“But that’s the glory of foreign travel… Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”

Though we have seen (and slept in) shepherd’s huts before here in Turkey, the dozens of small stone huts all clumped together like villages really got my attention throughout this vast and desolate area. Though we have seen a few of these nomadic “villages” near the road during the past few days, today we were able to stop and sleep in one of these huts as they provide a wonderful wind shelter. After ditching our bikes we walked for half an hour up the nearest hill and what we saw on the other side amazed me – village after village of these makeshift stone huts scattered throughout the area. Though the (predominately) Kurdish people who inhabit this area are no longer full time nomads as they once were, they still travel for months on end with their sheep, a few donkeys, and their large sheep dogs for protection.

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