Saturday, February 14/2026

 

Walking home from the little supermarket with fruit, sheep’s milk yoghurt and sourdough bread still warm from the oven. Uphill to our place but less than a ten minute walk. We always look at the building barely visible from our spot (marked with a 🔻). Does anyone live there? Is there a road? How was it built? 

Have to remind my Canadian self that thirty degree gradients here may be steep but they won’t ever ice up. Unlike that in one of the scariest rides we’ve taken, which was from Antalya to Taşucu along the southern coast of Türkiye. It was twenty-five years ago but we both remember it clearly. Three hundred and seventy kilometres of coastal road. Tight curves, narrow passages, long sections running directly along the cliff edges, lack of guard rails. In places the road tilted perceptibly toward the sea side. We went on a day in January when the road was icing and occasionally we could see at the bottom of the ravine the corpses of previous vehicles that had failed to hold the road. A road that is apparently now in the process of being redesigned in acknowledgment of its status as one of the most dangerous in Türkiye.