Transcript of Tape-recorded Diary
PART 5 of 7
The day of our Gallipoli visit was the first day of our Turkish tour [we were on the 15 days/14 nights “Asia Minor Explorer” tour organised by Explore Worldwide], and we left early from our hotel in Istanbul and spent the morning on the road, lunching at the small fishing village of Gelibolu, the town that gives its name to the Gallipoli peninsula. We’re travelling in a small bus, capacity about twenty people - maybe a couple more - but there’s a bit of space, there being only sixteen tourists plus our tour leader, plus the driver, plus a Government guide - a Turkish national named Sinan. He’s a young man, university student who does some guiding, but who in this situation is required by officialdom to come along with our group - presumably to gain experience, hopefully not to act as some sort of tourist spy. His presence is at the cost of our tour company and, while to them it’s a bit of an imposition, to us it provides an additional source of local information affably provided by someone who speaks very passable English. On a personal note, he has shoulder length rather unkempt hair (which is neither here nor there), a moustache, and a small beard on the tip of the chin; but his most striking features are a magnificent set of very white teeth - the top deck of which are usually being displayed [smiling, not snarling!] - and the most wonderful aquiline nose. The full hook, straight from caricature.
The driver’s name is Salih - a man of early middle age, balding, solidly built, I guess you might say typically Turkish in appearance, very open face, a most affable man - always talking when he’s driving, often to Sinan or to our tour leader or even to himself. His driving is impeccable; he’s only too willing to help load and unload the bus; and he seems to get a great enjoyment from his job. He has a wife and kids who live back in Istanbul, so being away for a fortnight at a time can’t be easy, but during that fortnight he has a couple of days off while the group are aboard boat, and during that time just holes up in the nearby town playing a lot of backgammon and drinking a lot of tea. And then after the excursion he has a number of days off work at home in Istanbul. He speaks sufficient English for us to make ourselves understood and he and Sinan, the so-called “silent” guide, are fine ambassadors for their country.
Our tour leader is Simon (Simon Boas) twenty-eight years old Englishman, tall - maybe six feet four - very lean, Oxford educated, beautifully spoken, terrific young man whose only failing seems to be cigarette smoking - about which he’s quite self-conscious, or should I say considerate; but quite unrepentant. Plenty of others have tried to have him give it up, so we might as well not bother. The advantages of being raised in the United Kingdom near to continental Europe, and the advantages of having a liberal family and a liberal education, are evident from his life story. At fourteen by himself cycling through Holland, various solo trips to the continent while fifteen and sixteen before going to university, working in Vietnam for a year assisting in its national charity, and then after graduation working as a tour guide. He spent two years in Cairo working with Imaginative Traveller, the tour company with whom we’d “done” Egypt three years ago, and during that time he heard of although didn’t meet Jim, our guide of that time, who was still then doing the same work ..... although Jim was just on the point of leaving the company and leaving the country. After Egypt Simon decided to switch to Turkey, and he’s been doing the present tours for about six months. He speaks fluent Arabic, and in his six months in Turkey has picked up enough Turkish to be able to get by very well thank you in his leader capacity. He loves the country and loves the people, and after a few days we can understand why; and he’s quite undecided about his future, although having a steady girlfriend back in England is a considerable complicating factor. He spends a lot of time on the phone to her - direct calls and text messages, both - and, we’re told, we’ll see her next weekend when she comes to Istanbul to be with him for a couple of days.
The tour leader is not a guide and is not expected to have detailed knowledge of the historical sites that we visit and, at some of those, guides are engaged to provide us with that information. But in the smaller locations, those more off the beaten track, Simon’s knowledge is extraordinary. There’s no suggestion that he studied ancient history as part of his academic courses, and he’s done remarkably well to pick up in a few months the information that he provides to us so confidently.
The drive from Istanbul to Gelibolu took the whole morning - exiting the city, then highways and freeways, excellent road system. But the dominant impression is one of people, people, people - not that we saw people as such, not milling throngs like an Indian bazaar, but what we saw were countless hundreds of high-rise apartment buildings. They’re being erected in groups - not just one ten storey pile, but ten of them in a complex - and the thing that surprised us was that often all ten are unoccupied - building works apparently not complete, although no signs of cranes. And the answer we’re told is that the costs of basic materials are not great, so that the structure as such can be erected fairly economically, and if you’re putting up one block you might as well put up ten (I find this a bit incredible); but that the fitting out - the internal plumbing and tiling and so on - is a more expensive process and that’s not done until the particular block, the particular apartment, is due to be occupied. It all strikes me as a fairly fanciful explanation and I’d like to meet some of these building contractors who have sufficient capital to be able to make such a great investment, even if the raw materials are relatively cheap. And it wasn’t that these new areas are confined to the perimeter of Istanbul, but all the way along, mile after mile, settlements large and small were surrounded by these huge high-rise developments. And it’s all the more noticeable because so much of the country is rocky and mountainous, so the buildings are very much on view from the highways, covering the hillsides as you might expect a forest to cover a hillside.
