Inkblog

“This is the traditional Turkish way to cook chicken!” announced our tour guide Arif enthusiastically, throwing another branch into the raging inferno engulfing four large cooking oil tins. Encased within each metallic tomb lay a single foul; pre-slaughtered, plucked and pinned to the ground via two skewers.

“You guys can gather more wood while we wait for the chickens to cook” instructed our guide and off we tramped into the twilit wilderness.
By nightfall we had accumulated enough dead branch to last the remainder of the evening and were sat in a tight circle around the glowing embers of the fire, which continued to smoulder and crack around our evening meal.

After another hour or so of cooking, Arif announced that it was dinner time and carefully removed one of the tins using a towel. We were greeted by one blackened and petrified chicken, it’s little limbs thrown upright as if to say “I surrender”.

The remainder of the evening was similarly calamitous. Mark – the joker of the group, mistakenly helped himself to an uncooked sausage. “You are like a child!” denounced Arif, slapping the remainder of the offending sausage out of Mark’s hand and into the flames, where it burned guiltily. One of the older female members of the group fell over a log.
Having set up camp at the base of Mount Olympos, the temperature was distinctly cooler than previous evenings spent in cosy B&Bs, closer to sea level. Zipped up inside our tent and encased in brightly coloured sleeping bags that were inadequately thin, my girlfriend and I resembled a pair of exotic, mating caterpillars. “I can’t feel my toes” she whispered into the freezing darkness.

Emerging bleary eyed and tired from our frost-laden cocoon the following morning, we set about dismantling the tents and loading our gear into the back of a 4x4. Revving the accelerator but receiving no traction, the driver (who had spent most of the evening drinking around the campfire) managed to lodge the back wheels of the vehicle firmly in the ground. With a combined heave we managed to shove the car forwards, its wheels spinning frantically and showering us with freezing cold mud.

And so began our 500 metre hike up Mt Olympus. We spent 10 days in Turkey, plotting along the ancient coastal path that is the Lycian way. This is the memory that sticks though, buried at the back of my mind, down in the muck and the mire; a little nugget of treasure, which when held under the light of a new perspective, gleams like comedy gold.