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.
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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.
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
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.
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
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