A week
in Bolu

The further you get from the city, the more the buildings give way to forest and the traffic noise to quiet. By the time we reached Narven, the hills around us had already changed the mood of the week.

What I liked most was that the place isn’t cut off from the landscape. Look out of a window and what faces you is forest and hillside, not more buildings. The walking paths and the density of the planting inside the grounds also make it easy to spend time there with children.

One of the best stops was Gölcük Nature Park. There is no reason to hurry around the lake; you walk without trying to get anywhere, looking at the water, then at the trees. That, I think, is where the appeal of Gölcük actually lies.

Going with children, the stretch with the water lilies was the best detail. The pink flowers coming up between the pads caught their attention in particular. Things the rest of us glance at for a minute turn into a small event of the holiday when you are walking around with children.

Coming all the way to Bolu just to look at the forest from a distance would have been a waste. For the more active part of the week we took ATVs out onto the dirt tracks.

Once you leave the tarmac and the tidy walking paths and push a bit further in, you get a much better sense of how dense the vegetation here is. We came back covered in dust, but that is part of the point.

Days were spent out, evenings back at the grounds. One night we lit the grill, another we sat by the fire. The evenings with no plan were the most restful part of the week.

For one of the children, the best thing all week was neither the forest nor the lake. It was riding a horse.

One evening we drove down into the centre of Bolu. I saw something at night that I had missed in daylight: once the shutters come down the bazaar street empties, and the mosque at the end of it is left on its own. The two minarets and the lead dome of Bayezid Mosque disappear among the shopfronts during the day; at night they set the whole direction of the street.

Another day we drove out to Yazıkara, a village in Gerede, and I flew over it. From the ground the houses, the fields and the road all sit apart from one another; from the air they become a single arrangement. One look from above is enough to understand why the village was built exactly there.

Looking back on the week, it isn’t only the places we visited that stayed with me. Sometimes a coffee break, sometimes a long conversation, sometimes half an hour by the lake.

There doesn’t have to be a sight to see or a schedule to keep every single day. That was one of the good things about this week: some days we went out, some days we looked around the area, and some of the time we sat still with nowhere to be.

Going back through the photos, I notice again how simple the things are that a holiday leaves behind. Children looking at the water at the edge of a lake. A road running through the forest. A long conversation at a table. And a handful of frames that will take you back to that day years later.

Cooler air at the end of summer, and a great deal of green. Sometimes a good holiday really doesn’t need more than that.