The Melting Blue Delicious

And now for something completely different.

My messing around with how to intersperse videos with text lead me to try my hand at a little stream of consciousness with my last installment. I want to back away from that this time around. Before I get started in with this tale, however, I do want to offer a small disclaimer about my ride through the Peloponnese. Since I was writing a stream of consciousness, I was putting down pretty much everything that was going through my mind at the time I was in Greece in September as best I could. However, the thoughts that I had in my mind when I was writing in January worked their way into the stream. Namely the cancer scare and the continuing issues with my daughter. I say something about these things, as a lot of what has happened to me and that I’ve written about on this trip has been incredibly bizarre, and I would like to maintain the position that these things I am writing to you, however strange they may be, are true. That was also the case with my last installment, but there was a mixture of things happening at various times. I was not in fact afraid I was dying of cancer last September when I was riding through Greece. The cancer scare was a January problem.

That said, let’s talk about Türkiye. At the outset of the trip, I had no idea that I would be going to Türkiye at all. I had thought that finding a boat from Greece to Cyprus would be easy enough. That turned out not to be the case. The only boat I could find from anywhere to Cyprus was from Alanya on the southern coast of Türkiye not far from Syria to Kyrenia on the Turkish part of the Island of Cyprus. I would later find out that there were boats from Athens to Rhodes, and from Rhodes to Türkiye, which would have meant that I would only need to ride a short stretch in southern Türkiye to get to Cyprus, but I didn’t know about that boat until later. The one I found was from Athens to Lesbos to Izmir in Türkiye. That’s the route I took, which meant I would end up riding through the entire southwest of the country. It ended up being an otherworldly time.

I learned a lot during my few short days in the country. In the modern day we think of Türkiye as a Muslim country, and while many are aware that the Turks are not Arabs, our impression of the place can be formed by much of the political and cultural environment of the modern-day Middle East. Many are aware that Türkiye was once a great empire, the Ottoman sultans being the premier Muslim power for many centuries. In fact, the crescent moon symbol of Islam is not inherently Islamic. It isn’t Arabic, either. It’s Turkish.

Before the Ottomans came, the region that is now Türkiye, called the Anatolian peninsula, was the eastern, Greek, half of the old Roman empire. As a Jew riding through a Muslim country, I was impressed by the amount of New Testament history the place contains. I’ll write about that below. And yet even before the Greeks and Romans, the Greek influence entered the area from Alexander the Great, who took the place from the great Achaemenid Persian empire that gave us Xerxes the Great, Ahasuerus from the Book of Esther. Before that, Türkiye was a variety of smaller kingdoms, the most famous of which is Lydia. I have a few interesting tidbits of information about that place.

The most famous king of Lydia was Gyges. The world knows about him through the accounts of Herodotus, the world’s first historian by many reckonings. The scene Herodotus describes was made famous in a movie that has always been very important to me, The English Patient.

While Lydia was a small country mostly lost to the pages of old history books that nobody reads anymore, there is one little fact about Lydia and Gyges that might be interesting to people who pay attention to religion and who read my writings. (Who am I kidding?…nobody reads my writings…)

The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, set your face toward Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him and say, Thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I am against you, O Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. And I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed in full armor, a great host, all of them with buckler and shield, wielding swords.

Ezekial 38:1-4

This verse prophesies against the king Gog, his country being called Magog. Magog was the term for Lydia. In Akkadian, the lingua franca of region before Greek and Aramaic, the term was Gug and Magug. Gog, or Gug in Akkadian, is the biblical name for Gyges. In Judaism, the “Battle of Gog and Magog” is a term for the final apocalyptic battle between Israel and the Messiah and the rest of the world, something equivalent to Armageddon in Christianity. Yet the New Testament is not silent about this term either.

