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The Dordogne River flows through some of the finest country of southern France. Truffles, cep mushrooms and wild pigs occur in the woods, while huge catfish and pike lurk in the slow eddies of the river. Photo courtesy of Flickr user davidmartinpro.

Ernest Hemingway popularized the cosmopolitan lifestyle of idleness, coffee shops and people-watching on the noisy boulevards of Paris. The author wrote some decent books in the process, but I still think Hemingway missed out every day that he wasn’t walking or cycling through the forested hills of the Périgord, the large agrarian region just east of Bordeaux and north of Spain and famed for its wild truffles, cottage fois gras industry and pre-modern cave art. There is a cafe here in the village of Saint Julien de Lampon, where we have a house for a week, and we can sit there if we like, watching the church tower and the villagers coming and going from the butcher shop, but I’ve got better ideas for the next six weeks that I’ll be traveling here, like these:

Search the shallows for pike. They’re as big as logs, mean as crocs and hungry as bears: northern pike. These spectacular predators eat ducks and rodents and will attack other fish their own size or greater, and they live in the Dordogne River. In his college days, my dad spent some time canoeing in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, where he and the boys went skinny dipping in pike-populated waters and jokingly called it trolling. Here, I’m keeping my shorts on when I go swimming. Probably the best way to see a pike is to peer off bridges into the slow current or stalk along the bank while watching the sloughs and backwaters for what seem to be submerged logs drifting upstream. I’ve already seen several near the village. Climbing out on horizontally leaning tree trucks and looking straight down on a slow pool for 30 minutes is a good method—and when you see one of these monsters drift past in the Dordogne, you can be sure that you’ve met the king. Or maybe you haven’t—because we just read in the papers that a local angler caught a 100-pound wels catfish recently, and the wels isn’t just a duck-eater; supposedly, it has swallowed children.

Ride a bicycle. They’ll hit you with extra luggage fees at the airport for daring to bring a bike overseas (and if you’re especially lucky, like me, they’ll leave it in London overnight), but once you’re rolling on the solid ground of France, a bicycle will set you free. A vast network of small, smaller and smallest roadways crisscrosses the nation. Many are paved paths hardly wide enough for a Fiat that lead through the woods and past forgotten farm houses and crumbling chateaus, along rivers and up mountainsides. Forget your map and just keep rolling–and if the road turns to dirt, don’t stop. It may even disintegrate into a rutted wagon trail or footpath, but almost without fail, just when you thought maybe you were in fact lost, the trail will dump you out again onto the highway. In this scheme of exploration, there is rarely backtracking or getting truly lost. Instead, one becomes familiar with a rare but thrilling déjà vu sensation—after a hungry day of pedaling in circles on unmapped roads—of winding up by accident right back again where you started.

Walk into a Cave. People have been doing it for millennia here, and in many nearby grottoes the paintings of pre-modern people remain on the walls. My nephew, who is seven, can paint better than they did, but to see bison, mammoths and bears scrawled by human hands 150 centuries ago is an awesome reminder of the reality of a history most of us only know from textbooks. The Lascaux, Pech Merle and Cougnac caves are three of the most famous. Lascaux, closed to the public, is only viewable via a reproduction of the original art, while at Pech Merle, you can see the real thing—plus animal bones and human footprints.

Tour the farmers markets. French chefs have taken crocks of credit over the years for wowing diners with their classic sauces, bricks of pate, rustic soups, wild game and pastries—but let’s face it: It’s the open air farmers markets where French food really comes from. Even the tiniest villages here host weekly assemblies of gritty-fingered peasants selling their cherries, beets, potatoes, walnuts, berries and greens. In Saint Julien there is a regular paella vendor, and makers of cheese, sausage, fois gras and wine do business here, too. Yeah, you could eat yourself ill at any local restaurant, where roughage from the garden and stewed potatoes soak in butter and duck fat. I say forget dining out, because no meal here is more gratifying than one cooked at home from a canvas sack of market goodies and eaten on the lawn until the sun sets at 10. The Saint Julien market arrives each Thursday. Souillac’s market is Friday. Sarlat, the nearest big town, has its market on Saturdays and Wednesdays. In, Gourdon, a medieval town on a hilltop, market days are Saturday and Tuesday.

American tourists negotiate for fois gras---or fatty duck liver---at the Saint Julien farmers market. Photo by Alastair Bland.

