The Agrinautica

   Here are the two parts of my Turkey article for Birregurra Mail combined into one. (:



   When I first stepped out of the Istanbul airport in 2009, my first time outside the Americas or Western Europe, I recall it seemed so foreign and exotic. Countless towering minarets jutted out of the city toward the sky, the ululating call to prayer echoed through the streets five times a day, swarthy carpet salesmen constantly tried to cajole us, the plumbing was a bit questionable. I ended up returning for one reason or another nearly every year through 2017 since it’s a major transit hub between “the west” and either Africa or Central Asia. I’ve literally spent more time in Istanbul than Melbourne, I came to be familiar with Turkey’s sights and culture and to see it not as scary and intimidatingly foreign but the first and last bastion of modernity before I’d step off into somewhere more remote or return therefrom.
   Turkey happens to be a place many Australians visit so I will focus a bit more on the tourism potential and aspects of it than usual.
   Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium is famous as the city at the crossroads between East and West, located mainly on the west side of the sea passage between the Black and Mediterranean seas known as the Bosporus, a substantial part of the city and its suburbs (Istanbul has about three times the population of Melbourne) also extends on the east side connected by bridges or reached by ferry. From the international airport on that first arrival we took a taxi across the scary unknown distance, through the still-standing-impressively legendary Land Walls of Constantinople into the city center, but on more recent trips I merely nip down an escalator to the city tram connection, buy a card like a myki card, and ride the rails right to whereever I’m trying to get to in the city.
The first area I and probably most tourists explored was the tourist heart of the city, the Sultanahmet district located on a hilltop with expansive views of the surrounding sea. This area held the capital palaces of the Eastern Roman Empire and later the Ottomans. It’s chock a block with Roman columns and architectural artifacts a millenia-and-a-half old as well as the famous Hagia Sophia basilica/cathedral/mosque -- constructed in 532 it was the largest cathedral in the world for about a thousand years. Last year current Turkish president Erdogan turned the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque so it may no longer be open to public tours. Topkapi Palace, the residence of the Ottoman Sultans, is an impressive place to tour; there’s also an extensive archeological museum; and a vast underground Roman cistern (I noted at the time: “It had giant fish in it that we're pretty sure eat tourists”). There are good restaurants here but they’re probably a spot overpriced compared to other places in Istanbul/Turkey. Here carpet salesmen pestered my traveling companions and I when we first arrived looking confused and hauling our luggage, but once we learned to look less like we’d just stumbled out of an airplane we hardly got importuned at all.
   From Sultanahmet I like to walk across the short bridge over the Golden Horn (a sort of inlet) to the Taksim district. This area is a more modern shopping district (modern being a relative term, plenty of buildings still look hundreds of years old) with the long pedestrian-only Istiklal street leading to Taksim Square. This is both a popular tourist destination but also very popular with locals which keeps prices realistically related to what a local would reasonably pay (as opposed to Sultanahmet which is a tourist bubble).
   On the third day of that first trip my friends and I flew from Istanbul less than an hour south (flight: $34) to the coastal town of Izmir (formerly Smyrna) and took the train ($2.50) another hour south to the small town of Selçuk -- we were on our way to fulfil the itinerary most first time visitors to Turkey follow. Selçuk is just next door to the remarkably well-preserved ruins of the ancient town of Ephesus, which aside from just being well enough preserved that you can actually feel like you’re walking the streets of an ancient Greek town, is also prominently mentioned in the Bible (the Ephesians and all), and is the former site of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis, though nothing remains to be seen of it.
   The next day we got on a tour bus bound for Pamukkale. During the three hour journey the bus stopped at a sort of cafeteria for tourists and it, like a similar one I encountered later in Cappadocia, was some of the worst food I’d had in Turkey. If you travel to Turkey, odds are pretty good you’ll end up on a lot of package tours that feed you at places such as this and I implore you to make an effort to eat in some good restaurants and/or simply where the locals are eating. Turkish food is so much more than just kebab. Some of my favorite things are the breakfast dish menamen which consists of poached eggs in a delicious stewy mixture of tomatoes, onions and peppers; or the ravioli-in-yogurt dish manti. You will also want to try the boat-shaped Turkish pizza called pide.
   Pamukkale itself consists of natural hot springs which cascade down a series of tiered rock shelves formed of the frosting-white calcium deposits from the water. A bathing pool has been constructed at the top where one can swim in the naturally 37 degree water.
   Much later, in 2013, I was dating a Turkish ship’s-officer, when we rather had a fight so I set off alone by bus to Cappadocia in central Turkey. Cappadocia is a region of soft sandstone in which the locals have long bored their homes right into the cliff walls. The local geology has somehow created these horn-like stone towers which sometimes occur right in the small towns and are pock-marked with windows from the dwellings that have been made in them, which looks quite bizarre. My hotel room here was a “cave room” bored into the cliff-face, though the front of the hotel looked relatively normal. Cappadocia has many tourist draws such as horseback riding or ATVing through the surreal landscape, or hot air ballooning above it, but what I’d really come here to do was see one of the ancient underground cities. There’s several in the area, I arranged to go with a tour group to the largest, known as Derinkuyu. This entire underground city of winding passages and subterranean rooms once held 20,000 people. Its lowest level is 60 meters underground. Locals built these underground cities for both insulation from the heat and protection from raiders. This city may have been begun in the 7th-8th centuries BC but reached its heights (depths?) in the 8th-12th century AD. As we wound up and down narrow stairs seeing former wineries and bakeries in little underground rooms it felt like some Tolkien goblin city to me.



