Free Magic Bus by Rory Maclean

passport. A thin, yellowed volume has been slipped between my notebooks. I pull out Penny’s copy of
Siddhartha
. The edge of a page has been turned down. As I step along the path, I read Hesse’s words on the shudder of awakening.
    â€˜He began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.’
    I turn the corner and walk away, leaving behind a lone voice singing to the morning.

8. Sympathy for the Devil
    Beyond the fly-flecked windscreen spread gaunt plains, barren flat-top mountains and asphalt ribbons quivering in the hot sun. In every direction the prairie unrolls a hundred miles wide, broken only by tufts of white flowers marking family plots. Distant figures scythe with short, crescent sickles. Summer breezes push and pool wheat and barley, weaving waves of pattern across the steppe. Space stretches out, as well as time, dwarfing electricity pylons and a thread-like rail line, as if the earth itself is expanding in the heat.
    I changed buses in Kayseri, my spirit lifting with the road ahead. A rose blooms beside a caged, blue-stone ossuary. On a blind corner we overtake an overloaded truck, its green chillies quivering free of their sacks like miniature elvers. I drop my pen.
    â€˜Excuse me,’ I apologize to the passenger sitting beside me, taking off my earphones, ‘I don’t speak Turkish.’
Türkçe bilmiyorum
. ‘Could you…?’ I gesture at the pen rolling under his feet.
    â€˜No panic on the
Titanic
,’ says the stranger, brushing away my apology, offering me a delicate white hand. ‘You shouldn’t bother to learn Turkish; it’s an underdeveloped language.’
    â€˜What do you mean, underdeveloped?’
    â€˜In French movies, a man need say only three words for a woman to kiss him. In Turkish, a man must talk to a woman all day just so she will touch the back of his hand.’
    I laugh, offer my hand, introduce myself.
    â€˜Call me Oscar,’ he says. ‘Everyone does.’
    Oscar, whose real name is Özcan, would never stand out in a crowd. His clean-shaven face is as smooth and ageless as a sea pebble. I write him off as a salesman or a crooked, small-town accountant with fastidious hygiene habits. Until I look into his eyes. They are colourless.
    â€˜Have you been travelling long?’ I ask him as he returns my pen. I hadn’t noticed him get on the bus.
    â€˜About forty years,’ he replies. ‘Forget that guidebook’ – I’d been leafing through the
Blue Guide
– ‘it’s no good beyond Konya.’
    â€˜You know all about it,’ I say, with an unexpected shiver. Yet I’m pleased to find an English speaker, so I tell him about myself.
    â€˜A travel writer,’ he replies, lifting his interest but not his voice. ‘Then we’re comrades-in-arms.’ He hands me his business card. Tourism Consultant. ‘But I have little time for the sixties. The flower children were as simple as their critics are unpleasant.’
    â€˜In Cappadocia they seem to have opened the door to prosperity,’ I tell him, mentioning the stories of Abdullah and Bayram.
    â€˜The hash-and-hepatitis trail did spawn an industry that packaged the world,’ he admits, folding his hands in his lap. ‘I should know. I stand near the start of that trail.’
    â€˜How so?’
    â€˜It was me who put Butterfly Valley on the map.’
    Butterfly Valley – Kelebek Vad1s1 – was once an isolated beach accessible only by sea; a divine holiday highlight for early, independent travellers.
    â€˜I worked as a guide for tour-company scouts,’ he explains. ‘I turned them on to its tourist potential. I went on to invent the
gulet
package holiday,’ he gloats with a flash of conceit, ‘enticing Club Med to Foça and convincing Airtours to build the first hotel in