Buy bulk wine in a plastic jug. Fine restaurants in America are now serving wine on tap for $4 a taste, but in reasonable France, they’ve been selling table wine in bulk for ages. In the rear shadows of many wine  shops (behind all the labeled commercial bottles), you’ll find a spigot coming off a barrel of some local plonk, offering perfectly decent if cheap wine by the pint, liter or gallon. Fill your jug, screw on the cap and go find a bench along the bike path or a grassy knoll above the river.

Hunt the cep. Europe’s favorite wild mushroom floats in three sing-song syllables off the tongues of Italians, but in France, the porcini is just the cep. No matter. This renowned mushroom is the same across all Old World borders—fat pig-like stumps with white stems and tawny brown caps that bulge from the leaf litter beneath chestnut trees. That blue and beaten-up Renault parked at the edge of the forest? That’s probably a cep hunter’s. Follow quietly, track him down and discover his secret patches. Better not collect your own unless you really know your shrooms, but there’s no harm in taking a walk in the woods—though you’re wasting your time if you look up. Other fungi hunting opportunities: Its season is the winter, and if you come here in December, remember that the Périgord black truffle grows among hazelnuts and oaks. You’ll need a good dog to sniff them out, although some walkers watch for vertical columns of tiny flies just above the ground—often a clue that a cluster of the world’s most pungent mushroom is hiding below. Warning: Truffle patches are often on private property, and truffle hunter landlords may shoot trespassers.

Go to Spain. The cheese is just as smelly. The rustic country cuisine is by and large the same. The people, like their French neighbors, live by espresso and wine. But the crowds are less and cost of living about half. The mountainous border along the Pyrenees is just 200 miles south of here, and three days ago as my plane landed in Toulouse, I caught sight of these peaks, still buried in snow in this exceptionally late-blooming spring. Even Hemingway ditched his beloved France for Spain. Soon, so will I.

However much one loves France, it may be impossible to resist visiting the Pyrenees---and Spain beyond. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Laurent Jegou.

Meadows, lakes, snow and granite are the enduring elements of California's John Muir Trail, which leads through 211 miles of some of the world's most beautiful alpine wilderness. Photo courtesy of Flickr user peretzp

After cycling for weeks, now I’m thinking about walking. Foot travel has been the way of the wayfarer since men and women were still dragging their knuckles. The fact that people still opt to walk today, in the age of the wheel and the combustion engine, tells us there is something virtuous and irresistible in the plodding of one foot forward after the other. And without question, walking works. Using their legs and feet, many people have moved thousands of miles overland, and in many places the trails they wore in the earth are used by modern recreational trekkers who follow in the footsteps of their forebears. Following are five of the world’s great walks—with more to come next week.

Appalachian Trail. Leading 2,181 miles through 14 states and the historic forests and backwoods shanties of Appalachia, the Appalachian Trail was conceived in 1921, and by 1937 it was ready for walking. Today, 4 million people walk parts of the trail every year. Those attempting a through-hike number in the thousands, and only one in four finish. From Maine’s Mount Katahdin to Georgia’s Springer Mountain, the whole package takes as long as six months as hikers accumulate a total elevation gain equal to climbing Mount Everest 16 times.

John Muir Trail. This path through the high Sierra Nevada of California immortalizes the landscape that naturalist John Muir worshiped. And at just 211 miles long through beautiful alpine country, it’s both epic and doable. From the south, the JMT begins at the lower 48 states’ highest peak, Mount Whitney; crosses mountain passes more than 13,000 feet in elevation; traverses some of the world’s most beautiful high altitude wilderness; never touches a road and finally lands hikers in one of the world’s most esteemed natural places, Yosemite Valley. The trail generally requires three weeks from start to finish. If you happen to have a little extra time on either side, you could walk from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail, of which the JMT is just a small part.

Coast to Coast Walk. A walk that doesn’t demand superb physical condition or half a year to complete, this 220-mile path crosses Northern England and leads through the evergreen verdure of the Lake District, Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors National Parks, from the Irish Sea to the east coast of England. Writer and walking enthusiast Alfred Wainswright devised the trail and suggested that hikers touch their toes in the Irish Sea at St. Bees before starting and step right into Robin Hood’s Bay after 10 or 20 days of trudging. Or else it doesn’t count.

