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CHAPTER 28 — SUMMER 2026 TRAVEL · OUTDOOR
41°27'N · 31°48'E
ZONGULDAK · BASE CAMP
Notes from the road

Far if you look, near if you walk..

Field notes, camp recipes, and quiet stories from someone who traded a desk for the horizon. Subscribe for the stories that don't fit in a sixty-second reel.

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Melih Bektaş
I traded a desk for the horizon — and never once asked for it back.

For ten years I was a civil servant. A safe paycheck. A predictable arc. At thirty-three, I gave it all up to chase the only currency that ever felt real to me: stories worth telling.

Since then I've slept beside Yörük campfires in the Taurus mountains, argued politics over rice in Vietnamese kitchens, and watched dawn break over snowy passes with strangers who became friends in eight time zones.

This site is the long-form home for that work — the stories, the videos, the field guides. Everything that doesn't survive the algorithm.

Melih Traveler · Storyteller · Zonguldak

A decade of stillness, three years of motion.

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Borders crossed
Each one a separate chapter.
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Instagram community
Readers, not just followers.
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Total video views
Across 1,075 videos, since 2017.

Twenty-eight chapters, and counting.

An ongoing index of every country that's shaped a story. Each one earned at ground level — no airport-and-out, no five-star tourism trail. The next chapter usually begins before the last one's edited.

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    @melihbektass1
    Svaneti, Georgia Traditional dress, Central Asia Lycian Way, Türkiye Red canyon, Kazakhstan Thailand With locals in India