   After Cappadocia I went on a five day “Blue Cruise” on a small sailboat along the Mediterranean coast. There were 12 of us passengers (half Aussies) and two crew. We spent our days going from ancient pirate cove to cute little fishing village and swimming in the perfect turquoise waters. As we were anchored off “Santa Claus Island” where the real Saint Nicholas had lived, a little boat came up to us -- aboard it, a local couple were cooking up crepes on a stove and selling them. Basking on deck after a swimming, eating a freshly cooked crepe from a little boat I felt life could hardly get better, other than the ongoing trouble with my girlfriend which I was trying not to think about.



Here ends Part I and Part II begins below:



   I had been on a fantastic 5 day “cruise” on a 12 passenger 2 crew sailboat up the “turquoise coast,” finally coming ashore in the coastal town of Fethiye, just onshore of the island of Rhodes on the Aegean coast, south-west corner of the relatively rectangular country of Turkey. Fethiye is a beautiful little seaside town that’s not on the usual quick trip to Turkey itinerary but there is much to do there. The nearby Oludeniz beach is often rated among the top beaches in the world, it doesn’t have soft sand or waves of any kind but what it does have is crystal clear turquoise waters and dramatic mountains and cliffs that surround it in a semicircle. It’s a popular paragliding location, as one can paraglide down from way up the steep mountain, riding the updrafts right on down to landing right on the beach. We had anchored in the little bay there when I was on the boat, I will observe also that the beach was very popular with Russians, who lounged about like a rookery of pale hairy elephant seals in speedos.
   Also just beside Fethiye is an abandoned Greek town, Kayaköy, preserved like a ghost town from the day in 1923 when Turkey expelled its Greek population. I had also heard about a nearby gorge worth visiting, so I took local buses (dolmishes, which is closely related to the stuffed grape-leaf dish dolma, as the word means “stuffed”) to Saklıkent Gorge, a very narrow crevice of a gorge one can trek several kilometers up, at times with water up to your chest
   That evening I was back in Fethiye taking photographs of the beautiful rock tombs carved into the cliffs behind the town, the setting sun casting them in dramatic pink rosey light, when my Turkish sea captain girlfriend, whom I’d been traveling separate from since a fight two weeks earlier, texted me to suggest we meet back up. As it happens Gallipoli was about halfway between us so we decided to meet there. At this point in the evening I didn’t have many resources at my fingertips to plan an immediate 700 kilometer trip, but a friend had recommended a tour agency in Istanbul and I now called them for help -- I almost never (actually literally never except for this one time) use travel agencies to plan trips but calling True Blue Tours in Istanbul, even late in the evening and not being an existing client, the women patiently helped me figure out what buses I needed to take to leave immediately and travel overnight by a combination of local and long distance busses, to Gallipoli, and I don’t think I ever booked anything through the agency, ie they didn’t make any money from me at all. So the least I can do is very strongly recommend you book your future Turkey trip with True Blue Tours!
   After my nine hour scramble across the country, I was with my girlfriend in Canakkale, the town across the Dardanelles strait from Gallipoli -- Gallipoli itself is a national park now and Canakkale is where the hotels are. But before we went to Gallipoli, first we visited another famous battleground -- Troy. The legendary city of Troy is very near there and the ancient walls have been excavated. As a huge fan of ancient myths and legends, to stand with my hand on the warm stone of the very walls of Troy seemed unbelievable to me.
   Finally we went across with a tour to Gallipoli. Nearly everyone on the tour except us was Australian (I was not yet an Australian at the time). The rugged landscape of Gallipoli still looks much as I imagine it did in 1915, and some trenches have even been preserved/reconstructed at the top of the cliffs. It’s truly awe-inspiring to stand there with the sparkling sea and the wind gently rustling in the lone pines and one can easily imagine everything that took place on those fabled beaches and bluffs. The tour guides are of course Turkish but as they recount stories of the war there’s no bitterness or lingering animosity, they and all Turkish people I have met truly embody the spirit of Ataturk when he declared “After having lost their lives on this land [your sons] have become our sons as well.”
   The next day my girlfriend and I went on a Turkish tour, consisting entirely of Turks with she translating for me. This tour naturally focused on more tales of Turkish heroism like an artillery man who allegedly continued to load and fire 90kg shells by himself when the rest of his gun crew was killed, and a Turkish soldier who carried a wounded ANZAC back to his own lines in the midst of the fighting, but the overall tone was still one of complete mutual respect.
   Overall, since 2009 I’ve seen Turkey under Erdogan drift a bit towards authoritarianism and away from some of Ataturk’s principles of a strictly secular state, but it’s still a safe country with a rich culture and many amazing tourist sites to visit. Many Australians are drawn by Gallipoli to visit Turkey and I strongly encourage you to make the trip, just please promise me you’ll eat more than just the food the package tours put in front of you.

