Better now.

I sincerely love my cat. Having someone to take care of makes me feel less selfish in a life committed to avoiding responsibility and emotional attachment.

Ten days ago I returned home. Nothing unusual there, I return home every day. Well, most nights anyway. By the time I open the apartment door, nine times out of ten Kepab is patiently waiting while I unload my pack and then expects the usual hugging and free under-the-neck-and-scalp-scratching session that ensues.

Kebap makes friends. Or enemies. Not sure. Anyway, social networking.

That particular night he didn't come to the door, nor did he stir when the bedroom light was switched on and I threw off tie, shirt and trousers to change into short, T-shirt and sandals. I picked him up off the bed. He growled deep and low. I dropped him back on the bed and, as is my routine, got out the cafetiere, lit a cigarette and checked for new grey hairs in the hallway mirror. Kepab, I realised while butting out my Winston Light, still hadn't moved from the bed. Something was up.

It took me several minutes to work it out. His tail was injured, possibly broken. A journey followed to visit Alper Bey, my vet of choice because the previous one seemed indifferent to Kepab and my several hundred questions regarding the right choice of cat food for a young street cat. Alper, knowing Kepab to be rather, well, violent and a master of claw-in-the-face martial art tactics when the need arises, excused his inability to take an x-ray on the spot since other staff had left for the day. Kepab is not the kind of cute little cat that sits quietly on a cold steel table in the examination room while a vet sticks a gloved finger in places Pope Leo X enjoyed a tad too much. Kebap is 100% street feline. He don't take crap and he don't like to be touched by strangers. Alper knows this well.

Badly brought up or not, Kebap is my charge and I had to leave him overnight until staff arrived tomorrow and enough hands would be available to hold him down and x-ray his tail. I naturally inquired about his diagnosis and was informed that if the tail were broken there was a high possibility of its amputation. I didn't take the news well and slept badly that night.

Flirtatious behaviour in the mosque gardens. Inappropriate.

The following day I raced to the vet after work. Kepab lay forlorn in his cat basket. Something between Lion King pathos and Isabelle Huppert as Madame Bovary (deathbed scene).
I knew he wasn't happy. Alper had tried to telephone me without luck during the day. To be fair, what would I have known about removing a lesion from a tail anyway? He had carried out what needed to be done and told me that my baby would still be 'drunk' for the next few hours. Do we even have a specific word in English to describe the after effects of a general anesthetic?

Back at the house Kepab appeared less drunk and more just plain pissed off. Certainly in no mood to talk. He went back to the bed. I had ten days' worth of antibiotics to administer. That sounded like a lot of fun. Kepab looked comic and pathetic a la fois with his bandaged tail and purple plastic Elizabethan collar. Kind of like Paris Hilton, though unlike her my cat is not a useless slut.

Now it's Saturday, ten days post-operation. The course of antibiotics has finished and we've angrily revisited a surprisingly calm vet who had changed and re-changed an ungrateful Kepab's bandage. Today is the first day of real, proper summer weather in Istanbul. Kepab and I are in the garden of Cihangir Mosque, affording a wide view of the Bosphorus and making me fall in love once again with this metropolis. Kepab is less interested in watching ferries ply the waters than I am. He enjoys scratching his head against plants more than I do. He enjoys socialising with others of his species. I do not.

We're both happy and relaxed. It's fine time to be in Istanbul.

Kebap a la plastic ruffle. Tres chic, tres aujourd'hui. Le must de Cihangir pour le chat de votre vie.

Words fail me

It's not funny. The longer I remain in this country the more tormented my mother tongue sounds as I attempt to communicate with both native speaker work colleagues and my students of English.

Daily I bemoan the fact that both my written and spoken expression of English worsens. I've gone from having words on the tip of my tongue to an almost complete inability to cough up the mot juste as required. Extracting abstract nouns is now more often than not a chore and, more than usual, I'm avoiding conversations where opinions rather than fact are necessary. I'm tired of hesitating and stalling my interlocutor while I rack my brain to search out the words or phrases needed to complete my sentences and convince the listener that I am not in fact just a near-native speaker. For God's sake, how can this be happening?

Help me, O dear, dear prescriptive grammar

Well, this shouldn't be happening. Of course, we all suffered intermittently from tied tongues. Especially when exhausted it's often difficult to take in, let alone produce a stream of the vernacular. We've all sat through dull, pointless meetings where our train of thought has erred, only to be expected to proffer some learned opinion on a subject discussed for the last half an hour about which we have no idea. This happens to me all the time because I detest meetings. They're rarely necessary, intensely infuriating and to be honest, for the handful of people who clearly enjoy the limelight I'd be happy to let them make all the decisions regarding agenda items.

However, I digress. My complaint revolves around my loss of naturalness, fluency and proficiency when talking about the most everyday subjects. My grammar falters, nouns have disappeared almost entirely from my vocabulary and it might even be that I can no longer use irregular past simple verbs. I gived up.

Naturally, there are those of you out there who would perhaps suggest that no Australian, regardless of education or upbringing, speaks an English worth listening to. I'm often subjected to opinions regarding bad English, lazy English, inferior speech. I'm not a fan of the prescriptive grammarians nor those who think a certain sociolect exists, namely theirs, that is more correct than others.

