Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
water to the white houses gleaming on the brown hillside of ￜskdar two miles across the strait. Distant
cars glinted in the hot sunshine and ferries plied doggedly back and forth across the Bosphorus and on out
to the distant Princes' Islands, adrift in a bluish haze. It was beautiful and a perfect place to stop.
I had clearly come to the end of my own road. That was Asia over there; this was as far as I could go in
Europe. It was time to go home. My long-suffering wife was pregnant with her semi-annual baby. The
younger children, she had told me on the phone, were beginning to call any grown man 'Daddy'. The grass
was waist-high. One of the field walls was tumbling down. The sheep were in the meadow. The cows were
in the corn. There was a lot for me to do.
And I was, I admit, ready to go. I missed my family and the comfortable familiarities of home. I was tired
of the daily drudgery of keeping myself fed and bedded, tired of trains and buses, tired of existing in a world
of strangers, tired of being forever perplexed and lost, tired above all of my own dull company. How many
times in recent days had I sat trapped on buses or trains listening to my idly prattling mind and wished that I
could just get up and walk out on myself?
At the same time, I had a quite irrational urge to keep going. There is something about the momentum
of travelling that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop. That was Asia over there, after all -
right there in my view.
Asia.
The thought of it seemed incredible. I could be there in minutes. I still had money
left. An untouched continent lay before me.
But I didn't go. Instead I ordered another Coke and watched the ferries. In other circumstances I think I
might have gone. But that of course is neither here nor there.