BARCELONA/FRANCE/TURKEY – TRAVEL DIARY 2003 - PART 7 of 7

Transcript of Tape-recorded Diary

 

PART 7 of 7

Ankara is a huge city - possibly four million people - secular, bustling, modern. The internet has several websites that detail the population of Turkey by regions, and list the major population centres.  The most recent figures, for cities of more than a million population, are:

         Istanbul           9.2m                       Konya                1.9m

         Ankara            3.7m                       Adana                1.7m

         Izmir                3.1m                       Bursa                 1.2m

That evening, a free evening, free in the sense that Simon had not arranged for us to be together, some of us walked the streets near the hotel - and with Faye and David we enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of a McDonald’s snack.  We’d previously asked for a beer at a pavement restaurant and been told that beer is not available in that particular street but the next street along is the place to go.  We went there, had our beer, and were surrounded by hundreds of Turkish men enjoying their beers together in a dozen separate outdoor restaurants, each of which had up a large television screen for the evening’s soccer match.  The custom of Turkish men meeting together for drinks, snacks, cards, dominoes - and now TV watching - to the total exclusion of female company that we’d seen in each of the centres we visited was here being replicated on a massive scale.  Despite the fact that this is their way we, frankly, found it quite distasteful.

 

Between Urgup and Ankara we visited our second Dervish lodge, at a place called Hacibectas.  We’d previously seen one of these lodges two days earlier on the Wednesday.  The Whirling Dervishes are a sect of Islam that arose around the year 800, about two hundred years after the prophet Mohammed had founded the religion.  They were not more fundamental and conservative, but nonetheless felt that Islam needed to be reformed, and they took that reform in the direction of mysticism.  The Whirling Dervish dance, with the simple black and white costuming and with one hand cupped upward towards heaven and one hand cupped downward to the earth, symbolised the transmission of God’s spirit.  

These lodges were set up by the leaders of the sect and were in fact monasteries with communal living, extensive kitchen facilities, and the whole premises giving the status of monks.  And even today visitors, although the premises have been de-sanctified and converted into museums, are expected to remove their shoes and wear respectful clothing.

 

Konya is a very large city - the fifth largest in Turkey [actually fourth] - and we passed through it on our way from Egirdir to the Cappadocia region.  In addition to the location of our visit to the first Whirling Dervish lodge and its attached museum, it was also our lunch stop - although not for me.  I was full up with food and decided to spend the hour walking the nearby streets.  I was befriended by Mehmet and Mustafa.  Depending where else in the world you’d say “accosted”, but in Turkey it’s “befriended”.  Mehmet spoke good English and wanted to practise on me - his friend Mustafa spoke no English at all - and we walked together along the streets for several hundred metres before I had to retrace my steps, and they went their way.  During my hour I walked through a huge cemetery.  We’ve seen cemeteries in small villages and in many places, and have marvelled at the way in which they’re often tucked along the roadside or stuck on a stony hillside.  Heaven help those who have to dig the graves.  But in Konya the land was quite flat and the scene was tranquil although cluttered.  The gravestones are typically much smaller than gravestones in Australia and almost always of white stone, probably marble.  And the headstones are almost always of the same stone, although some are dark stone with no inscriptions.  The white headstones are tall and narrow, about two feet wide at the most and standing about four feet tall often with ........... [missing]

Tape 4, side 1

 

The other notable stop on our way from Egirdir to Urgup was the caravanserai at Sultanhani.  I’d always known a caravanserai as a camel train but here the real meaning became apparent. 

 

It’s an enormous fortified structure to protect travellers, and to be a trading post in its own right, with space for all the animals and a sizeable population, although none of the dwellings is extant.  These caravanserai were set up hundreds of years ago, at intervals of some forty miles, by the reigning powers in acknowledgement that this part of central Anatolia was a focal point for the trade with the East.

 

Our trip through Turkey has been an ideal mixture of history and culture and scenery.  We’ve covered nearly 4000 kilometres.  A bit arduous sometimes in the bus, but certainly not life-threatening, and although Turkey has more than 1500 so-called historical sites, during our fortnight we’ve seen - so they tell us - the majority of the most important ones.  I’ve already talked of Troy and Pergamum and Ephesus and Hierapolis.  Two other magical places were Alinda and Aphrodisias.

We saw Alinda on Friday the 26^th, on our day between Selcuk and Dalyan.  Alinda was set up by Queen Ada who was exiled from her own nation but later did a deal with Alexander the Great in return for which she gained immunity from his armies and treated him as an adopted son.  Ada was a queen of the Carians, a nation of lower Anatolia, identifiable from before 800 B.C.  They may have had their origins in Crete, or from Aegean pirates - anyway they were seafarers.  They survived incursions from the Athenians and the Spartans; and retained a degree of independence under later Persian rule.  Then came Alexander, taking control with Queen Ada’s help.  There was a power vacuum after Alexander - until the Romans.  Caria prospered under Augustus Caesar, and didn’t decline until about the end of the Roman empire, fragmenting into a collection of coastal towns. The most notable Carian was King Mausolus (King from 377 to 353 B.C.), who ruled from Halicarnassus, and whose tomb is included as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and from whose name we have the word mausoleum.  Sited high on a hill, and with no tourists other than ourselves,

 

 the ruins, dating from the 340s B.C. with later Roman additions, had a magical feel, especially the modestly-sized amphitheatre.  The seating area, virtually intact, with three or four impertinent olive trees growing where they shouldn’t be.  A place to sit for a few hours - dreaming of princes and potentates, and marvelling at the vanity of it all.

The Alinda ruins sit above the small village of Karpuzlu, meaning watermelon, a delicious name that belies the conservatism of the local people; and on our descent from Alinda and walk through the town Simon asked the ladies to cover their shoulders and had previously asked them not to wear shorts on the day.

Aphrodisias, which we visited on Monday the 29^th, was stunning in a different way - stunning because of its vastness and because of the way in which it’s been excavated.  The driving force behind its excavation was an American archaeologist of Turkish extraction, and New York University.  True to say that American money has made it all possible; and the work continues.  Unlike other places the tourist entrance is a delightful area of lawns and gardens with a reconstructed Roman gateway.  A delightful and welcoming introduction to what lies ahead, and in considerable contrast to the dusty arrival at Ephesus, say.  Some of the significant civic buildings of the city have been excavated but much remains yet to be done. 