Great Wall of China. No, you can’t really see it from space. That was a myth more or less debunked in the past decade or so by astronauts. However, while the Great Wall of China no longer plays a role in international affairs, it makes one heck of a walking platform. Unlike the heavily trammeled Camino (see below) or Appalachian Trails, the Great Wall demands ingenuity, craftiness and durability in anyone who attempts to plod the length of it, which is broken, crumbled or gone in many sections. Australian Mark Scholinz walked the wall in 2007. He encountered frozen steppe country, wolf tracks, endless hospitality and a whole lot of rice and tea.

Camino de Santiago. Once a path of the pious, this European network of trails converges toward its terminus as it leads many thousands of walkers each year to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. Though founded by deeply religious pilgrims more than a thousand years ago, “the Camino” today is simply a recreational venture for most making the pilgrimage. It is also hardly an adventure anymore, as every step of the way has been walked a million times before, with many miles of pathway paralleling freeways and cutting through suburbs and farmland. One highlight of the trail is certainly the Cruz de Ferra, a 25-foot-tall cross which pilgrims have built by depositing knickknacks and trinkets and stones. Today, the rockpile is is almost 20 feet high, a sacred midden built over centuries. It’s truly a wonder just to touch it.

The Cruz de Ferra, surrounded by an ancient mound of stones left by pilgrims, is one of the marvels to be found along the Camino de Santiago. Photo by Alastair Bland

Reading About Walking:

Don’t feel like walking the walk? The armchair is one of the comfiest vehicles of travel we have. You’ll need a good book, and here are several classics of adventure travel.

The Snow Leopard. In this sober account, we find author Peter Matthiessen to be a man of Buddhism, western science, literature and a love of big cats. In 1972, when biologist George Schaller invited him on a 200-mile trek into the Himalaya to track the rare blue sheep, Matthiessen, now in his mid-80s, accepted, unable to resist the opportunity to see a snow leopard. It was the fall, and their trip led into one of the most mysterious, dangerous yet peaceful regions of the world under blue skies and a warm sun. By November, frostbite and blizzards were ever-present dangers. The two Americans, accompanied by Sherpas and porters, do eventually see the blue sheep, while all along the high and rocky trails lurk the haunting signs of the snow leopard.

Danziger’s Travels. English author Nick Danziger points out early in this book that he was not interested in walking a record distance or cycling across a continent when he took up the old trade route of the Asia-to-Europe silk traders. Rather, he utilized whatever local means of travel were available in China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey—and often he was walking. Danziger’s travels lasted 18 months, for part of which time he went disguised as a Muslim. The book is an adventure account almost as simple as the travel genre gets, but few are better.

The Places in Between. Journalist Rory Stewart walked for 16 months through Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal in 2000 and 2001. Then, in the virulent months following the September 11 attacks, he found himself facing Afghanistan. The month he spent walking across it would produce, eventually, one of the best modern travel books I’ve found. Stewart survived on the food and shelter of kind strangers, but many Afghans, hardened by war and the desert, were downright vicious. Stewart was determined to walk, and he firmly refused rides across known danger zones. For part of the way, a trio of Afghan soldiers escorted him. But it’s the many miles he walked alone (and with a great shaggy dog adopted along the way) that make readers marvel, at times, that Stewart lived to write about the trip.

A Walk in the Woods. He’s pudgy. He’s brainy. He has a strange penchant for stupid knickknacks and trivia from his Americana Midwest childhood. And for some reason, late in the 1990s, he decided to walk partway across America. In the end, comic Bill Bryson only completed, in bits and pieces, 800-some miles of the Appalachian Trail, but it was enough to provide him with the fodder he needed to write one of the funniest travel books of our time.

Graham Mackintosh and his burro Bonny arrive in Cabo San Lucas while trekking in the early 1980s, when the resort destination was still a quiet village.

In 1979, a 28-year-old Englishman named Graham Mackintosh visited America. He rolled west to California and, on a whim, slipped south across the border. He was stunned by what he saw, a wild land of sun, sand and sea that would dramatically change his life: Baja California. Mackintosh spent a month here with just a backpack and, to start, $150. He hitchhiked and walked and went as far south as Cabo San Lucas. Mexican locals astounded him with their hospitality while the bewildering, undeveloped landscape captured his imagination like no place had before.

“What’s over those mountains, I would ask [the locals],” Mackintosh later wrote in a travel memoir Into a Desert Place. “’Nothing,’ was the usual reply.”