I was walking to passport control when it happened. Was looking at my phone looking up the details of my next flight so I don't know if he'd been standing there scanning the crowd or watched me long, but I was first aware of a young man quickly stepping into my path and then a badge being shoved into my view with the word "POLIS" emblazoned on it.  It took a second to register, especially since looking up he looked nothing like a police officer: probably just shy of 30 in a tight fitting plain white t-shirt and jeans.
"Come with me" he commanded preemptorily with a thick Turkish accent.
"Oh, uh, okay." says I after a second.

I was already a bit annoyed, in Bishkek they couldn't book me all the way through to Melbourne (though they'd done the reverse on the way in?), so in Istanbul I'd have to go through passport control (really slow in IST, can take an hour), for which if I didn't have one already I'd have had to get a visa ($20 and a short line), get my luggage, and re check in. Layover here was 6 hours and I was a bit excited because The Organization had said I could expense booking into one of the airport lounges, which I've always been too cheap to do on my own dime, BUT having to re check in required waiting in the dingy uncomfortable part of the airport outside of check in until they opened check in three hours before the flight. Ie I was doomed to a0relatively uncomfortable situation without getting to redeem the promised luxuries of the lounge.

So I was feeling annoyed already when I was plucked up by the police.  Now I've been "randomly selected" for "additional screening" plenty of times in the past and it's always been pretty obvious what was happening, as a uniformed officer explained what was happening and took me to a table or nook just at hand.  As this officer led me down a hall past other security checkpoints it seemed a bit more serious than that.

The current Turkish government is one that arrests people for their political opinions and I've posted critically of them on social media before, even at the time thinking "I hope this doesn't come back to bite me." And I've been in and out of Turkey enough that it's not implausible they've taken notice of me.

Add on top of that I'd just been watching the Tom Hanks movie Bridge of Spies which is all about spies and suspected spies getting nabbed, and my Turkish friend Asli's dad's jokes that he suspected I was a spy suddenly was a bit of a forboding memory.

The officer led me to a small room with chairs and a desk, where we were shortly joined by another similarly dressed young man.

They went through my bag, even leading through my books, went through the pictures on my camera -- I had taken a picture just the other day of a soviet style armored personnel carrier that was half hidden in the yard across from my hotel window but other than that they'd just ad seeing donkeys and yurts. And of course asked me all the expected questions about where I'm going, where I came from, what I do.

And have I been to Turkey before? ("Yes many times"), do you know anyone in Turkey? ("Yes," for it would be hard to answer many questions about my travels in Turkey without admitting to this), "show us their contact info on your phone," I really didn't like the direction this was going but what choice did I have. "Random screening" or not it could result in trouble for my friends in a country like this. But what choice did I have? So I brought up Asli in my contact list and showed him.  In the picture that displays with her contact info she's looking beautiful and official in her snow white maritime academy uniform, with gold epaulets and an officers visor-cap, but it occurred to me that they might become even more unpleasantly interested if they thought I was in contact with a member of the Turkish navy. The policeman took out his own phone and snapped a photo of the contact info page, making me cringe inside.

He handed my phone back but a few minutes later the second man asked for my phone and went through it for awhile

While they weren't terribly polite or apologetic, at least they weren't particularly rude. It was all rather business-like. They didn't smile or joke or seen pleased or particularly displeased with anything throughout. After about twenty minutes they said I could go, and on the plus side said I could go through the diplomatic passport control line and handed me a little ticket to show there. So being as this took twenty minutes and in not exaggerating that the massive passport control line can take an hour, it at least saved me time.

I talked to Asli on whatsapp while waiting to check in to give her a heads up and she didn't seem terribly concerned. She's rather apolitical anyway, if anything being a bit supportive of the government, which sometimes frustrates me a bit but at least it's a safe position for her.

Also while I waited in the check-in area this guy who barely barely spoke English was trying to ask me questions about Israel, as far as I could tell, even though from what I could gather he didn't seem to be flying there. A short time later, past the check in as I was on my way to at least LOOK at the lounges (by the time I got in I had just enough time to grab a bite in the food court before boarding), a random girl passing me in the crowd gave me a friendly smile and enthusiastic shalom and that's when I realized I was wearing my black brimmed hat, a white collared shirt, black pants ... I've accidentally dressed like a hasidic jew!!!
Was I questioned because they thought I was Jewish?  And I felt particularly self conscious about this look when I was in Abu Dhabi, considered carrying the hat, but then decided I'd stand with the Jewish people and take what anti-semitism came my way.  As it happens I noticed if anything more random smiles than usual. I did take the hat off as I approached the security check-point just in case, I didn't feel like being randomly selected again.

And now I'm most of the way from Abu Dhabi to Melbourne, over the western edge of Australia with three hours to go. Flight is very empty and I have a whole row to myself!!

