Ayder: hiking, choked gazelles

7/1

We had a big day today. All the restless energy from being cooped up yesterday was unleashed. We got up early and headed for the hills. Taking the car as far as the road was good, we parked it and walked the rest of the way. The hiking plan is simple in these parts: just follow the river up, up, up, until you reach the lake. Today's lake is Büyükdeniz Göl, just beyond Yayla Yavrun.

We walked up the road for about 6km to reach Y. Kavrun. We were passed by a good dozen minibuses, and the obligatory caravan of Israeli adventure tourists. The Israeli group tours seem to dominate the tourist population here. There are very few Western independent tourists here. At Y. Kavrun we saw our first bona fide yayla village, with very simple wooden houses and cattle wandering all about. Our map is wildly not to scale but we headed in the general direction of Büyükdeniz Göl.

There isn't much of a trail but the alpine meadows are mostly easy to cross, so we just headed up the river. As the fog rolled in and the terrain became rocky, the path became less clear and we were lucky to run across another hiking trio. The father, Yusuf, is a wheat farmer who grew up running all over these very hills, the son Ali works in Izmir, and the daughter-in-law Esma is a nurse. They invited us to tag along. As we ascended, the air became thinner, and we came across giant fields of rhododendron. Back home, rhododendrons are nice but hardly breathtaking. But this was spectacular. With the roiling mists, the whitewater cascading over boulders, and the saturated colors of the wildflowers upon the green meadows, the setting was like something from Akiro Kurosawa's movie "Dreams."

We spread out into a single file, with Yusuf leading. After he asked us our ages and told us he was 65 years old, he seemed to pick up the pace in demonstration of his strength. Jim was next, then me, and Esma and Ali brought up the rear. Children of any age seem to regress when they are with their parents, and they not infrequently asked "Baba, daha ne kadar?", or "Dad, are we there yet?"

Although we were conserving our words due the exertion and thin air, as the landscape became more and more beautiful, we all broke out in exclamations of admiration, saying "çok güzel!" This sounds a lot like "choke gazelle," and soon Jim and I were speculating on how many gazelles must suffer by the end of the day.

After about two hours we reached the lake. It was not frozen, but there are patches of snow here and there. With the mist, we could not see more than 10 meters from the shore, so its lakeness was taken on faith.

The descent was much easier, and we ended the day with an open-buffet feast at the Yesil Vadi Restaurant.