Southeastern Anatolia Adventures - Turkey Part II

Hi everyone!

When I last left you, I believe I still had the Bubonic Plague and was chilling out on the Aegean Sea in Bodrum, Turkey.  Indira and I had dinner along the water with oh, millions of dollars of yachts docked alongside.  Like the whole trip, it was in the high 70s and we saw a beautiful sunset and just really felt lucky to be there!  We went out that evening and wandered along the row of clubs and bars and were harassed to go inside…but there were not many people out and about.  I guess what do you expect in the middle of the week in off-season?

The following day we took a bus (once again, a nice bus with a waiter – why did our overnight bus have to be so insane?!) to a town called Selcuk, which is the base for visiting Ephesus.  We figured we would leave our bags in the luggage hold part of the bus station.  Except there wasn’t a baggage hold office.  Luckily a nice guy in one of the bus offices said we could leave our bags, so we headed to the ruins of Ephesus.

 

Ephesus is “the best preserved classical city in the Eastern Mediterranean”, according to my guidebook.  It is where you go to see how life was in the Roman times.  Imagine – Ephesus was a prosperous city in 600 BC!!!  And just as crazy is how much of it is still left standing.   There are columns, gates, statues, pillars, carvings, a library and a huge theater.  

I feel like I use this phrase a lot, but it’s so often applicable – you can really feel the history when you walk through the ruins.

 

Once we left the ruins, we took a taxi back to Selcuk.  We decided to grab a doner kebab for a late lunch before heading to Izmir for the night.  We went to this little kebab stand that was run by the cutest family!  They offered us tea and coffee and wonderful little yellow grapes as dessert.  We had to get a picture with them!

 

We took a minibus to Izmir since we were flying back to Istanbul the following morning.  From the bus station we took a free servis bus to the city center.  By “we” I mean me and Indira and a few other people and various sacks of potatoes, baskets of fruit, bags of indeterminable items, etc.  It was the usual mayhem.  When we arrived to Izmir the hotel we planned on staying in was very expensive and not very nice, so we decided to look around.  I asked a man selling mussels on a street corner and while I waited with the bags, Indira went with him to check out some possibilities.  A boy on a bike appeared and Indira swears he was the mayor of Izmir!  He was ordering people around at the hotels and Indira was checking out various rooms.  By the time she came back, she was traumatized.  I didn’t realize that you could actually see cockroaches scurrying around in hotel rooms when you turned on the light, but yes – you can.  Clearly we found a different place to stay.

 

By this time it was probably at least 9 or 10 but we decided to go grab a quick bite to eat in the area of the city with all the bars and restaurants.  We figured we would be in bed early since we had to get up around 9 to go to the airport.  But, it was Friday and there were tons of young people out.  There is a big university in Izmir.  My guidebook said Izmir is a big, modern city, so you won’t fall in love with Izmir at first sight, but you may find yourself in love with it once you experience it.  How true that is!  Here is how our calm evening out to grab dinner went down…

 

We were looking for a restaurant and I asked three guys on the street where it was.  They walked us there but it was already closed, so they recommended another place.  They asked if we wanted to have a drink but we wanted to eat something first but I think our communication was crossed and they left.  About 20 minutes later they came back with a piece of cake they had bought for us!  How nice, right?  We invited them to sit down with us.  Once we finished eating they took us to a club where their friends were and a band they know was playing.  The place was absolutely packed.  The band dedicated their second set to “Emily and Indira” and then proceeded to play all American songs.   We were having so much fun when all of a sudden I looked over at our new group of friends.  They had (no joke) gotten into the cake and dipped their fingers in the frosting and put bindis on their forehead!!!  They were so excited, waving at Indira and saying, “Look!  Look!  We are all the same!”.  The two of us almost died laughing.  How sweet that they wanted to have an Indian bindi.

 

Our “early” evening ended at 3 am (as usual) and we were exhausted the following morning.  We somehow managed to hail the smallest taxi in the world to go to the airport and the man put our suitcases in the trunk, left them sticking out, and then drove like Mario Andretti to the airport!   Our flight to Istanbul was pretty uneventful.  It was a little bit cooler and windy when we got back.  Since it was Indira’s final day, we headed to the Grand Bazaar so Indira could get gifts.