Many adventurers have received this answer to the same question—but adventurers know better. Mackintosh returned home. He took up a teaching job, spent evenings at the pub, had a few romantic flurries—but he couldn’t forget Baja and those distant mountains. At last, he chucked everything, abandoning the life path most of us follow to go staggering after a dream. He went back to Baja. He took a backpack, a fishing rod, a tent, a few other necessities and even a clever contraption for turning seawater fresh—and he began to walk. Mackintosh would eventually trace by foot the entire peninsula’s coastline—3,000 miles—while falling entirely in love with the land, the abutting sea and the region’s people.

Today, in many a gringo’s vacation home on a beach in Baja California, Mackintosh’s book Into a Desert Place resides on the shelf. It has become something of a cult classic in the expat community. Even in the Mexican community, Mackintosh is legendary. In remote and rustic fishing camps along the shoreline, a few of the older fishermen still remember a red-haired Englishman who tramped through 30 years ago, asking for water from the well, kindly declining their invitations to stay the night, and finally disappearing around the next point.

A young Mackintosh gabs with commercial fishermen in one of the many camps along the Baja shore.

Today Mackintosh lives in San Diego and has written four books about his travels through the peninsula. He returns to Baja regularly to camp wild and enjoy the same scenery and stars that people centuries before us did. Like thousands of travelers, he still loves Baja California like no other place, even though parts of it have changed dramatically over the past three decades. I talked with Mackintosh earlier this week about Baja then and Baja today.

“I remember Cabo in 1979,” he says. “It was a village, and I just camped on the beach. I don’t think you could do that today.”

Cabo San Lucas, at the very southern end of the peninsula, has exploded into a hive of glitzy malls, unsightly resorts, cocktail bars and egregious golf courses. Many travelers build so-called adventures around places like Cabo, but Mackintosh no longer visits Baja’s cape.

“It’s a tragedy,” he says. “It’s not the real Baja that I fell in love with. I don’t go to Baja to go shopping or stay at hotels. There are adventures to be had everywhere and most involve seeing no one.”

He also avoids similar sprawl that has spread like infections at several hotspots along the Sea of Cortez coast, including the beaches south of La Paz, around the town of Loreto 150 miles north and near the northern gulf town of San Felipe.

“But you can still get lost out there,” Macktintosh says.

One of the author’s more recent adventures was the month he spent on Isla Angel de la Guarda, Guardian Angel Island. With 50 gallons of water, he took a boat ride to the island, made a base camp and considered himself blissfully marooned. At times, Mackintosh speculates, he was the only person on the 42-by-10-mile slab of rock, and for three full weeks he saw not a soul. But he did, he says, spend a week with company—poachers who kept busy fishing and stocking huge ice boxes with lobster, sea turtles, all manner of fishes and various bottom dwelling invertebrates destined for Asian markets.

“These guys are an ecological disaster but the nicest people,” Mackintosh says. He camped with the illegal fishermen and even witnessed suspicious midnight exchanges between them and other people who motored their skiffs to the beach and “rattled and banged their luggage around for a while before leaving.” Questions aren’t to be asked about such activity in Baja, where drug trafficking is a profession for many, and Mackintosh looked the other way. He describes his time on the island in his most recent book Marooned With Very Little Beer.

In 1997, shortage of beer was not a problem for Mackintosh. He received a sponsorship from the Tecate beer company and, with a burro named Misión for a companion and beer bearer, he walked the spine of the peninsula, visiting many of Baja’s old Spanish mission churches along the way. The mountains of Baja are a different sort of experience than the coast. The wanderer finds remote ranches and cowboys in hats and chaps instead of crusty fish camps and shirtless fishermen in sandals. Water remains the greatest scarcity but is easily had at any inhabited site. Usually it’s drawn from wells and is clear as Lake Tahoe and as safe to drink as the cleanest tap water.

Baja’s missions can be spiritual experiences, whether one is pious or not. Several are located in stunning oasis canyons of date palms, mangoes, avocados and figs, and the old buildings themselves are beautiful sanctuaries, cool and silent inside while the blazing sun scorches the country just beyond the immediate jungle. Mackintosh’s mission-to-mission walk would be the focus of his second book, Journey With a Baja Burro.

Between 2003 and 2005, I developed my own relationship with Baja. I walked wilderness coastlines, hitchhiked along the dirt roads, lived largely off of speared fish and, in many places, certainly walked in Mackintosh’s footsteps. Some people even asked if I was him. I spent 10 months in all backpacking in Baja California and was moved by the same beauty, hospitality and solitude that so affected Mackintosh 20 years prior. As he recalls that first visit in 1979, Mackintosh could just as well be narrating the impressions of a thousand other hikers, kayakers and cyclists who have been spellbound by wild Baja.

