no real plan. Sooner or later I’ d need to stop and plot my course, but not yet. For now, I just wanted to keep moving east— toward the distant horizon, toward something I couldn’ t yet name.
Crossing into Turkey in the late afternoon, I fell in with a group of local riders. They offered to host me in Istanbul, just 120 kilometres ahead, but one look at my eyes and they understood. There was a small motel a hundred metres away— waiting, as if it knew I was coming.
That squalid little motel turned out to have its own kind of romance. I spent the evening on a bench near the highway with two families of Turkish immigrants, sipping tea and trading stories of life and travel.
In the morning, I discovered that some of them had quietly paid for my room. I never had the chance to thank them.
I missed Istanbul this time, and I didn’ t mind. At four in the morning, I crossed the“ July 15 Martyrs’ Bridge” under a violet sky, watching the sun rise over the Bosphorus. The city glowed behind me, vast and still.
Beyond Istanbul, the road led me to one of Turkey’ s strangest places— Burj Al Babas, a sprawling ghost development of hundreds of unfinished fairy-tale castles. Between wheat fields and quiet villages, an entire forest had been flattened to build 732 luxury villas