The Kindness of Strangers

After a week in in the Aladağ and facing a 30+km walk out down an increasingly hot and dreary river valley, I was thinking to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice if the walk could end with this view."

Two minutes later, thanks to the kindness of İbrahim and Ali and their rented pick up, it did

WilliamC said:

After a week in in the Aladağ and facing a 30+km walk out down an increasingly hot and dreary river valley, I was thinking to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice if the walk could end with this view."

Two minutes later, thanks to the kindness of İbrahim and Ali and their rented pick up, it did

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Nice. Were you hitching?

Cranston said:

Were you hitching?

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No, just walking down the road. Out in the countryside, the majority of vehicles will stop and offer a lift, if they have space. The trouble with this walk out is that there are very few vehicles and the few that there are will be leaving in the evening and no good if you want to make the last (4pm) bus at the end. We considered hitching (Bozena had slipped, landed on her hand and sprained her wrist, so we didn't want to camp another night on the walk out) but didn't want to put pressure on anyone to stop given the times we're living through.
We were lucky that Ali and İbrahim had driven up at 3am to set up some bee hives and were returning early as İbrahim had to work in the afternoon. It turned out that he was a minibus driver and after tea at his house we ended up as passengers on his minibus to Adana.

WilliamC said:

No, just walking down the road. Out in the countryside, the majority of vehicles will stop and offer a lift, if they have space. The trouble with this walk out is that there are very few vehicles and the few that there are will be leaving in the evening and no good if you want to make the last (4pm) us at the end. We considered hitching (Bozena had slipped, landed on her hand and sprained her wrist, so we didn't want to camp another night on the walk out) but didn't want to put pressure on anyone to stop given the times we're living through.
We were lucky that Ali and İbrahim had driven up at 3am to set up some bee hives and were returning early as İbrahim had to work in the afternoon. It turned out that he was a minibus driver and after tea at his house we ended up as passengers on his minibus to Adana.

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Excellent.
Not about the injury. Hope it's on the mend.
Sounds like you really were lucky with Ali and Ibrahim.

Cranston said:

.
Not about the injury. Hope it's on the mend.

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Much better three days later, fortunately. She can now help with the housework

Thanks to Ali in Boğazcık, who, on seeing us failing to fill up from the two public water fountains (disconnected due to Covid), took us into his garden to fill up our bottles, then have us two enormous apples to help us on our way.
And to the anonymous beekeeper who paused his disrobing from his beekeeping suit to hand us both a handful of walnuts.

It's Random Act of Kindness day today apparently, do something nice and make a difference to someone's day

I've just taken Carol a coffee in bed so I'm off to a good start already

I'll make sure I hold the manhole lid whilst Sue clears the backlog cheers for the heads up.,that should get me some browny points

I gave up the cold lamb to my hubby for his lunch ....

A nice man, taller than me, picked an item off the supermarket shelves that I couldn't reach. He probably didn't know it was "Random Act of Kindness day" but he's earned some good karma anyways

PS. and the car passed it's MOT too .
I'm doing OK today (so far).

.

Shewie said:

It's Random Act of Kindness day today apparently, do something nice and make a difference to someone's day

I've just taken Carol a coffee in bed so I'm off to a good start already

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I made my son a coffee this morning.. ..









Yesterday he shaved his head and raised £300 for a charity called "Young Minds" and stayed up for 24 hours solid for his challenge...
It has shocked me how much he looks like me with a bald head but I'm proud that he actually followed thru with it...

Diddi said:

I made my son a coffee this morning.. ..









Yesterday he shaved his head and raised £300 for a charity called "Young Minds" and stayed up for 24 hours solid for his challenge...
It has shocked me how much he looks like me with a bald head but I'm proud that he actually followed thru with it...

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#toplad

There's a straggling village village called Boğazcık between Kaş and Üçağız on the Lycian Way. On the way through there's a solitary house next to the road, poor-looking with exposed concrete and brickwork. In autumn 2019 and spring 2020, whenever she saw us coming down the road, the wizened old woman who lives there would hobble off to here cellar, bent double and moving with the aid of a walking stick, to emerge with apples or pears to thrust upon us.
We've passed through a few times since the summer and there's been no sign of her so we feared the worst. However, we were passing through again yesterday and were delighted to see her silhouetted form outside the house turn inside to return with a bucket of apples.
Something good in these troubled times.

I regularly get lifts when I hike to, or from, trail heads in France, Spain or Italy, almost always by locals, almost never by tourists (unless they are hikers themselves), and often by local woman. But there is one ride that stayed with me for all those years. It was the day after the tragic accident in Corsica on 10 June 2015, when 12 Belgian and French GR 20 hikers got hit by a rock avalanche (probably triggered by a lighting strike during a big thunderstorm) and only 5 survived. I had been a village closeby with a friend on the day of the accident, watching the rescue helicopters on the mountain from her garden, and following the radio news. The following morning, I hiked along a secondary roads to re-join the GR 20.

When I got to the trail head, it turned out that the entire area had been closed down by the rangers because of the accident. I turned around and soon after a taxi slowed down alongside me and the driver asked me to get into the car. I thanked him and replied that I was happy walking. He clarified that his offer was not as taxi but for a lift, a chat and a coffee in the next village. I couldn’t say no to such a friendly gesture. I think this was the only “free taxi ride” I was ever offered. With hindsight, I wondered if the collective shock about the accident (the worst ever on the GR20) played a part. Everybody in the local area was quite affected by this tragedy (I don't recall that we spoke about it). But either way - I won’t forget him and his big warm smile...

I was looking at my picture archieve for the date and found a picture from the local news about the accident...

Brutal.

edh said:

Brutal.

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Yeah it was brutal. I had gone through that GR 20 section (Cascittoni or cirque de la solitude) in 2014 (with high awareness of the rockfall exposure) so I could picture it only too vividly...

We climbed the slab on the right in your picture as there were lots of people descending the chains and kicking rocks.

From Twitter

I am very fond of the White Lion in Patterdale, though I rarely get to visit. Ashley and Andy are great. Glad that someone did that for them.

Last Thursday.
With thanks to Fatih, who left off looking after his sheep to rummage deep into his motorbike saddlebags and present us with a huge bunch of grapes - very welcome after three hours of continuous ascent.

And thanks also to Harun, who walked with us for a while and showed us a shortcut on what was a long day.

Our thanks to Mürsel, retired electrician and current apiarist, and his wife for picking us up and giving us a lift for 3km*

And then running down the steep hillside to hand us a tub of honey from their bees, and a carrier bag full of home-made bread and tomatoes from their little garden. The 4kg or so that it added to our pack weight was worth it.


*which gave us time in hand to take - for the first time - the old trail above Çevrez Dere, rather than continuing on the yayla road.

With thanks to the anonymous man outside the mosque in Kapaklı, who told us that the water wasn't running, then a couple of minutes later stopped as he was passing us in his car and handed us a bottle of water each.

Thanks to the traffic police officers last Thursday who set up a checkpoint part of the way into our hour-and-a-half wait for the minibus, and unlocked the door to their shelter (behind our bags in the photo), so that we could sit and wait in comfort.

First time I have visited this thread, been enjoying reading about the various acts of kindness.

In answer to the question about beehives in the opening post, a strip of foam jammed in the narrow slot the the bees use to enter and exit the hive (we kept bees for a few years in Orkney, of all places).