My arrival to southern part of Turkey could be easily described like that. Total and absolute difference from the rest of the country (to my knowledge). Not only the air smells different, the whole vibe is like from another world.

This is the element of travel that I like the most. That feeling when you sit for seven hours on a bus and enter another climate zone, another region, new place of interest. And that Antalya surely is.

The whole duration of my journey I was staring out the window, trying to absorb the most of it. To see how agriculture operations look like, in every city we passed I am concentrating on how people look like, what shops and restaurants it offers. Of course this is just a snippet of what you get, if you actually stop and walk through, but as a brain exercise it works great. Your otherwise long travel flies by and you have a better idea where to go back to for a day trip...

The main bus station in Antalya is located quite outside the city center. It is after all pretty sizable city. Some one and half milion people live here.

My plan is to skip the city totally and go straight to the forest, to sleep outdoors and bath in ice cold mountainous river. The plan couldn't be further from the truth. My assumption that my desired destination would be reachable within two hours was wrong to the core. I have put all my belongings into one backpack and started marching like troops do...

After a while I realised it was a bad idea but already in the middle of nowhere I had to keep on going.

Shortly before sunset I have quickly found a suitable spot to hang my hammock at and slept like a baby. Well, untill the early morning cold temps...

Packed my camp even faster then I set it up, I am heading back to center (direction) as I realised my plan is not a good one. But my day started with some awesome panoramas and my mood was getting better.

Being in the forest, I have no mobile connection and I just go with the flow, south, to make it somewhere to the city. Boy, was I far away. Even founding a local bus station was a challenge.

Stuck in the middle of nowhere, I am waiting for a bus. After an hour or so he finally arrived and I was shocked. The bus driver didn't let me go on the bus. I didn't had a ticket and he couldn't sell me one. Wtf, where is the problem I thought, getting of the bus and walking to the city. The problem is in quite strong surveillance state here. You need to connect your ticket (even a one way ticket) with your HES code, generated for you by the state. Without a smartphone a hard thing to do. And even if you have one you just feel wrong doing it. But it is what it is and if you don't want to hitchhike everywhere you go, you better accept it. Well that is what I did, after I got by taxi to the city center and realised how expensive my anonymity will be...

All the best,

Global Local