Wednesday, August 28th
   I hoist myself out of the seawater and up the corroded metal ladder. The rungs have completely rusted away just about a foot under the gently lapping waves, so I can only kick my feet in the water until I'm high enough to get a foot on the lowest existent rung. About seven feet above the water I clamber onto the small concrete platform. A metal pole holds a light aloft above me as a warning to shipping. Around me the turquoise waters of the Bay of Fethiye sparkle, surrounded on three sides by the dusty green sunbaked shores of south-eastern Turkey, fading to grey on one side and close enough for me to make out ant-like people on the nearer side. Halfway between my perch and the nearest land the 65 foot sailboat Lucky Mar rides cheerfully at anchor, and I can see my fellow passengers splashing playfully in the water alongside her, no doubt each with a can of Efes pilsner in one hand.

This concrete light platform sticks out of the sea like a little cork, a solid immovable cork that would no doubt break apart if you tried to pry it out.
   As I sit there dripping, basking in the sun, I contemplate with regret that our journey is almost over. We've been sailing along the Lycian coast for four days, stopping in beautiful little coves and by delightful little islands. With no electricity for our cell phones, we'd been forced (god forbid!) to spend our evenings lingering over dinner with flowing conversation and learning to play backgammon ... and in the case of certain passengers, really large amounts of Efes pilsner -- though I must admit that I was singlehandedly responsible for the vessel running out of the licorice-flavored liquor raki.
   Soon the outside world will close in, I'll have to check my email and my text messages. It's been a nice four days not thinking about the girl who's not talking to me, the girl who set the winds blowing in my sails to come to her in Turkey, only to set me adrift here. Out on the water I couldn't possibly hear from her, so I didn't have to worry about the immutable tides of her feelings.
   That morning I'd awoken on the foredeck of the our small gulet, where the morning sun caught us in the little channel between "Santa Claus Island" and the mainland. Heaped on the island were the ruins of a monastery in which, if reindeer didn't play games nor elves labor to make toys, at least St Nicholas surely would have liked some milk and cookies as he contemplated the great theological questions of his day. Maybe if he'd had an adequate supply of milk and cookies he wouldn't have famously punched a priest named Arius in the face over a theological disagreement. Legend has it he did, however, leave presents in the form of coins in the shoes the poor villagers traditionally left outside their dwellings. Because of his island home, he is the patron saint of sailors.
   But that morning in the summer sun, St Nick wasn't much on our minds, and we swam in the already-inviting water and had breakfast before continuing around the point to Fethiye Bay.

   Presently I began to tire of my stylite perch and I clambered back down the rusty ladder to swim the gauntlet between myself and the Lucky Mar -- the passage of small pleasure boats across my path lent a bit of a frogger-like challenge to it.



   Soon we were docked in the busy Fethiye marina, saying our goodbyes and settling up with the crew. They'd been keeping a tally of beers consumed and certain Australians now owed something like 200 euros on their tab (at 4 euros a can I believe). I might be misremembering, an average of 12 beers a day sounds lower than what I recall observing.
   I didn't have any plans at this point, but, though the two gorgeous Spanish girls urged me to continue with them to a hostel at nearby Oludeniz beach, I ended up booking in the hostel owned by the same company that had run the boat, as everyone else was headed there.

   Initially I booked only one night, planning on moving on to somewhere else (I knew not where) the next day. After learning of such interesting nearby sights as Saklıkent Gorge and the Greek ghost town of Kayaköy, I ended up searching for somewhere to stay the next two nights -- and, as it would turn out, the only space I could find at that time would be the enclosed rooftop "lobby" of another hostel, where I wasn't even the only person sleeping on the couches.
   But first lets talk about Fethiye itself. If you'll excuse me for doing so, I'd like to transcribe in whole a segment from the book Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières (you more likely have heard of his book Captain Corelli's Mandolin) that describes the modern town formerly known as Telmessos:

