After battling this injury, surgery, recovery lull in my travels and my life, I had begun to feel incredibly stagnant. I hustled hard on the blog during this period of recovery but I needed to get back out into the world as soon as possible. I headed off to Turkey to get things going again and walk the walk because over the last month I had begun to feel like a self-help blog, talking a lot of talk about mindset, creativity, opportunity, and priorities.
Why Turkey? I headed out to Istanbul to meet, Jackie, an old friend from University who now works in human development in a remote region of Afghanistan. Because of the security concerns in that region, her team lives in a secure compound and has to take a forced vacation every few months to make sure they don’t burn out and can live normally for a little bit to hit the reset button before heading back to work. Jackie chose Turkey for her getaway so I decided to spend a few weeks in Turkey, finishing off my recovery from hip surgery and exploring a new country without too much of an agenda.
The plan was to enjoy the sun, salt and beach vibes in the southern region of Turkey at a prime holiday destination called Oludeniz. Popular among British vacationers, we found our relaxation mode quickly on the beach strip.
The water was chillingly refreshing and the clarity was pristine. It was a beautiful spot to stay cool in the hot Turkish summer. We beached it, hit the local hookah cafe’s, island hopped and even took advantage of the one beach gym in Oludeniz. I tried my best to limit my walking as I eased back into adventure mode. I had to exercise my self-control on many occasions as Jackie went off for a few hikes while I let the legs recover and chilled at the beach. It’s a long game not a short game for these hips.
We bounced over via local bus to a hippie valley called Kabak and stayed for a couple of nights. The British tourists don’t make it out to this valley so it was mostly Turkish campers amidst the valley. We stayed in a tree-house hostel, which included our breakfast and dinner and was only a short walk down to the beach.
It capped off a great little vacation week in the south of Turkey. I decided not to blog about any locations here as I was recovering and not able to do many adventurous activities and also I was only there for a short time, too short to write a helpful guide. I would save that for the next location. There’s always other content to catch up with on the blog and when I do a blog about a location, I try and cover every aspect so I would save my energy for when I headed inland in Turkey.
It was a great first week for many reasons. The weather, company, recovery and new location were all beautiful!
These are some of the travel moments from the week, unprofessionally captured candidly on the phone.