“I got all these great rides with interesting people, whether in cars or boats or airplanes, and people invited me out fishing and we had lobster feasts on the beach and I could camp anywhere under these amazing stars, and I thought, ‘This is paradise,’” he tells me. “When I was alone in the desert it was like a religious experience. It wasn’t scary at all and was so much better than what I was going back home to. I felt so free, like I could just grab a donkey and go walking into the sunset and enjoy this place as it was supposed to be.”

And thankfully, beyond the globalized tourist traps, he still can. We all can.

Figs like this one, so ripe it's bursting, dangle by the millions along the roadsides near Izmir and Aydin.

Izmir is to the fig what Bordeaux is to wine. The fruit didn’t originate here, but the region produces more and probably better figs than almost anywhere else. Those large, chewy, sugar-encrusted, dried Turkish figs that you find at some natural foods stores were likely grown in the prosperous valleys near Izmir. So renowned were this region’s figs in America even 130 years ago that California entrepreneurs of the time, keen on becoming fig farmers, imported wood cuttings of Turkey’s best fig trees from the southwest Smyrna region, especially the Sari Lop variety. They planted the trees by the thousands in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys. It took several years of failed crops for farmers to discover that a particular species of pollinating wasp was also needed for the figs to ripen, and so the U.S. Department of Agriculture isolated, imported and released the Eurasian bug in California. That did the trick, and at last, at the turn of the 20th century, the first bumper crops of California Sari Lop figs arrived. In honor of its old and its new homelands, the variety was renamed the Calimyrna. The San Joaquin Valley would become the nucleus of New World fig production.

Especially in the Menderes River drainage near the city of Aydın, fig trees cover almost every fold of earth deep into mountain ravines and across the valley floor. In warehouses and empty shop fronts, four-foot-deep heaps of dried figs spill out of doorways, waiting to be exported to the world, and fresh figs are sold along roadways and carefully packed and sent around the nation. Those who enjoy roadside fig hunting may be in paradise here, though the sport should be pursued with respect and restraint. Orchards are off limits, of course, while any trees dropping figs to the pavement are fair game for plundering, in my mind.

A fruit vendor by the highway near Izmir offers olives, grapes, pomegranates and figs.

And though more figs grow here than most other places, Turkey produces more of almost every other crop as well. Its apple harvest, for instance, was more than 20 times greater than its fig harvest in 2008—the former weighing 2.5 million tons over the fig’s national total of 205,000 tons—and the fact remains that almost no one, anywhere, eats figs.

Entering the region from the northeast, the first thing that caught my eye was not the fig trees but the beautiful Bozdag Mountains. They loomed on the horizon, just south of the Gediz River valley. The Bozdags stand as high as two miles above sea level—and they climb to these heights from sea level, or just about, making for the sharpest of geographic relief and thrilling scenery. As I drew near, I saw deep, shadowy ravines and canyons slicing into the north-facing flank of the mountains, and I could see the orchards petering out on the slopes and giving way to the pines and granite of altitude. When I came to a road sign pointing into the mountains to a town called Bozdag, I bagged some figs, bought some almonds and broke for it.

Spirits are sky-high in the mountain town of Bozdag, where the only place to go is down.

The valley dropped below me, and thunderheads hanging over the Gediz valley turned pink and blue as the sun went down. On the mountainside there was no flat ground to camp on, and I raced onward for the top, turning my blinking lights on as darkness fell. The stars were out when I finally reached level ground, and I pulled up by a fruit shack to ask the owner if I could camp in his adjacent picnic patch. He was a bit flustered by my sudden appearance, but he shrugged and said yes. “Here, please, 5 lira,” I said, handing over a bill. He looked puzzled but accepted without taking insult, and I made my camp as the night’s chill set in. For the next five days, I bounced back and forth between the parallel east-west Aydin and Bozdag mountain ranges, dropping each morning into the green lowlands and spending the afternoons on long, laborious, out-of-saddle climbs back into the summits. Climbing by bicycle into the peaks of wild and strange mountains is one of the greatest joys I know—though I’ve met touring cyclists who avoid hills and highlands like sailors might a notoriously nasty shoal. They nervously study their maps and hug the coastlines and follow the main roads and, I suppose, never know what thrills they’re missing.