 

I think I mentioned last time that I had met some really great friends six years ago but couldn’t find them this time.  Well, just by chance, I ran into one of them as we headed into the bazaar.  We went back to their leather shop and it was such an awesome reunion.  I was so surprised and flattered that they all remembered me – it’s been six years and they must meet thousands of tourists a year.  But they remembered me and Stephanie and Wendi (who I was with six years ago) and said that we were different…we were special and good friends.  It was so nice.

 

Indira decided to visit a hamam (Turkish bath) and get scrubbed and massaged before her long trip home.  I went to meet my friend Zeko for a drink, where we chatted about the current economic situation.  Zeko said, “We think this is the beginning of the end for America.  Remember, the Ottomans ruled the world for 600 years, and now, we are just Turkey”.  I fear that he could be right…

 

Patrick arrived that night, slightly earlier than expected since he was routed through London instead of Paris at the last second.  Indira and I tried to catch him up on our trip and poor Indira only got two hours of sleep before leaving.  For the following two days, Patrick and I wandered around and visited the Blue Mosque and Aya Sophia and all the places in Sultanahmet.  We went to an area of the city called Karakoy and had dinner outside of a restaurant where there was a wedding party inside celebrating.  We did a lot of people watching.   We walked down to the spice bazaar in Eminonu and wandered around the stalls selling teas, spices, aphrodisiacs, scarves, etc.  There are whole stores dedicated to cheeses and desserts.  It smells amazing!  We also visited what I like to call “the real people’s market” where they sell cleaning supplies, paper goods, vegetables, electronics, etc.  It’s like a whole other city.  I ran into an Israeli couple that Indira and I had met in Goreme (and who were are our overnight bus from hell).  In a city as big as Istanbul, what are the chances?  They invited me various times to visit them in Tel Aviv and I was like, “Ok, I hope you mean that, because I WILL come!”.  I don’t know if they realize that I will be showing up on their doorstep within the next few years!

 

Overall, Patrick and I drank a ton of tea, saw a lot of sights, spent as much time as possible outside enjoying the great weather, and discussed our itinerary for the week.  Having spent a total of nine weeks in Turkey, there was one area I had never been and wanted to visit.  Patrick was game so we bought plane tickets to Diyarbakir.

 

Diyarbakir is part of Southeastern Anatolia, or the area of Turkey along the border of Iraq and Syria.  My book describes, “No carpet shops, no tacky resorts.  Southeastern Anatolia is another world.  Opportunities for off-the-beaten-track exploration abound.  You’ll instantly feel a last frontier ambience and an overpowering sense of exoticism and adventure.  This huge territory is also considered “other” partially as it’s the bastion of Kurdish identity and culture.  Apart from some Arabic pockets, most towns and villages are predominantly Kurdish”.  Can you see why I was drawn to it?

 

In keeping with the original theme of the trip, we slept two hours the night before our early morning flight to the southeast.  When we arrived to Diyarbikir, amidst many stares, we rented a car from Avis.   It was a Fiat Linea, quite a step up from my Fiat Palio earlier in the trip, but still very interesting!  The badges were missing and the car was covered in scratches and dents.  But we hopped in and headed for the town of Mardin.

 

Mardin is a town of golden colored buildings perched on a hill overlooking Mesopotamia (the land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers) and the Syrian border.  Christians settled the town in the 5^th century and then it was taken over by Arabs, then Selcuks, then Turks, then Kurds, then the Ottomans…the town still has 11 churches and countless mosques.  The area was particularly hard-hit by the Kurdish vs. Turkish army squabbles of the 80s and 90s and is finally safe to visit.  Patrick and I visited the main square and the bazaar, where donkeys are still the main form of transport.  Men wearing fez sit in the shade and play backgammon.  We saw a meat delivery and men wandering with whole dead carcasses in their arms.   We walked around the town a little.  Unfortunately I think our exhaustion kept us from truly falling in love with the town since it was really, really hot and we were really tired.  So we were only there for a few hours.

 

From Mardin we drove to Savur, another small, honey colored town in the hills about 50 km from Mardin.  We found rooms at the Haci Abdullah house, which is a 250 year old stone house on the top of a hill.  A man named Aydin lives there with his mother and they have seven unique (and spotless) stone rooms.   Aydin is in his 40s but his six brothers and sisters have all married and moved out so he lives with his elderly mother and they run the bed and breakfast.  What an amazing time we spent there.  

