The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross Read Free Book Online

Ireland—why not?
    Of course, none of these was particularly dangerous. I have been to no war zones, and I have merely breezed through the wilderness. And yet I think such adventures might give pause to many travelers: Is this really something I can do with no special knowledge or training? I don’t want to make myself sound too special, but that question makes no sense. That’s because I already know the answer, which is “Well, I guess I’m going to find out, even if I don’t speak Kyrgyz and haven’t ridden a horse since that one time at summer camp when I was fourteen.”
    Perhaps this is a failure of imagination. If it’s boredom (with regular life) that impels me to travel widely and strangely, then boredom, I assume, will also hold sway over my wanderings. Not that my adventures themselves will be boring, but that whatever drama ensues will be muted: I will not die, or otherwise destroy my life, and any troubles I confront will be of the psychological and emotional variety, which I think—I hope—I can handle.
    This assumption has, on occasion, come very close to being disastrously wrong.
    One day in July 2006, I rode off on horseback into the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan, accompanied by Bakut, the middle-aged proprietor of the yurt camp south of Lake Issyk-Kul where I’d spent the previous night. That morning, there’d beenone minor hitch—Bakut had showed up two hours late with the horses, after getting lost in what he called “the badlands”—but I was optimistic. The horses were small and seemed easy to control.
    â€œPull left, go left,” Bakut showed me. “Pull right, go right. Pull back, stop. Go forward, say ‘Chut!’”
    â€œChut!” I said, and the horse stepped forward. I could handle this.
    The landscape we trotted through was stark and dry, with scrub grass and patches of lavender sprouting from the sandy earth. There were big snowcapped mountains we could barely see beyond the ridge we were slowly ascending. The sky was a hard, blank blue. I felt I could ride forever.
    About an hour in, however, I remembered I’d left my hat, my sunglasses, and my bottle of water back at the yurt, and although Bakut had assured me we’d find natural springs in the mountains, the fact that we were riding through an arid sandstone canyon suggested otherwise. I kept my mouth shut, though, and put my faith in Bakut. How could this gold-toothed seminomad lead us astray?
    Soon, he’d proved his knowledge: we reached a broad green plateau covered with tall grass for our horses to graze. While they ate, Bakut and I relaxed in the shade of some bushes, and he asked me what I did for work. I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. This trip was part of a three-month around-the-world Frugal Traveler jaunt, and I’d grown accustomed to deflecting questions about my employer. Tell people in the hospitality field you work for the New York Times , and their attitude instantly changes. They become friendlier, more involved; they make sure you have whatever you need, and often won’t let you pay for it. But I wanted to be a normal traveler, and so I kept it a secret.
    Here in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, however, these secrets seemed silly. The other day in Bishkek, the capital, I’d met a young, educated Kyrgyz guy who’d never even heard of the Times . Surely gold-toothed Bakut was no more worldly.
    â€œJournalist,” I said, pronouncing the word in the French-Russian way, the j a zh .
    â€œOh?” Bakut said with a glinty smile. “New York Times ?”
    â€œHa ha ha! I wish!”
    That was the end of that conversation. We remounted our horses and covered more ground, taking in the enormity of the view, across the lake to yet more mountains. The sun glinted on the steel domes of far-off mosques. The sense of space was boundless—the opposite of Vietnam, where all was dense and