 The most exciting building is the stadium - not to be confused with a hippodrome, the place for chariot races, or with a theatre for dramatic performances.  The stadium was for the games, the athletic games.  It’s a great oval structure, all the seats are still there, and the sporting field some 400 metres long.  Hamish did the 400 metres dash and against no opposition whatever was the clear winner.  Sadly, there was no laurel wreath to present.

Back in the parkland sitting at Aphrodisias there’s a new museum building housing a collection of the statuary and other artefacts unearthed at the site.  The marble used by the Romans has a wonderful lustre, and because it’s a soft stone it’s pretty lucky to find a piece that hasn’t got bibs and bobs missing.  Nevertheless, the collection at Aphrodisias leaves you in no doubt about the might and the majesty of the Roman Empire.

It was the day after Aphrodisias that we’d visited Hierapolis, and cultural indigestion was a prospect, but a prospect avoided by the fact that Hierapolis is sited right at the amazing natural feature of Pamukkale.  Pamukkale is another world heritage-listed site and it’s an astonishing natural formation of white solidified salt deposits down a long hillside - a waterfall effect resulting from millions of years of flow from mineral springs high up on the hill.  And it’s because of these mineral springs and their therapeutic effect that people have been coming to this site for thousands of years, and the reason why Hierapolis itself was established further up the hill.

 Because of the adverse impact of tourists, the site has now been managed, with the water flow being diverted through a man-made channel; and the various pools are now off limits - but this is all to the good.  It’s possible to bathe in the mineral pool but this is now a tourist complex and there’s an admission charge.  Three of the group took the plunge.

 

After Pamukkale we were on to Egirdir, on the shore of Lake Egirdir; and the only point of importance to note is that Anne had a swim in the lake, reporting that the water wasn’t as cold as the water had been at a couple of the hotels.  The bottom, however, fell away very quickly from the shore and it was pebbly, and she found it very treacherous getting out.

 

Another break from the culture-fest had been our time on the gulet.  The gulet is a type of local boat - sailing boat, two masts, but motorised and I would expect the sails are rarely used.  A tourist boat with accommodation for our group of seventeen - Salih the driver and Sinan the silent guide didn’t accompany us - plus the family of four erstwhile fisherfolk who own and crew the boat.  And do the cooking.  The food during our two water-borne days was probably the best we’ve had in Turkey.

We picked up the boat on Saturday the 27^th.  We’d spent the Friday night at Dalyan on the coast, and first thing on the Saturday morning enjoyed the bonding experience of a mud bath together.  We took a local riverboat up river a few kilometres from Dalyan to a little tourist complex that has a mud pool.  We immersed ourselves, caked ourselves with mud, stood around in the sun till the mud dried looking very much like creatures from the black lagoon.  Photo opportunity. 

 Powerful showers to get the mud off.  Back on the riverboat and down the river to the open sea, around the sandbars and through the narrow river mouth, to the gulet waiting for us to board.  On the journey downstream we passed under rock tombs, high up on the cliff-face, with extraordinary carved portals.  Fourth century B.C.  And we disembarked and strolled through the ruins of the ancient Carian city of Caunus.  The amphitheatre was spectacular.  Caunus prospered and survived despite its reputation as an unhealthy place - the nearby marshes harboured malaria.

We spent two nights on the gulet, the days spent cruising around the southern coast of Turkey

 - not travelling far, not travelling fast - reading, sunning, swimming.  There was room on deck for all of us to sleep above if we wished.  Many did.  Card games and joke telling at night, and my portable CD player got its first and only airing in Turkey, with considerable enjoyment from the “Best Hits of the 60s” and Blossom Dearie.

Dalyan had been a busy tourist port, and equally so Fethiye where we disembarked on the Monday morning, the 29^th.  A large and sophisticated town with good shopping, a European air, a big fish and grocery market; and, on the drive out of town, miles and miles of glasshouses. A very fertile and productive area.

 

- - - o O o - - -

 

And here we are back in Istanbul.  I recorded yesterday afternoon sitting in the garden restaurant on the top of our hotel - the Orient Express Hotel - pretentiously, according to its brochure, offering all the luxury of the famous train, even though it’s only three star.  But it’s a good place, and our only complaint is with the food - not really up to scratch - but the location is great.  We had our meal last night in the hotel roof garden overlooking the Bosporus, undoubtedly one of the great city views on the planet.  Every so often Jim would call “ten seconds” and we’d all look out to sea - to remind ourselves for a moment of our good fortune.

 

Our tour group hotel had been the Orsep, a hundred metres or so around the corner, and although we’d spent the Saturday night there after the tour ended, we had to move to the Orient Express for our final two nights.  The Orsep, I think, is totally committed to tour groups - one moves out and another moves in, and Simon having presided over our farewell dinner on the Saturday night was back at six o’clock on the Sunday evening doing his introductory meeting with his next bunch of pilgrims.

 

We’ve been fortunate, I think, to be located in one of the older parts of Istanbul and within walking distance of so many of the great cultural attractions.  And right by Istanbul’s sole tramline, which in turn runs down to connect with the train to the airport - so a location easy to recommend to any other visitors to Istanbul.

 

Our arrival in the city was just over a fortnight ago, but it seems a world away.  Our little hiccup at the airport was soon overcome.  We’d been instructed, when leaving the departure gate, to look for someone holding a sign with the name Pasha Tours, but there was no such person.  David and I patrolled up and down the dozens of people holding placards with names of individuals and organisations, and then at Anne’s suggestion we simply asked another tour operator, assuming that they’d be known to each other.  The one we spoke to was Tempo Tours and his response: “that’s me”.  When we later looked at our travel agent’s literature we saw the name Tempo, and when we looked at the guide and the driver who took us to the Orsep Hotel, we noticed that notwithstanding the Tempo placard their shirts carried the Pasha Tours monogram.

 

The first day of the tour was spent in Istanbul itself, and we commenced, after a short walk up the hill, with the local guide Mustafa, the very expert local guide who took us first to the area that was the site of the old Roman Hippodrome - an area still bearing the same name.  Parkland, a meeting place, and two obelisks - one of them brought from Egypt, a companion piece to the ones on the Thames Embankment and in the Place de la Concorde. 