And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

Revelation 20:7-10

While Judaism simply speaks about the Battle of Gog and Magog as a final battle, the New Testament, and with it Christianity, say that BEFORE the Messiah comes, there will be conflict between good and evil, which became named Armageddon, but AFTER the Messiah comes there will be ANOTHER conflict between good and evil, and this “second Armageddon” as it were, is called the Battle of Gog and Magog. So there I was, a Jew on his way to Israel, a quixotic prophet of the apocalypse on a bicycle, riding his way through a Muslim country very hostile to the modern nation of Israel, which is named after the final battle of the apocalypse!

Before continuing on, though, I’ll say that before the Lydians, the region of modern-day Turkiye was controlled by its most ancient inhabitants, the Hittites. There is one of those guys mentioned in the bible as well. King David had a Hittite killed in order to steal his wife, who would become the mother of his heir, King Solomon.

And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”

2 Samuel 11:3

Then finally, around the time of the Hittites there was another language or race or culture of people in the region called the Luwians. These guys are, probably, the ancient Trojans of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. I had no earthly idea how close I was to all of this until I got there. I had read about a lot and was not at all unfamiliar with these things I am describing above, but when I got there, the sheer amount of history of the place hit me square in the face, almost from day one. Almost.

Day one happened to be just before Shabbat, so I would end up leaving the boat at night and finding myself a little hotel in the town of Dikili north of Izmir where the ferry dropped me off.

Dikili was a quaint little place.

I was able to get to my hotel after a short little ride.

One of the first things I noticed was that in Türkiye, nobody speaks English. The hotel staffers, the waiters, pretty much nobody speaks English. I did have some luck with German, as Germany and Turkiye are heavily connected through the German Gastarbeiter (“guest worker”) program of the 1970s, with the result that Turks are the largest minority in Germany, and to this day many go back and forth between Germany’s great economy and Türkiye’s low prices and great weather.

I initially felt some reservations about being in a Muslim Middle Eastern country with everything going on surrounding Israel at the time, but I kept in contact with Omer, the dentist I had met in Basel, Switzerland, and he assured me that everything would be alright. I would find out that he was correct. He introduced me to a bicycle-riding friend of his, Suat, who I had hoped to ride with, but I never got the chance. He did give me advice on a number of routes through the country, though, and I am thankful to those two guys for their advice on navigating the land.

Since the ferry from Lesbos to Izmir actually took me to the little town of Dikili north of Izmir, I would have to spend my first ride in Türkiye getting down to the big city.

Heading out east on the way down to Izmir was completely impromptu. On the way out of Dikili I saw signs for the city of Bergama, and I just could not resist going to have a look. You see, Bergama in modern Turkish is the name of the old Greek city of Pergamon, or Pergamum in Latin, which is one of the cities of the Book of Revelation. In fact, it happens to be where Satan himself lives or lived at one time according to that book. Given the long history of my relationship with that jackass, I could not resist going to see the place.

“And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write: ‘The words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword. “‘I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you hold fast my name, and you did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my faithful witness, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.

Revelation 2:12-13

It was a windy ride, and it would be a long one, but worth it.

Yes, the splendid churches and cathedrals of Europe would be replaced by mosques of every size and shape.

I was able to see the ancient ruins as well as views of the city.

I tell you, along with my impressions of cities like Jerash in Jordan, riding through Türkiye showed me spectacles of the ancient Roman and biblical world that rivalled anything I’ve seen in Greece and Italy. Izmir was quite a clash of ancient, new, and Middle Eastern. While I didn’t see any ruins there, this city also hails back to ancient times, being the ancient Greek city of Smyrna, itself a location mentioned in Revelation.

“And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: ‘The words of the first and the last, who died and came to life. “‘I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich) and the slander of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.

Revelation 2:8-9

I was just staying a night in the city on my way south. My impression was that the place was an utterly urban megapolis from another planet entirely. Only Amman, Jordan struck me in any kind of a similar way with regards to its exotic energy.

The hostel I stayed at was the epitome of ancient world style and character with hanging plants, stone walls, and exotic rugs everywhere. I didn’t take any pictures of it, much to my regret, as I’d been living in a world that hates to have its picture taken for a while. There were of course a couple of gorgeous German chicks there, and this would be the place where I would meet the Scorpion Queen.