Bad English (food).

Although most arguments claiming superiority of one English over another usually boils down to what we like to call accent. From the English-speaking arena, those originating from Australia, Birmingham, Liverpool and the Black Country in England, and probably many Southerners from the United States, will have no doubt at time been subjected to or subject of arguments regarding deficient speech that of course doesn't measure up to those bright young things graduating from Oxbridge-upon-Pretense.

Accent aside, I find that Turkish words and grammar are having an immeasurable effect on my speech and writing. I am still yet to master Turkish yet clear progress has been made over the past few months. I have learned reported speech and can form definite clauses. In short, my Turkish is becoming more flexible, more elastic, and is rarely misunderstood. My English is raising eyebrows.

Below are some recent observations.

First, I'm thinking seriously about visiting the Spain and the Portugal during the summer break. I plan to spend a lot of time idling on the beach but then heading over to the Balearic Island to catch up with friends in the Majorca. you get the idea. The use of the definite article, otherwise known as the in English is sometimes difficult to teach and for all but the upper-intermediate learner, cumbersome to employ correctly.

That said, the use of the with geographical place names is straightforward and amounts to learning by rote a few rules. Exceptions are rare. We say I'll visit Germany but I'll travel to the United States. It would be pleasant to sip a mojito on a yacht in the Caribbean but find accommodation on Lake Como. And the rules appear to have slipped out of my head. But I'm still planning to visit the Spain regardless.

A possible birthday present for those who feel the need to offer something

Next in importance is the in-creep of Turklish, a phenomenon itself divisible into the art of inserting Turkish words when English suffices and the mollifying habit of Turkifying English words. Utterances such as yani, o kadar, tamam, evet, hayır, bitti, yok ya and değil mi? have all but wiped out the equivalent so, that's it, ok, yes, no, it's finished, no way, and really? Not that big a deal I suppose but at times it bugs me.

More problematic is Turklish, most noticeable in my miseuse of phrasal verbs and collocations. I often can't remember whether I should open or answer the phone if someone calls and either turn off or close the lights when I exit a room. I'm constantly giving notes to my students after marking tests and they take permission from me to visit the toilet during classtime. I overuse nice and good because in Turkish it's almost impossible to avoid the ubiquitous güzel, an adjective used to cover every possible positive situation in Istanbul. Interesting, good, delicious, pleasant, beautiful, impressive, fascinating among other seems to be shrouded in a halo of güzel-ness. I can't decide whether adjectives are lacking or I have reached saturation point for learning descriptive words.

Obsolete forms are seeping in. Where, whither and whence have all been used in the last month. I am Charlotte Bronte. I am James Hardy. I sound like a twat. Hither and hence are likely to follow.

Bad Turkish (hair and shirt)

But phrasal verbs. That's what I wanted to mention. Turkish has them, and most of them are rendered with etmek and yapmak, to do. I do party, do my work, do my duty, and strangely, in an unusual twist of fate and lingusitcs, do myself. I even confused my head last week but it was understandable since my day had been very crowded in the school.

The list goes on. Adverbs of position confound me greater still. I cannot distinguish between above and on, below and under, behind and between, but I am sincerely over it.

Many moons ago, when I live in Paris, I told a visiting friend that I was interrogating my answering machine from a distance. Some things never change.

And by th way: These people ought to be punched. Hard.

Ire

If there's one thing that makes me angry, it's people.

As is my regular Sunday afternoon, I've been browsing the electronic press and came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that informs me the Malaysian government is proposing to impose restrictions on women travelling alone outside the country.

The Malaysian ruling party is debating whether or not women should provide written consent from families or employers before being permitted to move outside the country's borders. Apparently there has been a significant number of criminal cases in which female Malaysian nationals have been duped into transporting illegal drugs and at present over one hundred women are lingering in foreign prisons.

The state news agency views this as a move to counteract criminal activity but I smell religious influence. I very much doubt that Malaysia, with a population of highly-educated nationals in a vibrant, dynamic and multi-ethnic society, has any further use for the stunted minds of officials stunted by misogynistic, God-fearing claptrap.

My grandmother, mother, sisters and female friends and colleagues are living proof that the chicks are equal to men in every way except their ability to remember birthdays and every celebration date I manage to forget. I find it incredulous that once again the evil that is religion pervades even further into a society that seemed secular not so very long ago. I was last in Malaysia in 1992 and retain vivid memories gorging on chicken satays in Ipoh and belting out Country and Western ditties in a karaoke bar somewhere in Sitiawan.

I loathe religion. I detest it because I've never seen it's positive side. Whether God exists or not is up to the individual and not the lawmaker. The Western Church may have given us some rather dab painting commissions and extravagant architecture that would have otherwise never seen the light of day, but for religion to continue to interfere with the rights of the individual is unacceptable and, in this day and age, deserving of two hard smacks to either side of the face.

Equally outraged but more eloquent in style are the words of Norhayati Kaprawi, a spokeswoman for Sisters in Islam. She is quoted as saying 'It is totally ridiculous and it's a totally regressive proposal with regards to women's right to movement'. I agree.