Gelibolu itself seemed an interesting fishing village but we didn’t have time to linger because Gallipoli Peninsula was an important destination, and Simon wanted us to have the maximum amount of time there to explore. There’s an unusual - unusual for the tour company anyway - skewing of the tour group in favour of the Anzacs. Of the sixteen of us, there are ten Australians, five New Zealanders and one Englishman. The Australians - Anne and Gary, and Faye and David, Faye and David’s neighbours Carol and Bob, and their friends Janice and Jim; and from a place just west of Noosa, Cheryl and David - all of the Australians middle aged to late middle aged. The New Zealanders: Linda and Jason, and Catherine and Hamish - twenties and thirties – and Di, also middle aged. Di’s husband doesn’t like travel so she does it alone. And our lone, if not lonely, Englishman, Brian.
After our last Gallipoli stop we had about twenty minutes to get to the 5.00 p.m. ferry - the ferry to take us across the Bosporus to the town of Canakkale where we were to spend the night. The Bosporus (also known as the Hellespont) is that strategic piece of water over which so many battles have been fought - the Anzac campaign being the latest. At this stage my geography was seriously bad. We were not crossing the Bosporus, we were crossing the Dardanelles. The Bosporus is the 35 kilometre-long strait that splits Istanbul [and Turkey] into its European and Asian parts, and that connects the Black Sea, to the north, with the Sea of Marmara, to the south. The Sea of Marmara, is about 280 kilometres long from Istanbul, south to Canakkale, and the passage narrows again as it passes into the Aegean Sea. The strait between the main lump of Turkey on the Canakkale (south) side and the long finger of the Gallipoli peninsula (on the north side) is the Dardanelles. 61 kilometres long, previously known as the Hellespont, and 7 kilometres wide at its widest point. In 480 B.C. King Xerxes of Persia built a bridge of boats across the Hellespont on his way to invade Greece; and Alexander the Great returned the compliment 146 years later.
The Anzac campaign was meant to cross over the peninsula, and take control of the Dardanelles hence blocking naval traffic into the Sea of Marmara, to Istanbul, and into the Black Sea; and to send a message to assorted Balkan countries who Britain hoped to persuade to join the war on the Allied side.
Simon recounted for us the legend of Hero and Leander, Leander swimming the Hellespont every night to be with Hero; and he recounted the story of Lord Byron who swam the Hellespont and later who wrote a poem in which he questioned Leander’s usefulness to Hero after such a strenuous swim. [The Hellespont is one mile (1.6 kilometres) wide at its narrowest point, and the current would make the swim much longer. Lord Byron did it in 1810 then wrote his poem "Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos".]
The next ferry was some hours later than 5.00 p.m., and while there was plenty of room on the ferry for us and our bus, I wondered at the certainty there would in fact be space available. Maybe during the busy tourist season they phone ahead to ensure a berth.
The next day, Wednesday 23rd September, was another big tourist day. Quite close to Canakkale where we overnighted are the remains of the ancient city of Troy. The story of the siege and the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, ostensibly pursuing Helen the wife of the Greek King Menelaus, who’d run off with the Trojan prince Paris; and the story of the Trojan horse: all of this told by Homer in the Iliad, and thought for generations to have been a legend. And then in 1871 the German archaeologist, Schliemann, rediscovering the site and unearthing the ruins. And over the years of archaeological excavation the establishing of the fact that Troy was built and destroyed and abandoned and rebuilt some nine times, and it was likely the sixth Troy that was the one that ended with the ten-year Trojan war.
It was fascinating to see the archaeological evidence of the different levels of Troy and to see that there’s not a simple overlay of one subsequent rebuilding on top of the previous one. This is because the city is on a hill and there will always be evidence of one of the earlier eras lower down the hill than some of the evidence of some of the later eras. And when you combine this with the fact that subsequent settlers frequently re-used, for building materials, the stones from the buildings of the previous eras, then there’s quite a vertical patchwork of time scales.