That was the name I ended up giving her when I would meet her later in Kash, a little town on the southern coast. But that night in the hostel, she was complaining about her ATM card being eaten by one of the local machines. I sympathized with this situation. I started this bicycle trip with four debit cards and a credit card. At the end I was down to one debit card. I myself had my PayPal debit card eaten by a machine in France.

I was rather shocked by this episode of real, inconvenient life. For the most part I’d been in hostels with kids having the adventures of their lives, or I was off by myself eating the fruits of my own shrill, shrieking madness. I’d been in a magical wonderland where everyone was young and beautiful except me. For a while I had been under the impression that I was the only person on earth who lost debit cards. I have to admit that it was slightly comforting to find out that I was not alone in what was, for me, the real world.

I could only stay that day, however, as I was in a hurry to get to Israel as always. My schedule had been thrown off by the extra three thousand miles I was adding to the trip by returning to the USA for a family reunion and then riding across Europe a second time. So out of town early I went without the Scorpion Queen’s contact information, never expecting to see her again. Traffic was murder.

The route was not uninteresting, however.

On the way out of Izmir, I randomly bumped into yet another powerful place that has meant a lot to me: Ephesus. This was the city where John the Apostle spent his golden years after being exiled for decades and boiled in oil by the Romans on the island of Patmos. He likely wrote the Gospel of John and his three New Testament epistles from there. I had to take another detour.

Ephesus was even more incredible that Pergamon, mostly because the myriads of Chinese tourists provided me with legions of beautiful Asian ladies to look at who were far, far more spectacular examples of divinity on earth than the ruined columns of the site. The columns were pretty hot too, though, I must say.

I really needed to get south, though, so I saw the site and rode onward. When on tour, we ride, rain or shine. Today it was rain.

I got the new bike to the hotel in Aydin, however.

Turkish food is amazing, by the way.

One other wild thing about Türkiye, which you don’t see in the hostels, only in the little Turkish towns where you’ll never find a tourist, is going to the bathroom.

When dropping a deuce in rural Türkiye, there is no toilet paper. There is, in fact, no toilet. There is a hole in the ground and a hose. You are expected to give the world your gift, wipe your butt with your hand, and then wash your butt and your hand with the hose. This is why in many Middle Eastern countries it is an insult to offer someone your left hand for a handshake, hug, or other friendly embrace. The left hand is the butt-wiping hand.

I was surprised to see that Muslim Turks, not only Los Angeles ladies in sports bras and yoga pants, have an urge to cherish the environment. They don’t seem to like forest rangers, however.

I did finally make it to Mugla, which looked to me to be the gateway to the world of the Turkish southern coast, which would prove to be another world entirely.

This is where I met a German guy on tour. I couldn’t ride long with him, however, as he was loaded down with a heavy camping rig on a gravel bike, basically like Daniele was doing. This is basically the standard way to do long tours, but these guys just can’t do the speed or distance that I do.

Like Daniele, the guy rode with his helmet on his bike, not on his head. Maybe there is an online group for gravel biking long tourers where they all got together and vowed that they would do this. I dunno. For my part, I’ve had ten accidents on my bike. Seven of these were me just falling off my bike at a traffic light while I was learning to clip in. That is, cyclists use special pedals which connect to special cycling shoes that cause the foot to actually stick to the pedal, so you can get power by pulling up on the pedal as well as getting power by pushing down on the pedal. When a cyclist gets a new type of pedals, or a new type of shoes, he has to go through a process of learning to “lock in,” so to speak. We actually call it “clipping in.” He has to learn how to stick his shoes to the pedals. He also, however, has to learn how to unstick his feet from his pedals. Well, while you are learning your new bike or your new shoes or your new pedals, you can pull up to a stoplight or something and want to put your foot down on the ground, but you get stuck to your pedal! A number of times I pulled up to a stop and found myself unable to put my foot on the ground and, kerplunk! I just fell over flat on the ground. Other than these routine mishaps that cyclists can encounter, I’ve had three legit accidents. One was me bouncing off the door of a car that didn’t see me. The other two, though, were “sudden stoppages.” That is, for example, in Petra I was riding to a hotel one evening and my bike fell through a drainage grate in the street and I went from 20 miles per hour to zero instantaneously, throwing me over the front of the bike onto the ground headfirst into a street full of racing traffic. If I had not been wearing my helmet, my brains would have been splattered all over the concrete of that Jordanian landmark. If I did not have God at my back, those brains would have had tread marks on them. I have absolutely no doubt about this.