 From the Hippodrome to the Blue Mosque, an extraordinary structure built by the sultan as his own personal mosque, not personal in the sense that it was for him alone, but in the sense that this is where he used to pray.  Not blue on the outside but blue tiling inside, massive interior space, and a fitting use for the word awesome.  Multiple minarets, the sign of the sultan’s mosque.

From there just across the way to the Topkapi Palace, the Palace occupied by most of the Ottoman sultans.  The beauty and the opulence and the grandeur is indescribable ..... so I shan’t try.

 

The group dispersed at this point and - get this - Anne and Gary had lunch at the Palace; and then we walked to and through the Grand Bazaar, described in the literature as having 4000 separate shops and you’d better believe it, we certainly had 4000 invitations to buy. 

 Very laid-back shopkeepers, and very little badgering of potential customers. And from there, after seeking directions a number of times, we found our way to the Spice Market, coming full circle back to the hotel only a couple of hundred yards away.

 

Two weeks on, we had an early 7.00am start on Saturday from Ankara, arriving at Istanbul at 2.00pm.  The terrain hilly to mountainous most of the way, very picturesque.  Couple of short stops, at one of which Anne acted as spokes for the group and said some words of thanks to Salih our driver and presented him with the remains of our tipping kitty.

 

- - - o O o - - -

 

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, quarter to six, our last day in Istanbul and the last day of our trip.  We’re being picked up from our hotel at five to eleven, and later this morning we’ll be visiting Suleiman’s Mosque, the mosque built for Suleiman the Great and described in the guide books as the biggest and best mosque in Istanbul.  Some boast.

 

It’s very quiet in the street this time of the morning, the first tram hasn’t come by.  The cats, as always, are stealthy.  A garbage truck appears in the distance, and the daily clean-up begins.  Yesterday was a warm day again, say 26 degrees, but last night there was quite a stiff breeze and our waiter assured us that it would rain - certainly rain tomorrow, that’s today - but it hasn’t yet rained.  The breeze is still fresh but it’s a delicious morning.  I’m in shirt sleeves, although it will be long trousers today for the trip home.  If the rain comes I guess the temperature will fall but hopefully we’ll leave all that behind us.  We’ll also leave behind us such wonderful memories of the great city and the great country, spectacular scenery, the enthralling history, memories of the wonderful people and of the spectacular good weather, and of our friendly travelling companions, the last of whom - the eight of us from Melbourne - are dispersing this morning; while at the same time Simon Boas leaves with his latest group on the first day of their Anatolian journey.

 

As the first tram for the day passes by - a long tram, four joined sections - and as the electronically detached voices of the muezzins start up all over the city, I’ll try to capture the missing bits of our nearly seven weeks away.

 

On Sunday our first task was to transfer hotels.  Check-out time at the Orsep was midday but check-in time at the Orient Express wasn’t until 2.00 p.m.  But at the Orient Express they have a secure baggage room and we simply trundled our bags a hundred metres around the corner and locked them up; then hit the road.  The first stop was the Byzantine Cistern, the underground tank used in early years as the water storage facility for the city, the water having being brought from some distance away. 

This is an enormous structure with some hundreds of columns supporting the roof, the columns of marble and stone, the vaulted roof of bricks, no two columns the same - another amazing Istanbul space now converted to a tourist attraction with a couple of feet of water only, with fish, and with walkways through the forest of columns.  Some platformed areas, and use made of the Cistern for intimate concert performances.  What a great venue and what acoustics!  The bases of two of the columns are huge lumps of marble, each with the face of Medusa carved on one side.  

These were cannibalised and brought from some other place when the Cistern was built - no one knows from where.  And the other great mystery is why the faces have not been placed in an upright position - one is lying on its side and the other has its head downwards.  A charming mystery to excite the archaeologists and to interest the tourists.

 

From the Cistern to the Aya Sofia, another sultan’s mosque, almost within spitting distance of the Blue Mosque, and of the Topkapi Palace, this one no longer functioning as a mosque but sitting there for all to come and admire.

  

It was built as a Christian church.  There had been two previous churches on the site - each of them destroyed - and this, the third, was clearly built to impress.  We’re talking here of the 500s, in the sixth century after Christ, and four or five hundred years, therefore, before the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe.  A central feature of the Aya Sofia is a great dome and for its time the engineering was a marvel and would be a marvel even today.  Much later the Aya Sofia became a mosque, and substantial additions were made including four minarets, and the provision internally for the sultan’s throne, for the muezzin’s lodge, and for the imam’s pulpit.  The magnificent Christian mosaics were plastered over, fortunately plastered over and not stripped off the walls, and now many of them have been exposed and cleaned - and the work of restoration and maintenance continues incessantly.  The Aya Sofia was decommissioned as a mosque by Ataturk and with its great interior space, is one of the must sees of Istanbul.

 

On the Saturday night, Simon led the group of sixteen on our last journey together up and around between the Aya Sofia and the Topkapi Palace, past a row of 1850s weatherboard Ottoman houses, to another street, an area Simon describes as his favourite part of Istanbul, and there to a restaurant for our farewell dinner. 

 Simon had with him his lady friend Lucy, who’d flown from London to be with him for the weekend.  A happy but sentimental occasion, some speeches, a presentation to Simon, and the realisation that this was it.

 

Cheryl and David were leaving first thing the next morning for Tuscany.  Brian back to London later in the day.  Di, if her standby ticket comes good, off to Dubai to visit with her daughter who’s based there and flies with Emirates Airlines.  Linda and Jason off to Germany.  The rest of us left to contemplate our remaining time in Istanbul and how best to spend that time.  On the one hand we’ve just about had enough of being tourists, on the other hand who can tell whether we’ll pass this way again, and if there’s something important to see then we should see it.

 

And thus it was that on the Sunday morning we walked the few kilometres to the Dolmabahce Palace. 