But touring this region wasn’t all fun and games, high roads and mountain air, because I was a tourist, and I had important work to do. Precisely, I had to go visit Ephesus, renowned as one of the most stunning ruined cities of the Roman era. But when I got there, I reeled backward from the wildest circus of mayhem, gridlock and crowds I’d seen since rush hour at Beşiktaş. I hadn’t met a single tourist in days, and in the parking lot of Ephesus were least a hundred full-sized buses, fleets of taxis, and several thousand people. What appetite I ever had for Roman amphitheatres and pillars of fluted marble evaporated in an instant. I sat on a bench in the shade for 30 minutes, dazed by the chaos, tormented by indecision, and unsure whether to bounce back into the mountains or do my duty and enter this ancient place. Finally, I stood. “Our history blogger will never forgive me,” I muttered, but there were no regrets as I rolled out the exit. A surprise northward tailwind picked me up from behind, and my spirits exploded like the full billowing sail of a racing catamaran. Giddy and glad, I sprinted north, and by dusk I was hauling my way uphill for my last beautiful night in the Bozdag Mountains.

Why do I love mountains? Because they’re there. Wait—no. That’s a weak answer. Here’s why: Mountains transform worlds. One may travel thousands of miles horizontally in any direction and see little or no change in the landscape; pedal across Siberia, and it remains Siberia from Finland to Kamchatka. But travel just 4,000 feet vertically, and the world around you rapidly transforms. Climate zones come, and they go. The tree fruits vanish as chestnuts and pines appear, and thrilling views open across the widening vista. Boredom, which rules the flatlands of sea level, dissolves, and while blubbery cows may graze listlessly in the hot, dreadful valleys, in the cool air of the summits and passes are sleek wild horses, bears and wolves. There are even parts in southern Turkey where an afternoon’s ride can take you from muggy, subtropical banana groves into a landscape resembling tundra. How incredible is that? In the Bozdag and Aydin ranges, so thrilling was the act of climbing that most evenings I was still pedaling well after dark by the light of my headlamp. I just never wanted to quit.

And the people! They were as collectively warm and generous as any I’d met. One morning in the Aydins, a huge Kangal stud leaped off a bank, bent on my destruction and snarling savagely in my path. A young man, attracted by the ruckus, hurried up a dirt driveway. “Mustafa!” he scolded, which turned the dog friendly. The family had me in for tea, then showed me through their two-acre farm. They gave me a melon, a pile of sweet cherry tomatoes and, of all the kindly but baffling gifts to offer a cyclist on a hot day, four pounds of fresh-cut broccoli. I could think of only one thing to say: “Petrol!” Onward, calls for tea followed me through the region. If I ever complained before about tea invitations, can I take it back? The unstoppable torrent of kindliness, friendly honks and open smiles was phenomenal, and many exchanges with locals sent me away giddy and rapturous—and always, every afternoon, looking for the nearest road up.

The author runs on empty as he pushes his bike over rough terrain in the Murat Mountains.

There’s something I must address: On this so-called “adventure,” I’m carrying a laptop computer. I’m not particularly proud of this fact. I keep the thing hidden deep in my rear left pannier, and I don’t usually turn it on in camp. But, hey, many travelers are carrying electronics now. Wi-fi zones have become ubiquitous—if not always safe—in virtually every tourist-savvy spot in Turkey, and even in the villages, the technology is arriving as locals get rigged up for the Internet age.

So, how does the presence of this thing, which weighs not even three pounds, affect the essence of adventure? Hardly at all. In fact, it adds an element of danger to just the mildest rain squalls. Moreover, the computer doesn’t have Internet-anywhere capability, which means, in spite of Google’s aerial Earth-view programs, I can still enjoy the most thrilling and sacred turn that a traveler may meet: getting lost. I’ll always take joy in reading paper topographic maps, and if I were with a partner who pulled out an iPhone to find directions back to the main road, I think I might smash it with a bat, like Quint did in that scene from Jaws. Anyway, one thing is certain: The era when cyclists and backpackers carried typewriters is over.