We took a leisurely nap and then we relaxed on the terrace overlooking the town.  There was one other person staying there – an American girl named Christina who was traveling by herself after teaching English in Istanbul for a year and a half.  Aydin’s mother prepared a feast for us for dinner.  We were served tomato and cucumber salad, carrots, lentil soup, bread, chicken, eggplant, fried potatoes, and fruit.   Aydin hung out with us and tried to force us to smoke Marlboro Red cigarettes – he was breaking off the filters and telling us that his doctor told him it’s healthier to smoke them without filters.  Patrick suggested that maybe the doctor is a beneficiary of Aydin’s will…

 

Aydin told us about the area and we mapped out the next few days.  Having a car was so convenient because it meant we could do things on our own time.  So after a great night’s sleep (probably my best in three weeks) we had a leisurely breakfast on the terrace and hit the road.  We went to visit a town called Hasankeyf.  It’s a good thing too, because although it’s hundreds of years old, it will not exist in another two years.

 

See, Hasankeyf is a beautiful, golden town (population 5500) on the Tigris river.  Like Capadoccia, there are many caves built into the rocks where people live.  You can see the remnants of an old bridge across the Tigris river, which has mostly run dry.  Hasankeyf will be destroyed as part of the GAP project, which is a project to bring irrigation water and hydroelectricity to dry towns in the area.  With 22 planned dams and two rivers, you can imagine the scope.  On a good note, parched towns now have lakes and fish and towns are building factories.  Unfortunately, other towns (like Hasankeyf) are slated to be destroyed when they are flooded.  The people need to move somewhere.  There has been an outbreak of diseases that are specific to wet areas like malaria.  And Syria and Iraq (to the south) aren’t too happy about the amount of water Turkey is keeping, so it’s causing political problems.  I’m glad I was able to see the town before it is gone.

 

We set off in the afternoon for a three hour drive to Sanliurfa.  Along the way I saw a little boy (circa 10 years old) hitchhiking.  Patrick and I stopped to pick him up.  When he climbed in the back, so did two of his friends!  And some really bad B.O.!  They sat in the back and stared at us and whispered.   Two of them fell asleep and the third clung to my seat.  We left them in Mardin, waving at us from the side of the road.  For another hour we drove along rocky hillsides, passing tractors and donkeys and slow-moving trucks and vans carrying 20 people.   We finally had an empty stretch of road…and got pulled over!  Yes, we were stopped by the police, and we forgot to bribe them so we were ticketed.  The best part is that when they asked for the registration, Patrick handed them the documents in the visor and there was a Turkish license in the documents!  The cops were like, “Who this?” and we could only shrug!  We got a hefty fine (they actually wrote “yubongi” on the ticket which means “foreigner”) and then got back to driving.  We saw every landscape imaginable…flat plains, mountains, rivers, rocks.  We stopped in a village for drinks and everything was a tenth of the price we were used to.  We finally got to Sanliurfa after dark.

 

Sanliurfa is one of my favorite places!  It is one of the greatest religious and historical sites in Turkey, dating back from 1370 B.C..  People go on pilgrimages to Urfa.  Wherever you go, you can see men wearing traditional baggy, Arabic pants and woman are dressed in brightly colored headscarves and long coats.  Due to Urfa’s proximity to Syria, it feels more Middle Eastern than most places in Turkey.   The bazaar has many distinct areas…one whole street sells silk and other cloths, one sells shoes, one sells leather goods, one sells metals.  You can peek in the various stalls and see men pounding leather or hammering metal.   Patrick even got a haircut in the bazaar and of course we ended up hanging out and drinking tea.  We were definitely something of a curiosity in Sanliurfa. 

 

But the reason that Sanliurfa was so fantastic is because we met amazing people there.  We asked someone on the street our first night if there was a bar or café they could recommend.   Per usual, we had a small entourage escort us to a place that looked like a café from the outside.  But when you went inside and up the stairs, it was actually a bar with live music.  The singer, Ali, has the most amazing voice I have ever heard.  He befriended us and soon we were sitting with everyone there.  They were so friendly and curious and fun.  They made us swear to come back the following night.  They taught us Kurdish songs and dances.   They extended such hospitality to us.  Luckily they (like everyone we met on the trip) use facebook so we can all keep in touch.  How cute is this – the “c” is pronounced like a “j” in Turkish so they call call it “faja-book”!