 

This Palace in a different part of the city, not in the Golden Horn  [It’s on the Asian side of Istanbul, not the European side], was built for and occupied by the Ottoman sultans in the 1800s and was occupied by the later six sultans, until the last of them was exiled in 1923.  And it was occupied briefly by Ataturk who managed to fit out some living quarters and an office in a few of its hundreds of rooms; and that’s where he died.  Why the sultan moved from the Topkapi to the Dolmabahce, I can’t imagine.  It certainly wasn’t done because of feelings of modesty and the need to downsize or to reduce the opulence.  Again, the great public reception rooms drip with chandeliers, and the separate living quarters, the harem - the place occupied by the sultan and his family – are only a little less extravagant.  The decoration is rococo, so we don’t have marble pillars, we have concrete pillars painted to look like marble, but the effect is spectacular nonetheless.  Unlike Topkapi, access is via conducted tours.  This was okay and reasonably informative, but our Palace guide was a bit of a dork and we’d have been much better off if, as in so many places in Europe, we’d been able to plug into personalised audio guides.

 

Mooching and shopping yesterday, Monday.  Back to the Spice Market, 

back to the Grand Bazaar, going our separate ways from Faye and David and the others (but continually bumping into each other), final present buying and generally rounding off our trip, culminating last night in another roof-top meal overlooking the Bosporus this time with a flapping umbrella over our heads anticipating the rain that never came.

 

And the last look at the guide book to learn that the Suleiman Mosque is the greatest in Istanbul, and that’s where we’re headed this morning during the couple of hours before our mini-bus arrives to take us to the airport.  It’s all downhill from now on and we’re certainly looking forward to getting home, our expectation fuelled by the thought of a roast meal later in the week.

 

In this disjointed diary I bounced around in a temporal sense, certainly not recording every day, trying to remember the experiences already recounted and trying not to repeat myself.  And I’ve tried to remember the parts of the trip yet to be described; and one gap I think, is the wonderful few days we had in Paris about a month ago.  We started with our one-night stand in the Ibis Hotel, and then on the morning of the 31^st August we moved down the street to our apartment, 43 rue de la Folie Regnault. [.......In the 11^th arrondissement.  Central Paris has 20 arrondissements (or neighbourhoods).  They radiate out from the “centre”, the 1^st arrondissement, where the Louvre is located.  It is said that in earlier times people were known to spend their whole lives without venturing out of the arrondissement where they were born.]  Dominique, the cleaning lady and our point of contact, was still there and after she’d completed her tasks we were off to explore the bustling street market down the centre of the Boulevard Beaumarchais, not far from our apartment, running off the Place de la Bastile - the place where three years earlier we’d seen the art display of objects painted in harlequin colours, and the place we’d had our funny experience changing currency at the Bank of France.  Our principal destination was the Place des Vosges, a large formal garden in a square surrounded by buildings of uniform design on all four sides - so formal, so picturesque, so Paris.  [And built for the famous Henry IV - remember him?]

 

A lot of walking but a lazy day really, the late afternoon and evening spent watching television, the World Athletics Championships, and the repeated victories of the French long jump and 100 metre relay champion, Eunice Barber.  If you thought Australian TV stations were obsessive about repeating the victories of Australian athletes, then welcome to true obsession.

 

Helen and Arthur had been in Paris for a week already and Faye and David were due to arrive on the Monday morning, and the plan was that the six of us would meet at 10am near the Pont Neuf, the new bridge.  We did.  And although Faye and David had just arrived from Melbourne, and hadn’t slept, the tourist bug couldn’t be ignored.

 

- - - o O o - - -

 

Postscript, August 2004.

 

The tourist bug still couldn’t be ignored on our last day in Istanbul either, and I left off recording, and never returned to it.  Anne and Gary visited the Suleiman Mosque on the morning of our flight home.  Another vast interior.  It was founded by Suleiman the Magnificent, the tenth Ottoman sultan, and built between 1550 and 1557.  Although only the second largest in Istanbul (not a bad boast in itself) it is described as the finest and most magnificent.  There is an assortment of structures attached to the Mosque including the tomb of Suleiman, and the tomb of its architect, Sinan.

 

The day of Faye and David’s arrival in Paris we took a one-hour river cruise on a Seine bateaux. 

 Then a prowl through the Samaritaine department store,

 and lunch at the rooftop café - ordinary food, and expensive, but worth the view over Paris - the senses starting to tingle.  We walked, and in the Rue Rivoli bought tickets for a planned excursion two days hence to see Monet’s house and garden at Giverny.  At this point we split, Anne and Gary returning to our apartment - mostly on foot, via the Tuileries, the Place de la Concorde (as we "did" later, on our last day in Paris); across the Pont de la Concorde to the Left Bank, and to the Metro St.-Michel.

The next day, the Tuesday, a walk to the Place de la Republique.  Then by Metro to the old opera house, Opera de Paris Garnier - Charles Garnier was the architect; built between 1862 and 1875  - with its extraordinary ceiling painted by Marc Chagall, completed 1964.

Thence to two more department stores, Printemps and Galleries Lafeyette.  

At this point Anne went back to the apartment, while I went underground to Metro Ecole Militaire, walking the several kilometres home via the Military Academy, the Invalides precinct, Rue St.-Dominique (where we stayed on our previous time in Paris), St.-Germain Boulevard, and so on.  Late in the day we went to the Metro at Gare d’Austerlitz, and from there walked to the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical gardens - dating from 1626!  A really great park, also containing the natural history museum and the zoo.  Then continuing on foot to Helen and Arthur’s apartment in the Marais district, near the Pompidou Centre.  The six of us out for dinner, then coffee; then home via the Metro.

On the Wednesday morning we attended to diaries and postcards, then a walk along St.-Germain (where we’d first stayed together in Paris), and an early lunch in the gardens of the Petit Palace - the weather delightful.  After a 1.15 bus departure, the afternoon was spent at Giverny.  The Monet garden was spectacular, although not quite so magnificent as we’d remembered it from three years previously.  Still, a “must see” for any Paris visitor who loves gardens, or who wants a sense of the environment in which the artist worked.

 

On the Thursday, the 4^th of September, we prowled around our local neighbourhood; then had the Taylors and the Weeks for lunch at our place, followed by an amble through the Pere Lachaise cemetery. 

[Pictured: the tomb of Frederic Chopin.]

 Later, after we’d dispersed, Anne and Gary walked through the Luxembourg Garden.

