The Agrinautica

   In August 2013 after a fight (in which for poetical sake we may say she breathed fire) my Turkish girlfriend cast me adrift to wander Turkey alone. That should be all the context you need for the rest of this to make sense but if you're curious: this is the immediately prior installment.



The Chimaera
August 24th, 1233 BC – Fethi blinks the salt spray from his eyes and leans over the heaving gunwale to peer into the dark ahead. Between the sparkling starry canopy of the sky and the inky blackness of the sea the mountains of the coast can be discerned more as a negative space, except .. there seems to be a flickering orange glow near the top of one of them just coming in to view.
   He scampers back along the edge of the small boat, for the middle is heaped with cargo, to where the rotund first mate is holding the tiller.
“Sir, sir, what is that??” he asks the mate, pointing.
   “Ah that, that’s the Chimaera” the man answers with an aura of mystery and a chuckle. Above them in the darkness the sail billows and the lines creak.
   “What’s the chimaera?” asks the boy.
   “It’s a terrible monster.” says the man trying to sound Very Serious, “with the head of a lion, its tail is a snake, and on it’s back it has… um … the head of a goat!”
   “Really?”
   “Yes and it breaths fire, as you can see.”
   “Wow”
   The mate struggles not to laugh at the gullibility of the youngest member of his crew. But really the the perpetual fire there is an important landmark. They wouldn’t normally be sailing at night but the pirates are rumored to be operating in the area and in addition to their regular cargo they need to bring this passenger Bellerophon to the city of Telmessos up the coast. The mate glances back at Bellerophon, who is also still up, gazing at the glow of fire on the hill.



August 24th, 2013 – Up ahead in the darkness, the sharp sinister yellow glow of fire flickers beyond the silhouetted trees dancing in the wavering light. “The Chimaera!” someone whispers, as we pause on the dark path up the mountain. “According to Greek mythology, it was a creature with the head of a lion, a fire-breathing goat’s head coming out of its back, and a snake's head on its tail” our guide explains. I try to picture it. A fire-breathing goat’s head on its back!
   It’s a long walk up the mountain path through the forest by night, lit along by flashlights. I haven’t met anyone else on the tour and the darkness doesn’t lend itself to making friends. Despite being surrounded by other groups of tourists I am alone in the dark forest. We emerge from the trees into a stoney clearing, fire licks up from a dozen different places in the rock. Apparently, it is a natural vent of methane from the ground that has been continuously on fire for all of known history.
   “Hot dogs! Marshmallows! Hot dogs!” a Turkish man strolls among the tourists who have scrambled up the mountain trail in the dark, pitching his wares. They come with free use of his roasting poles. For just a few lira you too can roast a hot dog in Chimaera’s breath!


   “Hey … hey!” I realize someone in the group of people drinking is trying to get my attention, as I make my way through the open area of the hostel after returning from the Chimaera. The hostel, in the valley of Olympos just below Mt Chimaera, consists of a bunch of glorified sheds (“tree houses”) spread about among the trees, lights hung festively between them and the trees, spreading a cheery lighting among the area of couches, hammocks and picnic tables. Several groups have been cheerfully drinking all evening. I’m aiming to head to bed and depart in the morning.
   “Did you just come from Chimaera?” this guy with an Australian accent asks me.
   “Yeah”
   “How was it?”
   I approach the group, they appear to be all in their 20s (Turkey is not a first trip abroad kind of place), from all over the world, having just met here at this impromptu gathering. My friendly interlocutor is Stephen, from Melbourne, Australia. I’m drawn into the group and we play drinking games for an hour or two before walking a short distance up the road past several similar hostels to the one nightclub in the valley, where not even the bartender speaks Turkish (he appears to be from Jamaica). In the early hours of the morning, the sky already becoming pale, we all stumble back down the road arms around eachother trying not to collectively crash.

   The next morning I was planning on moving on. But as I make my way to the front desk, my planned escape is interrupted by my new friends lounging about on the divans.
   “Don’t leave already, come to the beach with us!”
   Well, okay what’s the hurry. I ask the hostel manager if it would be at all possible to extend my stay, he vaguely waves me away with    “just tell me when you’re leaving.” Continual postponements of departure are apparently common in this valley of the lotus eaters. Stephen has already postponed several times from his original intended departure date
   We spend most of the day lounging on the pebbly beach, swimming, and playing card games. Soon growing impatient with that I wander along among the ancient ruins overgrown with foliage just inland from the beach. In places, the walls are intact above head height and one can walk along the cobbled narrow streets and imagine it as it had once been. It had been a pirate haven in ancient times, but the ancient Greek hero Bellerophon killed all of a band of pirates in the area before going on to face the Chimaera, and in 78 BC a Roman expedition including a 22-year-old Julius Caeser once and for all quelled the pirates living there (and the pirate king, Zenicetus, set fire to his own house and perished, according to the Greek historian Strabo, which I feel like is a vague hint at a more interesting story).

   In the afternoon I find a Turk sitting in a plastic chair by the trail to the beach, with a sign for Alaturka Cruises, and decide to set up my next move. He tells me to come back at 7 pm to talk to his boss.
   I return at 7:00 to be informed his boss had passed out drunk, but it’s no matter, I should come at 7 am for pickup.
That night we all go out again, and at 2am I’m feeling the warm summer night air whipping past my face as with newfound friends I’m heading back down the curvy mountain road in someone’s swanky convertible.



The Turquoise Coast
   As a sailor myself I generally disdain “cruises,” but I had been convinced that this would be worthwhile by the simple math that $200 for four days, would be cheaper than accommodation and food would be otherwise anyway, and this would be the most practical way to see a number of places on the rugged coast. And it would be a small sailboat with just about a dozen passengers. Okay, sign me up.

   When the dolmuş (passenger minivan, from the Turkish word for “stuffed” that also gives rise to the stuffed grapeleaf dish of “dolmas”) arrives to pick me up the next morning, one of my new friends, an Australian from Melbourne makes an instant snap decision to come along as well — this is how you live the backpacker life properly!

   “We’re here to pick up…” the driver pauses to look at his list “Michelle Robertson?” the driver asks at the next hostel.
   “Oh, um, she just got in a different dolmuş”
   “What do you mean a different dolmuş?”
   “There was another here a moment ago she must have thought it was you and she got in”
   “Where was that one going?”
   A helpless shrug greets this. What unhappy fate has Michelle from Brisbane been whisked off to? Will she be fed to the Chimaera?
Well, there’s nothing for it but to continue on our way without her. As we wend up the curvy mountain road through the pine forest suddenly around a corner a lone girl on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere is waving us down – it’s our missing passenger! Apparently realizing her mistake she had immediately disembarked the dolmuş even though it was in the middle of nowhere.
   Half an hour later we arrive at the little coastal town of Demre, where the 65-foot traditional “gulet” schooner Eleutheria is one of the few vessels tied up to the dock in the broad shallow bay.
   Our crew consists of a cheerful suntanned weather-beaten captain; his rotund jovial father-in-law as first mate, who doesn’t speak any English but always has a sly conspiratorial grin on his face and laughing eyes; and the cook, a slight man who always seems to be out of sight but can whip up amazing Turkish meals in the little galley..
   As for passengers, from the dolmuş we have myself, my friend Stephen from Melbourne, Nick from Canada, two more guys from Melbourne who will spend the entire time fairly intoxicated, and the girl from Brisbane whom we’d nearly lost; on the boat itself we find two cute Spanish girls, a middle-aged Spanish couple (both journalists), and the last addition to join us on deck, via the captain diving in and pulling her back from where she was slowly drifting away on a pool noodle, another girl from Melbourne. We are soon underway and being served the first of many delicious meals.

   Our first destination is a cave on the coast. The captain practically puts the boat’s nose right into. A banner above the cave advertises a pirate bar, which I feel rather diminishes the atmosphere.



   Our next destination is a cute little village just off the coast. With no road access to the mainland, the streets are just two or three people wide between the beautiful little cottages. All three crewmembers apparently live here. The rocky hilltop above the village is crowned with the ruins of a fortress built to fight pirates. From the walls of the fortress ruin, more foundations and old paths are visible in shallow water beside the village where either the land had subsided or the water level has risen.

   In the evening, anchored off some unknown cove, we passengers linger over another delicious meal (the things they can do with eggplant!), without cell phones or television or video games no one is in a hurry to do anything other than enjoy the conversation. Until we cast off from the flimsy Demre dock I had been neurotically checking my phone for any signs of rapprochement from Her, but with no signal and my phone long dead, there’s nothing for it but to put it out of mind. After dinner, we play backgammon or swam lazily about the boat, cans of Efes in one hand and a pool noodle in the other. It is so pleasant and warm that even coming out of the water dripping at 2 am I don’t feel cold, we all sleep on deck.



   The next day we stop in at the coastal town of Kaş (pronounced cash), another town of authentically beautiful Turkish architecture draped in purple bougainvilleas on the steep Lycian coast. Just outside of town, a large ancient amphitheater still stands facing the sea, one can easily imagine what a nice place it would have been to see any kind of show, in fact it’s in such good condition surely they must still have shows here.

   At anchor in another cove that night we once again while away the hours after the delicious dinner playing backgammon and chatting. I wish I could more often force a group of friendly strangers to forgo electronic entertainments and connections, though sadly as they make electronic devices ever better to connect from anywhere this dream just becomes ever more chimerical.

   The beach of Oludeniz is our next stop. This beautiful beach features in most Turkish tourism montages, as a peninsula and sandbar give the beach a distinct semicircular shape. Somehow all the promotional pictures get it looking pristine and empty (of course), but after I swim to shore I find myself carefully picking my way through a thriving rookery of pale, pasty, bulgey Russian walruses in speedoes, packing every square foot of the gravelly strand. High above, paragliders circle in the updraft, having launched from the steep slopes surrounding the beach. Strolling on shore I find the road lined with “British Fish and Chips!” shops.