That written permission is going to halt the transportation of A-class drugs across transnational boundaries...

God, if you really existed you wouldn't have made the human race so stupid.

And if I were a Malaysian woman I'd be after someone's head.

Another quiet day in my favourite city.

When the sun shines in Istanbul my mood becomes as warm as a Turkish bath. And although I generally work on Wednesday, the nervous ruling AKP party had, like their predecessors, preempted social uprising during May Day and sealed off the centre of the European side of the city by the early hours of this morning. School was therefore out of the question since commuting from the Taksim district where I live was supposedly unfeasible.

According to the media, 66 schools were closed in affected areas and much public transport closed down. In particular, all transport leading to Taksim Square was suspended for fear of allowing large numbers of demonstrators to gather. Enough riot police were present to fill a football stadium along with many amoured vehicles, a number of which were fitted with water cannons.

You need to understand that successive Turkish governments have been loathe to allow public demonstrations in Taksim Square since 1977 when a score of people were killed. Since the armed forces coup d'etat in 1980 permission has not been forthcoming for any demonstration, although from time to time I've seen gatherings, all of them peaceful and all attended by a gargantuan contingent of police.

So I spent the early afternoon playing improvised volleyball with a security guard at a neighbourhood mansion on my street corner, checking on the multitude of new feline arrivals in the area and sharing chocolate with Mert, a six year old happy not be be at primary school for the day.

Helicopters began to circle over head and the sounds of protesters came floating down the street. Several hundred moved slowly into view and managed to advance a hundred metres up the main thoroughfare of Cihangir before being blockaded by Robocops. It all seemed relatively peaceful though the crowd slowly dissipated and people moved silently on their way.

Half an hour later I decided to head to the local Carrefour supermarket. Arriving on Sıraselviler Street, a new scene opened up to me. Evidently, events had transpired less harmoniously here. Scattered across the street were the remains of heavy concrete pot planters, strewn in every direction. The pepper gas began to sting my eyes and I'm assuming that water cannons had also been used since rivulets of scarlet were running down the gutters. All bar my barber had closed for business and people sat aimlessly. Police everywhere, yet no real tension in the air.

Or at least it seemed like that to me. Often it's hard to comprehend events that take place in your adopted home since you haven't enough history in the place to fully understand what's going on. It reminded me of how the media reported several bombings in Istanbul last year of which I remained unaware until I read about them on the BBC website the day following the events. How a city can be rendered unsafe by a biased media that makes your family and friends wonder why you're living in such a dangerous place. Istanbul is so large that events can happen here to which I am oblivious for days on end. And yet it always feels so safe to me.

It also brought to mind the uncovering in Austria of a man who purportedly kept his daughter hostage in a caller for the past twenty-four years. How something so insidious and terrible can be kept hidden for so long, and yet now the country's chancellor is calling for an 'rebranding' campaign. It's easy for us to judge the entire nation by one shocking event so that we can quickly distance ourselves from the 'others' who might have implicitly allowed this to happen. I feel sorry for those people held captive as I feel sorry for the Austrian people as a whole. I hope we can all reserve our judgments and eventually realise that this crime was committed by an insane individual who could be found in any one of a number of places on the planet. And that this outrage doesn't taint the Austrian people as a whole.

Besides, I've a personal reason for not wanting hostility towards the heir-apparent of the Hapsburg dynasty. In Turkish, like in so many languages, Austria/Austrian and Australia/Australian are oft confused. I don't need that now.

Turkey still has bigger problems to face than allowing a full democracy to operate and therefore allow demonstrations during May Day in the heart of its biggest metropolis. A reported released on 29 April regarding Freedom of the Press summarises that the country still has a long way to until it allows its journalists to write openly and freely, and indeed in certain respects perhaps the situation has even worsened since changes to the penal code were introduced in 2005.

I hope very much to see a government elected one day that is worthy of the people in this wonderfully complex country which I choose to call home. And maybe there will be a time when demonstrations no longer bring out en masse pepper gas and water cannons.

Ilk bahar geliyor

I am loving the spring sunshine. The neighbours celebrated its arrival by promptly cutting down the sole tree providing shade to our kitchen and afterwards cementing half of their garden.

However, the positive spin on this is that Kebap and I now have a uninterrupted view of the Cihangir Mosque from the larger of the apartment's two balconies. The wisteria's looking fine too.

Well, tomorrow it's ANZAC Day and the multitude Australians and New Zealanders in town last week have disappeared further south and, as I write, are undoubtedly stirring from their hotel beds in the Dardanelles to begin the bus journey that will take them to the Gelibolu Peninsula National Park. The first of the Memorial Services will take place in a few hours and thousands of Antipodeans will remember, lest they forget, the sacrifice that so many made and will continue to make as long as we still feel the need as a species to conquer each other, take what doesn't belong to us and kill someone who might otherwise be our neighbour.

After visiting Lone Pine and other sites last year I was often moved to tears. I know it's naive to suggest that we can live in a world without war. There are simply too many evil and self-serving governments on the planet who stand to lose their sanctimonious idealogical raison d'etre if they don't possess an 'other' whose sole function is to relegate us to history. Or so they would have us believe. Get them before they get us. I've not naive enough to believe that anything is ever going to change.

