Yenikoy Walk
Trip Start
Feb 08, 2008
1
83
125
Trip End
Sep 11, 2009
Canakkale,
Turkish Aegean Coast,
Turkey
Sunday, November 30, 2008
He took me all the way across the Trojan Plain to a village of Yenikoy, my first objective. He was kind of a grumpy guy, drove slowly, scanning the roadside for beer bottles. When we got to Yenikoy he stopped to also pick a couple of large burnt, rusted cans from a trash tip and throw them in the wagon. I got to wondering if I, too, was a part of his haul. So when he stopped in the village and got down and walked a few yards away, I too got down and walked slowly off in another direction. He didn't come yelling after me, so I was outta there.
I walked along the coast in yet another day of right fine weather
A Good Long Ride
. All I needed to wear was a single tee shirt, even along the breezy coast. My objective was the second of the three tumuli visible from Hisarlik. There is also a small peninsula projecting from near by. This tumulus had been excavated. A book, now out of my reach, showed an aerial picture of its opened top, with the peninsula in the background. Now the mound was covered with a rough stone pile cap.From there I just headed off cross country, intending to join the paved road which ran south out of Yeniköy. That's when I thought I'd take a couple of vanity shots of the territory I was walking through, most of it nice and pastoral. But every so often in Turkey one comes across another reality, this in the form of an open-air garbage tip, seemingly associated with a near-by vacation home development.
(By the way. One of my pet peeves is of those folks who call themselves--and are called developers. To my mind there are few truly dedicated developers. Most are merely exploiters. And too frequently the exploiters are ruinous or unmindful in their quests.)
To continue. It wasn't long or difficult to get out to the road. Nor was it long before my hitchhiking thumb elicited a ride
With Yeniköy in Sight, Maybe Another Beer Bottle
. They asked me in Turkish where I was going. I couldn't say anything but, ileri (mispronouncing it), ahead. They took me to a small town or village of Mahmudiye. I spent a few minutes walking around there, just to get oriented; then bought some chips, asking the store proprietor if there was a mini-bus to Canakkale. He said one would be stopping right directly across the street in fifteen minutes.It came in about five minutes. It was only another few minutes on the road to Canakkale to the turn-off exit to Troy, and about a 40 minute walk the five or so kilometers back to my pension in the adjacent village of Tevfikiye to complete the circuit.