   We continue to “Santa Claus Island.” St Nicholas Island is a small island just off the coast covered with the ruins of an ancient monastery where Saint Nicholas, yes, that one, Santa Claus himself, had presided. Interesting fact, the actual Saint Nicholas famously punched a priest he disagreed with in the face over a disagreement about the formulation of the Nicene Creed — so be wary of his naughty list!
   We while away the afternoon with our usual rounds of swimming, backgammon, delicious meals, and meandering conversations. At first backgammon, a national pastime of Turks, had looked to me like a very simple game, but the more I play it the more I realize it’s akin to some sort of linear chess. Turks such as the captain patiently explain strategy to us while doing their best to hold back and not beat the rest of us too badly.
   A Turkish husband and wife come along in a small wooden boat propelled only by the husband at the oars, while the wife makes fresh crepes on a stove in the boat and sells them to us and other boats in the area.
   Our usually-wise captain recommended we visit the ruins at sunset to enjoy the view but on this advice, I’m going to disagree with him — the sun set behind a hill anyway and we just found ourselves squinting in the fading light trying to read the informational signs. I never even found where Rudolf had been disallowed from playing in reindeer games!
   Back aboard the Eleutheria we are treated to the grandest most delicious dinner of them all, as the cook magically brings dish after dish from the galley. At one end of the table the Australians tell stories of drunken adventure while at the other end the journalists and others discuss current events, until it all melds together. The boat’s beer supply actually runs out and the captain breaks into his personal supply. I wistfully reflect what a nice distraction this has been – the next day the journey will end and I’ll have to find out if She has been trying to email me or has been happily ambivalent – not having any way to know has been nice but it can’t last forever. But such thoughts are quickly swept away by the engaging conversations around me. The moon slowly rises, a big red crescent, low over the eastern point we had sailed around to get here.



And this, conveniently, brings us right up to immediately prior to the beginning of an LJ entry I had written for the 2014 season of LJ Idol: The Faraway Land and City of Light

   In the popular imagination, I imagine, "honeycomb" is a gooey dripping amber chunk of honey with, somewhere inside it the hexagonal framework of the beeswax supporting it. In actual fact it rarely looks like this.
   When first built wax comb is a crisp bone-white, one often sees it like this where bees have nested briefly out in the open on a branch. Sometimes they've only been there 48 hours before finding a new home but they've already build a few bright white blades of comb. Older comb that has been used to store honey is a creamy yellow and when full up of honey they seal the honey in with a snow-white layer of capping.
   Bees use comb for two distinct purposes (mainly), there, the honey storage, but there's also "brood comb" where they raise new bees. Here in the core of the hive they ley eggs, which develop from little pieces of rice into larvae, which look like grubs, only cutely -- they do not creep around though but stay snug in their cell like you in a sleeping bag in a tent on a cold night. And then after six days the nurse bees put a cap over the cell and the young bee pupates in its cell, spinning a silk cocoon around itself (you don't think of bees making cocoons around themselves now do you). This brood comb is distinct from the honey comb, the cappings over the brood is not snowy white like the honey but a pleasing light brown in the youngest brood. Shortly it becomes a cinnomen red-brown and eventually, after a few years, a dark mohagony brown of dark chocolate. Along with this chocolatey color it is by this point no longer crisp and angular but thick with rounded edges. If you were to try to cut it with a knife you'd find it is also thick but yielding, again like chocolate, but also filled with the cellophane-like crinkling remnants of bee silk. And it's delicious like chocolate -- no not to you or I but to the "small hive beetle" (which looks like the lady bug's evil alter ego, all black), and the wax moth, whom we'll come back around to so stick a pin in it.

   Where does beeswax come from, I hear you crying out into the void on many a dark night (in your tent). Young bees extrude it from four glands on the underside of their abdomen, they then detach these and mold them into the wax comb they is being built. Interestingly, it does not begin with the famous hexagons but begins with circles that then become hexagons through I suppose the morphological pressures pushing and pulling their walls.

   Beeswax mainly consists of esters and saturated and unsaturated fatty acids -- WAIT WAIT I see your eyes glazing over, and let me tell you right now I haven't the faintest idea what an ester is either, but what I can tell you is beeswax readily absorbs most chemicals it comes in contact with, especially oils. As a result of this, old dark comb is full of all kinds of chemical build up from things the bees have brought into the hive. Debris including from the bees own cute little dirty feet as they come in from outside, gets absorbed into the beeswax (leading to a build up of a high amount of "proteinacious material" (read, delicious to moths and beetles, they be licking their lips just reading this), as well as the silk cocoon lining (silk is almost entirely protein). As a result of this build up, especially the latter one, the actual size of the inside of the cell gets progressively smaller, which causes the bees developing in the cells to be smaller, in one experiment bees emerging from 7 year old comb were only 55% as big as bees developing in fresh comb, and many other experiments how smaller bees are less productive. Ii imagine if they could talk they'd have really high pitched voices they'd be extremely self conscious about.
   But let's get back to those wax moths for a moment, that find this old comb so delicious. Galleria of the galleriini They generally aren't present when there's a lot of bees, but if a hive has become empty of bees or nearly so is when they run riot. Their fat white grubs will burrow through that chocolatey old comb, rendering it into the sticky cobwebbing like the devil's cotton candy. Then the grumbs spin clusters of cocoons that have the consistency of styrofoam. Finally the emerge as drab and dim-witting moths that flutter about ineffectually but somehow find their way into more hives eventually. Many a beginning beekeeper has opened a hive to find its just been reduced to grey webbing and packing peanuts (would that be the peanut galleria). Experienced beekeepers learn this fate is easily avoided but still generally harbor a vindictive grudge against wax moths (I told you to stick a pin in them didn't I?)
   We tend to lose track of the Old Ways, of how things were Before Us. What happens when people aren't manually rotating out old combs after all? Well, before we were keeping bees in boxes they tended to live in tree hollows. Established feral (naturally occurring) hives only live about six years (probably not a coincidence that that's about the point at which the comb becomes particularly too old), then the hive fails. The population dwindles away. A greater or lesser wax moth flutters drunkenly in for better or worse, and lays its nigh microscopic eggs all over, which soon become dozens and dozens of fat squirming grubs turning the wax into so much unsettlingly-sticky fluff, which they leave behind when they themselves go fluttering out to find more mischief. Now there's a cavity space full of fluff, which some mice or squirrels find make a snug home, until their activities have used up all the cursed cotton and left an empty cavity space ... perfect for reoccupation by a new swarm of bees. The natural cycle.
   The man-managed cycle, meanwhile, requires that these old frames be painstakingly cleaned of the old comb. The old wax is either cut, melted or blasted with a pressure washer, to remove the comb from the wooden frame. This old wax weighs 5 times as much as new comb, precisely because it is now 80% stuff other than beeswax ("slumgum" its called), so even melting it down can feel unrewarding considering one is mostly getting this waste material. And then one needs to rewire the frames and put now straight pieces of "foundation" wax in them to guide the bees. Bees can obviously build on their own but with no guides they might not necessarily build straight enough on the frames.
   So we know what we need to do, what we should do, as a good beekeeper, right? Change out those frames. But a few years ago I came up with a rather unorthodox solution. I do rotate those old frames out of the brood area to the honey boxes wherefrom they will be removed from the hive at harvest. But then, as they're sitting empty in storage in the shed waiting for the hives to be ready to receive them, ripe for nibbling my wax moths ...I, well, I don't mean to scandalize you but, well, I let them. Just a nibble. Going through them about once a month is frequent enough to catch the wax moth larvae having turned just a few square inches of the comb into hell-floof, which I remove. And those squirming grubs I pluck them out and toss them to the waiting magpies who come with heart shapes in their eyes. Repeated every so often until the whole core of the comb has been removed, I'm left with a frame with just a border of old comb, empty in the middle, not needing to be rewired. I haven't wasted any time mucking around but now have a frame I can put into a hive, and the bees will use the remaining edges as a guide to build the requisite straight comb.
   The resultant comb will have swirls of dark chocolate brown whirled with the golden french vanilla coloured brand new comb like an ice cream of buzzing bees, or, perhaps, as I gaze fondly at it, I might say like a purring calico cat.

I've once again been too crazy busy to post the next installment of this even though it was already written. My intention had been to post all of the chapter in weekly sections in the hope that the reader here might have at least some semblance of context-within-the-chapter. Ah well. Most recent distraction on top of my other things was teaching an advanced beekeeping class in Ghana via (zoom) (google equivalent but I like to use zoom as the generic because Microsoft "teams" and google "meet" really don't clearly convey the concept). I don't think I ever thought to appreciate that putting together a top of the line teaching curriculum is for the teacher even more involved than simply having to write a paper as a student. Not only do I need to double check and flesh out the background information on every fact I intend to cover I also need to find appropriate visual aids and strategize the delivery all out. Anyway I digress. Here is the next section, including a few paragraphs that I posted last time but I'm including them again because I think they're important to the context of the whole, I'll indicate where the new material begins if one wants to skip to it.