ALWAYS WEAR YOUR HELMET. ALWAYS. NEVER NOT WEAR YOUR HELMET. NEVER.

But, okay, I’ve said my peace about that. The next place I hit was one of the most undiscovered pieces of country I could ever hope to run into. Akyaka. A tiny town on the southern coast with a blend of Middle Eastern and European atmosphere that I never would have expected to find. When I hit that southern coast I was definitely overcome with a “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto” vibe. Overall, a spectacular ride.

On the way into Akyaka, coming out of the mountains, I enjoyed an enormous, fantastic, beautiful descent into the town. It rivaled the descents coming through the alps. The video below that captures it is for the cyclists who enjoy this sort of thing. It’s ten minutes long. Feel free to skip it if you’re not into ten minutes of superfast highway cruising.

The hotel was quite modest, but pristine, and more than I could expect given the incredibly favorable prices that the Good Lord continued to throw my way. The town was tremendous fun, however.

The place had an alpine vibe that you’d expect from Vale or Aspen or some undiscovered pearl in Utah, yet there was no shortage of beach.

Let me tell you, when you get to the southern coast of Türkiye, you find that the place is popular with Russians. Rich Russians. Russians who like to buy cities and turn them into vacation paradises popular with their brethren wanting to escape frigid muscovite winters. And they do a good job.

Concerning the Jungian synchronicity I’ve been writing about on this journey, I was seeing references to Milan everywhere.

Milan is an important place for me. That’s where I got my bike.

Otherwise, the place was a bit empty on account of the September off-season, but there were some tourists here and there enjoying the sun and nature.

There were indeed things there that you’re just not going to see in Aspen. A guy walking his cows to work, for example.

And a mosque where you’d expect a church or a synagogue.

I didn’t want to leave Akyaka.

I didn’t talk to people, though. There weren’t a ton around, sure, but the main thing was I just needed to get to Israel, as I always do. My next stop would be Fethiye, where I would spend Yom Kippur.

Türkiye isn’t exactly the bicycle capital of the universe, but I was surprised to feel a bit of the presence. Just like in the USA, coffee shop/bicycle store hybrids seemed to be the thing.

I could have lived a life of wonder here, no doubt. Bicycle paths do exist, and also those cute little apple bottoms that always inspire me to go faster.

She’s not wearing a helmet, but I just can’t criticize such a delightful view.

Heading out of Fethiye toward Kash, though, I ran into some autumn weather that would introduce me to one of the locals. The deal with touring is that when it’s time to ride, when it’s time to get to where you are going, you go. Rain or shine.

I was really at my limit as to how much I could handle. That’s when God stepped in. A Turkish seafood restaurant owner named Ahmet heading into Fethiye to get some fresh fish saw my plight and couldn’t resist helping a brother out. A brother he never met. An American. A Jewish American.

You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.

Exodus 23:9

If only the Jews knew the Torah like this guy knew Torah. If only the Christians knew the Bible like this guy knew the Bible. He’s probably never read it. But he knows it. The ride to Kash was as comfortable as could be.

He would even pull over so I could get some shots of the views. He didn’t speak a word of English. Not one word. Thank God for Google translate. Google got us through situations of absolute necessity, but everything else was nonverbal. Just harmony.

He showed me some Turkish music. I was having a blast.

Ahmet dropped me off in Kash, the two of us promising to meet again. When most Americans do that, they don’t mean it. But I do. More on that later. I want to dig into Kash right now. I think it was the highlight of Türkiye for me, not because of the environment, but because of the people. However, the landscape was not a distant second.

