Hitch Hiking Through Eastern Turkey

“Do you believe in Allah?” the lorry driver asks in Turkish, staring at me intently as we bounce along the partially paved road. I am at first a bit taken aback; this is a dramatic shift; our three-minute conversation, up to this point, has centered around how many family members we have and what they do.

“I was raised Christian but now I’m undecided.” Articulating this takes three attempts. My thickly accented Turkish is roughly equivalent to %% mentally challenged second grader and lacks all but the most basic grammar. The best I can do is to throw out nouns and infinitive forms of verbs and hope my listener gets the gist of it.

The lorry driver looks at me severely, “You should, Allah sees what you do and he will judge you.”

This is the first of what will end up being 6 rides that I get that day as I try to make my way across Eastern Turkey from the lake side city of Van to the Kars, a city with around seventy thousand inhabitants located seventy kilometers from the Armenian border.

My second ride dropped me at a gas station and told the attendants to put me on the first truck heading toward Kars. They yelled at the large semi that was pulling out of the parking lot as we were pulling in and told him to stop as they hurried me to it. I hopped in and, smiling, shook the drivers hand, introducing myself and hurriedly going through who I was and what the I was doing there, “Hello, my name Travis, Ankara in, America student, METU (Middle Eastern Technical University, the name of the university where I am studying in Ankara), me school finish (I pantomime wiping off my hands to indicate that I have, in fact, finished my final exams), 10 days travel Turkey, Georgia, Armenia me. Father muscle doctor (I have no idea how to say physical therapist, or muscle for that matter, so I rub the drivers shoulder to indicate exactly what kind of doctor my father is. He looks at me, no doubt wondering what he has gotten himself into and, smiling awkwardly in the way I do when it is easier to just let the point pass than to try to understand it, nods). Mother nurse.”

Now it is his turn. He informs me that he is a Las (an ethnic group from the Black Sea coast of Turkey), he is one of four sons, has 5 sons himself (at this I tell him “good job,” he nods and smiles proudly), and that his parents are long distance truckers who go between Germany, France and Turkey. Our conversation continues for another half hour after which we enter a comfortable silence. As I admire the emerald alpine steps that we are passing through I am also struck at how well immersion helps to learn a language; I learned more Turkish in those eight hours of hitch hiking than I did in 2 months of Turkish class. I must have dozed off at some point because I woke up as we hit a pothole in the road. I groggily notice that my chest is spattered with drool stains; I am not an elegant sleeper. The driver notices this and, laughing, asks how I’m doing. Smiling, I tell him I've never been better.