About the walk

David and I covered the approximately 27 kilometres in about 8 hours. Neither of us were worse for wear. I inhaled my combo fajita plate, and then left David to get back home. Lighting a cigarette in the dark as I stepped onto Istiklal Caddesi, I heard my name! It was Jimmy, my guitar buddy, and his wife, Anna, who works in my department. They were on their way, late, to somewhere and said hello/goodbye. Coincidence, yes, but they also live just a 100 metres from the Galatasaray… I had forgotten! I paced back the steps I half jogged down the hill of guitar shops, all shining windows in the night with gorgeous electric guitars under the neon lights… toward the bottom, then sudden right, and there it was, the tower. So beautiful in the flood lights. A few pictures, Touched the tower. Now I can go home. 20 miles of walking and I felt like a kid, like I could have played 5 more sets of tennis. Fantastic.

One other note. In Beşiktaş, on the busy street corner, just as the military band finished playing, I was panning around with my camera on video, 360, and the palpable thought came to me, like this multiple image—a thousand, no maybe more, images of Sibel, as a girl, as a teenager, as now, they were all milling about in their various existences, waiting at lights, crossing streets, carrying book bags, smoking cigarettes, meeting friends, climbing the steps to Taksim… it was so odd and unexpected. It was another realization that I simply love someone so much, I am so much in love. My heartbeat was insistant, like a message, and I carried this feeling with me up the steps and all the way to Taksim entrance, and to her favourite hamburger shop, lit up in orange neon under a darkening İstanbul sky.

Fireworks froom the bus; Juli wants breakfast

To Galata Kulesi, end of a long day's walk

Taksim, finally

Beşiktaş some more

Beşiktaş

The Walk

My colleague in Communicaitons, David O’Regan, is widely considered the premier Irish distance walker on the faculty. Notoriously reclusive in his ambulatory habits, I felt both surprised and challenged when he asked me to accpmpany him on a Republican Day excursion.

From Sarıyer to Taksim. That’s over 20 miles. I took him up on it. I layed out my hiking shorts, my nylon sweat pants, my runner’s thermal shirt with zip up collar, water bottles, apple, banana, couple of cookies, and some cashews. My red runnign shows for cushioning on all the pavement. Set.

As I waited for David by the guard gate at the entrance to the campus, who sows up but Juli, my adopted street dog orphan. She could surmise that I had the cookies in my satchel. I broke down and gave her one, and that was my error. Davis showed up at 8:15 and we were ready to go… but he proposed that instead of catching the bus, that we walk to Sarıyer. “But that is almost a half hour’s bus ride,” I said. “I have a short cut,” he said. Okay fine…

So we take off and walk briskly up little piece of highway leadign away from Sarıyer… and there is Juli, loping after me, in the middle of the road. “Go home!” I told her, but then recalled she doesn’t have a home. She followed us for maybe 5 kilometres, even off the highway and off onto a rocky trail that wound over the crest of the huge hill that separates Koç from the urban area below. Juli’s sense of terrtorial boundaries took over, and she became visibly stressed and nervous and finally tuned tail and disappeared back up the hill. I was hoping she would make it home okay, and stay off the highway when the driver’s came careerning round the corners. Doofus, I thought. Gosh, I like that dog.

Anyway… the tour.

It took forever to get the first leg out of the way… the hill became very steeo on the way down, and the trail often disappeared. At one point we had to cut through the backyard garden of some locals, and I was watching for a shotgun barrel to emerge from the kitchen widow. We made it through clumps of brambles and thorns, muddy patches, standiing water (wet socks, rats) and steep rocky portions where we had to slide down on our butts. In the brief intersperses where you could actually look out and take in the view, the view was spectacular… the origin of the Bosphorous straight was fed by a bowl shaped body of water and there were huge freighters floating along. And out the other way, toward where we were to walk (once this tryign decent was completed), there were the skyscrapers on the business district in Levent. Their diminutive appearance along the horizon was my first direct indication of just how far we were to walk yet. I mean, our final destination usually takes a couple of bus fares, another fare onn the Metro (underground), and then some walking at the tail end. About 27 km in all, and a windy route at that almost entire along the water.

To the pictures...