Wheels on the bus go round and round

We were introduced to overnight buses in Morocco and Greece had their fare share of long rides, but I think the Turkish were born on buses. Before we leave Turkey we will have spent 120hr+ on long hauls rides. Many were overnighters that range from 8-17hr journeys. They’re not fun but it’s the best way to get around this country. After tossing your bag in the storage compartment below, hoping desperately that it’ll be there when you arrive, you’re directed up the stairs to your assigned seat. The bus quickly fills up because there is no such thing as an empty seat. Usually children sit on laps to avoid being charged an extra fare. When seats are oversold the extras are given plastic stools to crouch on in the aisles. Shortly after departing, a steward comes by and offers a beverage and a packaged snack followed by squirts of lemon disinfectant for your hands. Throughout the night you stop to drop-off or pick-up passengers at what seems like the side of the road in middle of nowhere. Just when you start dozing off the lights suddenly come to life for the hourly stops for a snack break, toilet break, smoking break, or tea break. Sometimes they’ll slow down so the steward can unceremoniously flail the plastic bag of trash out the side door. Turkey’s very 3rd world in the way they treat their rubbage. The only way we’re able to get any sleep on the overnighters is to tire ourselves out during the day then try to block out the world with earplugs and eyeshades. Even then we’re lucky to get four hours of sleep regardless of the length of the journey. At some unreasonable hour of dawn they wake you up and toss you and your bags off the bus to let you know you’ve reached your destination, leaving you to figure out the next step half asleep and aching for a chiropractor.

-Mary

Falling on deaf ears

Eastern Turkey has been full of historical and religious significance. We saw the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, gazed up at the fortress where Abraham was flung down by God to land in a bed of roses, smacked our lips over the sacred carp but didn’t dare try to catch them for fear of going blind, and smelled feet in the tiny underground cave where the prophet Job spent seven years and I can’t recall what else. Most of this stuff is really wasted on us, but the stories make looking at rubble and holes in the mountains much more interesting. There’s really too much to remember and take in; it’s a real bummer there’s no cliffnotes for the Kuran. The closest thing we found is a book titled “The Crisis of Islam”, which Steve had to read very discretely given present company.

-Mary

Out of time

Bummer I have a really poor net connection and we need to catch a boat so the rest of the pix must wait. We are jumping now onto a 4 day sailing cruise along the coast from Olympos to Fethiye.

Lost Days in Eastern Turkey

We spent about a week running right along tense borders in the east and south of Turkey: Armenia, Iran, Iraq and finally Syria. Even more tense is the mood in this part of Turkey because it is where the Kurdish separatists call home. Yeah, those Kurdish separatists who keep bombing the tourist areas of Turkey. The military checkpoints actually got a little tiring after a while as they mean extra time on the bus. The trip from Doyugabazit to Van, through Batman to Diyabakir, off to Mardin and then to Urfa, Harran and Mt. Nemrut was through the frontier and agricultural heart of Turkey. People tended to be very friendly, if for no other reason than the curiosity of passing Americans.

'beehive' houses ın Harran next to the Syrian border. Note the TV antenna...


Mary playing kissie with the Travelocity Gnome at Mt. Nemrut






Rest of the family at Nemrut



















Batman: İ don't need to make this stuff up. There's really a town named Batman. We just passed through, but long enough to note that the bus station looks a lot like the Hall of Justice. Really, it was quite funny. But the bus didn't stop there so no picture :( I also wasn't fast enough to get a picture of the Batman ambulance we saw in Diyarbakir. Gotta be quicker with the lens. The picture here is from a bus company in the next town advertising service to Batman.



My Shoe, Part 2: I tore the leather out of the sole of my sandals hiking in the Kackar mountains last month. Mary fixed it up with some twine and that kept me going until Diyabakir. A rug salesman noticed the repair and as his opening line said something to the effect of "nice to see there are Americans as poor as we are". Not 10 minutes later, we stumbled across a row of cobblers and gave one a chance to disguise my poverty. The bottom picture is the stitching that resulted. That was a couple weeks ago and it's still holding strong. Pay attention Merrell!.