One story is that in 1913 Fethi Bey, an intrepid Ottoman aviator endowed with a Blériot monoplane and memorable moustaches, crashed into the bay of Telmessos and was untimely killed. In 1923 the town of Telmessos changed its name in his honour, and became Fethiye.
   On the other hand it might be that in 1923 Fethi Bey, an intrepid Ottoman aviator endowed with a Bleriot monoplane and memorable moustaches, undertook to fly from Istanbul to Cairo and was killed when his plane crashed in Palestine. Louis Blériot, world famous not only for flying the English channel and winning the thousand-pound prize offered by the Daily Mail but also for his own unsurpassable record of spectacular and marvelous crashes, most charmingly and honestly acknowledged that the wires above the wings of his aeroplanes were insufficient to withstand the download caused by turbulence. The French army grounded its Blériot monoplanes, and in 1923 the town of Telmessos changed its name to Fethiye in honour of the first Ottoman pilot to have been killed by a design fault.
   Another version is that in 1923 the town of Telmessos changed its name to Fethiye in honour of a pilot named Fethi Bey, who had been killed in action during the Turkish War of Independence.
   Since "Fethiye" means "conquest," however, the town might equally have been renamed to celebrate Ataturk's expulsion of the foreigners and the establishment of the modern Turkish state. The identity and manner of death of Fethi Bey, aerial, intrepid and unfortunate, are concealed forever behind the tangled contradictions of multiple and congenial myth, and he lives on solely in the name of a pleasant and modest town that may not indeed be named after him, having existed, it seems, solely for the purpose of demonstrating the impossibility of history.
   Every Tuesday there is a market in Fethiye that bestraddles the sides of a shallow and limpid canal that carries the water of the mountains into the sea. It is a market that seems to go on forever, to be crowded by every nationality, and to sell the strangest possible combination of touristic handicrafts and daily necessities.
   There are agriculture and carpentry stalls, laden with nails, adzes and sickles, stalls with generous and redolent bags of spice and saffron, stalls with brass tea sets, coffee grinders, kebab skewers, and mortars and pestles, stalls with wondrous aubergines and turgid watermelons, stalls with tapes that alternately blast out the equally lamentable pop songs of both Turkey and America, stalls selling priceless carpets inveigled for a song from naive peasants of Anatolia, stalls selling hand-sewn silks, waistcoats, hats and socks, and stalls selling seductively beautiful musical instruments, geometrically inlaid, which Turks can play by instinct, but which Westerners find impossible, even in theory.
   Many of the traders have formerly lived in London; "Cheaper than Tesco," they cry, "cheaper than Asda, better than Harrods. Buy one and get one for nothing. Pay me next year. Who cares about money? Look, look. English? Deutsch? Please, please, very nice, very cheap. Lovely jubbly." They trade con brio, bursting with joy and panache, and each of them has a samovar on a portable gas ring in order to fill themselves and their customers with hospitable and inexhaustible draughts of sweetened apple tea.
   [...]
   All this is quite normal and unremarkable for the town of Fethiye, whose old name was Telmessos, meaning "City of Light," or "Megri," meaning "The Faraway Land." The truly anomalous and remarkable thing about Fethiye, its market and the region of Lycia, is that there are no Greeks."

 I wasn't there on a Tuesday, so I can't confirm the existence of such a market, but there was definitely a permanent touristy market area just past the statue of Fethi Bey (intrepid, bemustached). Strangely the hawkers seemed to leave me pretty much alone, when I went through by myself, but when I went through there later with two girls I'd met in my second hostel they all piped up with "Australia, Australia! Special deal for you, I love Australia!"
   "How do you know we're Australian??" one of the girls finally inquired.
   "It's your hair in a bun, all Australian girls have their hair like that."
   And now you know how to spot an Aussie girl, apparently.

   But first, that first day, after checking in at the hostel, Nick the Canadian and Sean the Australian (fellow passengers from the boat), and I set off across town to find the Fethiye archaeology museum. It was so hot and dry we found ourselves resting in shade along the way and having to buy second water bottles.
   On the way back we found a restaurant called "Pasha Kebab" that Nick had read about in his Lonely Planet book. This place it turns out had the very best food I'd tasted in Turkey other than what Asli and her parents had prepared. I ordered the number 58, whatever that was, and it was memorably delicious, whatever it was.


But this is what it LOOKED like

   Later I'd bring the Australian girls there, and the glass of wine I ordered was so huge it must have contained half a bottle.

   That night I went out with four of the Australians from our boat (ie all the Aussies save the weird girl from Melbourne), and Nick. One of the streets tucked behind the touristy market was packed with bars (oddly, one of them had a Route 66 theme), and we sat in the outdoor seating area enjoying the warm summer evening and the sweet smell of hookahs wafting on the breeze, and we ordered frou-frou cocktails.


Thursday, August 29th
   Thursday morning we boatmates had breakfast together for the last time. Michelle from Brisbane was about to hitch a ride with people she only knew through couchsurfing.org on an epic trip the length of Turkey. Seemed a little questionable, but as I would later find out via facebook, it looks like it was an enviably epic adventure. The lads meanwhile were headed to the beach, and I was in search of a hostel that wasn't booked up for the night.
   First though, I had to check my email. There was word from The Girl, but it still seemed to be murky ominous clouds presaging storms, the distant rumble of thunder, tense seas.
   I shut down my laptop, turned off the blasting AC in the room, headed out into the warm distracting streets of Fethiye. Found the hostel that would put me up on a couch. Looked up directions to Saklıkent Gorge.

   Caught the dolmis ("dol-mish") from the center of town -- dolmises (dolmii?) are small vans that serve as local buses. Don't try to ride a dolma, that's stuffed grapeleaves and won't get you very far. I waited for a dolmis with "Saklıkent" listed on a placard in the window along with its other destinations. Of course everyone else on it was a local Turk and no one, not even the driver, spoke a word of English.
   After we'd been driving for about two hours I started to become rather nervous. I knew Saklıkent wasn't particularly close to Fethiye but this was getting a bit concerning. My anxiety had risen to a level nearing panic by the time we finally saw signs proclaiming we'd arrived at Saklıkent. There were parking lots and stalls selling nicknacks, we had arrived!