   I always wanted to go to Cappadocia in the center of Turkey, so I decide to head there. I catch a small bus on a nearby corner, and it winds through the narrow streets of the old city collecting passengers from various stops. Eventually, the main terminal looms ahead, a vast windowless tomb-like edifice, that swallows us as we drive down a ramp right into its dark gullet. Stepping out from the shuttlebus I find myself in a cavernous parking garage with whole freestanding ticket offices whose roofs don’t touch the dripping concrete ceiling above. Buses lumber out of the darkness like mythical beasts. Crowds of people wait in the eternal night, like some dystopian underground city. The people here are almost entirely Turks — this isn’t how tourists get around. Kebab carts vent greasy smoke into the black abyss, surrounded by plastic chairs and tables, as if on a grassy lawn rather than underground oily pavement. I ping-pong through with a few well-placed questions to people who look like they know their way around — “Pegasus? Pegasus?” I ask, and they point off into the darkness. I splash through puddles in the gloom and find the office and buses of the Pegasus line.
   I climb the steps into the bus and enter a bubble of light and civilization in the gritty darkness. Soon we roll out of the catacombs, back into the gathering twilight of summer evening. Onto the highway, and soon we are rumbling through the purpling dusk, from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Bridge, with sweeping suspension spans like the Golden Gate.
   We fly down the highway through the night, and I’m mostly able to sleep on this comfortable bus, interrupted twice by rest stops during which most of the passengers exit to stand about in the cold night air gasping out acrid cigarette smoke — not quite the fire breathing chimera Bellerophon sought when he rode the original Pegasus in legend. The sun rises over undulating hills and occasional blocky villages of small apartment buildings.
   Suddenly, around a bend, a town comes into view that looks like it was hewn right out of the face of the hill — stone houses project from the cliff face, but the windows continue up the rockface itself! Rock spires rear up above the buildings, dwarfing the man-made minarets. We are in Cappadocia!

[this is where last installment ended]



   I step out into the fresh morning air of what vaguely resembles a quiet modern hippodrome – the bus turnaround is an oblong oval cobblestone loop with the glass sided bus shelter in middle. Surrounding it rising upward on the slopes like the semi-circular seating of an amphitheatre rise the stone buildings, minarets and spires of Goreme. The bus trundles off with a puff of black exhaust smoke leaving me alone in the crisp morning light.
   I check into one of the many cave hotels, choosing a ten bed hostel-style cave room, in hopes of making some friends but there’s just two Scottish girls packing their stuff to leave. The room had been carved into the soft sandstone of the cliffs. Thick Turkish rugs carpet the floor, like dark-red warm soft squishy moss.
   Next on the agenda: breakfast. I find a restaurant with nice rooftop seating and order menemen, a delicious dish Deniz’s dad had made, a stewy mix of tomatoes and peppers and a few fried eggs. But the dish the restaurant makes is a pale limpid comparison to her dad’s cooking – less the sumptuous flavorful dish he had made and more a plate of flaccid stewed tomato. I gaze off at the Dr Seussian rock pinnacles -- at least Turkish coffee is dependable.
   Normally when it appears one has been broken up with, one tries not to dwell on it. One goes to work, absorbs oneself in the mundane day to day. But normally one hasn’t found oneself marooned halfway around the world as a result of the fight. It’s hard to ignore that as a result of the disagreement, one is now living in a cave in central Turkey. It's always hardest laying in bed at night, thinking about how you used to run your hand through Her hair – dark chestnut brown that falls in curls like a turbulent current, that glows fiery red when the light hits it just right.



   I generally avoid package tours but it’s the only practical way to see the main thing I’d wanted to see: one of Cappadocia’s underground cities. I sign up for one and the next day a small van picks me and a dozen other tourists up from various cave hotels. The guide explains that the name “Cappadocia” comes from the wild white horses that used to live here “but today there aren’t any any more” of course. We go on a short hike through a nearby canyon, it’s deep and twisting with ample foliage in its narrow base. Dovecots have been carved into the cliff wall, and around a corner we find a vendor selling cold drinks out of a cave. At the end there is an abandoned town of stone houses hewn out of the sandstone slope, an old Greek town whose residents had been resettled in Greece after the Turkish revolution in 1923.
   For lunch we are taken to a tourist canteen in the nearby town of Üçhisar, dominated by a castle-like rock of sandstone pitted with windows. The canteen is full of the sad ghosts of the real Turkish cuisine I had enjoyed with Deniz. Köfte that aren’t the delicious giant juicy meatballs I’m used to, but dry and flavorless; dolma that has just been haphazardly thrown together –memories of Deniz in her mom’s kitchen, only half-lit by the light from the refrigerator, explaining that the grape leaves need to be sprinkled with lemon-juice and put in the refrigerator overnight; mantı that is just cheap ravioli in cheaper yogurt, no garlic, no meat – memories of having a delicious bowl of mantı with Deniz at an open air restaurant at the seaside near Bursa, her eyes shining, while nearby children launched candle paper-bag lantern-balloons into the air to the accompaniment of the gentle sound of the surf lapping against stone. To the metallic clatter of a hundred tourist’s silverware I pick at the food which is now my lot.
   The underground city itself, is as impressive as I had hoped. We go to Kaymaklı, the second largest of around 200 ancient underground cities in the area. This one has four underground floors open to tourists, though it has at least eight, the deepest at a depth of 85 meters. In its heyday it housed 3,000 residents, living underground for the stable cool temperatures and safety. A lifelong fan of the Tolkien books, the narrow labyrinthine tunnels remind me of a goblin city.



July 15th, 2013 – The gravelly slope gives way beneath my feet — a cascade of sand, a hiss like waves running back to the sea, scrabbling fruitlessly for traction I fall slithering down into the canyon. The slope curves into a hump like a ski jump halfway down. Sliding helplessly towards this unintentional launch, I desperately spread my arms and legs, flattening myself against the rough slope in a frantic attempt to maximize friction and avoid being launched into the airy void. Pebbles continue to skitter past as I come to a stop. Standing up, I wipe sweat from my brow, and look across the rugged canyon: manila colored sandstone — more sand than stone, the sides a sheer drop in most places. Thick tower-like rock formations rise above the jumbled slopes, jutting into the blue cloudless sky. The sun reflects mercilessly off the buttresses of rock, and I gaze longingly down into the bottom of the canyon, green with waves of tufty grass and scraggly shrubs. I look back up the slope I just slipped down and realize there’ll be no getting back up. Below me, the steep slope is a tumult of boulders and crevices. There’s only one way to go now, down there, somehow.
That morning, in a quest for more authentic food I had gone to the corner of town where there seemed to be the highest concentration of locals. Old men sat at tables under shade trees playing backgammon, ah this is classic Turkey. After having a much more authentic meal I asked the young man working at the little café where a good place to go hiking was and he drew me a rough map on the back of a piece of scrap paper, indicating the way to “Love Valley.” “You can’t miss it!” he exhorted.
   Well, I missed it, Finding myself on a sunbaked ridge looking down into a narrow valley full of lush foliage, bounded by rugged slopes and punctuated with more of those surreal pinnacles. Down there was where I wanted to be, not up here on the shadeless heights surrounded by chasms. I bet there’s another cave selling beverages down there I thought to myself. I thought I’d venture down just a bit of a slope to see if there was a path down the rugged sandy side here. Just as I was concluding there was not, I had involuntarily commenced this slide.
   It’s not any kind of route I’d have taken if I had any other option, but I don’t, so I carefully descend through a series of narrow chutes in the soft sandstone, sometimes essentially rock-climbing down the crumbly surface. I imagine if I fall and seriously injure myself, no one knows I’m here and might not find me in this obscure corner until I’m nothing but bleached bones. With great relief I finally reach the level ground and tall bushes of the valley floor.
   I wander along the dry wash in the center of the valley floor, up towards the back end of the valley because I have an idea the trail should be that way. But there’s no trail, and no friendly Turk selling fresh orange juice from a cave. I’ve long since finished my bottle of water. Sweat runs down my forehead and my throat feels very very dry. I begin to contemplate the possibility of my untimely demise again.
   But wait, is that movement up ahead? People? I excitedly round the next corner only to startle a white horse, who looks at me and darts quickly into the shrubbery. Damn. But on the plus side here’s a wild grapevine draped over a low scrubby tree like a heavy cloak, thick bundles of plump grapes hang down from its branches. I grab grapes by the handful and stuff them in my mouth without bothering to dust them off. They are delicious and refreshing. I eat as many as I can stomach and then take a large sprig of them with me as I continue up the gorge.
   The valley narrows, but, fortunately, the sides are also more traversable at the deep back end, the slippery gravel held together with coarse grass. I’m able to ascend the back slope on a steep narrow goat path. I finally emerge over the rim of the valley, dusty and tired, to see the great rock of Üçhisar close in front of me, surrounded by its haphazard brood of houses, hotels, and cafes. Some Italian tourists are standing near a turquoise jewelry shop I happen to emerge beside, they stare wide-eyed as I climb from the canyon rim, and with surprise I realize I had met them in the tour group the day before.
   “Where’d you come from??” they ask.
   “Um, I don’t even know.” exhausted, I gesture vaguely.
   And then I wander into Üçhisar to search for authentic food among the fantastical tooth-like rocks.