Home cooking:We've become really tired of Turkish food. It's good and all, but after a few weeks we very much craved anything else. Luck came in the form of a Burger King in Diyarbakir. There's no two ways to look at it. We had two meals in the town and both were Burger King. And they weren't small meals. We gorged. Now that we're back in civilized Istanbul, this process is out of control. We've already had Slotchkey's Deli, Pizza Hut and McDonalds (twice).

Welcome to the freak show

I enjoy the friendly local that strikes up a conversation and inquires about my ethnicity, which seems to be a real novelty for them. But when literally 9 out of 10 people on the street yell at me as I pass taking wild stabs at my country of origin, it quickly adds up to hundreds of unsolicited and identical questionnaires over the course of a week for every week we’ve been in rural Turkey where we’re the only foreigners around. Sometimes this creates a rowdy entourage of local youngsters. Near the Iranian border in Doyubayazit we were climbing up a rocky bluff to the rubble of some 13th BC fortress when some picnicking locals stopped to take pictures of and with us. They were very friendly and courteous but they followed us like paparazzi, curious about everything we did and continually making attempts at conversation. As we left they lead us to their family at the make shift park below to take some more pictures. Upon approaching the women practically threw their babies at us. They took pictures of Steve and I carrying their little bundles of joy. Unfortunately we had to rush back to catch a dolmus so we were not able to accept their offer for tea. We left smiling and waving. We’ve also had some other wonderful exchanges with locals so having the asian card as an ice breaker does have its positive points.

E-I-E-I-Oh crap!

Eastern Turkey is very rural and heavily agricultural. People live in stone, mud and straw huts smaller than their neighboring mounds of manure. The roads in the countryside are often lined with farm animals challenging passing vehicles. There have been numerous incidents where our minibuses have bounced around, horns blaring, trying to get various herds, flocks and gaggles off the road. We’ve had near accidents involving eagles flying at the windshield, confused mules, turkey tossings, stubborn geese, dumb cows, and suicidal sheep. We’ve been on more buses and minibuses than I can count and they're anywhere from 2 to 16hr journeys. So now the maniacal driving, dodging of farm animals and other vehicles is just par for the road. Even armed checkpoints are blasé.

Run for the border

We've been running along borders for the past few days. First we were near the border to Georgia ('Gerkistan' in Turkish). Then we came within feet of the Armenian border at Ani. So close in fact that we could see the Russian (Armenia uses the Russian's as their army) military base and lookout towers.

Turkey and Armenia don't play together so well and have a closed border, so being in the seriously historic former Armenian capital barely on Turkish soil with armed soldiers wandering around was quite exciting.We followed the Armenian border on our way to Dogubayazit which is on the way to the Iranian border post. Along the way, we went through a handful of checkpoints littered with tanks and armored personnel carriers. That's Mt. Ararat in the background of the first picture.

Hiking the Kackar (pronounced "catch-car")

Together with the Spaniards, Alejandro and Belen, we labored through some incredibly sketchy mountain roads to get to the hiking base in the tiny town of Barhal. From there we hiked a couple days up the mountains through hamlets that cling to the mountainside for no apparent reason. We had some real excitement when our guide motioned that we should go and climb up to a lake and then follow the trail over the next hill and he'd meet usfor lunch. "1 hour". Haha. We made it up to a lake and then took a trail over a ridge that left us a good 500 feet above the meadow we were to meet him in. No problem except the trail ended and we had to clambor down a steep incline with poor footing. Oh and the rain started. Good times. We eventually made it down and the only casualty was my right sandal which is now held together with twine expertly fashioned by Mary. But it is a beautiful mountain range and we had a great time. Best part was when Mary and Belen busted out the yoga moves on each other. Life really doesn't get much better than this.


Although it would have if the pasta had pasta sauce. Notes to self next time we negotiate a hiking package: make sure the pasta comes with sauce, make sure the meat is more than 1 stick of salami for 4 people, we don't need 3 pounds of cheese or a dozen loafs of bread...

Disappointment

We had read that travelling the Black Sea coast is really nice, so we headed out to the first town where we'd start our journey. We met a Spanish couple, Belem and Alejandro, who had the same plan. But when we made it to Amasara, we found that the road to the next town along the coast had just washed out. Long story short, we said forget it and decided that we'd travel overnight together to Trabzon, well down the coast.In the meantime, a local girl who was on the same bus had been helping us and so we took her to lunch. She picked a place overlooking the beach with great fish and salad.