 

As usual, this is getting insanely long, so I will try to shorten it from here on out. 

 

Our last day in the southeast was spent in Diyarbakir.  This is THE center of the Kurdish resistant movement.  It’s a town of narrow alleyways, ancient, crumbling, basalt city walls (the city walls are second in length only to the Great Wall of China) and proud Kurdish people.   Apparently there was a terrorism incident about a week earlier, so we did see a lot of police but we never once felt unsafe.  We were again treated with such friendliness by everyone.  We had a wonderful dinner and were served tea and this special honey and almond dessert, just out of kindness.  When we went to the gas station to fill the Linea, we were offered tea and (as usual) everyone wanted to know where we were from and talk to us.

 

Returning the car was interesting since no one was at Avis when we got back to the airport.  Again, we had a typical Turkish experience…a small crowd formed and everyone wanted to be involved and help and people were loaning us their phones…it’s so nice to feel like you will always be taken care of when traveling. 

 

I’ve been thinking about why I love Turkey so much, and I think I figured it out.  I am very trusting (too trusting if you ask some people) and I am obsessed with nice people.  In Turkey, everyone is really so authentically nice and you can trust them.  Would you leave your bag at a random office at a bus station in a town in the U.S.?  Would you allow some random from the street to lead you somewhere in the U.S.?  Ok so I probably would, but most people wouldn’t.  But in Turkey, it is always ok.

 

So, my last story…Patrick and I were back in Istanbul for one final day.   We hung out with my friends who work by the Grand Bazaar and did some shopping.  I planned to be in bed early since I had to be at the airport at 3:30 in the morning yesterday.  Well, I think you can probably figure out that my vacation never goes as planned…so Patrick and I went to dinner with Engin and Zeko.  Our friend Yusef came by around 10 pm and invited us to go for a drink.  We ended up in Kumkapi, an area in Istanbul with many fish restaurants and live music.

 

Around 1 am, after countless beers and raki, it seemed like a good idea to go to my hotel, grab my stuff, and take a taxi to another bar before going to the airport.  So this is what we did.  And once we got to the next bar, my friends just told the taxi to come back at 3:30 to take me to the airport.  So the taxi left (with my bag in the trunk) and as promised, came back (I told you that Turks are trustworthy).  I was sort of rushed going to the airport (not to mention sort of drunk and very tired) and got on my flight to Amsterdam.  I sat next to a great girl who is Turkish but lives in Boston, and we both had long layovers in Amsterdam so we had coffee and hung out for a few hours.  When I got to my gate in Amsterdam, I waited a few minutes and then it was finally time to go talk to the passport control man at the podium.  “Hello, where are you coming from, how long were you there”…and questions like that.  UNTIL I got the question, “Did you pack your bags and were they in your possession at all times?”.  I realized, oh shit, I could lie but what if, by some random chance, the taxi driver who had my bag for two hours put something in it?  So I opted for the truth.  Our conversation went like this:

 

Me: Well I packed them but then they were in a taxi for a few hours.

Him: When?

Me: Around 2 am this morning.

Him: And you were also in the taxi?

Me: Well no, but I knew the taxi was coming back.

Him: The taxi driver was a friend of yours?

Me: No, but you can really trust people in Turkey.

Him: (looking at me like I have five heads)…

My bags were heavily searched (obviously) and I sat next to a cool guy from Cleveland on the plane and even slept for an hour.  I got home and took a scorching hot shower (sans flip-flops…what a treat!) and now I am going to settle back in.

 

Now I have to take a quick final minute to preach politics.  Spending three weeks in Turkey made me realize just how much we need Obama to win.  Everyone we met (and I am not exaggerating), whether they spoke English or not, all said (upon finding out we were American), “Bush very bad!  Very bad!  Obama!  Obama!”.  America has the chance to gain some respect in the rest of the world with this election.  Ok, that’s all I’ll say :)

 

I’ll be surprised if you make it through this!  XOXO Em

 

Comments

[Indira]

Sounds like you had an awesome time! I miss Turkey so much and what you said is totally true--the people there are genuinely kind. Let's catch up soon!

[Colleen]

I made it to the end!!! Sounds like another wonderful vacation Emily. Not sure I could ever travel like you do as I would freak out at some of the places you have had to stay. Glad you made it home safe!