   Many restaurants with traditional low tables and cushions, as well as tree houses (which I suspect they just build to amuse tourists, surely they're not a traditional thing?) clustered along the river, which emerged from a sheer cliff which bordered the whole site on one side. To venture into the gorge, one must pay admission (20 lira ($9) I think is a number that sounds familiar?), and then go along a raised wooden walkway over the raging torrent. A short way in the rush of water lessens, and one can safely wade across the ice cold water, as shown above. From here on out one is walking up the narrow canyon, sometimes on fine white sand, sometimes ankle deep in chalky blue water, and sometimes armpit-deep in the frigid water. I put my wallet and phone in my upper breast pockets, and held my camera above my head. This kept it alive long enough to get the referenced pictures here, obviously, but sliding down a waterfall on the way back I think it got terminally splashed, and after that day it never worked again. My watch also didn't work for several days after and gained a somewhat tarnished appearance.
   Splashing through the deep pools and over boulders was fun, though sometimes I wished I had someone to share the adventure with. As I went deeper and deeper into the crevice-like canyon, the number of other people I encountered got thinner and thinner. In places one had to climb up little waterfalls and slippery smooth rockfaces. Eventually I climbed a very difficult one and never saw anyone else after that. Now it was really exciting.

Finally, several kilometers up the narrow canyon, I arrived at the above boulder. On one side the water came splashing down in a waterfall, on the other a slimey foul-smelling rope led up to a narrow crack. I tried climbing it several times, I could get some purchase on some knots tied in it, but as it didn't reach all the way to the ground it was hard to get to a point where I could get my feet on it, and it wasn't near enough the rock to push against anything solid. I managed to drag myself up to where the rope disappeared into the crack but then there was nothing above to hold on to and nothing below to push myself up on.
   As a sailor I felt it a point of pride not to be defeated by a rope-climbing obstacle, lord knows I don't need a stair, but after several attempts I concluded I was too likely to somehow injure myself in a place where help was very very far away. It appeared the light was starting to fade anyway, I didn't need to follow in my parents' footsteps and spend the night in a narrow canyon because I couldn't get out in time (Zion Narrows in their case).

   Waiting for the dolmis I began to once again develop a very high level of anxiety as it didn't turn up for over two hours, but it finally showed up at around 8:00.


Friday, August 30th
   Lying in bed is when it haunts you the most. I remembered the way she lay there gazing at me that first night in Egypt, her smile serene like a favorable breeze, her brown eyes warm like calm inviting waters you wouldn't mind falling overboard into. That unbreaking steadfast gaze ... how I missed that stare.

   Ran into the Australian girls during breakfast. Not the same Australians I'd been on the Lucky Mar with, different Aussies. Turkey is rife with Aussies. You run into them on three, four, six month holidays. I don't know how they manage it. No wonder the people I met when I lived in Australia were mostly foreigners!
   One of the girls was kind of cute, they were both friendly. It was their first day in town. Their hair was in buns. I showed them around town, and led them to Pasha Kebab for lunch. Afterwards they were going to the beach, the cute one asked me if I was sure I wouldn't join them, looking perhaps even a bit coy, but I shook my head. I had ghosts to pursue.



   In 1923 Turkey had expelled all christians and deported them to Greece. Greece was supposed to send Turkey all its Muslims but it appears the order wasn't enforced as mandatory on the Greek side and few Muslims came to replace the expelled "Greeks." I use quotation marks because it was news to many of them, living as deep in Turkey as Cappadocia, that though they'd never been anywhere near the place they were apparently Greek. One of the Greek towns to be depopulated was Kayaköy, just a few kilometers from Fethiye.

   It was a quick and straightforward dolmis ride to Kayaköy. I stepped out onto a quiet cobblestone road, where large olive trees created pools of shade and touristy restaurants lethargically waiting for customers like trap-door spiders. On the hillside above, surrounding me in a semi-circle, like amphitheater seating, was the crumbling ruins of Kayaköy. I followed the road up and soon found myself on a narrow cobbled road barely wide enough for a donkey-cart, that hadn't been maintained since Kayaköy had abruptly ceased being a functional village in 1923. I'd seen plenty of ruins in my travels, but never such an expansive and recent site. The whole village was there. Roofs gone, grass growing in living rooms, empty doorways, sometimes opening onto nothing where a wooden stairway had once been. Walking up the steep narrow stone road it was hard not to imagine what it must have been like with villagers carrying goods up and down, dogs lying carelessly in the road, children running around, laundry hung up to dry. It's no wonder it inspired Mr de Bernières to write Birds Without Wings about exactly that, the final days of the village. Next to a former chapel on a hilltop overlooking the village a red Turkish flag proudly flutters in the breeze.



   At one end of town there's a big Greek church, which apparently has some pretty Byzantine style mosaics on the floor. It's doors are closed with modern metal gates. Signs tell me it will soon be open as a museum. While the most recent occupation of the village was 1923, some of the buildings, such as at least one of the churches, are as much as 500 years old.