July 12th, 2013 - I find myself standing in the serene vastness of the Hagia Sophia, the basilica turned cathedral turned mosque turned museum that for a thousand years was the largest building in the world. High above on the lofty ceiling gilded quotes from the Qur’an in Arabic seem to glow golden in the dim light, and above that, the inside of the great dome itself is elegantly covered with painted scenes from the Bible in soft pastels. On an upper balcony I find the Viking graffiti the Norse-men the Byzantine emperors had employed as guards had left. Bored and far from home, did “Halvdan” lean against that parapet, some warm July evening, looking out with jade green eyes on the same sea, thinking wistfully of his home a world away? As a cool sea breeze rustled his rust-red beard, did he contemplate impermanence and set to carving his name with his axe-blade? Or was he thinking about some far distant Erika with braided hair whom he’d last seen years previous as his boat pushed off from the banks of the river Göta? Did he dream of seeing her again and wonder why he couldn’t just settle for the convenient local girls? Or was he thinking about nothing nearly so interesting, just extremely bored with a monotonous shift at work?
   From the Hagia Sophia I continue on to the nearby palace of the Ottoman Sultan. Deep amid the geometric architecture and grassy courtyards I come to the tiled pools and baths of the legendary harem of the Sultan. For centuries this cloistered place titillated Western imaginations – dark haired circassian beauties luxuriating by the pool, nubile odalisques plucking exotic string instruments, coy looks in large brown eyes, fleshy curves, tender caresses…
   The voices of tourists echo harshly off the elegant tiles. A fresh salty breeze clears the steam of one’s imagination -- from this corner of the palace hill the open air pool looks out across the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. A small black-hulled tanker leaves a wake like a snail-trail as it makes its way into the narrow strait known as the Bosporus, which leads to the Black Sea. The days of tender caresses are over.
   Later I stand outside the ancient Land Walls of Constantinople, still huge and imposing, though now a highway pierces through them. It is said that when the crumbling Byzantine Empire was in its very last gasps, and the Ottoman Turks finally got one of the gates open, the last Roman emperor tossed aside his purple robes, unsheathed his sword, and personally ran into the breach, disappearing forever into the melee. For a thousand years before that the city had defied all invaders. Not only were the walls impregnable, the city could hold out forever, reprovisioned by the sea. No hope waiting for her to give in. I decide it’s time to move on.


"The Terrace of the Seraglio" by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1866 (He apparently managed to see the actual harem pool at Topkapi Palace because this is it, note the same star-rail as appears in the below picture!)



Into the Underworld
   I always wanted to go to Cappadocia in the center of Turkey, so I decide to head there. I catch a small bus on a nearby corner, and it winds through the narrow streets of the old city collecting passengers from various stops. Eventually, the main terminal looms ahead, a vast windowless tomb-like edifice, that swallows us as we drive down a ramp right into its dark gullet. Stepping out from the shuttlebus I find myself in a cavernous parking garage with whole freestanding ticket offices whose roofs don’t touch the dripping concrete ceiling above. Buses lumber out of the darkness like mythical beasts. Crowds of people wait in the eternal night, like some dystopian underground city. The people here are almost entirely Turks — this isn’t how tourists get around. Kebab carts vent greasy smoke into the black abyss, surrounded by plastic chairs and tables, as if on a grassy lawn rather than underground oily pavement. I ping-pong through with a few well-placed questions to people who look like they know their way around — “Pegasus? Pegasus?” I ask, and they point off into the darkness. I splash through puddles in the gloom and find the office and buses of the Pegasus line.
I climb the steps into the bus and enter a bubble of light and civilization in the gritty darkness. Soon we roll out of the catacombs, back into the gathering twilight of summer evening. Onto the highway, and soon we are rumbling through the purpling dusk, from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Bridge, with sweeping suspension spans like the Golden Gate.
   We fly down the highway through the night, and I’m mostly able to sleep on this comfortable bus, interrupted twice by rest stops during which most of the passengers exit to stand about in the cold night air gasping out acrid cigarette smoke — not quite the fire breathing chimera Bellerophon sought when he rode the original Pegasus in legend. The sun rises over undulating hills and occasional blocky villages of small apartment buildings.
   Suddenly, around a bend, a town comes into view that looks like it was hewn right out of the face of the hill — stone houses project from the cliff face, but the windows continue up the rockface itself! Rock spires rear up above the buildings, dwarfing the man-made minarets. We are in Cappadocia!



###

Notes
I have never actually succeeded in finding the Viking graffiti but it is well attested and allegedly find-able. Only "Halvdan" is legible. I plan to directly parallel the imagined scene of Halvdan on the river Gota with his Erika in a later chapter when I'm in Goteborg, on the river Gota, on a boat, with a Swedish girl I'll rename Erika. ;) Also, though I still haven't worked in a physical description of the protagonist, the rust red beard and jade green eyes could well apply.

I'm assuming when I originally wrote in the black hulled tanker (parts of this are from a piece I wrote many years ago), I suspect I was intentionally homaging the argonaut, commonly referred to as "the black hulled argonaut" throughout the Argonautica, which had sailed through the Bosporus in the eponymous work.

"Not only were the walls impregnable, the city could hold out forever, reprovisioned by the sea. No hope waiting for her to give in. I decide it’s time to move on." by now you've probably gathered I absolutely love hidden meanings even if no one else will ever get it. Recall from previous sections I'd gotten in a fight with my Turkish girlfriend "Deniz" and was now traveling on my own -- the cause of the fight being that she wanted to get married immediately, and an unstated dimension was that she was dead set on not having children as it would hinder her career as a seafarer, so you can see how this sentence very subtly alludes to that.

I like the contrast between the soaring beauty of the Hagia Sophia and underworldly depths of the bus terminal in this section.

Pegasus as I recall was the actual name of the bus-line, fortuitous for the allusions I am inclined towards! Recall also several chapters ago I was on a ship named Pegasus (renamed from the actual Unicorn, though not a stretch, we called the Unicorn's smallboat Pegasus). Splashing through puddles was accurate to events but also serves as yet another overly-deeply-obscure reference to Pegasus being an offspring of Poseidon.



While looking for art representative of "tittilated western imaginations" I came across the art of Robert Walsh and I adore it. It's all in the public domain so maybe I'd use elements of it to illustrate the Turkish chapter:

   Yesterday I got home from Ye Old Factory after an overnight shift, at 11:30am. I proceeded to take a nap on the couch.

   Around 14:00 I was rudely awakened by a mouse loudly squeaking. I didn't want to get up and knew from past experience there'd be no hope of confronting the culprit, I'd just see it scuttling behind the oven. So instead I just loudly exclaimed "SHUT UP MOUSE!!"

   That worked for only about a minute before it started up again, so I got up, it was probably about time to anyway. Investigation revealed the mouse was actually in the toaster, his leg suck on the toast elevator. This was an interesting circumstance but there was no simple solution. The most obvious, that were this a computer game I'd call "delightfully evil" and do in a moment to an enemy, would be to activate the toaster and toast the hapless creature to death. But this is not a video game and I am not a sadist towards animals, that seemed cruel and inhumane. Plus, then I'd have a toasted mouse in my toaster!!!

   But how to extract it? My favorite method of disposing of mice is somewhat avoidant -- I have live capture traps and when I get one I like to put it in my greenwaste bin. I assume it can happily live there off the bugs frolicking on rotting lemons in a sea of coffee grinds, until its pitched into the greenwaste truck where it will either be taken off to some greenwaste paradise, or possibly crushed, but ::shrug:: that's not on me and everything dies eventually. So I was contemplating maybe taking the toaster to the greenwaste bin and shaking it upside down into it in hopes the mouse popped out, when the mouse popped out. And in half a second had disappeared down the gap behind my kitchen cupboards (this place unfortunately is a mouse's dream with the available gaps).

   So now this mouse is still alive in my house and I have a toaster it may have pooped and peed in. How do you clean a toaster? Maybe I should take a bath and bring the toaster that's a classic yeah? ahaha. If I had, like Paul "Maud dib" * Atriedes from Dune, had spice induced foreknowledge of future events, I suppose I would have just tossed the whole god damn toaster in the trash bin. It's a $40 toaster but not sure how I can possibly clean the insides it might as well be trash. (* "Maud dib" apparently means "desert mouse" in-universe, maybe it was the mouse that had foreknowledge of future events after getting into my spice cabinet)

I probably should have posted these Egypt sections in closer temporal proximity, being as the whole section was already written before I posted the first one. Ah well. On the plus side I just finally finished the Turkish chapter that comes a bit after this, and I'm thus finally finished with 2013! But anyway, for now, the third and final Egypt section! It began here and this is the second / immediately prior section.



Sunday, April 28th [2013] - It’s a two and a half hour drive through the fertile Nile delta to Alexandria. Here the terrain is green and agricultural, with occasional square brick buildings, sometimes whole villages of square brick buildings, with the occasional minaret of the local mosque.
“What are those conical towers on the roofs of all the buildings?” I ask Husam.
“They’re dovecots, they raise them for food.”



   As we enter one of these villages just before Alexandria, to my surprise there’s banners over the main street heralding my arrival. We visit a beekeeping family: a grandfatherly fellow, his middle aged son, and his 18 year old son. We look at their hives and extracting plant – spinners and bottling machines.
Afterwords they invite us, Husam the driver and I, to a sumptuous home cooked dinner in their house. The wife and daughters slip in and out silently to deliver food to the table but are never introduced or mentioned, though a shy eight year old son is proudly introduced. The table is covered with dishes of meat stewed with lentils and spices, rices, vegetable salads.
“Try the bird tongue soup!” Husam says cheerfully pushing a taurine of soup towards me. My look of alarm is immediately apparent as everyone bursts into laughter.
“It does not actually contain bird tongues, that’s just the shape of the pasta” Husam informs me after the laughter dies down.
The conversation is in Arabic with Husam occasionally translating for me, or at least giving me general summaries –“we’re talking about politics again.” … “they say no one supports the Muslim brotherhood but they were the most organized when we had elections because all the other parties were just forming themselves.”
   As we are afterwards driving through the twilight back towards Alexandria Husam mentions casually to me
   “They invited us to stay the night there but we already have a hotel in Alexandria”
   “I don’t care about a hotel in Alexandria I’d love to stay with a family here”
   “Ah, well, it’s too late now.” he shrugs in a manner that conveys it doesn’t matter to him what I want. “I hope you’re ready for the presentation tomorrow at University of Alexandria, there will be many people with PhDs in beekeeping there!” he continues, seeming to relish making it intimidating. And it works, how can such an esteemed crowd not be disappointed with me?