Our excellent guide was Mustafa, who is local to the region and whose family formerly owned farmland - olive groves - that are now known to be above some of the areas of Troy yet to be excavated. He’s had a life-long interest in the city and is the author of a very informative and comprehensive guide book - which we purchased. There’s a lot to be comprehensive about when you realise that Troy goes back to three thousand years B.C. The Homeric Troy was in existence from 1800 to 1275 B.C. - all of this now able to be rather accurately established by radio carbon dating, quite apart from relying on the veracity of Homer’s epic. It was the very precise description of the location of Troy in the Iliad - and of the plain below the city where the battles took place - that led Schliemann to the exact spot. It’s not that Troy was completely buried by a couple of thousand years of dirt and vegetation. There were ruins visible, but the local inhabitants in 1871 did not recognise their significance.
On from Troy to Pergamum: the tour brochure says through endless olive orchards, and this is true. For a couple of days we saw olives in abundance, and it’s clear to see why olives in Turkey are a dietary feature of breakfast, lunch and dinner. The olive seems capable of growing in land flat or steep, cultivated groves, or rocky outcrops ..... and there are plenty of rocky outcrops, and the olives are clearly a great way to utilise what would otherwise be wasteland. The question of ownership is unclear to us; and surely the rocky hillsides can’t be privately owned - but the trees would be privately owned and the olive growers must know who owns which tree.
There is now a Turkish town of Bergama nearby to the ruins of Pergamum. Pergamum, once a Greek city and then a Roman city, gave its name to the word parchment - for which it was famous.
The Thursday was, in a sense, an easy day. The morning spent only in sightseeing, the afternoon free; and staying overnight at the same hotel as the previous night - hence not the need to pack ourselves up and on the bus first thing in the morning. The morning of sightseeing was very full, spent entirely at the city of Ephesus - the ancient city, the ruins. Again, a Greco-Roman city like Pergamum - but huge.
A city visited by Marc Antony and Cleopatra, and by St. Paul the evangelist; a major cultural and economic centre that apparently reached its zenith in the second century A.D. and didn’t decline until about the seventh century. Another excellent and expert guide, Nijat, who focussed more on the human side, the day-to-day living of the Ephesians, as distinct from the city’s political history. Anne had visited here thirty-five years previously and the place was much transformed. An enormous amount has, since then, been excavated and identified and made accessible to tourists, as was the case at Troy. But the major transformation has been the number of persons visiting. Thirty-five years ago Anne and her group were the only people strolling through the ruins; today there were hundreds, verging on thousands. Nijat said that during the height of the season sometimes as many as three tour boats pull into the nearby harbour, each with three-and-a-half thousand tourists, and they have been known to descend on Ephesus at the same time. Unadulterated chaos, and surely not a pleasant or informative experience.
Back to Selcuk, tentative thoughts about eating lunch, and then a visit to the museum - containing many statues, parts of friezes, and artefacts transferred from the ruins into the safety and safe custody of the museum environment.
That night, at Simon’s instigation, the group visited the Kiwi Carpet Shop, the local Turkish carpet vendor. The Turkish man and his English wife had lived for some years in New Zealand; now trading - it would seem very profitably - back in Turkey at Selcuk. The idea, ostensibly, was to be given a talk on the way Turkish carpets are made and the different types of carpet but, in reality, a carefully, albeit leisurely, orchestrated soft sell; and very effective at that because all but one or two of the group made a purchase. We were rewarded at the end with a free barbeque provided by the proprietors, and impromptu musical entertainments provided in the back street behind the shop - a most affable way to be deprived of your money, everybody coming out a winner.
We’re on an adventure tour and there’s no promise that our accommodation will be five star, or anything approaching. The hotels in fact have been passable to good, all with swimming pools, but each with something a little quirky. At Selcuk the shower rose was badly fitting and as much water squirted sideways as downwards, and there was no way to stop the floor of the bathroom becoming flooded. Local colour, I think it’s called. There was local colour of a different kind in Istanbul several days earlier; and, before that, during our last days in France.