   I returned by dolmis to Fethiye. Stopped by a ticket office to buy tickets to visit the Greek island of Rhodes the next day, but was informed there weren't any ferries that day. This flummoxed my plan a bit, and I started walking toward the Lycian tombs hewn into the rock behind Fethiye to watch the sunset, I'd heard it was lovely.

   As I walked along the road above the cliff behind the city, with the city stretching off to my left in the warm twilight glow and tall pine trees on my right, I received a text message, my first in several weeks.
   "What are you doing?" she asked.
   Now I can't fathom why, but this text has been caught in my phone like a ghost. Every time I turn on my phone, after the welcome screen, it displays this text as if it's new. But then it doesn't show up as new after that, because of course it isn't. For all I know it's deleted. Just a ghost, an echo.
   "Walking to the tombs overlooking Fethiye," I say, "why?"



   The tombs, it turns out, have these huge monolithic facades with columns, and a door in the middle. So of course one is expecting a huge room on the inside, but within the doorway there is actually just a closet-sized room the size of the door -- and it smells like piss because humanity in general can't be trusted not to piss on ancient ruins.
   "I'll come to where you are." she says.
   The sun is setting over the bay, bathing the cliff-face in soft pink light and the rooftops below me in an orange glow. There's two tortoises slowly trundling along the hillside in front of the tombs.
   "Nah I'm done looking at the tombs" I say blithely, as I try to line up a photograph with a tortoise right in front of the tomb. "I was thinking of going to Çanakkale tomorrow, let's meet there." It's about 9 hours by bus south from her in Istanbul, 12 hours north from me.
   "Tomorrow?" she asks. I'm walking back now. Lights are starting to come on in the city below.
   "Yeah I'll take the overnight bus" I say while looking at the menu of a little restaurant perched precariously above the cliff. They don't have an English version of their menu, which is one of the best auguries I could ask for in endorsing their food -- the less touristy the better I say. The owner comes out and translates his menu for me, and makes a recommendation. It's delicious. He won't accept a tip. "Turkish hospitality!" he insists.

   Lights are twinkling all across the city as I continue my walk, a city of lights below me. And she's already purchased her ticket to Çanakkale. As unpredictable and uncontrollable as the sea itself, but maybe the tempest has passed.

...

To be continued. (:

   Having continued on from Olympos...

Flashback to Monday, August 19th
   When a travel agent in Istanbul first suggested I might like to go on a Blue Cruise ("Australians love it!") I was almost offended. To me "cruises" are something only posh people do, and I'm a sailor, why would I pay to go on a boat, and why was I talking to a travel agent anyway?
   Well let's go off on a bit of a tangent and tackle that last question first. Why WOULD I be talking to a travel agent, having a long history of DIY travel behind me and a healthy loathred for package tours? Frankly, I was kind of curious. What were they all about? How did they make their money? Did they actually have decent travel related ideas? Would it be considered some form of plagiarism if I talked to them about travel plans and then used some of those plans without booking through them?
   First I stopped in at the travel agent on the ground floor under my hostel in Istanbul, and he traced a plan from Istanbul to Cappadocia to Nemrut to Konya to Olympos to Fethiye and back to Istanbul, which included some odd things like "in Konya you can have home made icecream" (uhh, or I could do that at home if I found it so novel), and he practically refused to take the Nemrut loop out of his proposal, and couldn't get the whole thing under $1800, which was way more than the shoe string budget I had in mind. But it was here where I first heard about the Blue Cruise, popular among Aussies.
   Well that travel agent experience was rather unpleasant, I felt like he had tried to badger me into package deals I didn't want (the Nemrut thing was a package tour loop out of Cappadocia), or that didn't sound terribly entertaining (I'm sure Konya has its charms but it really seemed like he was just trying to jam it in). I thought I'd visit another though, that a friend of mine had strongly recommended. So I ventured over to True Blue tours, half expecting it to be some Aussie thing (being as "true blue" is apparently some sort of Aussie thing). The specific person I was recommended, an American expat, had the day off though, so I ended up talking to Ruta, a Latvian expat. Compared to the first guy though she was excellent, she quickly got the idea of my avoid-package-tours shoe string budget planning-one-day-at-a-time travel plans and made her recommendations accordingly. In the end I left their office with that one package tour booked for Cappadocia (since as she pointed out, it would be hard to see some of the far flung things there otherwise) and a bus ticket to Cappadocia and nothing more. Since travel agents sometimes do have special deals for things I called them a few times on my trip to see if, for example, they had a better deal for the Blue Cruise, and things like that. In the end I never ended up booking anything else through them, but Ruta still had nothing but enthusiasm for helping me sort out last minute bus transfers to get from Fethiye to Cannakale in the middle of the night when I called her at 8pm one Friday evening late in the trip.

   As to the "Blue Cruise" itself, the first most salient point made to me was that it probably IS the most cost effective (in time, if not money) way to see so many different locations on the rugged Lycian coast. For the 200 Euros one gets a place to stay for four days, with three delicious (by all accounts) meals, which would work out to at least a significant portion of that cost no matter how you sliced it. Also though the word "Cruise" conjures up images of massive cruiseliners on which pampered vacationers sunbathe and carefully avoid rubbing elbows with locals, the Blue Cruises take place on traditional wooden gulet schooners with 12-14 passengers. The itinerary sounded packed with visits to interesting places an I started to come around to thinking it sounded like a fun idea. (Again, spoiler: best idea!)