Monday, April 29th - The presentation at the University of Alexandria goes much the same as the others, they are up to date with the very most cutting edge information there is to be had about beekeeping, but I talk about comparative methods, and they are polite. At least these people profess that they allow their hives to grow larger than one box. Someone adamantly tells me one person cannot run 500 hives alone, which of course is what I’ve been doing.
   Tuesday I visit various beekeepers, a beekeeping supply store, honey processing and wax processing facilities around the town of Tanta in the middle of the Nile delta. I’m told everyone in this town is trying to get into beekeeping as those that are not are seeing how rich their beekeeping neighbors are getting from it. There’s two beekeeping clubs here in town, I’ll speak at both but must be careful never to mention one to the other because they hate eachother, a tale as old as time.
   Wednesday morning I learn that some of the people the day before had invited us out in the evening but Husam had once again declined on my behalf because he didn’t want to. I remonstrate unsuccessfully with him. He wastes no opportunity to mention that on Thursday I am expected to speak to a meeting of the Arab Beekeeping Association, and there will be people coming from as far away as Kuwait and I better impress them.
   Despite Husam’s fairly successful campaign all week to psyche me out for Thursday, the Arab Beekeeper’s Association meeting, in which it turned out I was merely one on a panel of speakers, was not nearly so painful, though I did meet some people from Kuwait there as promised. And the project is over!
   In 2008 I had come to Egypt as a tourist, saw the tourist sites and paid tourist prices while constantly harassed by tourist-focused peddlers and touts – this time I had seen a more authentic Egypt, met locals living their day-to-day lives, who had extended genuine hospitality to me and given me a better glimpse into what life is actually like in Egypt.


Gosh I was young

Friday, May 3rd - Three years earlier while posting and perusing pictures of sailing ships on the photography website Flickr I had become friends with Deniz, a fellow moderator for a sailor forum, a young Turkish woman who worked as a third mate on cargo ships of the largest size. Now it happens she is on leave in Egypt and I am there too.
   Laying sight on her with my own eyes for the first time, grinning on the sunny Cairo sidewalk outside my hotel, I’m struck by how beautiful she is, with her fiery auburn hair and sparkling brown almond gazelle eyes. And also how short! She has her nikon strap around her shoulder and, like me, black combat boots on her feet. I take her out sailing on the Nile on a felucca, and we stroll around town taking pictures. All too soon it’s time to go. Mohammed the driver obligingly lets her come with us to the airport (Husam was against it, but the driver has always been more obliging than Husam), and I’m off.


§

   Return to Dubai for a direct flight from there to Los Angeles. Seems like the opposite side of the planet, and it is, sort of, but the opposite side of the planet from Los Angeles is much further south, south of Madagascar, so this will be “only” 15 hours. Due north across the Persian Gulf, over Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, dull brown-green steppes far below. Russia, a darker green of Siberian forests glimpsed between clouds, and then an endless white down below. I watch the airplane marker on the map on the seatback display as it approaches and passes directly over the North Pole. The North Pole! I’ve been to the North Pole now.
   Down through Canada, Washington, Oregon, and I’m back in California after a 33 hour day.

   I just had a thought about a book I'd like to write. So the Ides of March having just passed I'm seeing a lot of mention of it on Twitter (I probably follow a disproportionate amount of history nerds ...... who, incidentally, tend to unfortunately skew towards toxic opinions, though that might be an all-twitter thing now (though there's a funny rule of thumb I've heard about people with classical marble statues as their profile pics as generally being toxic)). And to go off immediately on another tangent today I learned Caeser's actual last words as reported by Suetonius were "Kai su teknon" which is Greek for "and you child?" and _could_ be translated into "Et tu [pueri?]" in Latin or with a bit more literary license the famous "Et tu Brute" to refer specifically to Brutus, but is most probably actually a reference to the "kai su" that often appeared in curse tablets at the time, ie what he was actually saying was more like "see you in hell, punk!"

   But anyway anyway, this all got me thinking about how I've often thought here should be a whole series of historical fiction books set right at the fall of the Republic, civil war and rise of the Roman Empire, not least of which because I think there could be some eerie parallels to today. I imagine it being a bitttt like the Richard Sharpe series about the Napoleonic wars, but I think would definitely need at least two POV characters, who start out as best friends but find themselves on different sides of the civil war. Except what I didn't like about the Sharpe and other series' by Bernard Cornwell is that his protagonists always are the real heroes and the known heroes are always bad people who took credit -- in his telling he'd probably have Caeser as an incompetent or something (like he did to, I don't know, King Alfred, King Arthur, Paul Revere, etc etc) -- I much prefer the Flashman series that totally reverse that with the protagonist being a scoundrel who gets pulled into things and given undue credit, though obviously only one character could probably be like that.

   Anyway, here's where we catch up with the most recent thought I was excited about -- one of Caeser's first adventures was fighting pirates on the coast of what is now Turkey, I was contemplating how I might write about that and suddenly I realized, for this one would simply use as a model my other favorite genre: this would be very much Master & Commander / Horatio Hornblower etc etc etc but in triremes (galleys) in the Adriatic! (And this being like 20-30 years before the main parts of the story perhaps the father of one of the future main characters would be a POV sailor on Caeser's trireme or something).

   So yeah add that to the list of future books I'd like to write. It occurs to me, I've got no shortage of ideas, if there was any way to guarantee at least a modicum of success with at least one I could probably justify spending enough time to start getting them written but....


   And unrelated to the above, but another literary idea I was very excited about the other other day. I was thinking about the Master-and-Commander-in-Space genre (a la like the Honor Harrington series), and I had this sudden idea I felt was amazing. So there's always always artificial gravity right, which is just hand waved into existing, though I note in both the "Honorverse" and The Expanse it doesn't work when the ship isn't under power. But otherwise it generally works fine. My thought was this. What if it DOESN'T ever work fine. What IF just, the best the technology can accomplish is artificial gravity that's just a bit ... wavy. As in like.. it feels a bit like being in a ship at sea. People get sea (space) sick, professional spacers walk with the rolling gate sailors are known for.


   In other other other news I've been working on an entry that is essentially reviews of all the major Napoleonic Wars naval series. I might post that presently.

   Monday, April 22nd, 2013 – There’s 500 hives in close rows, arranged in roughly a rectangle, with a loose canopy of palm fronds overhead to provide shade and a slat fence around the the perimeter. The hives are frame hives like we use in the US, raised up on stands so they’re at a comfortable working height, the top of the one brood box at elbow height. And in fact, there’s no more boxes than the one brood box.
   The way we keep bees in the US, the first brood box is just the beginning, the minimum requirements of a hive that they soon outgrow, more boxes then being added on top. Here (I would find this hive to be absolutely typical of the rest of the beekeeping operations I saw in Egypt), if the bees are across all ten frames of the first box, it’s time to split it and have two boxes! Husam cynically explained that “here, the beekeepers would rather be able to brag about the number of hives they have than have fewer stronger hives.” I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, I believe in people’s self interest enough that I hold out hope it’s not so short sighted and maybe the conditions in Egypt actually favor this, but I can’t say for sure. When a hive is smaller than two boxes of bees, the bees spend proportionately more of their time and effort raising brood – they must have 6-11 frames of brood, so these smaller hives are perpetually concentrating on that brood making. When you have 10 frames of brood, six of those frames of bees at least are working on brood. When you have 20 frames of bees (60,000 bees), there’s still only 6-11 frames of bees rearing brood and 9-14 frames of bees out collecting honey.
   And in this case, any frame you try to harvest honey from will also have brood on it. Normally, in The West, I would never harvest a brood frame, but here they just carefully uncap the honey cells but not the brood ones, and run it through the spinner at slow speed so the brood doesn’t et extracted.
   But, and here is maybe a crucial difference, this beekeeper primarily harvests bee venom, and so did a significant number of other beekeepers in Egypt I met. This hasn’t been a major activity among beekeepers I have known in the West (To be honest I’ve never met anyone who said they did this in the US or Australia). They do this by putting bees in a glass tube in which they get electrically shocked, which causes them to sting the glass, the venom is then collected and dehydrated. Bee venom is by far the most valuable commodity that can be harvested from bees per weight (they were getting $60/ounce ($2/gram), about 1000 times the value of honey, though one can only collect less than a gram per hive per harvest). Obviously it can’t just be sold at the corner market but it has medical uses and pharmaceutical companies will pay good money for it. Probably the conditions in Egypt, the relative amount of honey produced, costs of running a hive, price of honey and of venom, make harvesting venom the particularly best remunerative beekeeping activity there. Economic supply and demand curves often explain things like this.
   Another twist on the economics of beekeeping, in many places farmers pay beekeepers for pollination – in Egypt the beekeepers have to pay citrus growers for the privilege of locating their hives near the orchards.
   I have a variety of advice I can share. Such a concentration of hives in one place facilitates the spread of disease (“yes but it’s practical for working them”), bees will be unable to find the correct hives in such grids and rows, they could at least paint the hives different colors (“they find this works okay as it is”), they’d probably get better honey production if they let the hives increase in size rather than constantly splitting them (“they would prefer maximum number of hives”). They had an answer for my every advice, while looking at me expectantly waiting for me to divulge some sort of easy golden bullet they’d never heard before that would revolutionize their production, giving them an advantage over their competitors, without them having to actually change any of their cherished ways. I begin to feel anxious again as to whether I’ll be able to accomplish anything. The owner of the hives shows me the business cards of several other beekeeping experts who had already visited him and said the same things as me, obviously similarly failing to convince them to change anything.
   I learned something myself from them. The hives only had as many frames within them as were occupied by bees. The way I had learned beekeeping, a ten frame box always had ten frames in it even if there were only three frames of bees. In Egypt, unoccupied frames would probably melt in the heat so they only add a new frame when it looks like the bees within are ready to occupy say a 5th or 6th frame, and the rest of the space is left vacant. If one did this and didn’t check your hives for a few weeks in Spring you’d return to find they’d built comb willy-nilly throughout the empty space, which would be a mess to clean up, but labor being very cheap in Egypt the owner had several workers who could ensure each of the 500 hives were checked weekly. Inspired by this, much later in Australia when starting new hives I’d often not put a full complement of frames in a box until a few weeks later so it wouldn’t melt or warp in the heat.
   The workers were in fact just sitting down to lunch when we arrived. The bees were nice enough that they were having their lunch (falafels with a pickled cheese in pita bread, very strong tea brewed up in a kettle over an open flame) in a cleared space in the middle of the apiary. They were very friendly and welcoming, sharing their lunch with me. Afterwords as we were going through the hives we found a scorpion in one – from the way they all jumped back I’m guessing one particularly doesn’t want to get stung by one.