The memory of this beautiful park is a fitting place to conclude this diary.  We had a truly wonderful trip, seeing such a lot but not exhausting ourselves.  Very little indisposition; few hassles; all well at home.  Fine company throughout; and some really precious moments.  And, the acid test:  there was nowhere we went that we wouldn’t, one day, be happy to re-visit.

 

Gary Andrews

 

 

 

BARCELONA/FRANCE/TURKEY – TRAVEL DIARY 2003 - PART 6 of 7

Transcript of Tape-recorded Diary

PART 6 of 7

[By the way, I am standing under a mosque with my dictation being completely drowned out by the muezzin calling the faithful to the last prayer of the day.  (And standing across the road from a Turkish bath, where Anne was enjoying the hot steam and a massage.)  Sadly, the muezzin no longer climbs the minaret, but the minaret is encircled by speakers that operate at such volume and with such distortion as to be painful to the ear.]

 

There’s a great deal of organisation involved in the hot air ballooning.  Each gondola holds up to twelve passengers plus the operator.  And the twelve passengers are arranged six to each side with a central fixed partition - really set up like two horse stalls; and on the four surfaces of the two stalls there are rope handles for use should there be an imminent hard landing.  The soft landing is more or less guaranteed, though.  The worst you can expect is a couple of bumps, but should there be a real problem the operator will be aware and the passengers are to grip the rope handles and crouch slightly with bent knees and, if the gondola tips on its side, they’re to hang on with their backs to the ground.

 

The gondolas and balloons are transported on trailers behind four-wheel drive vehicles and the twelve passengers are transported in mini busses.  There’s a lot of equipment, quite apart from the balloon itself.  The idea is that two balloons take off together and more or less stay together, although they can be separated by quite significant differences, but the reason for staying together is so that they can land reasonably nearby to one another, hence all the backup facilities will be available to them; and more importantly so that the twenty-four customers can get together for a champagne and cake breakfast.

 

There’s a ground crew of four hefty young men, and their strength is needed not just to man-handle the gondola and the balloon and so on, but to rope in the gondola at the point of landing.

 

- - - o O o - - -

 

Last night’s recording was interrupted not just by the call to prayer but also by the call to dinner.  And here I am, Friday morning, on a tor above our hotel, in the crepuscular light waiting for the sun to rise.  It’s a chilly morning, which means shorts with a tracksuit top, but there’s no sign of the promised rain.  The balloon operator yesterday said that the forecast was for rain, either yesterday afternoon or today, and that within a couple of days there would be some filthy weather lasting for three or four days.  I guess it’s the prerogative of balloon operators to be well informed on matters of weather.  But, thankfully, this time the change has been a little delayed.

 

I should mention that again this morning there’s no hot water - or at least it’s tepid - possibly warm by the time the others arise.  And I should also mention the toilet arrangements in Turkey.  All of the hotels and most of the places we’ve stopped have had conventional lavatory bowls and seats; a couple of squats, but the squat arrangement is certainly not the norm in public facilities.  And there have been plenty of them - every public venue has a toilet, every place we’ve stopped for lunch, towns we’ve passed through, all with the universal signage WC.  There are always urinals as well as cubicles .... but the one astonishing feature is the rule about toilet paper.  Turkish sewerage systems we are told are not able to cope with toilet paper, and this includes the mighty city of Istanbul.  And the rule is that nothing must be put into the toilet that hasn’t passed through your body.  Thus, in every bathroom and in every cubicle there’s a small bucket and into that bucket you deposit the soiled toilet paper.  This is a practice that’s very hard to get used to and, even after a couple of weeks, we still make the occasional slip and have to go fishing.  I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.  Some of the little buckets have lids but most do not.  They’re invariably lined with a little plastic bag and it’s somebody’s job to collect the plastic bags and dispose of them.  One hopes that they’re disposed of in some place other than the general tip because the thought of dogs, cats and goats foraging for scraps amongst these countless little plastic bags is not a nice one.  But at least they don’t have pigs in Turkey.

 

The curious feature, curious to people like us who think the whole process is pretty unsanitary, is that there is no offensive smell emanating from these buckets, even when you use them in the morning and then come back to the room in the afternoon - I recall no odour at all.  But the fundamental question is why can a system be sufficiently sophisticated to take away all the body waste but not also take away soft paper.  Since the Turks, 99% muslim, use their left hand and don’t use toilet paper anyway, I wonder if it’s a system devised for the benefit of foreigners and that even though local sewerage systems might have been updated to cope with all manner of foreign matter, the “no paper” concept is kept in place for the sake of uniformity and for the sake of those settlements working on outmoded systems.

 

The modus operandi for the hot air balloon is first for the balloon to be laid out along the ground connected to the gondola, with the gondola lying on its side; and then for the balloon to be inflated with cold air by means of a very large fan sitting on the ground.

In this way the balloon inflates in a prostrate state and rises to the vertical only after the hot air burner is ignited and has been going for a few minutes.  It’s then time to climb aboard, and with a few spurts from the burner we’re away.  The operator has absolute control over the balloon’s vertical position - we were told to within about ten centimetres.  The control is achieved by spurts from the hot air burner which cause the balloon to rise, counterbalanced by occasional tugs on the ropes, that extend about a third of the way up inside the balloon, which have the effect of pulling in the sides and thus decreasing the volume of hot air in the balloon.  At least I think this is the way it works - the process wasn’t explained to us, but you could see from the way our English lady was continually busy that it’s not simply a matter of filling the balloon with hot air and then floating along.

 

Much of our excursion, which was programmed to last about an hour and a quarter, was spent at tree-top level and, given the amazing terrain with its soft stony pinnacles

and lush valleys in between, we spent a lot of our time climbing up and over little peaks with the gondola skimming over the top with about a two-foot clearance.  The vertical control is truly awesome but control over direction is another thing.  Before departure the operators had released a weather balloon and had an idea of the wind direction at various levels.  It wasn’t a windy day.  They don’t fly if the wind is much more than ten knots.  But this is a very calm part of the world and they have a very long season.  They tell us that they’ll probably cease operations about the end of November.  By that time there may well have been snow.  Our guide told us that there can be a metre of snow here on the Anatolian plateau and that it lingers on the ground for some months.  And when the wind is up no balloons take to the air, and it must be very disappointing for those who are here for a day and who’ve anticipated their flight and booked ahead, only to be told on the day that conditions are not conducive. 