It’s morning, and I moo like a cow and squeeze at a pair of invisible teats to indicate to a man in the road that I want fresh milk from a village cow. The man, named Adem, is dressed something like an El Paso caballero, with a leather hat and a vest, and his handlebar mustache bounces gladly as he tells me that fresh milk is available. He walks me into the adjacent village, a quiet little place of 200 people called Orencik. At the café, the men are gathering for another day on the stoop. Adem introduces me, and the men begin chattering about “the American.” Adem is a superb host, energetic and selfless, and he bounds away to find me some milk. In just a moment he returns to report that he’s found a household with a ripe heifer and that milking is underway. “Super! How much for a pint?” I ask. The old man beside me wearing a fiery orange head-wrap raises his cane, jesting that he’ll brain me before I leave a dime here. In a moment, a lady delivers a pail of steaming hot, boiled milk. Adem serves it into glasses and we drink. When the milk runs out, we have tea, and when that runs dry, we talk.

Adem, at left, fills a bottle with fresh milk for the author in the town of Orencik.

Eventually, our conversation peters out, and silence resumes her reign. Though the traveler in me itches to move, the anthropologist in me decides this is an invaluable opportunity for some deep cultural immersion. And so I sit with the men, all of us still as tombstones. The water in the mosque fountain trickles across the street. The wind brushes the dry leaves. The men rattle their prayer beads. An hour passes, and the anthropologist in me feels a sudden urge to go for a bike ride. I stand, shake hands all around, hold the warm bottle of milk to my heart, offer a bow of gratitude and bid farewell to the good little village of Orencik.

I continue northward, on a meandering route that I guess will take me to Istanbul in two weeks. The region consists of scrubby halfhearted hills. I much prefer real mountains, with high windy passes that get cold at night and summits that scrape the sky. Nonetheless, I manage to contrive a good adventure, getting lost and hungry for two days in the Murat Mountains. It takes some concerted effort. With just 30 almonds and some raki to my name, I leave the asphalt and head into the higher peaks. Going hungry, you understand, is a basic requisite of real adventure. The relevant works of Nansen, Nordhoff and Hall and Orwell teach us this. Most times in our opulent modern world, we don’t have the guts to go hungry—or if we do, some nice melon vendor by the roadside calls us us over and carves us up a six-pound fruit packed with calories (and won’t even take any money), spoiling the adventure. But not today. I’m out of almonds by late afternoon, and the gravel roads lead past nothing but a few cabbage patches and barren plum orchards – and figs don’t live at this elevation. I grow weak and must walk on the steeper grades. I resort to eating rose hips. For dinner I have several stolen wormy crab apples and a glass full of raki. I type the day’s travails into my laptop. Times are hard. Life is good.

Early in the morning,  I enter a village called Ovacik. I’m ravenous, and I approach a man in the street. “Please, cheese to buy? Money money?” I sound like an idiot, but he leads me through the streets of dirt, stones and rubble to his home. As we pass a side alley, he beckons me to stay in the rear as he picks up a large heavy stick. A black dog guarding a doorway lowers its snout and curls its lip. The man faces off with the mongrel like a gladiator and with a flick of his head motions me to hurry past. If only I had brought my spear! We’d be a formidable duo. He backs away and tosses the weapon, and we carry on.

He is Ahmed and his wife is Sultan. I foolishly plod inside their tidy home wearing my shoes—a breach of Turkish custom—and they have a minor panic attack as I tiptoe back and remove them on the doorstep. I really just want to hand over five bucks and leave with a brick of cheese, but their Turkish instincts kick in and they treat me to a two-hour breakfast. Making conversation is laborious, and my Lonely Planet dictionary isn’t helping. It contains translations for “babysitter,” “beach volleyball,” “bribe” and “reiki” but not for practical applications like “elevation,” “mountain pass” and “bear” (which is ayi). I have to roar and claw at the air to ask if the animals live in the Murat Mountains. Ahmed says, “Yok,” meaning “none,” though I swear I saw scat the night before. Finally, Sultan packs me a goody bag with tomatoes, peppers so hot I can’t even touch them and homemade cow cheese. I timidly suggest paying for it and she tilts her head back sharply with a quick tsk—body language for “not a chance.”

The food comes in handy, for it’s another long day of dirt roads and rose hips. Near dusk, I hit asphalt and zip downhill toward the city of Gediz, sparkling in the valley below. I find a loaded roadside peach tree, take several and then ask a goatherd if I can camp in the hills. He leans forward on his staff and looks outward, surveying the landscape. He sweeps one arm across the view, palm facing up, and smiles. “Anywhere you like.”

And under an oak tree I spread out my tarp and kick off my shoes. I have five juicy peaches and a hunk of cheese. I also have a splash left of raki—plus six hours of battery time on my laptop. Life is good.