I would have some fantastic experiences at the hostel there.

Sole’n Blu was the hostel, a whole world unto itself.

The morning after my arrival, I went for a walk around town, which is where I first tasted the glimmer of what heaven looks like.

All of this was only the initial glimmer, however. Heaven didn’t show up in full force until the agents of the Almighty hit the scene.

The bikini babe front and center was Yacht Girl. American. Talking to her with hands on hips was The Girl of Copper and Milk, always blessing the universe with the shade of her copper skin peering out at us from under some milky white romper or some other such divine item of wardrobe while she hypnotized us with notes of her Australian accent.

If I haven’t told you before, I’ll say it now: Despite every ounce of masculine stoicism that I can muster, I am in all cases powerless to resist the wiles of a blown-out truck tire if it speaks to me with the slightest hint of an Australian accent. Or kiwi. I have no recourse other than to propose marriage in a relationship of chivalric servitude to such creatures. And they were everywhere in this place of myth and magic.

Yacht Girl got her name after she told me that she had spent recent years crewing yachts around the world for a variety of nebulous patrons who she couldn’t describe in detail because her captains had her sign non-disclosure agreements which would prevent me from hearing of her adventures. Now I’ve seen on xvideos.com a number of escapades enjoyed by lovely ladies who have taken jobs crewing yachts. I don’t presume to be able to make any statements about what Yacht Girl may have been up to on her way to Kash, but what stories she told had me convinced that I had entered some kind of Paradise Island only described in Wonder Woman comic books. Her life was one of pure travel and adventure by all accounts.

The guys were cool too.

This guy above, Dmitry, a Russian digital nomad, was tons of fun, but the most amazing thing about him was that I would randomly run into him months later on the streets of Limassol in Cyprus. I’m not kidding. Below is a shot of when I randomly bumped into him on the streets of Limassol with another guy I met at the end of last year, Artem Lemsky, the guy on the right with his jacket and backpack.

Yes, I didn’t follow this guy on social media and get in touch with him when I found out that he was in Cyprus or something. I was literally walking through the old city in in Limassol early this year when I just bumped into him on the street. A guy I had met in a hostel in Kash, on the southern coast of Türkiye. The “small world” effect of seeing him reminded me of meeting Jarret Fossen in a bar in Budapest only to see the guy again later in Barcelona where he would store my bike for me while I was skylarking through that city waiting for a cruise ship back to the USA for my family reunion in Texas. Or meeting Omer in Basel in Switzerland only to find him later working for an Israeli dental clinic in Kyrenia in Cyprus. These kinds of coincidences will drive most men mad. I know they loosened most of my screws and very effectively convinced me that I was either being spied on by some powers of otherworldly agency or that the life I was living was arranged completely by God Almighty with no attention to obedience to the laws of probability whatsoever.

Dmitry has a Telegram channel chronicling his travels if you want to take a look. Vagabondity. It’s in Russian, but can be auto translated. I would learn from this that after we met in Türkiye, he would travel to Paris, where I just came from, and where the girl Christina that I met in Venice lived. Christina is also Russian, and I introduced them to each other on WhatsApp, though they didn’t end up linking up as far as I can remember.

So we meet in Türkiye, he travels to where I came from and had an otherworldly psychedelic and spiritual experience, and then I just randomly bump into him on the street in Limassol, Cyprus while I am hanging out with another Russian I just met.

Another cool dude at the hostel was King Saul. The nickname I gave him was based on his real name Saul. He said people usually connected his name to Bob Odenkirk’s character Saul Goodman (“S’all good, man!”) from the shows Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but he did not at all mind the moniker of the ancient king. Also from the land down under, we find this cinnamon-skinned stud girded with armor of washboard abs. Here he is with Yacht Girl.