There seemed to be air currents at ground level, so occasionally we dropped right down to ground level simply to gain a bit of horizontal direction; and then there were currents much higher up.  The highest we flew was around 6000 feet above sea level, but since the ground here is 2000 feet above sea level we were - wait for it - 4000 feet above the ground.  All the time in the air the two balloons are in radio contact with each other and in contact with the crews on the ground.  And it’s their job to track along country roads and tracks - main roads if necessary - to anticipate where the balloons are going to land and to be there and ready for the retrieval.

They can’t land in orchards, or treed areas, or rocky areas, and they try not to land in farmers’ fields that are operational, so they don’t land among paddocks full of ..... [missing] the balloon allowed to collapse, we clambered off, having had an exhilarating experience, quietly drifting over an astonishing landscape, totally free from fear and anxiety.

 

The problem then lay with the other balloon.  Lars was being blown in a direction where there were no open fields, and had made a number of attempts to land only to miss his target.  So, leaving one of the men with our balloon and gondola, and one of the four-wheel drives, we all set off in the mini bus to participate in the landing of the other balloon.  Continual radio contact, traversing the countryside, down dirt tracks, all the time watching the other balloon behind the brow of a hill.  As Kylie pointed out, once it lands and deflates we’ll find it much more difficult to locate.  In the event Lars, after what they later described as far and away - by some twenty minutes - the longest flight of the year, had a very bumpy landing and the gondola and all its inhabitants tilted on its side.  Not quite fallen over, but at an angle not doubt that made it difficult for disembarkation.  Great fun for all concerned.  We gathered around, they set up the table, produced the Bollinger, served champagne and cherry juice, and then Kylie bundled the five Explorers into the mini van and raced us back to our hotel.

 The group was due to move off at nine o’clock for a land-lubber’s exploration of Cappadocia, and we were running very late.  Contact was made with Simon Boas and agreement reached that we would meet up at the first scenic point for the day. We’d been dressed in warm clothes for the flight, although it wasn’t particularly chilly - remember that there’s a lot of heat radiating from every blast of the burners - but we needed to get into shorts for the warm day ahead.

 

So back to the hotel, a couple of minutes to change, back into the mini bus, and Kylie dropped us off just as the group was ready to move off with our local guide for the day, Mehmet.  Mehmet, a young man who gave us most useful information through the day, not only about Cappadocia, but about the Turkish scene in general - its history, its politics, and what it’s like to be a young person in today’s Turkey.

 

Only about a tenth of those young people qualified to enter university each year are able to get places.  The university-trained folk are privileged indeed.  He’s one of them.  He’s done a degree in English language and literature, and then another degree in tourism, the rationale partly to be educated, but also partly as a way of postponing his commitment to do national service.  But his education is over and in a couple of weeks’ time he has to report to the military.  He’ll be in service for six months, or for twelve months, depending on whether he goes in as an officer or as a private.  And if it’s for twelve months, he’ll be able to have his wife and child at the barracks.  As the world over, it’s not something that most young men look forward to.

 

Mehmet was raised in Cappadocia, and explained to us the marriage customs.  Most marriages are still arranged.  But arranged doesn’t - not in every case at least - mean a compulsion forced upon children by their parents.  But it certainly means that the parents have reached agreement in advance and that, generally speaking, young people do not first find their mate.  He did say that his older sister had no choice in the matter and that, although she’d been taken to the house of her future parents-in-law and asked whether she liked the look of the son to whom she was to be betrothed, he was sitting in the darkness and she didn’t get a clear look at him; and it wasn’t until the party a couple of weeks later, when the two families got together to celebrate the betrothal, that she got her first real glimpse of the man she was to marry.  Although it is the prerogative of the girl to say no, the degree of awkwardness that that produces will depend on the rigidity of the parental attitudes.  Arranged marriages as an institution can’t be all that unsatisfactory because the divorce rate in Turkey is around 1%.  Conservatism and traditional attitudes increase the further east you travel in Turkey, and arranged marriages are not nearly so prevalent in the west at Istanbul.  In the east it still happens that if there’s an elopement it is a matter of honour for the older brother or father of the eloping girl to seek out the couple and to kill them.  This still occasionally happens, and it happens as a matter of perceived honour and in the knowledge that the murderer will be incarcerated for life.

 

It was a big day of tourism.  We visited a number of sites in the Cappadocia region. Anne travelled here thirty-five years ago, and has always thought of the place as Goreme.  Goreme is one of a number of towns that snuggle against the hillsides and which are overlooked by a honeycomb of caves up in the higher reaches.  These caves are no longer occupied, but used by pigeons.  Some suggestion that they’re used for storage but they’re pretty inaccessible and you’d need to be keen.  There’s a lot of underground storage, though.   Driving through rather open country we saw pipes sticking out of the ground, concrete or terracotta pipes.  These are ventilation shafts for underground chambers.  The principal use is to store lemons.  Citrus doesn’t grow in this region but the people buy crops of green lemons, bring them up here, and store them for some time.  The miracle of it all is that ten kilos of green lemons placed in storage when removed weigh eleven kilos, and they’ve changed from green to yellow and they’ve become juicy.  One place we visited had dozens of tall pillars of weathered rock, long shafts with caps of the hard stone on top, looking very phallic, the place described colloquially as the “love valley”.

Perhaps the most interesting place of all was the underground city - the underground city of Kaymakli.  This city was built by Christian people escaping from Arab oppression in the 1100s.  The thought is that chambers or cellars were originally dug under people’s homes as hiding places, and the excavation of the soft solidified ash was so easy that the chambers became bigger; and in time huge complexes of interconnecting tunnels and chambers, living quarters, communal cooking areas, areas for pressing wine, were carved out - in truth a full city underground.  The one at Kaymakli is estimated to have accommodated three thousand people!  Ventilation was skilfully handled, with there being a number of major ventilation shafts.  We looked into one - very precisely hewn, rectangular in shape, more than thirty-five metres from top to bottom.  The city has a number of layers, with each level being slightly offset from the next, not directly underneath. And we traversed through some six levels now open to the public. 