Our farewell to Duravel and the Valley of the Lot had fittingly involved a visit to our apartments by our friendly hosts Jerome and Margot, wishing us well, inviting us back, and providing us with some detailed route maps to Breve and to the railway station for our journey next morning. That journey, partly by local road, partly by freeway, was giving us a bit of anxiety. The train for Paris was due to depart Breve at 9.37, but our hire car was to be left at the Hertz branch which wasn’t due to open until nine o’clock; and our early rising was dependent on our handphone alarm. As it happens everything went very smoothly - up at 5.20 away at 6.15, about thirty-five minutes through the Lot Valley from Duravel to Cahors our turning-point north, and on to the freeway. We were in Breve in fact by eight o’clock and had more than enough time; and the Hertz man was at his desk a little before nine. There was nowhere to park near the office and we put the car into the station carpark about fifty metres away. He was perfectly happy with that, did his inspection, no paperwork to complete, and then just killing time on the station. The train was a fast train, although not one of the TGV. Two stops only on the way to Paris, at Limoges and Chateauroux, and in Paris at the Austerlitz station by 1.35. Thence by taxi to our hotel, Le Regent, the place where Faye and David had stayed during the week in Paris. Located on the left bank in a street off St.-Germain, not far from Pont Neuf, very central, an attractive small hotel - although the room was small indeed, but no problem for a simple overnight stay.
We’d had two weeks in the company of our friends and there was more to come, so on this afternoon we split up and Anne and Gary on our final afternoon in Paris took a long walk from the hotel - along the Seine, across the Place de la Concorde, through the Tuileries Gardens [Paris veterans will immediately spot the error - we would have gone through the Tuileries before crossing the Place de la Concorde], up the Champs Elysses to the Arc de Triomphe; and back, passing through the courtyards of Le Louvre. Crowds of people, brilliant sunny afternoon and evening, Paris at its best.
We’d ordered a taxi with station wagon configuration, and the four of us were away to the airport at seven-thirty - Charles de Gaulle airport; and absolute chaos. Our trouble was somewhat caused by arriving too early. Our plane was due for departure at five past ten, and around eight o’clock the relevant check-in counter was not yet being indicated on the board. But upon enquiry we were told the counter, and we then formed part of a straggly queue which, through lack of lane tapes and common queueing courtesy, became messily entwined with the queue for the St. Petersburg plane. Things became a bit easier once the check-in counter displayed the Istanbul sign; but things became really chaotic when the luggage conveyors failed. For a while the attendants coped by stacking the baggage near the mouth of the chute. But then the real problem became apparent because the scales, it seems, form part of the same conveyor belt mechanism, and they weren’t working either. So, it was not possible to compile the official load figures. Everything stopped, and it was stalemate for more than half-an-hour, closer to an hour perhaps. And then the word that they would likely open up some other check-in counter for the Istanbul plane - but no announcement. We heard because we were the very next people to be weighed in [that is, we were at the head of the queue - and so heard the staff talking ..... with helpful translation by a young English-speaking Turkish chap next to us in the queue]. And then the word came, passed from mouth-to-mouth, followed by a mad stampede fifty metres down the departure area to the new counter. It was clear that the plane was not going to leave on time and it didn’t, but because we missed our scheduled departure time air traffic control had to place us in a new departure slot, so we sat on the tarmac for another half hour.
The flight itself was fine. We arrived at Istanbul around four-thirty, having lost an hour by the clock, and had no trouble collecting our luggage and passing through. But a bit of stress at this point.
- - - o O o - - -
My sad tale of distress was interrupted by the call to dinner, and here I am next day getting very concerned that the diary is not contemporaneous and that I’m starting to forget things.
I’m standing right on the top deck of the theatre at Hierapolis, the Greek city, later Roman, erected beside or at the back of - that is, above - the hot springs of Pamukkale. I don’t say this with tongue in cheek and in the tone of a world-weary traveller, but this really has to be the best theatre we’ve seen anywhere.
It backs on to a hillside, at least at the centre of the back tier, and the hillside has been built up behind the two wings. It seats twelve thousand people. It’s been restored no doubt. What’s particularly impressive is the amount of detail available on the stage area, and on the main building facing the auditorium where the actors appeared from, where they dressed, where the props were held. As we saw back in Orange, in France, this part of the theatre is a major structure. And here we are at Hierapolis with a lot of the original marble statues, columns, fascia, friezes, put back in place, and the grandeur of it is impressive indeed.
Down below us on the sloping hill are the remains of a Temple of Apollo, the patron god of this city, and nearby the site of the Plutonium, an underground spring dedicated to Pluto, the God of the Underworld, from which there emanated deadly poisonous vapours - the story being that man or beast exposed to the vapours would perish with the sole exception of eunuchs who somehow were immune from the poison. Good story. True or false? Does it matter? And off in the distance, from where we’ve walked, the main street of the city - the agora - the open-air marketplace; and further back where we alighted the bus, the largest necropolis known in Asia Minor.
