There are many instances where taking the sustainable route has left me with in a position where I am confronted with the complex beauty of life and the unwavering kindness of strangers.
I. I’m standing on the side of the road with a friend I met 3 months ago, sticking our thumbs out together towards the ongoing traffic. We are a 5 hour bus and 28 hour train into our journey to the east of Turkey. I guess we could have gotten a flight, but the thought of carbon emissions and resource consumption sends shivers down my spine. So here we are, wagging our thumbs and smiling as broad as we can, hoping anyone can pick us up in this 3 degree ice cold weather. I can feel the wet snow seeping into my socks and the hood of my jacket is drenched. I’m slowly losing my sanity as every car drives past without even a glance in our direction. I curse the world under my breath as we set off on another 1 hour walk to find a better spot to hitchhike. Less than 10 minutes into our migration journey, we hear a yell from the intersection ahead of us. Some guy is waving a clipboard at us and standing next to a huge transportation lorry.
‘What are you guys doing? Aren’t you cold?’, he called out in Turkish.
‘We are trying to get to Tunceli!’, we yelled back.
As he drew closer, the swagger of his hips and the glint in his eye told me that this was gonna be the ride of a lifetime.
‘I’m going there to deliver this bread’, he said, gesturing to his lorry, ‘Come with me, I will take you where you need to go’, and with a two shakes of a hand and a swift climbing the stairs leading up to the door, the three of us squeezed into the front of his truck. I breathed a deep sigh of relief and thanked him heartfully as he offered us a cigarette and cracked open the window for us. We spoke about his job and his lovers and his dreams as we shared this small space for 2 hours. My belly hurt from laughing hard and my chest hurt from all the cigarettes he so generously forced on us. At one point in the journey, he turned to us and asked, ’Do you like music?’.
‘Yes we do!’, we chorused back.
An ambient joyful Kurdish song begins to play (which is one of my favourite songs today) and the driver reaches for some toilet paper most likely to blow his nose. The beat drops and his fist raises in the air, swinging the toilet paper in circles above his head, cheering along to the song.
This is a story of how a simple decision of choosing not to get a flight turned into a memorable experience abroad and shows the humanistic side of sustainability.
