"So what day of the week is it?" I (Austin) am lounging lazily in our pension, asking a question I have often not known the answer to for weeks. Welcome to vagabond life, but more specifically, a life spent trekking for over a month straight (39 days, to be exact). A sense of date and time vanishes, instead we live by the sun's rhythm, simply waking refreshed at day break and in an exhausted fashion snoring logs soon after sunset. Just as Kindra mentioned weeks earlier in a blog, we have found our rhythm, and the sense of finding a groove only got deeper just about every day since then. Now, past the finish point, and back in Fethiye where we started, it's high time I caught you up on the journey of a lifetime: our tiring, adventurous, and so ever satisfying days on the trail, picking back up from Liman Agzi near Kas.
To be honest, the whole trek is a bit of a blur, our experiences and lessons blending with each passing day, but I'll try my best to share the highlights. We left Liman Agzi, the free beach resort hangout, bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to conquer anything ahead. Well, at least that's how I felt. Kindra had a stomach ache, and that compounded with her rapidly appearing blisters made for a grumpy, rightfully slow moving wife who courageously slugged through three days of hilly, treacherous coastal trails with marvelous views and way too many rocks to walk on. Along the way we encountered an all you can veggie buffet, spectacular ruins coming out of the water (pics coming in a few days!), and a sense that we were pushing too hard again. Then, our entire trip changed as we entered a four day, no supplies section of mountains rising from sea level to 1800 meters. Naturally, it was brutal uphill, but along the way we found the stillness and rest that only remote hillsides can offer, and camped in fantastic locations, like in a thousand year old church ruin the first night, or beside a crumbled BC dated town the third evening. Our second night was near the summit, with rain and thunder and hail, oh my! But then at sunset it cleared, and out came a breathtaking view of recently past islands below, with hues of purple and red strewn across the cloudy horizon. That night may be the most memorable of the entire trek for me, not only for the sunset. While we prepared a bonfire to stay warm by, the distant grunt of an unknown beast in the shadows approached. Was it a cow, a boar, perhaps even a rare wolf? Our hairs prickled, and Kindra got panicky when red eyes bled through the black dusk. I, being spooked but not overly worried, readied a burning stick for protection and headed into the night. It was big, a boar?! No, impossible. It was a spotted Bertha, udders and all, lost from her herd and out for a night grazing, who gave such a scare. We laughed and returned to a relaxing and rather special night, with conversations together with God that helped us see his generosity and plans for a life of discovering love and adventure (call me crazy, but we like to have conversations with him, and we get some beautiful responses). We slept by the fire, me being wild fire man who woke up freezing to tend it back to bonfire status. In the morning, two wild foals and their protective mare mother stumbled and then, upon discovering us, galloped by our camp at sunrise, with blue skies shimmering and spring flowers twinkling. I looked at Kindra, snug in her blue sleeping bag, with surprised, excited eyes peering out, and smiled. Our lives and hearts are full.
The next installment of this tale should be up in the next few days.
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