Backpacks

Kackar Mountains of Turkey

Woken daily by the call to prayer, we skinned the narrow streets passing elderly couples in plastic shoes, carrying rough baskets stuffed with hay for safely sheltered livestock.

The language barrier broken with toothless smiles and callused handshakes, both bemused by each other’s lives, the glaring hardship of theirs and the questioning why head into the snows of ours.

The packs on our backs both weighed with items of survival, ours filled with compressed air, shovels and probes,  their’s a much laboured Summer crop, now a Winter feed.

We travel to see, to feel, to sense, but for me the biggest joy is to meet. To press the flesh with those whose lives are different from ours, whose outlook is far removed from our norm.

Word and Photo Pete Coombs Kackar Mountains of Turkey, 2018 Backdrop Expedition.