men to cruise around our camper. A perfect guarding of our property while we went shopping for food :-)
This month we encountered many pensioners in Turkey, escaping the rain, snow and the cold in western Europe. Somehow Spain and Portugal seem to have lost their attractiveness with Turkey becoming the new
winter destination. 'Too crowded, all nice places gone, we've seen it all' were the things we heard about Spain and Portugal.
The word goes fast as we noticed, the beach paradises in winter seem to have been
taken over by pensioners with caravans and campers. The places in summer where you could walk over peoples heads, while paying dearly for food and a place to stay.
Anyway, seeing this we started thinking,
what will Turkey be like in winter over 10 years? Will Turkey be 'out' too? An argument we heard a few times, stopping pensioners to go any further than Mediterranean Turkey; "we're too old for that". But
well what will happen when the "word" goes around about Asian destinations? Sounds unlikely after our trip, but we feel things might change quickly when mass-tourism invades the Arabic world.
There
might be a descend in the average age of the 'pensioner', and 'pensioner' might not be the right word anymore in ten years. As one German pensioner (well beyond 70) said; 'aussteiger/einsteiger' during 'the working
years', a far more better choice than paying/waiting 30 years for your pension to become reality and then finding out you feel too old to pursue your dreams. After 4 months we can only agree.
And as shown in
our monthly summary, having plenty of time at hand made us think about all sorts of things we would have never thought about in our daily life at home. One question we asked ourselves this month a few times was what
we should do if we had 12 months more? Would we spend it all on travelling or would home be included in this picture? After 4 months we known that a full year on the road needs a whole lot more logistics and mental
preparation than we did for this journey, assuming we'll be making such a trip by car. However the biggest question remains, are we ready for an even longer trip?
Travelling for so long creates a great deal of
detachment from daily life at home. After 4 months the image of life in the Netherlands has faded considerable, coming back won't be easy we realise. One thing we feel very sure about, a longer trip must have a
meaning or be based upon a goal.
An experience we both value very highly during this journey are the inside views we encountered in people's daily life in the Middle East. Never we've been invited so many
times at random, and for the occasions we took the invitation the experience was incredible. But even more intriguing was that the people we encountered actually created the time to do so. Even with work at hand and
the responsibility of providing for a big family there always seems to be time available for inviting people who happen to stop by in the neighbourhood at one way or the other. Hospitality seems to have no limits.
Thinking the other way around, would this happen to a foreigner visiting the Netherlands? From our own perspective of the Dutch society we think that this wouldn't even have a remote chance. Imagine inviting a
random foreigner home while running a few errands at the local supermarket. We can think of a huge list of 'excuses' not to do so, if we ever would have noticed a foreigner in our neighbourhood anyway. Somehow a
disappointing thought, given the experience we've had with the people who took the time to invite us. Is this a difference of culture or a result of living in the western world? We don't know, however the
disappointing feeling remains.
Concluding our 4th month on the road, we can say without doubt that we had a marvellous time so far. We've never had one second of regret of making the decision to go for this
trip. Even at the times life on the road was 'hard' in many ways we feel that it has added another dimension in our lives. And for anyone considering making a roadtrip we can only say: "Do it now. Life is
short."
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