Notes from the Evliya Çelebi Way: Days 21 and 22

Monday morning got off to a beautiful start in the mountain town of Şaphane.

I had a leisurely breakfast at a family-run restaurant, feasting on bread and cheese and more tarhana soup, and then the family’s 26-year-old son Murat accompanied me to the old mosque, which dates to 1490.

It was the first mosque I had been inside on the Evliya Çelebi Way, and there couldn’t have been a more perfect one for the occasion. I hadn’t expected it to be so colorful, for there to be murals on the walls and a vibrantly painted cupola in the center of the ceiling. For there to be an enormous, three-tiered chandelier, its golden rings engraved with sayings from the Quran. For there to be an 800-year-old grandfather clock, the ticking of its pendulum the only sound in the room.

It was almost 11am by the time I said goodbye to Murat and began walking, but I wasn’t worried. My guidebook said the day’s route would take just five and a half hours to cover, and a line from my journal the night before hints at my growing lenience:

“Now I can relax a bit more on my last two days of walking, knowing they’re shorter days.”

Was I asking for it or what? Naturally, I was lost within half an hour. Maybe even twenty minutes. Murat had tried to stop me from taking this route, had tried to send me on the asphalt as opposed to the guidebook way, which he said would be “difficult, and long.”

Difficult is okay! Long is no problem! I assured him, marching off blissfully up a chalky forest road. But I soon realized it was not the road my guidebook meant for me to be on. No connecting path appeared after 700 meters. No second firebreak came for me to cross. No grassy clearing with yalaks, or watertroughs, at which to refill my water bottle.

I kept walking up a pine-covered slope and reemerged onto asphalt. Miraculously, a taxi passed me right at that moment – the only car I would see all day. The driver told me the asphalt would not lead to the village of Sariçam I was aiming for, but that another unpaved forest road would, which could be found on the left at the top of the hill. To further make his point, he brought his hands together in an upside-down V to suggest the summit of a mountain.

I scribbled all this down in my notebook.

Top of the hill!

On the left!

Got it!

What the driver failed to mention – or the more likely case is that he did and I just didn’t catch it – was that by taking this road, I was entering a maze-like network of forest roads, fanning out in every direction across the mountain. Not a couple hundred meters after leaving the asphalt, I came to a four-way crossroads. And then a fork, and then a three-way junction, and then another fork.

I wanted a neon sign suitable for Las Vegas’ main drag screaming, THIS WAY TO SIMAV >>>; instead, I got one identical stretch of pine forest after another. And so I did what I have done a few other times on this path, when there has been not a single soul in the world to ask for help and the directions in my guidebook are rendered all but meaningless because of how severely I’ve messed things up:

I took out my compass.

It cost me just $7 in an outdoors shop in Istanbul, and though the sales associate had guaranteed it was “military grade,” I can’t say I expected to use it much on the trail. Rather, it was more of a fun, just-for-the-heck-of-it purchase. That morning in Istanbul, my biggest concern had been finding appropriate pants to wear on the hike. Priorities, right?

But in the forests above Şaphane, my compass suddenly mattered far more to me than my flashy new rain-and-windproof trousers. I knew that Simav lay northwest, and so that would be how I made a decision at each fork and crossroads. I didn’t care if it meant I bypassed Sariçam; I simply wanted to emerge from the forest and not be miles out of my way from Simav. When one path I chose began winding east, I backtracked and went the other way, and when that path began winding southwest, I took a narrow track through the woods, simply because the needle on my compass said it led northwest. This went on for hours.

And as I shuffled through a thick layer of pine needles and fallen leaves, praying only that I would make it to the valley before nightfall, I kept looking down at the little object in my hand.

Never was I so grateful to have spent seven dollars.

My blessed compass got me through. After five hours in the forest (two of which were spent sketching, so perhaps that’s more like three?), I emerged into tussocky grassland right at sunset, descended the valley, and stumbled across a family who invited me to stay in their home for the night. I then woke up yesterday morning and began my last day of walking.