However, it's paradoxical that I now find myself on the soil of a friendly country and that was seemingly our enemy not so long ago.

I hope those who visit Gallipoli over the upcoming days will find it the humbling experience that I underwent.

Below is an unsourced quote by Paul Rodrigues that I found on the Net:

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.

And you have to admit that these days, even the average Westerner can find Baghdad on the map.

The Lycian Way: Day 6

I knew this would happen. I return to Istanbul and an entire week runs out before I've finished my holiday memoirs. Rather crap at time management, I never seem to improve what has evidently become the bane of my life. It all just slips away so fast and compounds the feeling that I never complete the task at hand.

Anyway, my favourite day on the trip.

Not the most beautiful scenery and certainly not the best weather we experienced on our journey, however, our penultimate day on the trail was the most varied and interesting. And close to twelve hours of walking. I was feeling fit.

We arose at the crack of dawn, ate something for breakfast that must have been instantly forgettable because I can't remember what is was. Undoubtedly fruit. I know I drank only water because it was to be the first challenge of the day. to find some more of the stuff. Until this point, we had merely glanced at markings on the map that showed the locations of various cisterns and natural springs, however today we were certainly going to need to find some as we intended to make it hydrated and headache-free to a small village, Kılıçlı, by sundown.

We set off and up a hill where we found a large signpost showing the way forward. A large white house with makeshift garage was our first sing of life and within moment Damon located the cistern. we were then at odds whether to knock on the door and request water. In these parts we doubted the inhabitants rose early. Why get out of bed at all when you don't have to deal with incessant traffic and your obligations are limited to watching peacefully over some languid livestock. Of course, I'm wrong. These people had quite likely arisen hours previous and by now were many furlongs away tending to goats high up on the ridge.

Extracting water from the cistern require the kind of lateral thinking of which I remain in short supply. However, given the urgency of our situation it was indeed amazing at what we achieved using a small two handled pot, some old string and elbow grease. Ten minutes and a few failed attempts behind us, we managed to fill at capture at least three litres and I felt rather proud the event had gone so well.

The nest few hours were spent collecting another dog, idling among the usual olive groves, scrambling over rocky outcrops and travelling through gentle pine. Bracken and small scratchy bushes were a feature of the day and on several occasions we needed to stop to check we were indeed headed in the right direction.

Eventually we came into a almond orchard and met with Bayram Bey. Who I thought initially was going to shoot one of us dead for meat and keep the other as a sexual plaything. Unlike most Turks, Bayram was not garrulous. He liked to stare at us a lot. A lot. I felt the taste of fear and an impromptu and imperfect rendition of Deliverance involuntarily played in my head. I wasn't ready to squeal like a pig.

Like all Turks, Bayram was hospitable to a fault and invited us in for tea. His house was as ramshackle as you could possible imagine but had a particular to it even though I couldn't imagine what exactly life would be like in such an abode. We drank a few cups of tea and Bayram offered us water from his tank, which he needs to collect from the nearest village every now and then since rainfall has presumably dropped in the parts in the recent past. Bayram had a puppy called Aslan, Lion, that could have killed damon or I with a single jump to the throat. Deliverance involuntarily re-played in my head.

We were accompanied to the tractor path that crossed one of Bayram's fields and pointed in the direction of the nearest village, Boğazcık. We greeted a few builders and refused the offer of lodgings from a woman who appeared from nowhere and then disappeared equally mysteriously, as we set our bearings to Appollonia.

Appollonia. At the foot of a hill we unyoked our burdens and climbed backpack free to a view and ruined Hellenistic city atop a scree-covered hill. The ancient sure loved to build a) on steep slopes, and b) way above sea-level. I have really good calf muscles to prove it.

We found a theatre amidst the undergrowth and Damon performed a sparkling RADA-inspired version on Aristophanes. I took photos and cheered him on until finding my own niche among the collapsed Byzantine church where I delivered a fire-and-brimstone sermon from a tree-cum-pulpit. It was all very thespian but I suddenly remembered that I necessarily hate all actors for the pretentious jerks they are and more importantly the suns rays were no longer warming my aching cadaverous body.

We slid down the slopes, got back into the yoke and took off towards a village that time and perhaps even Turkey, forgot.

Backtracking a kilometre or more, we came upon a large bull emitting a large sound that gave a largely uncomfortable feeling in my pants. An grumpy 900kg bovine is not to be tampered with, especially when it clearly does not want that green piece of string around its horn to be tied to a lamp post. It looked irascible and sounded damn well annoyed. Damon and I spent approximately three minutes wondering whether the big scary bull was going to flee, mount the cow, or worse, mount us. A completely calm couple sat there gently coaxing the animal that was going to kill us into its leash. Jesus, have you seen the hooves on a bull? I choose to sat afar.

Animal chained, we moved on into the village proper, except there wasn't one. Man, this place was small. I loved the stone houses but hated the feeling that this was the sort of town people think are full of gentle welcoming village folk but in fact one of the barns contain acid bath holding the remains of previous intruders. Don't blame me, I do originate from a scary town. I come from a very spooky place indeed. Still, not that it left any psychological damage.

