Part of my summer program has been a hiking club. It has not been easy. The first day was fantastic. A huge amount of kids showed up, coinciding nicely with my family’s visit. It wasn’t much of a hike, but the kids seemed to have fun, and we ended up in the town park, visited our small history museum, and got to see a meteorite. The next day, after I got back from Istanbul, was almost unattended. In several other attempts, the attendance continued to jump and drop.
I’m not sure why the attendance varies so much, whether it’s poor communication, summer heat, or summer vacation. Regardless, when it came time for yet another attempt, I was a little nervous. On this morning, three twelve year old boys showed up, one of whom I’d never met. Determined to actually do something with the kids, I piled them into a taxi with their water and food, and set out for the nearby village Talistan. Above Talistan in the hills are some ruins of Javanshir castle/fortress.
The boys were a little nervous that I was working off of the travel book and asking for directions from people, but they had fun as we got higher into the hills. Along the way, they found fruit trees ready for the picking, wandering animals, and a river crisscrossing our path.
We finally reached the base of the hill where the fortress was. From the trail we could see the remains of one of the walls. And so we began to trudge up the hill, which quickly turned into a steep, treacherous, slippery half-trail. About halfway up, the kids decided they were too scared to continue (by popular vote), and we backed down the hill carefully, sometimes standing, sometimes sliding. Looking back, we were so close to the hill, but in hindsight that path was not something to be trifled with.
After stopping for a picnic lunch, during which the boys were insistent on sharing their sandwiches with me, we came back to the river, where the boys decided they wanted to go swimming. After stripping to their underwear, the standard swimsuit here, they set to building a dam for bathing. As I sat watching them and reading through my Azerbaijan book for other hikes, I was transported back to a reservoir in Maryland, where I went several times with my friend, David, our families, and our dogs. I can still vividly remember building dams in the river while the dogs ran around us. One summer after coming back from Indonesia, we were still testing each other, and decided to go and stand out in the middle of the freezing river, to see who would budge first. We quickly found that we were both so stubborn neither would give in. And so we knew we were still friends.
As we neared Talistan, the boys began planning our next hiking club. They asked over and over who would be allowed to go and petitioned that it could just be them so they could go swimming more without being embarrassed in from of older boys or (gasp!) girls. I’ll take excitement about going out again as a sign of success. People don’t do enough hiking or exercise here, in my opinion, especially considering that there is so much beautiful nature in which to hike, and that Azeris pride themselves on the natural beauty of the country. The next step is trying to incite the kids to go hiking without me being the reason they go. Fortunately, I’ve got a couple more months of summer.
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