My Travel Writing Scholarship 2011 entry - My Big Adventure
WORLDWIDE | Friday, 18 March 2011 | Views [223] | Scholarship Entry
It took a whole day to walk into Istanbul. By nine the city was looming large, and slowly it engulfed me. I passed the fuming factories, the half built apartments, the cranes poking fun at the sky. The wandering traders, sellers of oranges and cigarettes, and the horse-drawn carts waiting stoically in traffic jams, wedged between the cars. The smells of heat and grilled meat and diesel blurred amongst the crowds. After months alone through mountains, over plains, along coasts, the city bore me forward relentlessly, and I found myself unable to resist.
I reached the Bosphorus long after night had fallen, my feet raw, and sat down. I felt a little underwhelmed, after months of imagining this moment. I took several photos of Asia, shimmering in the dark on the opposite bank, closer than I’d imagined, and looked at what I had read was the busiest waterway in the world as one man rowed slowly past. Eventually I took out my map and saw I was sitting by the much smaller Golden Horn, looking across to the final bit of Europe. Wearily I laced my boots. Five thousand kilometres down, one more to go.
Further down the bank, a small group of fishermen were coming to the end of their dinner. They called me over. One of them spoke English, and told me that he’d moved to Hackney for work and had stuck it out for a whole week before the weather drove him home. It was long enough for him to call me “bruv” and end most sentences with “init”. They offered me grapes and rakija, the local brandy made from anis, and I explained in my smattering of Turkish what I was up to. “Londra, Istanbul,” slap legs, mime walking. “Sekiz ay” (eight months).
Throughout my journey I had been offered the most incredible hospitality, but I assumed I would never find it in a city of thirteen million people, especially when it seemed like every other person was carrying a rucksack. But as we finished eating they told me proudly that the only way to see their city was from the water, and invited me out in their boat.
The skipper clamped a cigarette in his teeth and warned me that once we were out in the bay there would be lots of waves, so we’d have to keep moving fast and hold on. We passed beneath the bridges of the Golden Horn and into the mouth of the Bosphorus, and there, there, was Asia, and the mile long bridge threading the continents together, the mosques and the palaces, all the millions of lights on the water and us bouncing in a tiny boat across the waves, darting amongst the ferries and the cargo ships. I had walked from England to the beginnings of Asia, and here I was going to stop. From across the bay blew warm winds that spoke of deserts, and I felt as though, finally, I had arrived.
Tags: #2011Writing, Travel Writing Scholarship 2011