Cousın Fred and the Smiths from Safranbolu

Sometimes you just have to pay for the kitsch. Mary was looking at a plant growing up a wall and was immediately accosted by a raggedy old woman who was spewing Turkish so fast I wonder if she even knew what she was saying. She dragged Mary forcibly by the arm while jabbing her in the buttocks to these painted egg-shaped ceramics. Finally, she found a busted one to show us that the vine grows from a seed inside the egg. So there went another hard earned 2 Turkish lire. Hopefully our new friend, named Cousin Fred, will survive the postal service.

Safranbolu has a lot of ironworks hidden below the village. We wandered through and stopped to talk with one of the blacksmith shops making farm tools. After a bit they let us take a shot smithing up a stake. Check out Mary taking a big whack at the anvil! They had to take the mallet out of her hand before she hurt someone.

Oh yeah, the town is famous for saffron, go figure.

Safranbolu

Everyone is really excited about this town Safranbolu near the Black Sea coast. It's one of the must see sites and all the Turkish tourists take over the hotels on weekends. Why? Because it has a cute old village with famed "Ottoman" architecture. We couldn't figure out for a long time what the big deal is. These Ottoman houses look a lot like older western homes in the UK, western Europe or east coast US. In fact, our hotel seemed very much like a ski lodge up in Tahoe. But I guess it's a big deal when half the country is living in either concrete bunkers or shacks made of dry stacked rock and heated by hay and dung.

Georgia on our minds

İ have no pictures to offer you today, just a note on our whereabouts. We spent a week running across the Black Sea coast from İstanbul to the Georgian border. The land is mountainous and lush. There's a stretch even covered in tea leaves. Who knew? We met a Spanish couple on the bus and travelled together into the Kackar mountains to do some camping. Talk about back woods. These towns are in the middle of nowhere on poor mountain dirt roads to begin with, but there is a lot of road and dam building (really, the kind that floods small Turkish villages to create lakes) going on so everything takes a day. Somewhere on my laptop there is a picture of us waiting for a backhoe to finish excavating the road that we are driving on. Really.

We're now in a relatively large (20k) person town called Artvin ın the mountains near the Georgian border again mulling over whether or not we are sufficiently interested in Georgia and Armenia to sit through a few more long bus rides to really get into the countries.

Stuffed (American) football or potato, you decide

We went out on a limb and went to a baked potato bar for dinner one night in Istanbul. The guy reaches into the cooker and grabs two American footballs out. These tubers were Frankensteinian, something you would expect to win the county fair. After we got over that shocker we started pointing at all the toppings to add to our carbo 18-wheeler. There was butter, cheese (ewww), corn, olives, spicy salsa, bologne, pickles, mushrooms, lots of creamy stuff (eww again), pickled red cabbage, with mayo and ketchup (yuck and yuck) to drown it all. It was surprisingly good and not surprisingly very filling. These were seriously the biggest potatoes I have ever seen. You couldn’t look at them and not think growth hormones.
-Mary

edıtor's note - no comments necessary about the 'stuffed couch potato' ın the background.

İstanbul not Constantinople and definitely not Damascus

Depending on how you look at it, we had our first major trip setback here when we petitioned the Syrian consulate for a visa. They claim that starting July 1st, the only way for an American to get into Syria was by getting a visa through the Washington DC consulate. That’s a little bit out of our way, so after some half-hearted research we decided to just visit Syrian airspace on a flight directly to Jordan. Unfortunate, but perhaps somewhat safer. Although this does give us a bit more time to explore Georgia and Armenia. Azerbeijain also sounds interesting and untamed, but I can’t write blogs if I can't spell the country...

And in other news, Constantinople is stıll the home of Sultans. We ran into this kid on an outing with his family to one of the palaces. He had an entourage of tourists waiting in line to take a photo with him.

We start a Bookmobile

It started out as just one book for each of us to pass the time on our long travel days. Since leaving London there has been a scarcity of English books so we try to grab what we can. Add to that our growing reliance on guidebooks and now we have the beginnings of a small library. No wonder our bags are getting heavier.
- Mary

Editor's note – scarcity of English language literature is no excuse to punish me with Hemingway, Dickens and Cervantes. I paid my dues in high school. Sort of. How about some Archie comics? In Turkish is fine.