Tuesday, April 23rd – I present to Dr Adel’s apiculture class about comparative beekeeping in the various countries I’ve worked and visited. The students are studious and intelligent. It’s also clear that Dr Adel is thoroughly knowledgeable about apiculture, there’s nothing scientific about beekeeping I can say he doesn’t already thoroughly know. But he’s intrigued by the Australian j-hook hive tool design and takes a tracing of the one I have brought with me. Then we visit an agricultural high school, which has a beekeeping department, and I take questions and answers from the staff there and look at their hives. Like many places, they have folk remedies for the “incurable” bee disease American Foulbrood (it didn’t come from America I promise, we just first discovered it) – in this case something involving cinnamon?



Wednesday, April 24th - I present to the Minya Beekeepers Association, Dr Adel and I sitting at the end of a long table of old beekeepers. Dr Adel acts as my translator. As with the beekeeper earlier, I have plenty of suggestions, but they’ve heard them all before and aren’t interested in the suggested changes, and yet they seem impatient for me to tell them something revolutionary. I tell them the very most up-to-date information on treatment of the bee pest the Varroa mite, but they’ve heard that already too.
   At least Dr Adel is able to often enlarge on my answers. He knows the exact context of what they know and which points need re-enforcing. I am very confident that he thoroughly knows his business and am more than happy for him to do so, it takes a bit of the pressure off me. However, Husam apparently has other ideas and takes Dr Adel aside for chastisement, telling him he is only to repeat me word for word. I feel bad about this, Dr Adel is very nice, an expert in apiculture in his own right and with the academic credentials to prove it, being told he must act as the mere translation device to me must be demeaning. He bears it with dignity, however, and after the meeting with earnest handshakes and good will, we say goodbye.
   This time I’m awake for more of the drive back and I notice often there’s a random pyramid in the distance. Like most people I had only been particularly aware of the three famous “great pyramids” at Giza, but it turns out there’s actually 118 of them all over the place. Once again I’m intrigued to later read about what I see. That slouchy pyramid in the distance? It’s apparently the Meidum Pyramid, the first straight-sided pyramid (as opposed to earlier pyramids with distinctively stepped sides), built between 2613 and 2498 BC. Originally built as a step pyramid at a steep angle, it was finished in the now familiar more or less (nearly) equilateral triangle design, but the angle being too steep it collapsed possibly during construction. The burial chamber is missing the usual inscriptions, with unfinished walls and wooden supports still in place that are usually removed, it seems probable Pharaoh Sneferu gave up on completing it.
   Shortly later I see another oddly shaped pyramid in the distance. The Bent Pyramid was under construction at the same time as Meidum Pyramid, started after they’d decided against steps, but hadn’t figured out yet the steep angle wouldn’t work. After Meidum collapsed they finished this one at a shallower angle. Sneferu may be buried here, or he perhaps went with his third attempt, the Red Pyramid. Sneferu strikes me as a great name for a cat. An indecisive cat.



   Back in Cairo the guest house is now full. The potato expert is there, now plus a citrus pest management expert and another tomato expert. When I express to them my frustration that the beekeepers I’ve been meeting had already been visited by experts and knew practically everything there was to know, they all said the same – all the operations they visited had been regularly visited by consultants and were better than typical comparative operations in the states. It’s my cynical hypothesis that this is what happens when somewhere at “the top” it is said “Egypt is a strategic ally of ours, we need to give them a large amount of aid money,” And so projects to run consultants through Egypt are constantly put forth regardless of if they’re needed, because the aid projects must happen.



Thursday, April 25th – It’s once again a three-day weekend. It’s almost a relief from the anxiety of trying to teach people who already know everything, though I didn’t come here to play tourist.
   The Organization organizes some tours for us. On Thursday we visit the Great Pyramids at Giza. These are the pyramids everyone thinks about when they think about pyramids. They were built by Sneferu’s son Khufu and avoided the mistakes he had made in his earlier pyramids.
   I had been here before of course, but this time tourism is down 90% due to the political situation. This time there’s no crowds, just the enormous pyramids under the blue dome of sky and a handful of tourists. Even the peddlers and touts are few since these small crowds can’t support a robust tout/peddler(/pickpocket?) ecosystem. And of course, being the youngest of my colleagues they mostly leave me alone.
   From Giza we go to Saqqara, just south of Cairo, where I hadn’t been before. If the Giza pyramids, just visible rising above the city to the north, leave an impression of a singular unrivaled ancient grandeur, Saqqara leaves the impression of an immense amount of grand history. There’s about a dozen pyramids here in various stages of disintegration, for these are among the oldest. Besides the pyramids, there’s ruins of temple complexes. And a lot of holes in the ground from excavations. The three Giza pyramids stand majestically on an empty flat slope, the pyramids of Saqqara are crowded amongst ruins, and in addition to Giza to the north one can see the Bent Pyramid and others to the south.
Djoser’s Step Pyramid is the most impressive here. It is the oldest standing pyramid, built 2670-2650 BC (ie finished about 40 years before the Meidun Pyramid was begun). It has scaffolding along several of the step walls, presumably preservation work going on but it gives it the appearance of still being under construction.



   Friday we go down to the docks on the Nile and for $10 (in total) one of the lateen-rigged felucca sailboats takes us all out to sail around on the Nile for an hour.
   On Saturday we go to the Egyptian Museum, another place I hadn’t been before. It’s absolutely stuffed with fascinating unbelievably ancient artifacts. From 4,000 year old relics of pharaohs to Roman mummies which seem comparatively recent at only 2,000 years old.
   Driving around Cairo we also see “Cemetary City” where people live right among the tombs of the cemetery, and “Garbage City.” Because Christians face substantial discrimination in Cairo, garbage collection is one of the few jobs open to them, so they collect the garbage and process it right in the area of town where they live.
   We also learn a story about the “swine flu” scare in 2010. The government had ordered all pigs killed, which experts say wouldn’t have any beneficial effect on human health but was easy to do politically since only Christians had pigs. But all the Christians just kept their pigs in their apartments for a few months until it blew over. And that they were able to get the pigs through alive was good because the pigs eat a substantial amount of the garbage.
   Three days of tourism are alright but by Saturday night I’m looking forward to getting back to work, though already once again feeling anxious about how I’ll be able to benefit the beekeepers I meet.

It's been awhile since I posted another segment of this, so here's the next one! Where we left off Our Protagonist had just left Nigeria for Egypt

Chapter 8 - Egypt
October 27th, 2009, Egypt – I walked to Egypt, with three friends, the first time. It was only a few dozen meters from Israel through the Eilat/Taba border control point. On the Israeli side, personnel in forest green military uniforms scanned our passports and ran them through computers before letting us pass. On the Egyptian side a man in a white uniform sitting in a chair shuffled our paperwork officiously, then walked with it to some other room, and then somewhere else, before coming back and waving us to another room where more white uniformed Egyptian border guards, one with an actual sword at his hip, had us walk through a metal detector that was clearly not even plugged in.
   Outside camels idled among palm trees, gritty sand scudded across the worn asphalt road, and the rugged mountains of the Sinai loomed as a backdrop. Taxi drivers descended on us. Knowing the bus stop was only 400 meters away we did our best to wave them away but we were experiencing an immediate lesson in the tenacity of Egyptian hawkers. One taxi driver slowly drove along just behind us, continually offering to drive us to the bus stop even when it was clearly only 50 meters ahead of us, much to our exasperation.
   He began insisting the bus wasn’t coming. We found a bus station attendant and inquired about the bus.
   “The bus should come here soon yes?”
   “Maybe”

   We waited. The taxi driver continued to hang around and badger us. After twenty minutes he went and had a close chat with the bus station attendant, then returned declaring he’d been told the bus isn’t coming.
   This seemed like an obvious ruse but after ten minutes, with the bus we expected half an hour earlier nowhere in sight, we asked the attendant again, and this time he told us the bus isn’t coming.
   So we relent, fine, we’ll let the taxi take us to Sharm El-Sheikh 130 miles away. He wants 100 Egyptian pounds ($18) a person and will not be budged by haggling. We load our things into his trunk and get into the car. Just as we’re pulling out of the bus station the bus comes in behind us. Welcome to Egypt.