 The extraordinary thing about the underground cities is that when they ceased to be occupied in the 1200s the erstwhile inhabitants left no permanent record of their existence - neither written record, nor record in folk tales.  The thinking is that their existence was simply kept secret in case they should be needed again.  The time of peace between Christians and Arabs had arrived with the Ottoman Turks who practised tolerance.........but you never knew!  And all of those who were aware of their existence gradually died away; and the first of the underground cities was not rediscovered until the 1900s, and then only discovered by a farmer, having in recent years irrigated a field, falling through a collapsed cavern roof.

 

Twenty-six underground cities have now been unearthed (to coin a pun) in the Cappadocia region, and archaeologists suspect that there may be as many as sixty in all.

 

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We are now on our way to Ankara and I’m sitting by the roadside while the rest of the party is having lunch.  We arrived here before twelve and it’s a bit early for me to be eating, and with assorted nibbles on the bus this morning - we’re all trying to get rid of the nuts and biscuits we’ve bought along the way, before we run out of time - I’m just not ready for lunch.  This roadside stop is a service station with associated restaurant, typical of the stopping points on the major roads.  I’m amazed at the number of large service stations.  As we were coming into the large centre yesterday there were, by my count, some fifteen service stations - big ones - within about a ten kilometres stretch.  A wide range of brands - mostly unknown to us - the French Total are here, and Shell, and BP, but I’ve seen little evidence of the major American companies.  There’s certainly a lot of traffic, a lot of vehicles, but with sixty million people you’d expect there to be.  The road transport, the trucks, are not typically large pantechnicons and there are certainly no trucks with equal-sized trailers.  Tankers of course.  But the typical truck is more what we’d call a lorry.  And driving has been very easy indeed.  Our driver, Salih, is expert and has no trouble negotiating the small bus around even the most awkward streets in towns.  We’d have no hesitation in driving a hire car through Turkey.  We’ve occasionally seen drivers who drive like farmers unaccustomed to busy roads, and they probably are, but that’s no different than at home, and the traffic is generally orderly and free from hoons and free from anyone exceeding the speed limit.

 

Just off to the side of the service station there’s a little patch of grass surrounded by pleasant trees, but the ground is absolutely covered in litter and trash - from cigarette cartons to lolly wrappers, to bits of newspaper, to Coke cans, to suspicious bits of blood-stained cloth.  Turkey surely needs a “Keep Turkey Beautiful” campaign or someone to sponsor a “Clean up Turkey” campaign.  It’s a great shame, because it’s all so unnecessary.  We’ve seen places where there’s an orderly disposal of waste, but more often we’ve simply seen trash dumped by the roadside.  Often in piles along the road at almost precise intervals.  You see a number of piles of what looks like builders’ waste and wonder whether it’s left out for the pickings, in case some other builder wants some rubble or bits of old brick or piping as infill for somewhere else; but then you see a pile of waste that’s clearly household waste.  No good can come of that unless the goats are a better waste disposal mechanism than I’d formerly thought.

 

There are plenty of goats, but only once or twice have we seen what you’d describe as a “large” herd, of twenty or thirty or fifty animals.  Typically, it’s half-a-dozen or ten, always looked after by a goat-herd whose life must be boring to the point of suicide, but apparently accepted with equanimity.  And there are sheep, although we’ve seen no large flocks, always in small groups with a shepherd .... and the reason for the small flocks may be as much to do with the fact that there are no fences.  Fields are generally small, even the wheat fields that we’ve been passing today, maybe two or three acres at the most.  You can discern the difference between one field and another through the way in which it’s been cultivated or through there being a built-up bank, but no fences and hence no capacity for large wandering flocks of sheep or herds of cattle.

 

This is all part of the enigma of Turkey.  Turkey is frequently described as a third-world country, but it’s not poor.  All of the busses on the road are modern, brand new - Mercedes or Isuzu.  The big service stations are all newly constructed.  There is multi-storey housing being erected everywhere.  That’s an enigma of its own because so much of it is unoccupied: is it government building, is it spec property development?  There are ten eight-storey buildings in a complex - why don’t they finish and occupy the first before starting on the second, or at least why don’t they finish them off progressively and thus defray somewhat the capital cost of the total enterprise? [This is the second time I’ve mentioned the vacant residential towers - I really was non-plussed by them.]  We’ve seen this everywhere on the outskirts, even of relatively small communities; there’s this burgeoning provision for more people.  There is mass immigration into the large cities - Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir - and a traditional although now illegal system of squatting, and laying claim to government land by erecting a dwelling on it.  There’s a frightening statistic that some sixty per cent of all people in Turkey live in accommodation of this type and, by definition, it must be more jerry-built than accommodation built on freehold land.  And the real problem it poses is the problem of services........the property development, so to speak, is occurring before provision is made for water, electricity and sewerage.  Nevertheless, this is not apparent to us passing by, and we certainly have no sense that there is a lack of services.  Electricity is everywhere.  As I’ve previously commented, every settlement is sewered, every settlement we’ve been to; and we’re astonished by the availability of water.  The outsiders’ impression is that Turkey is a dry country.  Certainly, it has an interior that’s drier than the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts.  But there’s available water everywhere, and in the strangest places we’ve come across irrigated fields.  The answer I suppose is that because there’s so much mountainous terrain, and because there’s an annual snowfall, there’s an enormous amount of water run-off; and doubtless there are dams.  And certainly there are multiple lakes; and put all together there’s not a water shortage.  My impressions were not correct.  According to Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs website: “Turkey, contrary to the prevailing belief, is not a country rich in water resources”, although richer than most Middle-Eastern countries.  It has available water resources of 1830 cubic metres per capita per annum.  Iraq has 2110, but Israel has 300 and Palestine has 100.  The USA, Canada and countries of northern Europe each have 10000.