I don’t know where he started his trip, actually, but I followed him on Instagram and saw that he was on an epic trip that included Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and the UK. For part of that trip, at least the Syria part as far as I can tell, he actually took one of the girls he met in Kash. She was also an Australian “going on walkabout” I guess we call it. This young lady had the most powerful effect on me out of everyone. I was utterly enchanted by her. She is the girl in blue below with the Scorpion Queen (yes, the Scorpion Queen randomly turned up here from Izmir without any coordination with me whatsoever) and the Girl of Copper and Milk.

She didn’t speak much, and I can’t say that I know her well, though we hung out a bit and traded a few messages on Instagram. Mostly, though, I couldn’t resist just staring at her at every opportunity as much as I possibly could, my eyes unable to avoid feasting on her beauty. She was a wispy, thin little thing, beautiful by all accounts and surely not lacking attention from men of all sorts, but what attracted me to her so profoundly was that she reminded me of my daughter. I think part of this had to do with the blue shirt she liked to wear. My primary nickname for my daughter has always been “Caterpillar,” but another nickname I gave her was “Melting Blue Delicious.” That is a powerful name for me. The term comes from an old Wild Swans song from the 90s.

The first person in my life to have that nickname was my high school sweetheart Christina Speer, the name having been given to her by her previous boyfriend that she was dating before me. I wrote a poem to my daughter Alia that describes how I transferred the name from Christina to her.

Melting Blue Delicious

I gave the name to my daughter when, after so much incessant pain was dealt to me at the hands of lovers, I decided that my daughter would always only ever be the single utter love of my life. So I gave her the name of my quintessential early life girlfriend Christina. The irony here, though, is that while Christina was a blonde with eyes of steel blue, my daughter has absolutely nothing blue about her. She has brown hair, gorgeous brown almond eyes, and the caramel skin of her Tatar heritage.

These are some of my last pictures of my precious baby before she disowned me. Well, as you know from my stream of consciousness trip through Greece, we are in communication now, but only by e-mail, and only minor, sporadic, superficial interaction, though this situation seems to be somewhat traumatic for me in and of itself given the technological insanity that plagues me to this day (the “technodemons” I’ve written about before). So I gave my daughter a nickname based on the color blue, but there is nothing physically blue about her. Now I’m not saying this chick from the hostel in Kash was a clone of my daughter concerning her appearance. However, this other girl also had brown eyes and brown hair, but everything about her struck me as an explosion of blue.

Blue pool, blue pillow, blue pullover, brown girl. Delicious in every sense of the word, like a Hershey Kiss floating in a bowl of arctic icing. Alia had left me, but heaven sent this Melting Blue Delicious across my path, and I was utterly captivated.

As the weekend drew to a close, I was offered to have dinner with all of the volunteers at the hostel by the owner, a guy they named Slim Shady on account of his bleach blonde hair.

If you want to backpack around the world on the cheap, one of the things that the kids like to do is go to a hostel and offer to volunteer there to keep the place clean and orderly for the privilege of being able to stay for free. This option is available to guys and girls, and both genders make use of it, but in general, the hostels prefer to be staffed by cute girls. It makes the female travelers feel comfortable to be in a hostel surrounded by other females, and of course the guy travelers are always going to be thrilled to stay at a hostel with a bunch of cute girls everywhere. So at this hostel in Kash, pretty much all of the chicks I have described to you were staying at the place for free and working there. They all ate together. I was watching Slim cook some of the most amazing Turkish food, and he invited me to hang out with the employees for dinner. I was the only guy there.

There were more there. I only snapped this one shot before everybody else showed up. I was swimming in a sea of estrogen laced with pure, unadulterated gorgeousness. My gynophobic, traumatized soul was being healed. I was falling in love with them all. But, of course, when I am involved in something, it’s always going to go weird.