[The above in a different color or font than the below to clearly distinguish it as a different time period]

Thursday, April 18th, 2013 - Arriving in Egypt I almost immediately cause an international incident. “We need to talk” the organization’s program assistant Husam says to me in a coldly serious tone when I finally meet him four days later. This is not the usual Organization but another one, OCAV-ODCA (which had organized my project in Ethiopia) [I've cleverly changed the name from ACDI-VOCA, I'm sure no one will figure it out].
      Having been severely constrained for time in Nigeria, jamming the project into 7 days which wasn’t nearly enough, I had arrived in Egypt on Thursday to, as I posted on facebook:
   Arrived in Cairo to be met by a driver with a big envelope for me, which included a cell phone, keys to a guest house, and a note basically saying "see you at 7am on Sunday" .. it's presently Thursday evening. Not thrilled with OCAV-ODCA's warm welcome, also it felt a bit like a secret agent drop. Also not thrilled with cooling my heels for two days. If I'd known they weren't going to do shitall until Sunday I could have gotten more work done in Nigeria ):<
   I had posted it “public,” which I just thought meant friends of friends might see it. Turns out that makes it publicly searchable, and like the all-seeing-eye of Sauron, the organization’s head office in Washington DC had seen it. There followed “several angry calls” to the Egypt office, which, naturally, motivated the local staff to chastise me four days later when they finished enjoying their very long weekend; which further motivated me to henceforth only complain in friends-only posts or books with barely disguised organizational names.
   I never meet the organization’s country director, which is unusual, but in their defense they are juggling seven volunteers at once.
   The Guesthouse is nice at least. Instead of putting us up at a hotel they have a three bedroom suite on the seventh floor of a residential building in the upscale Al-Maadi district of Cairo. When I arrive there’s an American handicraft expert whose been living in Indonesia for the past 30 years, and a professor of crop science from Eugene, Oregon, there. The handicraft expert’s project was just ending and she is soon replaced by an Alaskan potato expert with a white bushy Santa Claus beard. He doesn’t own a computer.

   At night I lie in bed listening to the occasional crackle of gunfire wondering if it’s celebratory gunfire or political instability. Longtime Egyptian dictator Mubarak had been overthrown two years prior, the political party of the “Muslim Brotherhood” had won subsequent elections based it seems on being the most organized and prepared for this sudden democracy, but seeing it as a winner-take-all system, were quickly alienating large segments of the population. Though Egyptians are often devoutly Muslim, they’re accustomed to a more secular government than the Muslim Brotherhood was intent on. “This is not Saudi Arabia!” someone explained to me, “women wearing full niqab, that’s not Egyptian, but the fundamentalists are pushing it on us.” Just three months after my visit the Muslim Brotherhood would be overthrown in a coup, so the situation was well and truly simmering.



   Dr Ross (the crop science expert) and I go to the city’s citadel on Saturday. There’s a sweeping view over the city from there – a sea of minarets and brick buildings that look unfinished, with steel girders protruding from them. Apparently, it is the custom to just add another floor to the building when they feel the need to expand. A guard at the citadel gives us a bit of a personal tour, and then as is custom, expects baksheesh (a tip), but as Dr Ross is significantly older than me the guard focuses on him and he is utterly oblivious. I’m relieved not to be the one it is expected of but a bit embarrassed of his obliviousness. Much as I hate demands for baksheesh the cultural sense that it is now due has gotten into me.
   At the famous Khan al-Khalili bazaar it’s noticeably less vibrant than it had been four years ago. They say tourism is down 90% due to the political situation. As always, a local guy attaches himself to us like some kind of parasite, despite our unambiguous statements that we don’t want his help. We steadfastly ignore him as he suggests we go in this place or that as we walk around the bazaar, and when we are ready to leave he demands baksheesh for his trouble. We did not oblige, and once again I was happy Dr Ross was the focus of his attention. The most interesting thing for me is at the vegetable market, where Dr Ross could point out exactly what was wrong with all kinds of vegetables, be it a disease, poor pollination, or poor nutrition.
   Coincidentally 86 year old Roger Ransom this same day was just walking up to the pyramids, no doubt saying “Goll-y –” and about to make some wry witticism about them, when a local man called his attention from just behind. On turning, he found the young man was saying he had found his wallet on the ground, and hoped for some baksheesh in return. Being as wallets don’t just fly from one’s pocket to the ground in open spaces it is to be supposed that this is merely the more polite form of pickpocketing, and perhaps safer for the pickpocket since they seem to live in absolute dread of the Tourism Police. Now, despite that Roger is my grandfather, we actually failed to communicate the coincidence of our both being here (he on a brief stop on a Mediterranean cruise) until realizing some weeks later. [I don't know if the continuous through-reader would recall but my grandfather Roger had earlier come up in that I use his navy peacoat and sextant]


The mentioned guard, showing how prisoners were whipped here

Sunday, April 21st – Sunday is the beginning of the work week in Egypt. Eager to finally get started I jump in the car that comes to fetch me at 7am, already containing Husam the program assistant and the driver Mohammed. We buy some green falafels for breakfast from a streetcorner vendor and head south on the main highway. The dense high rises of Cairo soon give way to a flat barren sandy moonscape. It’s so monotonous that I soon fall asleep.
   I wake to a scene from a dystopian science fiction movie. All around us the land looks dug up, bulldozed, excavated, piled. Large construction vehicles lumber like great beasts in and out of billowing clouds of white dust and around great mounds of snowy white gravel or sand.
“What is this?” I ask
   “Lime mines”
   They go on for miles and miles. And then suddenly we cross over the rim of the Nile Valley, which we’d been traveling parallel to, and descend into lush green agricultural fields. Up ahead we see another city of brick highrises, and presently we’re within it, Minya, the “Gateway to Upper Egypt,” population 256,732. In several places around the town, in the center of round-abouts, on pedestals in squares, there’s large recreations of the famous bust of Nefertiti. You’ve probably seen the bust, it’s one of the most famous works of art from ancient Egypt, portraying Nefertiti with sharply defined features and a blue hat that rises over her head like a cone expanding from the point of her chin to a broad flat top.
   Despite being a big fan of history in general, I’ve always found the sheer amount of known history there is about Egypt to be overwhelming. But I find googling the historic context of specific things I’ve just seen to be very interesting. The famous Bust of Nefertiti, it seems, was found, complete with its colors of skin tone and blue hat, in a sculptor’s workshop in the ruins of the ancient city Ankhetaten, near Minya. The city had only been occupied for one generation, during the reign of Nefertiti’s husband Akhenaten, who had made it his capital. Nefertiti lived approximately 1370 to 1330 BC. Akhenaten’s son and successor was the famous pharaoh Tutankhamen (“King Tut”), though his mother was not Nefertiti but another wife of Akhenaten’s ... who was also his full sister. And Tutankhamen married one of Nefertiti’s six daughters (his own half sister). Perhaps not surprisingly Tutankhamen had physical deformities and both his children died as infants. Okayyy enough of that reading for the day.


The famous Nefertiti bust, not my picture

   We proceed directly to Minya University, which looks much like many large universities, with empty roads criscrossing between buildings of classrooms and grassy squares with students walking to class. On several main intersections there’s student protestors holding signs. Ah yes, this is familiar, at UC Davis there were always students protesting for more rights in one area or another.
   “What are they protesting?” I ask Husam.
   “They want women to cover themselves.”
   “Oh.” I note that all the protesting students are bearded young men.
   We meet Dr Adel, head of the apiculture department, and look at some of their beehives. They’re surrounded by 15 acres of flowerbeds belonging to the horticulture department, and the staff are well informed about which local plants are good for bees. I am eager to learn this because I’m asked this everywhere I go and usually woefully uninformed about local flora. Amongst the flowerbeds and peaceful shade of frees, under a canopy of palm fronds 30 to 40 chairs are set up – a delightful outdoor classroom. Of the students we meet among the flowerbeds, a majority are young women, serious and intelligent, conservatively dressed but not enough, evidently, to satisfy the protestors.



   In the evening at 10pm I meet Husam and Mohammed at one of the many streetside cafes in downtown Minya. All along the sidewalks the wall-side is lined with people sitting on stools at tables, smoking water-pipes and, like us, drinking fenugreek tea. I learn Husam is 28 with two children. Mohammed is older, with kids in their twenties. His daughter is engaged.
“Do you like your future son-in-law?” I ask. They both laugh.
“This is Egypt. They would not be engaged if he didn’t like him.” Husam explains. Mohammed’s English is alright but he doesn’t speak much. I ask him if he has any pets and a broad smile crosses his face as he begins to tell me about his cat.

[To be continued (this is 2053 of 5446 words in the Egypt chapter so it will probably be three parts)]

   Originally I had envisioned this featuring more of the 2008 trip but it doesn't really come up again, as that was just tourist stuff. The part I'm currently writing is from later that year when I go to Turkey, I'm currently puzzling out how to best combine the 2008 Turkey trip with the two trips in 2013, and in particular, whether I should keep them separate or for simplicity sake combine them (in actual fact, because I had become involved with this Turkish girl at the end of the Egypt chapter, I go to Turkey, and a month later decide to go back and see her again).
   To help sort out what I have to say about Turkey I've started writing some entries on Medium about it. One about my first trip in 2008 went up and was carried by the "Globetrotters" publication without a hickup. When I went to post a second one focusing on Cappadocia one of the Globetrotter editors wrote "Hello Kris, so sorry but will have to pass on this one. We actually have a term for this kind of story at GT: 'And then and then'. They get to be rather tedious to read. Instead, we love captivating, well told first person travel narratives that have a more or less gripping story to tell. Thanks!" which ... like look you could say that about THIS entry and I would certainly understand, but the submitted story is pretty focused on going to Cappadocia and what one experiences there, to such a degree that I feel like the received comment is just unwarrantedly insulting and I'm wondering how I got on her bad side. Especially since another publication then accepted it and the editor raved about its quality, and another Globetrotter editor also left a nice comment. Anyway since I live to be snarky I changed the story's subtitle to "Fairy towers, goblin cities, and white horses, a gripping tale with literal cliffhangers and literal gripping, of a journey into the depths of Turkey!"