 

We’re now in autumn.  It’s been a dry summer, but the country looks good.  Most of the crops are now in.  [Gathered in, not planted.]  We’ve seen the remnants of sunflowers, some corn - some of it still green so there’s the capacity, it seems, to stagger the plantings.  But the country after the crop certainly looks no drier than inland Victoria after summer.  Interestingly the most prevalent tree is the poplar.  Mostly of the Lombardy type but there also seem to be other varieties, all tall and fine.  Planted in plantations, in groves, along rivers, on the edges of fields; and many planted in narrow windbreaks in a way that we would never contemplate planting in Australia, that is with the trees planted closely about a foot apart.  This leads to a delightful effect

Tape 3, Side 2

 

almost like pickets in a fence.  The trees we’ve seen have all been twenty to thirty feet high, so there must have been a concerted effort to make the country green or re-afforested some years ago.  Poplars have been everywhere; we’ve seen the occasional eucalypt but not many; and, in some of the cities, avenues of the standard deciduous trees like claret ash.  On the southern coast and for our first few days of travelling the most prevalent tree was the Gallipoli pine, but several other types of small pine trees are grown as well.  These are both in plantations and in what you might call very scattered plantings.  They looked to have come about through natural seeding (and maybe this is the case), but given that they’re all a uniform height, planting by man seems to have been involved.  In lots of places we’ve seen small timber mills, often on small blocks sandwiched between shops or houses, and the unsawn timber lying around has invariably been of very small diameter, maximum about eight inches.  So clearly this timber is not being grown - and certainly can’t be used - for telegraph posts or other large diameter applications.  In places we’ve seen scaffolding for new buildings or second floor additions, and the scaffolding has been of wood; and it’s a little bit worrisome to contemplate scaffolding put together with short lengths of small-bore timber.  And in the streets of the rural centres we’ve seen people with bits of trees, trimming them, cutting off the small twigs and breaking the thicker branches into usable lengths; and the story is that this is frequently tree cuttings from their own farm properties, or otherwise it’s timber that they’ve been allowed to remove from Government-owned forests under a strictly regulated system, all of it being cut up ready for winter for use in household fires.

 

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We made an early departure from Urgup and from Cappadocia and were on our way to Ankara, arriving there just after lunchtime and being taken straight away to the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations.  A very fine collection, displays arranged chronologically from the Paleolithic era (described as two million years to ten thousand years B.C.), through the Neolithic, through the Hittite, through Greek and Roman occupations of the country, to the Turkish and Ottoman.  A very extensive collection, wonderfully displayed, and the museum itself having won the 1997 award for the best museum in Europe .... curiously, the museum is in Anatolia, which isn’t strictly in Europe.

 

Probably the most interesting part of the displays is the small objects rather than the large statues, and friezes and tablets - small objects such as hair decorations and jewellery; made with the finest craftsmanship, and amazing to see how craftsmen two and three thousand years ago were able to manufacture items in gold and iron and copper.  Such fine detail.  As impressive as the collection is the building itself, the central part of which was once a covered market.  There were photographs showing the state of disrepair and the way in which it was totally restored for its present use.  It was Ataturk who decided that this derelict structure should be restored and should be put to public use as a museum.  Once again, the great man’s judgement was vindicated.

From the museum we went to Ataturk’s memorial.  It’s a huge complex: central courtyard, colonnades on each side, a long forecourt with - on either side - prone lions in the nature of Karnak and in the nature of Washington D.C. 

Displays of memorabilia relating to Ataturk - his clothing, his cigarette holders, his office furniture, three limousines.........all the gifts of State provided to him during his presidency.  Memorabilia of Gallipoli; and, far more extensive, of the war against the Greeks which led to the foundation of the modern Turkey and then the expulsion of the Sultan.  To me the most interesting displays, contained in a series of alcoves, were displays showing Ataturk’s achievements while President.  In so many different fields: the granting of suffrage to women, the development of education as a right of the populace, the control of the economy (with inflation rising by no more than 1% per annum over a ten-year period), the compulsory adoption of surnames by all Turkish people - which was what gave rise to the name Ataturk, the name given to Mustafa Kemal by the people of Turkey.  Also the abandoning of Arabic script, and first the adoption of Roman numerals - and then a little later the adoption of the Latin alphabet.  The abandonment of Arabic scrip did not change the Turkish language, just the way of writing it.  Here is an example that we saw in a number of hotel rooms:

    The towels cannot be used in the pool or outside the room.

    HAVLULARI HAVUZA VEYA ODA DISINA CIKARMAK YASAKTIR.

And the establishment of forests, the reform of agriculture with peasants being allowed to acquire freehold land on twenty-five-year loan terms from the government.  And generally the bringing of Turkey into the modern world and taking its place with other nations of Europe.  A remarkable man and still greatly revered - his statue appears in almost every significant centre and his face appears on every bank note.

 

Turkey has suffered reverses since Ataturk’s death from cirrhosis in 1938 at the age of 56, including martial law for a period and including hyper-inflation, and it could do with another hero.  The current inflation is exemplified in the bank notes which are in millions of Turkish lire.  One million lire is about one Australian dollar, so a meal can cost twenty million; and the whole situation is difficult both for tourists who have to grapple with all these zeros and the Turkish people who have to grapple with great lots of bank notes to pay their bills - and with a prospect that every month these multi-digit notes buy less and less.  The inflation is not under control but the reform process has commenced, and soon after we leave the country they’ll be recalling the currency and reducing the denominations by a factor of a million.

 

Turkey is a member of the European Economic Community, but is not a member of the European Union.  It’s applied for membership a couple of times but has been turned down until it can get its economy in order.  There’s also the Kurdish question which bothers other EU members, but upon which we’ve not been fully informed during our stay.  An 8 July 2004 press article headed “Mounting pressure on EU to talk Turkey” reports that Turkey is the most important issue on the EU agenda.  “No longer is the EU under pressure simply to determine the merits of Turkey’s claim to become a member.  It is now under pressure to create a formal, institutional connection between the Christian West and the Islamic East”.  “The EU has announced that it will decide the status of its relationship with Turkey before the end of the year.”  

The foregoing was written nearly 20 years ago.  Turkey is still not a member of the European Union.

 

The final and most impressive part of the Ataturk memorial is the mausoleum itself. 

 

The sarcophagus is a huge block of stone, although it’s not as impressive as Napoleon’s sarcophagus in the Invalides in Paris, but it may be as big.  But more impressive is the building in which it stands - a great rectangular box with undecorated walls, but a marvellously decorated ceiling with alternating beams and recesses, possibly eighty feet high - a stupendous building.

 

To be continued........

Gary Andrews