More than 1200 tombs, sarcophagus-like structures, stone boxes standing four to five feet high with stone slabs on top, all empty, maybe empty for two thousand years! Hierapolis was founded around the hot springs and it’s a place where people in the ancient world came for the cure. It’s interesting that there’s such a large necropolis attached to the city, and one wonders whether the cure wasn’t so effective after all. The truth of the matter is probably that people came here when they were in the last stages of life, took the waters in vain, died here, and were buried here. There are different types of burial configurations, not just the sarcophagus-type above ground tombs but also burial mounds with underground funeral chambers, giving a clue to the fact that people came here from all over the Roman Empire and brought their funerary practices with them.
Tape 3, side 1
Today has been an extraordinary day, although that’s not exceptional for this trip. Today is Thursday the 2nd of October, and it started with Anne and Gary in a hot air balloon.
We’re in the area known as Cappadocia. This is a large section of central Anatolia - not a place name as such, but a general area - and about a third of its area is made up of the extraordinary geological formation comprising pinnacles of solidified volcanic ash. There are three extinct volcanoes in the region, and about thirty million years ago these erupted and the region was in a state of volcanic disturbance for ten million years or more. [I should have warned believers in Creationism to skip that bit!] There had been some underlying base rock and the lava flows from the volcanoes were not extensive, but what was extensive was the amount of ash deposit put down for the whole of the area between the volcanoes; and then at some later stage some harder rock was formed on top of this ash layer. Over geological time a lot of the surface rock has worn away but not all, and the exposed ash layer has been weathered into these strange pinnacle formations. [The pinnacles are known as fairy chimneys.] The geology is fascinating in its own right, but the area is historically interesting also because men found that the rock comprising the ash - now known as tufa - was so soft that it could be chiselled out and spaces created for habitation and storage. And this indeed was what happened. The Hittites were the first recorded people in the area, and later it was occupied by Christians during the Byzantine times, and it was these Christians who, when persecuted, found refuge in caves of their own creation. In the nearby area there are some twelve hundred cliff dwellings and some eight hundred churches. When I say churches, I mean small chapels, two or three chambers, niches, and in their day typically decorated with frescoes. Some of these still survive and the whole area of Cappadocia is on UNESCO’s world heritage listing. A degree of restoration work has been done by UNESCO. The guide books describe this strange landscape as a “moonscape”, and indeed the filming of the first Star Wars movie was done here.
The day was to be spent in visiting the high points of Cappadocia, but we started our day looking at it from above. Well in fact we started our day with a 4.45 a.m. early call, the objective of the balloon company being to have us in the air before sunrise. We’d allowed sufficient time for a shower but alas found that the water was not hot, the first time on the trip so far that we haven’t had ample hot water. There was plenty by the time everybody else arose, so we must have just kicked in before the thermostat did so! Of the sixteen in the group, there were five of us only who were ascending, and the other eleven missed a great experience.
Speaking of showers, the standard of our bathroom accommodation has varied considerably. We’re not staying in four-star establishments, but the difference in bathrooms is quite surprising. I think we might have had one shower over a bath, but the rest have had showers only, and these have varied from shower cubicle, to shower space surrounded by plastic curtain, to showers simply coming out of the bathroom wall with no means of preventing the water from splashing all over the place. And invariably they’ve been of the hand-held variety - and to inexperienced users like ourselves this has meant that there has been a mess through the waving of the hand holding the shower, water distributed in all directions. The present shower, the shower at Urgup where we’re staying, is the worst of all. The bathroom is tiny and the lavatory seat is about a foot-and-a-half from the facing wall - no problem with that - but in that space is the shower. The only rules you can follow are to make sure there are plenty of bath mats to mop up the floor, and to make sure the lavatory seats are raised before ablutions.
There seem to be three operators of hot air balloons located in the Cappadocia region, certainly near Urgup. The one chosen for us by Simon Boas, our guide (and I guess the one authorised by his travel company), is operated by an English woman and her Swedish husband. They each pilot a balloon and there are two other balloons as well. They’ve been living here and operating the business for thirteen years and before that were running hot air balloons in France. Their business card also shows a French address. So presumably they still own the business there.
To be continued........
Gary Andrews
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