Provisions had diminished rapidly after a day's energetic use of muscles, and I called out to a man who was staring at his wife who was staring at us. Luckily for us he turned out to be the owner of the town store. Of course, if can can call a room covered in dust and stacked high with only fifteen different flavoured varieties of Pop-Cakes and Cola a shop, then were in for a rather large spree.

Being American, I assumed for Damon this was virtually a health food store because he promptly stashed a lot of things in individual single serve sized packets into a medium-sized plastic bag. When I started to cry the owner went back into his house next door and brought two loaves of bread. I stopped weeping. Damon was grinning about his new diet of Pop-Cakes. Turks loves this kind of crap. It's cheap. It's completely void of nutrition. None of this can ever be good for you. It was all cheap and let's face it, we had no other choice.

On the shopkeepers advice, we could pitch our tent and sleep anywhere we wanted. I wanted to stay out of range of both aminals and people who might like to eat other people. We effortlessly avoided more big fat and scary things making loud noises and made our way out of town. Spotting a great, wide and green field that might give us shelter and offer at least a 400m unobstructed view in every direction, I felt safer that we weren't going to be eaten.

Murat Bey kindly allowed us to rest in his field, and his obese, food-munching son waddled his way in front, signalling us to follow. Mustafa was about 24 years and 24 stone. The kind of man who spends his whole life ogling woman who never want to marry him. Still, we were males and so his only interest was to help us clear the field of the 857 rocks that might cause discomfort while sleeping. Mustafa gave up after the third stone but we carried out while he proffered all manner of information about the area.

Very helpful he was too, when, after unpacking the tent he informed us public transport didn't make it far. Without explaining the entire thing which would take too long... Damon I ended up riding in Mustafa's mate's car to the next town of Üçağız later that evening for the tidy amount of too much cash. In fact, Mustafa was wily and had, by exaggerating the distance and difficulty of the journey between his town and our next destination, organised him and his buddy enough beer money to ensure he'd be hassling poor, unsuspecting females for a long time to come. God, how can any young man allow himself to get a belly so big that he looks pregnant? Disgusting.

So, we were in Üçağız and our tent still needed to be pitched. I'm fairly sure we ended up sleeping in someone's extended garden, though in these parts they don't seem to worry about that kind of thing so much.

I will say, however, that at this point in the journey, Damon and I were no longer smelling very nice.

It might even be fair to say Mustafa just didn't want us reeking in his fields.

The Lycian Way: Day 5

Today, the backpack felt lighter. My body and mind had gradually adjusted to carrying more than the usual daily burden of laptop, wireless moused and unmarked test papers up the hill to the taxi stand and I was arrogantly starting to feel like I knew what this trekking thing was all about. And, I had the beginnings of a very sexy tan.

It was a late start. Damon was eating everything on the table at braeakfast and so for no reason other than it felt good, I slipped downstairs for my second hot shower in 24 hours.

We headed up to the Otogar and took a bus ride to Kaş. We had decided earlier that to cover the best parts of the Lycian path in our extremely short period of time then some shortcuts would need to be taken to avoid the uninteresting bits. In fact, back in Faralya we had received it on good authority to avoid leaving Kalakan by the waymarkers since we would have been following tarmac for eight to ten kilometres. Damon and I had instead opted for 45 of returning to the ways of modern transport and lisntening to the kind of modern Turkish pop music played therein rather than suffer several hours snaking along the paved coastal road, listening to car honrs and soaking up exhaust fumes.

As Kaş it was time to stock up on supplies - namely a small pot, rice, lentils, bread, soup mix, chocolate, lighter fluid, fruit, and the kind of sweets that Australians call lollies but that I never ate unless a) my grandma gave them to me or b) I'd just had a vaccination and the doctor's receptionist felt obliged to offer something for the pain. Damon chose a bag of candy called Olips and I laughed quite a lot because that sounds dirty to my ears.

We went downhill until we reached the harbour and then kept moving so that I saw nothing at all of the town but instead was out among the trees, bushes and other nature-type things within no time at all. I distinctly remember us losing us way, confused by either a junction waymarker that in fact was not a junction and a house with turrets that we were supposed to turn left at but in fact wasn't even in our field of vision. After sometime we confirmed the junction was a lie and the house situated around to the right. I finally understood the guide book contained about the same quantity of literal truth as the any of the Holy Books.

On Day 5 I began to hum Goodbye Yellow Brick Road to myself, a tune I would find in my head some three days later. When ar you gonna come down? When are you goin' to land? Still have no idea. We came to a strange field with rocks that were amassed in no particular fashion but that would have looked at home at some pretentious modern art installation gathering somewhere in your local wanky upmarket neighbourhoood. Entitled Rock(y) 1. There next hour of so involed a lot more prepositions of movement and some confusion involving our first motorised cistern and a temporary gate made of chicken wire. We separated ways for 500m to ewnsure we werne't actually going to take a wrong turn, though after being truamatised with chicken wire and animal kept within in at a young age I in fact just need a couple of minutes to compose myself.