Continuing The Apinautica, this overlaps a little bit with what I already posted (the first four paragraphs)



Nigeria III

Thursday, April 4th, 2013 – “The King of Saki is looking forward to meeting you! He had heard many good things about your previous project in Ibadan and has been looking forward to your arrival for months!” John from The Organization tells me as we drive from the airport to the hotel. John is the same age as me, 30, and will accompany me on this project. He mentions that he had had to work as a volunteer at Non-Profits for many years before his resume was impressive enough to get this job. [this sentence feels out of place here but I don't have a better place for it and it seems worth mentioning that to get a good job in Nigeria you need to be able to work a good job without pay for years]

   I feel very flattered that a king should want to see me, and in the mean time, here is the literal princess still working in the hotel lobby. She is looking gorgeous in her elegant clothes, glittering gold jewelry, broad smile of brilliantly white teeth as she greets me and brown eyes sparkling confidently. She remembers me as if it had been just yesterday we’d last met. “We should hang out" I say, in awe of her elegance, her title, and encouraged my her sweet smile. But my rumbling guts and fatigued body remind me as ambitious as I may want to be, I'm in no state for socializing. "… maybe when I’m back from Saki” I add, making my exit. My friend the security guard appears to no longer work here, and the receptionist doesn’t know his number.

   The next day John picks me up for the domestic flight to Oyo State. He’s running on Nigerian time, which stresses me out, but surely he knows his country – we get to the airport at 3:00pm for the 3:00pm flight. Nope the flight has left, and there’s only one a day. But on the bright side, here’s my luggage arrived!
   I’m very frustrated, this project is sandwiched in before a project in Egypt so there were only 9 training days but now that’s been reduced to 7.
   “The King of Saki is really looking forward to your arrival!” Yes well. But there’s a bright side to another evening in Abuja, Princess Nwaji is keen to hang out, though I still feel very unwell. She’s happy to come chill with me in my room and watch a movie, though I still feel like an invalid and still have to keep running to the bathroom. I fear I’m not at my most charismatic. [I feel like I really owe it to the reader to write more of a scene here. I suppose it could be rather comedic. I don't really remember any funny details though of course one could just make them up, but I'm not feeling very inspired. I'll try to remember to come back to it some time in the future]

Saturday, April 6th - We once again arrive at the airport 5 minutes after the flight’s scheduled departure but that’s okay because it doesn’t depart for another hour. From there it takes four hours to travel 100 miles north through Nigerian scrub, zigzagging across the road to avoid the most enormous potholes. Finally we arrive in Saki. The guest house is in a quiet government compound surrounded by lots of space and trees. There’s a small welcoming party is waiting outside the guest-house which includes two or three people I had met last year in Ibadan.
   “The King of Saki has been greatly looking forward to meeting you … but he died yesterday.”

[okay this marks the divide between what was previously posted and what hasn't been]



Monday, April 8th – “Hi, so do you work for a university or in commercial beekeeping?” I ask the Chinese man in the straw hat, extending my hand, during the mingling after opening ceremonies. One of the officials during a speech had made reference to the two Chinese men, Mr Sān & Mr Sì saying they were posted here with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, a beekeeping technician and a fisheries expert. [For this name change I looked up what they call a "John Doe" in China and gave him the name ajaja. It basically translates as "Mr Three" and is not actually an uncommon name, in fact if there's multiple John Does they just advance the number and "Mr Six" is in fact the second Chinese man's actual name!]
   To my surprise the Chinese man turns his back fully to me and spits emphatically on the ground, taking the time to scuff it with his foot before answering pettishly “No university! Commercial beekeeping!”
   As I’m awkwardly trying to decide if I’ve just been insulted and/or what a good follow up question might be, someone else comes and asks him the same question.
   “I just answered that! Commercial beekeeping!” I make my escape.

   “What’s with the Chinese guy?” I ask a Nigerian friend a little later.
   “He’s been here for two years but the beekeepers rarely see him. He was a police officer in China, here he spends all his time smoking and fornicating with young girls. His colleague doesn’t even speak English or Yoruba after two years here.”
   “Actually speaking of smoking I never see anyone smoking here?”
   “Oh, yes, people smoke and do the other drugs. Usually they just do it where no one can see them.”

   Later that day we are going through some beehives, and Mr Sān is with us, in his pristine white suit. He takes out a grafting tool –a small hand-held tool like a dental instrument (indeed they are sometimes used) with a delicate spoon shape on the end for scooping a bee egg out of a cell and depositing it into an artificially made queen cup– and looks for a frame with eggs in it to demonstrate. He hastily looks at several frames, declaring they each contain no eggs. I look at one of the frames after he has and do see eggs but don’t say anything. Eggs can be very hard to see, especially on dark comb.
I’m careful to wait until later, when Mr Sān hasn’t recently been unsuccessfully attempting to do so himself, before I show the trainees how you can bite down on the end of a toothpick to make a spoon shape in the end to make a homemade grafting tool, and demonstrate it on some eggs.
Later we are discussing making the artificial queen cups one grafts the eggs into. Mr Sān eagerly exclaims “I will show you how to make them!” He finds a stick of the right approximate size, and whittles it a bit to optimize the shape and size. Wax is fetched and melted, He dips the tip of the stick in the wax, then in the water to cool it, and then attempts to remove the cup shape that has formed over the end of the stick but it always breaks.
I surreptitiously remind him, in a moment when others are distracted, that he has forgotten to dip the stick in soapy water first before dipping it in the wax, so it will be easier to remove. “Oh, right, right.” It is then successful.

   “What’s the width of a topbar for Africanize bees?” Mr Sān asks me on Saturday. In the presence of other people no less! He has finally become comfortable enough not to feel the need to put on a front of knowing everything. “32 millimeters, rather than the 36 European bees need” I answer happily. African bees are slightly smaller than European ones.



Monday, April 15th – As we pull up to the forest clearing where the beehives are, the beekeeper’s begin loudly grumbling and then exclaiming angrily. It takes me a moment to realize what they’re seeing: the boney white cattle of Fulani herdsmen.
   As soon as the cars come to a stop they’re pouring out like angry bees, shouting and throwing rocks at the hastily retreating Fulani. But the damage has already been done, the beehives here are already smoking ruins as if they’d been exploded. The raiders had lit fires under them and broken them apart to rob the honey.

Tuesday, April 16th – “There’s a problem with your visa, please step out of the car” the immigration officer holds my passport in one hand and fingers a large chrome revolver on his belt with the other. He’s tubby and wearing a white polo shirt, but backed up by half a dozen men in green camo with AK-47s.
I look at John, he’s getting out of the car so I do so as well.
   “What’s the problem?” John demands.
   “It says here he has a working visa but you said he’s a volunteer”
   “Yes there is no volunteer visa. If he has a visa to work for pay he can work for no pay!”
   “Well the company name isn’t listed on it.”
   “There’s no space for a company name on the visa, it never carries a company name!”
I’m a bit concerned with John’s rising angry and confrontational voice. Surely that’s not the tone to take with a gun wielding probably-corrupt bureaucrat in a remote part of a country where people get gunned down all that time.
We had had our closing ceremonies this morning and now we’re on the long road back to the airport in Ibadan.
   “Look, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job,” says John in a tone that says he’s going to do exactly that, getting right in the man’s face, “but you know there is absolutely nothing wrong with this visa and you need to let us continue right now!”
To my surprise the man backs down “You swear wholeheartedly that there is nothing wrong with this visa?”
   “Yes of course there is nothing wrong with the visa!”
   “Okay you may go.”



Wednesday, April 17th - I was able to catch up with Dayo from my first Nigeria project while in Ibadan the previous evening, and on arrival in Abuja I’m able to catch up separately with Whale and Yinka from that project as well.
   There’s an animal feed specialist from Hawaii and an environmental impact expert in the Organization’s office. The latter has just finished two weeks in Nigeria and greets me with “it’s good to finally meet you, you’re a legend!” followed shortly by “wait why do you have an Australian accent?”
That evening, feeling better, I’m able to go out to dinner with the princess, like a civilized person, and she attempts to teach me to salsa dance, in the balmy air of the outdoor restaurant under the strings of lights. I feel like James Bond, dancing with a gorgeous princess! Unfortunately, I may no longer be sick but I still have a shockingly bad sense of rhythm. She is very patient with my bumbling and at the end of the evening she slides her gold colored watch off her arm and latches the blue band onto my own arm. “Rolex” is elegantly etched on the watch face. ["gold colored" sounds awkward but I don't want to say it's "gold" because I'm pretty much as she's a dear and clearly is in fact wealthy, I don't believe she actually gave me a gold rolex. But who knows maybe she did lol.]
   “A gift to remember me” she says earnestly.
   Is it a real Rolex? I have no idea, but it’s value to me was as a gift from a friend. Perhaps I should have saved it for special occasions rather than worn it every day until one day I was completely submerged in a narrow canyon in southwest Turkey and the watch ceased to work.


God I needed a haircut

Nigeria Epilogue:
   Later this year (2013) I receive the “impact reports” the Organization does a year after the projects in 2012. From my first project, the community increased their income by 56% over the baseline established prior to the project, and from the second project 66%. I’m blown away. I did this??

   I (spoiler alert) haven’t returned to Nigeria in the ten years since. Princess Nwaji graduated a law school in London, returned to Nigeria and married and had a kid. Yinka, leader of the non-profit that hosted my first Nigeria project went on to address the UN about women’s issues, but then sadly died before turning 40, I have not been able to learn why. Everyone else I know has been doing well.

And so there you have it. As you can see, this being the third Nigeria project I've pretty much boiled it down to just the key little stories that are worth telling from the project. There's not a lot of scene setting, possibly largely because I was feeling like the whole thing was on track to be too long. The sections I've written this year I had estimated would be 22,500 words but have come out to 14,981, so I'm successfully being more concise, _but at what cost!_

(Original entry (it was all just in one))