Legless in Turkey:

Travels Without a Magic Carpet

By Vivienne Jepsen

In 2004 I took my adult son for a trip around the world. The prime goal of this trip was a month in Turkey to visit and revisit places for nostalgic, adventurous and research purposes. Ten years before I had decided to set a novel there and I wanted more inspiration. I took my son because I was ill and crippled and I needed a strong arm or two to help me.

I had only got as far as Italy when I broke my knee falling in a shower room. Unaware of the full extent of the injury, I decided to carry on – albeit in terrible pain. Part of my way around Turkey I fell again, turning my knee to rubble and, ultimately, causing the loss of the leg above the knee.

Being an inveterate traveler and a committed writer, I had often considered combining the two, but thought that I did not have an angle to base travel writing on. But as my painful journey around Turkey progressed, I saw the angle emerging: few enough people visited Eastern Turkey at all, fewer drove independently there, hardly any disabled people would have, nobody else would be mad enough to cut the cast off a broken leg in order to fit in a car to do it.

The book follows the path of this trip, overlaid on the history of my two other trips to Turkey. It provides a personal take on the history of places, and peoples the country with historical and literary characters as well as those encountered en-route. Naturally, my traveling companions become an important part of the story.

As well as the usual tourist bus routes along the Mediterranean coasts and around Cappadocia and the Hittite sites, we travel more than 5,000 kms from one side of Turkey to the other and back again, taking the car along desolate routes in Eastern Turkey, up mountains along roads scarcely worthy of the name. We go through countless army checkpoints and follow the borders of Iran and Armenia. This is an intrepid journey.

One of the difficulties of writing on any journey which has pain as its constant companion, is that you walk a tightrope. Give the pain a realistic focus and the book becomes unendurable for the reader. Ignore the pain too much and the reader will fail to understand the reasons for your actions. I hope that I have managed the tightrope.

Short description

An unscripted car ride to the far edge of Turkey - with a smashed knee.

Medium description

It was supposed to be a novel, but it turned into a travel book with an approach unlike anything in the "official" guidebooks. It cost its writer a lot, but she isn't complaining.

Long description

I never meant to spend a month driving around Turkey with an unsplinted broken leg, but the plaster cast from groin to toes wouldn't fit into any form of transport, so I spent 3 hours hacking it off with a knife, before heading off in a hire car. I'd cracked my tibial plateau (knee) in Florence and struggled on across Greece to meet friends in Istanbul. The car was prepaid. There were to be no refunds. I was in possession of a good supply of illegal (in Turkey) prescription codeine, I was well acquainted with pain, and I was very bent on carrying on. I had a stuck novel to reinspire.

Then I slipped in a Turkish toilet and smashed the knee up very badly. The pain could not put me off taking the car on an adventure which included driving up to the top of one of Turkey's two Mount Nemruts (the one with the big stone god heads) and into the deserted volcanic bowels of the other (where we got the car bellied in a washout so deep we couldn't open the doors). We drove among great peoples and places, and through countless checkpoints, to the far edge of Turkey, and were chased away from the border by soldiers. My Turkish novel had to be abandoned there for the moment. What I came home with (besides a buggered knee and a codeine habit) was a travel book. It didn't cost an arm and a leg - just the leg. Was it worth it? I can't imagine not having done it.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3