Soon we were sitting down again eating more chocolate and then we were following a blue piece of rope across a field of young pomegranate trees. Next, more rocks led up to the windswept Çoban Plajı. I had once of those successful anger management moments after seeing inordinate piles of non-biodegradable plastic refuse strewn in an otherwise deserted location.

More walking before we arrived a couple of hours later we found ourselves at another protected and this time clean bay, replete with an outcrop of ruined stone buildings and cistern containing foul-smelling undrinkable water. It was here that we decided to pitch camp for the evening.

We set up the tent and proceeded to gather firewood. A lof of fun too complicated to explain was had with an enormous piece of granite and some very thick branches, although maybe it'll get lost in translation here. The fire started first time around. Fire started ensured that, and at only 1.85 YTL, it was clearly a bargain and a product for which I would need to find more uses.

The rain set in and we cooked dinner over the campfire. A few fishing boats chugged into the bay for the evening. not a sound but water softly lapping against the rocks. As had already become our habit, we slept soundly that night.

The Lycian Way: Day 4

I'm a little too tired now to write but know if I don't get these thoughts down now then it'll be another week until I have the opportunity and by then my memories of the journey will have already withered and begun to fade. I'm going to limit myself to 500 words. Which is what I say every time I begin to type an entry.

Again the sun shone, we ate a hearty breakfast and set out from the village of Gelemiş to the ruins of Patara, a couple of kilometres down a paved road. Turning right at a majestic old stone gate, we turned left at the first Lycian tombs we'd encountered. With difficulty with found the track through waist high flowering weed which led up through a smattering of houses and until we passed a man who gave us fresh peas. Not since Orlando's last risotto had I eaten them since city Turks seems to prefer theirs pickled in jar. Foul.

The first dog we encountered was vociferous and warned us and our accompanying canines to keep well away from his charge of goats. The next dog we encountered just about made me poop in my already quite filthy shorts. A real live Hound of the Baskervilles, I paled when he showed his fangs and ever so nonchalantly picked up in each hand a stone the size of my head. Which made walking cumbersome. His owner was nonplussed about the entire thing but it wasn't until we were half a mile out away until I unclenched my buttocks. I could still hear his bark as we turned another corner and proceeded down the remains of a poorly kept road that rains had almost completely washed away, thinking abseiling gear might have come in handy.

We delved into the chocolate supply to keep our minds from the growing trickle of sweat running down our backs and passed over into green fields and yet more of the now obligatory but charming olive groves. A retired English couple now living in the district handed us a few pointers before we stopped for lunch. Again we feasted on fresh tomatoes, cucumber, goat's cheese and I hoped that God would provide me with a leaner, more svelte figure upon my return to Istanbul.

Over a few more hills and we began to head down as the track widened and again the sapphire waters of the Mediterranean came into view. The downtrodden looking dog has so far followed us the entire morning's journey - no mean feat considering she was both malnourished and had clearly been abused for most of her short life. I'd forced Damon earlier to gently lob a few stones its way to discourage it, but either this was the greatest adventure she had heretofore known or perhaps, as I would later come to accept, she had simply come to far to make her own was home safely. she was clearly intelligent enough not to want to face the shepherd's vicious canines again on her way back to Gelemiş.

A couple of hours later and our Kalkan, a once sleepy haven now draw card for northern Europeans of a town greeted us on the other side of the bay - the evening's destination was now in sight. and of course, it went began to go iffy.

After mounting and crossing the largest aqueduct I'd yet seen in Turkey, we came to a junction. Then we turned right, and down. Big mistake. After five hundred metres across razor-sharp rocks we had already passed the point of no return but even the dog hadn't been blindly foolish enough to follow.

For the next three and a half hours Damon and I could barely take our minds of the now dangerous terrain to stop and admire the views. One slip would've been a Hellish ticket to hospital, given that some glamorous Turkish rescue team would've been bothered to get the unlucky injured soul out. To be fair, it was foolhardy of us to continue. However, the sun decided to begin its descent and I was saying a large quantity of naughty words under my breath, and maybe some out loud too. I can't remember.

Rocks. In every direction. Rocks that would injure, main and possibly leave gaping wounds that would become infected, septic, and fail to heal. My leg broken two years earlier throbbed. I had a headache. We stopped playing 20 questions because I no longer cared about anyone else who had ever lived or died. It was us against nature with the soundtrack of our now lost dog in the distance.

Except of course, she wasn't lost. After howling for while she simply reappeared, silent. It's moments like this you marvel at the sheer intelligence of animals and wonder why it couldn't actually show us the path outta here rather than just follow us. Surprisingly, I kept my cool. Kalkan disappeared behind a ridge and the shadows passed over our head. Still nothing but rocks.

It was all very stoic, methinks.

Eventually, the combination of a newly bulldozed road, recent building development and a sheer lack of patience brought us to a switchback that climbed back and forth up an incline that would've made an Istanbul taxi driver refuse the fare. I had to stop three times on the way up. Now was probably a good time to give up smoking.

