Turkey Time

Gilotsav shobas da akhal tsels! I just got back from Turkey (or I could be a travel snob and write “Türkiye”) yesterday, and the following is a series of journal excerpts, since I was kind enough to think of you all and my own self-aggrandizement while traveling. I’m gonna try to link the entries to pictures if I can figure that out, elsewise things with relevant pictures are in bold and can be found at http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2125584&l=a1c24&id=813973 . If you get bored, just read the last entry (January 6) for some good old-fashioned schadenfreude.

December 27—
We’re in Trabzon, Turkey! Some things were a pain today—snowstorm, taxi fishtailing into a snowdrift, hostel not actually being a hostel during the winter but rather a dormitory. Some things may be a pain tomorrow—all the flights to Istanbul and Izmir were canceled this evening, but ideally they won’t be tomorrow. However, some things have been surprisingly exciting that would have seemed mundane in the first place—rectangular pillows, Doritos, safely walking through the streets at night, Latin alphabet usage, smoothly-paved roads, things like that.

December 29—
Now we’re in Selçuk, which has been delightful! I don’t know how well I fit into international backpack culture, but we win every hardship contest by mentioning that we’re Peace Corps volunteers. The hostel is quite cozy (my first hostel!), though they’ve been a little hardcore with the tour guide offers, and they charged Paige and Ryan extra for heating (us four down in the dorms don’t have the option).

We strolled over to Ephesus today, a city of ancient Greek ruins (my first Greek ruins!) which was impressive—much more so than the Temple of Artemis, a wonder of the ancient world that has been reduced to a single pillar in the middle of a field. We all sat in a 1000-year-old amphitheater and waited for the tourists to leave (there’s an inordinate amount of Koreans here, by the way).

December 30—
This one’s getting written in what could be called my first genuine hostel experience… after 10 hours of bus rides, we found our way to the Orient Hostel, a land of like a 3’x5’ bedroom, a stained towel that two of us shared for 3 lira, and not to mention 5,000 other G6 Peace Corps volunteers. In fact, when we came home from our delicious Mexican dinner at El Torito (?), we went upstairs to the Orient Hostel bar to use the internet and were greeted by the “HEEEEYYYY!!” of PCVs who’d clearly been drinking for a while. Nicholas and I turned heels and fled downstairs to take showers (also a failure of sanitation, involving hopefully-unidentifiable empty plastic wrappers).

By the way, Turkish buses are amazing—we stopped every 2 hours to stretch our legs, we were guided along at our connection in Izmir, and (here’s the kicker) there’s a bus attendant who serves drinks and snacks. Bit of an improvement over Greyhound.

January 1—
Thus far in Istanbul, we’ve visited the Blue Mosque (complete with headscarves) and the Hagia Sofia, explored the shops of Taksim and drank Starbucks therein, climbed this really old tower just in time to hear tens of calls to prayer simultaneously from mosques all over the city, and of course seen fireworks for New Year at Taksim Square followed by dancing til 3. Not bad for two days, though this pace may contribute to our current condition of napping until we meet up at 5:30.

The general consensus of our group is that Istanbul represents an optimal level of development—you can get most things that you want, but there’s not a McDonald’s inside the Blue Mosque. It was too much of a consensus, though, so I had to be a pain and play devil’s advocate, pointing out that there’s less political freedom here than in America. We’re still waiting for a verdict on gender equality… only today have we seen many Turkish women out in public at all, though this could be because the holiday (Eid al-Adha, or Kurban Bayramı in Turkish) started yesterday and there’s some household duties of ritual animal slaughter that needed to be looked after.

January 2—
Man, I was in the worst mood ever today. We went on a cruise of the Bosphorus and we had a seafood prix fixe for lunch… all this cool stuff, but I just wanted to tie a sock gag around the heads of everyone in my vicinity. Perhaps it’s fatigue from traveling, perhaps it’s my psychotic brain chemistry, perhaps that’s what happens after holidays in developing nations. Regardless, it sucked, and I can’t say for certain that I won’t feel the same way tomorrow, though I’d better not because it’s boot-buying day and making purchases warms the cockles of my capitalist heart.

