pat loughery

Day 5: October 24, 2008

Today was another travel day. We had a long trip from Urgup in Cappadocia to Pamukkale on the western coast of Turkey.

We started out at 8am after breakfast in the hotel and perfectly timed our arrival outside to see a flyover by a dozen or so hot air balloons navigating the Goreme Valley. I would love to take a balloon trip through this area if I am able to return to this are of Cappadocia. For this trip I had to content myself with a few pictures in the morning clouds and fog.

We stopped in the city of Kona, known in Biblical times as Iconium, which we can read about in Acts 14. We picked up a tour guide who took us through a museum dedicated to Rumi, the poet and founder of the Islamic strain of mysticism, Sufism. It is the Sufis who give us the image of whirling dervishes who practice music and the whirling dance that is their worship or union with their god.

As a cultural experience, it was interesting. I have read a little bit of Rumi’s poetry and enjoyed it, and it was interesting to see a bit of his life. However, for my first time in any city that Paul had set foot, I would have much preferred to see more from my own faith tradition. I’m certain that this wasn’t the intended way for us to spend our time in Kona. I’m not sure if there simply isn’t anything to see related to Paul in modern day Kona or if our guide nudged us in a different direction, but this was a disappointment.

In what has become an ongoing theme for this trip, we took much longer than we estimated to go to our lunch place and got lost after we were done, cruising the same section of town a few times over before finally getting on the right track. It is, at this point, a mix of funny and truly frustrating. I hope that future BGU Trails into this area seek to hire drivers who are familiar with the area that we will be driving through. I understand that the drivers’ GPS unit was malfunctioning earlier in the trip, and perhaps it still was. I wanted to give them grace, but I also was having a harder time with what appears to be a minimal amount of preparation for the group’s transportation.

After a very difficult day yesterday with pain in my ankle, today was much better. There was still a substantial amount of pain, but ibuprofin and aspirin were taking the edge off and my biggest difficulty came in stretching my ankle, calf and hamstring so that our short trips to restrooms and to find snacks didn’t find me too stiff.

I had a nice chat with Ray Bakke at lunch, and with Shirley Akers and Robert Calvert during the bus ride.