Among the girl crew was an older, but quite lovely, Asian lady who I had some pleasant conversations with earlier. I’d been boozing off and on throughout the day, and by the time of the dinner I was relaxed, if not a little dazed and tired. Well, during the dinner, I started rubbing this chick’s foot! Like an old school patriarchal male aggressor hitting on a chick kind of thing such as slapping a girl on the behind and calling her “cute toots” or something. For the last few years, I have been living with the fear that if I smile at a woman too much, she will call the police or pull some kind of #MeToo move and have been incredibly reserved. I’ve suffered many situations where I just wanted to be casual around a chick, nice and friendly, and they assume I am hitting on them and gripe me out. Getting a chick’s phone number for WhatsApp or something requires a miracle of such scope that it makes the Revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai look as insignificant as watching a dryer dry clothes. But here I was surrounded by such beauty I could not reckon in what way I could possibly deserve to be there. Everyone was cool and comfortable with me and each other. I wasn’t actually drunk, but relaxed and chill from drinking earlier. Then all of the sudden, I’d even say somewhat unconsciously, I start rubbing this lady’s foot! She wasn’t comfortable with it, and when the Melting Blue Delicious saw this, she calmly and with loving friendship commented, “you need to keep your hands to yourself,” and smiled at me. Of course, I instantly returned my hands to my lap. I had survived being a low-class horn dog that the #MeToo movement complains about! Nobody called the police! And everybody just continued talking on and having a good time.

I was slightly embarrassed, but to be honest, in a general sense, I wasn’t all that upset either. The world did not end. However, from that point, I basically zoned out of the conversation. I am not sure why. But I was mostly staring off into space. The conversation was dominated by Yacht Girl talking to the Girl of Copper and Milk. I paid some attention at the beginning of the conversation, noting that Yacht Girl was talking about how a couple of the guys at the hostel had been “going through a lot of girls.” I suppose there had been some serial hooking up or something. The Girl of Copper and Milk was asking various questions about finances, wanting to know how these other travelers managed to afford the ability to trapse around the world for such long periods, some of them not really even having days jobs or hometowns to go back to. Just permanent travelers. But other than that, I was really just zoned out and could not follow the conversation. I do not know why.

I think the combination of my foot massage mishap with being surrounded by more beauty than an aged mortal such as myself had any right to be around, and then the talking about hooking up gave the whole evening a kind of sexually charged energy that I just didn’t know what to do with. So, I just sat there while they talked, not having any idea what they were talking about, until I heard Yacht Girl say, “something oral.” Since I had been so zoned out, I had absolutely no concept of the context of the conversation. My mind latched on to the concept of “blowjob,” which reminded me of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Bruges. At that point I was in shock. I asked, “what did you just say?” to which she repeated herself: “something oral.” At that point I was done. I couldn’t ask anyone, “what the heck have you guys been talking about for the last half hour? Oral? Blowjob? What?” So, I just stood up, let everybody know I was tired, and I went to bed.

I woke up the next morning and left without talking to anyone. I did send King Saul and the Melting Blue Delicious some text messages after that. Some funny encounters, actually, but to go into them would be too much for this chapter, which is starting to look like it is going to need to be broken up into at least three shorter ones.

Kash was an absolutely amazing weekend for me. Like bathing in the supernal comfort of all that hair and perfume and bikinis as if God had gifted me a box of diamonds wrapped in ribbons. It was more than I could take, actually. Blessings from sisters of mercy rescuing my soul with lassos of truth while riding Pegasi through the cloudy skies of my broken heart.

Leaving Kash I would head to Felike, where I would make good on the promise to meet up again with Ahmet, and I enjoyed a meal at his restaurant that he insisted on not charging me for.

While I was falling in love with Türkiye, Turks, and gorgeous travelers in Türkiye, I would get a sense here and there that there was another side of things that I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to but may have been more relevant to me than to the others I was associating with.

Felike also seemed to be a cool place.

Ahmet’s restaurant was a cultural event of its own.

The guy offered for me to stay with him that time or any time I would cross paths with him in the future, but I had already booked a hotel (for nearly no cost) in the nearby town of Komluca.