I’ll be honest with you, my friends, and confess I stuck to the asphalt, eager as I was to reach Simav. Even still, the highway led through scenic countryside framed by mountains – mountains I was quite happy to not be traversing. While a steady stream of passing cars made for less atmospheric walking than the forest, it was nice for a change to actually know where the path was leading.

At 5pm, I asked a truck driver broke down on the side of the road how many kilometers to Simav.

“Yakın,” he said. Close.

It was the first time in twenty-two days that someone had told me a destination was near, and hearing it about my final destination no less almost brought me to tears. My shoulders burned and an indistinct pain had been flaring up in the center of my left foot all day, but I was close! Much too close to stop for the night.

I set my sights on a mosque with two minarets, beautifully silhouetted in the afterglow of that night’s sunset, and when I reached it and realized I was still far from the city center, I kept walking. After another twenty minutes, I stopped in a supermarket to make sure I had actually reached Simav proper, and then checked into the first hotel I came across.

Twenty-two days and 350 kilometers later, I had made it.

After walking part of the Camino de Santiago in northwest Spain and completing the 88-Temple Circuit on Shodoshima Island in Japan, the Evliya Çelebi Way makes for my third pilgrimage – pilgrimage being defined in my books as any walking adventure where you come seeking to journey through both inner and outer worlds. Where you come, as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala writes of one of her characters in Out of India, not only for a change, but to be changed.

And what keeps drawing me back to this particular kind of journey is the way it becomes an allegory for life. You reach the end and put down the pilgrim’s staff and are left asking, “Now what?” but what is next is that you return to your normal life – the life that doesn’t find you walking several hours a day, shoulders burning beneath an oversized backpack – with a well of moments and experiences to help you understand it better, to help you navigate its twists and turns more assuredly.

What’s more is that you return with a little more confidence in your own ability to navigate. You got yourself to the cathedral in Santiago or to the 88th temple or simply to a hotel and hot shower in Simav, and the courage that enabled you to do so – courage being not bravery, but merely continuing to walk even in your most un-brave moments – will remain with you through other less-tangible journeys in life.

Journeys where the path you’re walking on isn’t quite so literal.

That same courage will get you through a move to a new city, or to a place of peace after a break-up, or to the point where you quit a job that isn’t fulfilling to pursue one that is.

How?

Exactly as it got you to Santiago, Shodoshima, or Simav.

Mile by mile, step by step.

Thinking back to my trusty compass and to how it was only by the point of its silver needle that I made it to Simav, what I want to say next I’m going to try and say in the least cheesy way possible: I think we have a compass in life, too – whether we want to call it our heart or our gut or as my friend Kim once described it, the voice inside us.

And I think we intrinsically know when we’re walking in a direction not in tune with where our compass is pointing. When we need to leave the path we’re on because it isn’t the right or best path for us, and plunge blindly into the forest.

In my own case, each of these pilgrimages has found me walking through a transition – walking away from a particular path in life.

On the Camino, I had just decided to leave a fairly stable life in London and return to India to devote more time to writing.

On the 88-Temple Circuit, I had decided to leave India and the many projects I became involved in there, which gave me a reason for being in the country but were not necessarily getting me closer to my dreams, for a more nomadic existence – or what I like to call voluntary homelessness.

And here in rural Anatolia, I have been gearing up to put a few roots down next year to work on my book, slowly understanding – as my friend Hannah recently put it so perfectly – that a little stillness goes a long way for art and creativity.

During my lowest moments on the Evliya Çelebi Way, I would fume at my guidebook, officially over the lack of signposts and way-marking on the trail. “I came here to walk, not learn how to navigate!” I’d yell out to the pines, to the lone lizard darting across a rock, to whoever or whatever would listen.

But from the comfort of my Simav hotel room tonight, I believe I’ll be leaving Turkey grateful for this unexpected lesson in navigation – lessons from shepherds in the woods and clarinet-playing bakkal owners, and others that have still yet to reveal themselves.

All I know today is this:

We have to trust that the direction our compass is pointing in – whether what lies ahead is a less defined path, or perhaps there’s no path at all – is worth taking.

Always.