By the time we reached main road into the city our combined remaining energy level wouldn't have had to strength to complete a full English sentence. Beyond exhausted. As we crashed into Kalkan proper we headed downhill (thank you God) and headfist with dog in tow to the cheap and cheerful restaurant full of bronzed tourists and an East London family for whom everything was 'bangin''. Indeed, so it was.

Damon managed to shove in a chicken kebab while I again opted for beans and rice. Those muscles that run from you neck across your shoulders felt like someone was driving a Laguiole mezzaluna with a piercingly sharp blade into them. No pain, no gain an' all that, but to be truthful, I was feeling half dead and certainly smelt that way.

Ömer met us at the first pension we encountered, and had he not had rrom we would have both happily collapsed in the main street. The hot shower in the Gül Pansyıon was as invigorating as it was a fitting finale to the day.

I peeled of the filthiest socks since Edmund Hilary went walking up a hill and hallucinated as I lay down on a bed of cotton candy and drifted into a coma. No need to mention how well I slept.

Worth mentioning, however, is the breakfast we ate the next morning and also how Damon, possessing a slim physique at best, greedily polished off omelette for two (ie me and him) and then packed away half a kilo of the town's best clotted cream, known to Turks as kaymak and to the medical world as an A-grade aorta blocker.

Suddenly, we had energy again. And a full stomach. And the same filthy socks.

The word count is reporting 1187. It lies.

The Lycian Way: Day 3

I awoke with verve and gusto. And three hours before anyone else. And hungry.

God smiled down upon us. The lingering clouds parted and at the princely hour of half past eight the sun rose lazily over the crest of the mountains and spilled its warmth into the valley; not that any of that makes Damon more of a morning person. By the time he pulled his idle arse from its slumber I had devoured enough my own body weight in olives, tomatoes, cheese, cucumber, yoghurt, honey, bread and jam. Our clothing and backpacks remained damp but Brian has assured us that today;s scenery would be some of the most spectacular along the trail. He was right.

We started uphill on a goat track and soon understood that not a few trekkers were losing their way on the Faralya-Alınca route. Brian's hand-drawn map would hold us in good stead to avoid backtracking and simply getting waylaid. The goat track moved uphill through the now daily dose of conifers and then flattened out over the saddle and onto a tractor path, upon whose left side rose terraces with craggy olive trees. It was now warm. As we moved over the next ridge it becomes impossible to describe the natural beauty. Think sharp intake of breath with an irrepressible desire to do an accapella Sound of Music into possible followed by uncontrolled rolling about in fields of buttercups and other flowers oft illustrated in children's fairy tale books. I have neither talent nor faculties to do justice to the perfect union of colour that held us in its sway. All that and Pan's tree too. There were a young German couple and two middle aged English folk attending to maps and fresh blisters but they held no interest for us.

This was nature like I hadn't tasted for three year since the valleys of northern Pakistan. The cacophony and incessant grind and greyness of Istanbul was all but lost as my head drowned in a sensory overload. we took some excellent photos too.

As we became more attuned to walking we felt confident enough to ask a goat herder for a shortcut. On the advice of Brian we had planned to avoid the village of Kabak, for the sole reason that I refuse to go anywhere named after a vegetable. Especially 'Pumpkin'. It sounded too David Lynch for my liking. So Nasreddin pointed across a gully and Damon and I nodded like we knew what he was talking about. Though we actually did, since speaking with herdsmen was proving more successful than with the average Istanbul taxi driver.

The next hour was spent wandering and wondering whether our newly chosen path was in fact a shortcut to Alınca. you cannot expect someone who lives in these parts, living with the ebb and flow of nature to have any real concept of time and distance. I realised that I had been a bad student and asked him open-ended questions. How would he possibly know what half and hour was? He'd simply told us that to keep us all smiling. In any case, while our timing was out we were on the right path and after encountering a bubbling spring among the oleanders we found the recently bulldozed track that would lead us upwards and onwards.

A quick break was followed by an emormous amount of walking. All of it spectacular and the majority uphill. Goats fed among the pines on gnarled bushes and the Mediterranean wove in and out of view as we weaved among the rock faces and along ledges. Damon dabbled in sunbathing atop a precipice that looked down the valley to a small beach and Pumpkin village. We'd managed to organise a picnic lunch from the previous night's lodgings so we feasted on spinach and bulgur, rice and flat bread.

We started to tire as uphill inclines became steeper, the sun beat down harder and we halted more periodically for a breath of air. After filling up at another spring we had only a couple of kilometres ahead of us until we happened upon Alınca with another awe-inspiring vista across Yedi Burun, The Seven Noses, a group of sharp peninsulas jutting out from the coastline.

A continent of septuagenarian German, Swiss and Italian walkers were busily consuming Turkey's favourite state produced beer (which personally I think is rubbish), so Damon struck up conversation auf Deutsch - he's talented like that. Next thing you know they're telling me of their experiences in Australia (Cairns was a dive, Sydney felt stuck in the 1950s, everyone was drunk after 6pm).

Damon chatted with a man for a while and then translated something to me. It goes a little something like this, Apparently there is a species of black dwarfish beetles that ingest pine sap that passes unaltered through their digestive system. Bees then feed on their fecal matter, return to the hive and produce something that is later harvested and sold around the world as pine honey. Marketing it as Double-Poohed Out Conifer Sap probably wouldn't assist with reaching sales targets. Once thing's for sure, I was right to move from German to French class in 9th year. Who knows what cultural dirtiness may have been impregnated into my feeble adolescent mind?