Early the next morning I rode to the largest city on the southern coast, Antalya. I had heard it was a great place, but in my urgency to get to Israel, I just spent the night there and rode out the next morning. The bicycle ride in was amazing, however, I cut into mountains, did a lot of climbing, and thought at any moment I would round a corner and find myself in Flagstaff, Arizona. That’s how much this part of the country looked like the American Southwest. I consider myself both a Texan and Arizonan, so the area hit pretty close to my essential core, though with conspicuous differences that always let me know I was in Türkiye. Roadside restaurants that you just wouldn’t find anywhere else, for example. Even Rocky Mountain motorcycle tourers.

Even here you find a little Spanish culture, but there wasn’t so much that I was convinced I was dreaming my own reservations about starting a new life like the one I left in Mexico. What it did do, however, was remind me even moreso of the American Southwest with its heavy influences of Latin culture.

Riding through tunnels was fairly harrowing at some points.

Probably the most Jungian thing about this part of the trip were the conspicuous mentions of Milan that I would see everywhere. Way more than one would expect.

As I approached Antalya, I saw more and more Russian as well.

What little I saw of Antalya riding into and out of the city did impress me. I had entered the area of Russian-owned resorts.

The next ride would be to Alanya.

There was a small reminder of Zack Snyder on the route out of Antalya to Alanya where I had hoped to catch the boat to Girne/Kyrenia on the northern (Turkish) part of the Island of Cyprus. I say “Island of Cyprus” here because whether the Turkish north is a part of the Greek south or not is a huge point of passionate debate among Cypriots, and I’ve loved nearly everyone I’ve met on both sides of the island, so I’ll phrase this subject as delicately as possible. This little sign would be the only time Zack Snyder popped into my world at this time. The director has a deal to advertise on the Vero social media site, and that’s where I would always go to find out what he was up to.

The resorts heading out of Antalya put Las Vegas to shame.

I did actually find out where the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was, but didn’t have time to get over there to claim my riches.

While Alanya was smaller than Antalya, I liked it more. The atmosphere of the city was amazing, and it was obviously a heavy tourist center for Russians and all sorts of other internationals.

The harbor full of pirate ships was one of the more delightful highlights.

Once again, I only stayed in the place for a day as I was rushing to get to Israel, and I found that the boat I thought would be there was actually leaving from a nearby town of Silifke. I would have a couple of days to ride before hitting Cyprus.

Yes, I still collect smiley face pics. I will forever be a Watchman. I have several more that I haven’t included in these posts because every one of them has a story, but they don’t quite fit in with this narrative.

I didn’t take any time in Anamur, again, I needed to get to that boat to Cyprus in order to get to my goal of Israel. I went straight to bed at the Rolling Butt Hotel (actually the Rolli Butte Hotel, but we don’t need to be precise).

I should have been exhausted with all of the mammoth rides, but I was trucking hard. I don’t know if the energy came from my urgent desire to get to Cyprus and Israel, or if maybe it was some bananas I bought heading out of town.

This next video is a bit long at over a minute and probably not of interest to anyone but cyclists. This was the ride on which I went the fastest I’ve ever gone on a bike: 48 miles per hour. This is the video of that stretch.

Finally, I did make it to Silifke. This town was pure Türkiye. No tourists, no Russians, no resorts. I spent Shabbat there sitting at a little hole in the wall drinking beer with locals.

Sunday morning I hit the port, and I was on the ferry to the north of the Island of Cyprus.

And with that, I will end my recount of my rides through Türkiye. No great conclusions or analyses now. I’m going to get carpal tunnel if I write any more. This installment is definitely going to need to be broken up and embellished. There were incredible tales of Jungian synchronistic events that I have not described. I really did continue the idea I had picked up in Greece that this just has to be a dream. But the various intersections of my personality, my daughter issues, the crazy coincidences, the spectacular countryside, the beautiful nature and character of the people I met in this country that is currently acting as an enemy to Israel, and the surreal saga of an old man bathing in beautiful bikini babes, well, reflections on these things could make a book on its own, and if I add them here you’ll want to drop me in a garbage disposal for making you read such a monolithic chapter. So, let’s close this with a commitment to see what I can do with it later.

God bless you.