January 6—
Various disasters led to our trip being an extra day long. I suppose I should explain… The last couple days were lovely but uneventful. We made all the airport arrangements to catch our flight at 10 AM on the 4th only to find out when we got there that the flight was at 7 AM, a fact none of us bothered to check although we’d been hanging out next to an open computer with internet the night before. I still think it’s my fault, being Planny McPlannerson and all, but that’s not the point; the point is that we were late enough to be ineligible for any refund or transfer, so poo on that $72.

We decided to try for an IstanbulTbilisi bus, and—just our luck!—there was one leaving the second we got to the station, and they offered to take us to Tbilisi for $50 each. Fine, cha-ching, let’s go. A few hours later, we noticed that the route was drifting south, rather than following the Black Sea coast to enter Georgia at Batumi. We also noticed that no one on the bus spoke English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Georgian, Vietnamese or Japanese, so we couldn’t ask questions about our mystery destination, which upon re-inspection of our tickets we discovered was “Ardahan.” We looked around the bus. Was Ardahan in Azerbaijan and all these people Azeri? Or was Ardahan in another border country (Turkey borders Syria, Iran, and Iraq) and we were on our way to Tehran?? We tearfully pointed at maps and made caveman-like gestures until the bus driver reassured us that “Tiflis okay” (re: “This bus is going to Tbilisi.”)

In the meanwhile, the Turkish countryside rolled by—27 hours of it—which I sometimes think was worth the whole ordeal. We saw houses with mud roofs, snow-covered mountains, and even the desert under moonlight, all of which we’d missed in our tourist ventures.
Around 12 the next day, we rolled into Ardahan. Once again, nobody spoke any of our languages, though one man did manage to convey that he’d take us to a border town we’d never heard of for $20. Ha! Whether it was the bus company’s fault or not, we’d been told that we were going to Tbilisi on $50, and that was what we were sticking to. Finally, we found a German speaker, and he and Heidi worked everything out. We thought.

After a harrowing mini-bus ride on snow-blown cliffs and switchback roads with 200-foot plummets instead of shoulders, we rolled into Posof. Again, the plan hadn’t quite been communicated correctly, so they tried to charge us $120 to go to Tbilisi. DECLINED. Much arguing ensued, and in the end they agreed to take us across the border to Akhaltsikhe for the 60 lira the bus company had provided the driver in Ardahan to take us to Tbilisi. Fine. We got on the completely-empty bus and rode to an empty border crossing that we didn’t know existed. As soon as we’d gotten through (and been searched by Georgian customs officials), we decided to try to bribe them to take us the rest of the way to Tbilisi on the rest of the Turkish lira we had left (about 40 lira). It turns out that one of the men on the bus (of about 3 total, since we noticed the bus would only pick up Turks who tried to flag it down and not Georgians) spoke Russian, so I was nominated to negotiate. Unfortunately, his broken Russian plus my broken Russian led to no understanding—on the plus side, I think his Russian was more broken than mine because we called a fluent Russian speaker to talk to him, and that still didn’t work. Anyway, using the work “Tiflis” and rubbing our fingers together, we got it through and all was well. We made it to Tbilisi, at some khinkali, and slept after 33 hours of bus rides.

I think that’s the end of the travel catastrophes that were interesting. By myself the next day, I had fresh torture trying to get back to site that involved a sold-out train, a series of out-of-order ATMs, switched bus signs, and being cornered by a snarling dog, but there’s no need to turn that into a melodrama. The fact remains that I’m home now, and part of me is still glad that I got to spend extra time in Turkey, despite the circumstances.

Now, for concluding observations:

1) Turkish coffee is much better in Georgia than in Turkey, though Turkey has better roads.
2) My stupid banana-feet are too big for Turkish shoe sizes, so I still need boots.
3) It’s hard to see in Western Turkey that it used to be a Peace Corps country, but the status of developing nation is a bit more apparent in the East. Still farther along than Georgia, but Turkey had a head start.
4) Döner kebaps are delicious.
5) This vacation is more perfect than usual because I have two more weeks off to recover from it.

P.S. I've been lately informed that we were riding along through Kurdistan in the bus, which explains all the tanks and military checkpoints. Yay!