Still, Damon's half-Hun and his Teutonic tongue had us on a free ride to Gelemiş, our next starting point.

Gelemiş is a town becoming increasingly popular for it's long peaceful and surprisingly unpolluted beach. We didn't care for that as we had just walked a bloody long way and ended up falling into the arms of an old woman who offered us a camping place in her backyard for a fiver each. Best of all she left us fresh bread, cucumber, tomatoes, olives and bread.

At this point in the journey I stopped wearing my sole pair of underpants.

The Lycian Way: Day 2

Of the four elements, wind is my least favourite. Principally since it reminds me of a bad childhood experience at the seaside in Port Broughton, The Moors (a place to conceal homicide victims), and conjures up a vision of Kate Bush on a stallion, bespoke in top hat and billowing chiffon, singing Wuthering Heights. The wind makes me shudder. It also tends to cause distress and unease to animals, namely my cat.

So in the first wee hour of the morning when the tempest blew up the valley and slammed into the side of the tent, there was general malaise all round. The tent seemed involved in some kind of synthetic, energetic and spasmodic Pilates session with Damon and I edging ever closer to the cliff face. At the point where I had to break loose from the tent in little more than my blue briefs to rescue a fugitive fly cover, it was clear we would have to move. Now.

Bleary-eyed and not in the best humour, the wind unleashed all its Zephyric force, currents of air violent and hostile worked against us as we hurriedly packed our belongings, took flight across a dirt field and sheltered in the shell of yet another unfinished residence that mars the landscape in these parts. However, this was not the moment to sound off about inevitable ugly cement progress but rather to huddle down in the among bricks and building material and so remain out of reach of the noreaster.

We awoke in a mass of thinly and widely spread goat excrement. Not an idyllic manner by which to begin the day. Damon was not smiling. A pear and apple each later we were determined to soldier on, left the turd, wind and cliff face behind us and head for the nearby village of Kozağaç. At the cistern we filled our canteen, cleaned our teeth, greeted an unfriendly canine with little-dog syndrome. Then along came Coşkan.

Without heading into territory of overused metaphors and images of the hospitable villager, Coşkan, his wife and two progeny, Yasin and Yasemin entreated us to the most onion-filled breakfast of gozleme I had ever known, coupled with the ubiquitous Turkish tea. I cooed over the baby, chatted with the young boy, talked endlessly wıth the man of the house and encouraged endlessly the woman of the house to bring more food.

Damon and I felt the need to move on as we hadn't really progressed very far and behind us gloomy clouds hung heavy over the formidably towering Baba Dağ. In recent memory an earthquake had triggered landslides that buried a row of houses and it was clear that the mountain seems fond of intermittently dropping several hundred tons of landmass, without warning, down its slopes and into the village.

Across scented pine forests, olive groves and pastures bursting with spring blossoms, it was difficult not to fall prey to the cliche of the pastoral. Had a knight dismounted his steed and practiced le droit de seigneur with some russet-haired buxom shepherdess, I don't think Damon and I would've considered it in poor taste. The views were arresting and it's always good to know that no matter how much city life can make you jaded, the country rejuvenates and restores your faith and enthusiasm.

Kirme was quite naturally the picture-perfect hamlet set amongst the flowering fields. Stone cottages with ramshackle fences, cows meandering. Everything was emerald green. Before I got sucked into some freaky Wizard of Oz type hallucination the mist enshrouded us once again and the heavens rained down upon us and our backpacks. We promptly took refuge under the conifers to realise half an hour too late that the rain had, as the Turks would say, 'soaked us like a sausage'. Go figure. As the steam rose from my dank and now reeking socks, our backpacks had collected enough water to be wrung out at some point in the future.

Unneighbourly bovines shot us furtive glances as they moved up the hill. I realised for the first time in a long time that I don't actually like cattle. Unless it's bleeding on a plate with my fork in it.

Soaked pas the point of return, we moved a little sluggishly to end our day entering Kelebek Valdisi, Butterfly Valley. We'd already exhausted our superlatives some time earlier and refusing to utter 'pretty' again, instead we stayed silent, mouths open and collecting rainwater. Kelebek Vadisi is freakin' gorgeous.

George House was owned by Rıdvan Bey and run by his son Hasan and other members of the extended family. Damon and I peeled off our wet suits and were inextricably drawn to the heat of the wood stove in the common room. Circulation returned to my toes and other, drier pension guests came through the doors. A few expatriates teaching English in Istanbul along with Brian, an Australian living in some remote village who spends his time planning and waymarking new treks.

As we lounged on Ottoman cushions scoffing a plethora of hot and cold meze, Brian volunteered his knowledge and gave us sound advice for the days ahead. A man of strong opinions, he warned us of shortcomings in our plans and suggested alternate routes.

We slept soundly with full stomach in a damp room, with the optimism that the sensational sunset was would bring more clement skies on the morrow and that our newfound information would ensure even better days to come.