Monday, August 26th
   And so we arrived on Monday morning at the little harbor of Demre, which appeared to be a large protected cove, most of which was far too shallow for vessels. A little motorboat took us from the shore to where the Lucky Mar, a 65 foot gulet, waited at anchor.
   In addition to myself and Stephen (who was from Melbourne, you'll recall), there were two fellows from Brisbane who had come from Olympos with us, and the girl who had gotten picked up by the wrong shuttle, also from Brisbane. Also on that shuttle was a guy from Canada. On the boat we met up with a girl from Melbourne (who apparently would have floated helplessly away while floating with a pool noodle in the sheltered waters of the cove, had the captain not dove in and pulled her back), two cute Spanish girls in their early twenties, and a Spanish couple, both journalists, in their late 30s. So that makes 11 people if I'm not forgetting anyone, with nearly half being Australians.
   Having so many Brisbanites about was funny, since they'd be talking about some night out at the bars in Brissie or such and I'd be ignoring it as one does about the at-home happenings for foreign travelers, and then I'd suddenly remember wait I know the bars and localities of Brisbane!

   Our captain was a cheerful suntanned weather-beaten looking fellow of maybe his late 30s, he spoke decent English and like many captain's I have known seemed to have some magic powers. In this case he seemed possessed of the ability to roll a dice while playing backgammon and get it to come out exactly the way he wanted it. There was a cook, whom we didn't interact with so much, I don't know where he was when he wasn't cooking, but he cooked some amazing meals. Didn't speak English. Unfortunately, writing this three months later as I am my descriptions may suffer but I think he was a somewhat slight man, with grey hair and a kindly and good natured face, who despite his grey hair moved with the nimbleness and rapidity of a much younger man. The third crewmember, "the first mate," also didn't speak any English, was a bit rotund and thoroughly jovial. I think he may have been the captain's father-in-law. He always seemed to have laughter in his eyes and a sly grin upon his face.

   After lunch, the first in a long line of delicious "home made" meals, we set off for our first destination. Made a quick visit to a cave that had a banner over advertising a "pirate bar," and the captain practically put the boat's nose right into it.
   Continued to the sheltered area inside "the Great Disappearing Island" of Kekova, as I like to call it. You see, now you see it, now you don't (or, probably easier than flipping through those two links, just toggle between the satellite view and the map view).



   Here we arrived at the beautiful little seaside village of Kaleköy (known in ancient times as Simena), where all three crewmembers live (and all the above pictures were taken). Many of us were taken to the dock by the smallboat and wound our way up the narrow streets to the fortress ruins at the top. Interestingly, within this confines of the fortress walls there was a small amphitheatre. This struck me as slightly odd since usually the small amount of space in a little mountaintop fortress like that would be a premium and an amphitheatre could be located anywhere. Also pirate fans may be interested to know the fortress had been built specifically to combat pirates.
   After we'd had our fill of enjoying the view from up there (see the top picture in this entry), we followed the meandering paths back down through the village. Since it is not accessible by automobile, the "streets," if you can call them that, are all narrow winding paths between the houses only about the width or two persons walking abreast. As you can see they're all crowded together on the slope there and sometimes it seemed the only way to reach a place was crossing across the porch of a neighboring house. The sealevel had either risen, or the ground has sunk, since ancient times, and there were some foundations visible underwater, and the tomb pictured below seemingly rising right out from the middle of the water. The water was about knee deep around the tomb and from the heights of the fortress you could actually make out a well worn path on the seafloor leading to it.



   From there we headed to this cove just a short distance away. To anchor for the night, though it was still fairly early in the day.
   While underway I saw the first sea turtle I've ever actually seen, so that was exciting, and then as we were anchoring we saw another one. The first mate dove in after it but to no avail.
   Having a nice long evening ahead of us we had another delicious dinner and drank Efes and played backgammon. Though the food was included in the price of the cruise, they kept a running tally of beer's consumed by everyone and charged about $4 a (24 oz) beer at the end which seemed alright, it's more than retail but less than many bars. The two Australian lads from Brisbane in particular had huge tallies by the end
   Also the water was a lovely lovely temperature and swimming about commenced as soon as we were anchored. The Australians quickly discovered they could float on a pool noodle and hold a beer with their other hand and spent many hours drinking in the water, having new beers tossed to them as needed (and I fear, since one of the Brisbane lads was also named Chris, while I kept myself to a beer or two on account of my budget, I may have been credited some of his).
   The sun set and I watched the moon rise over the water, a large red crescent. The very symbol of Turkey. Eventually Jamie and Chris, the two Brisbane lads, were extremely "loose" (which means drunk, apparently) and they kept informing one another "ah you're so loose mate, you're so loose!!" which was rather hilarious. Filled with drunk courage, Jamie declared himself / was acclaimed our fearless leader and around 1am we (Me, all three Brisbanians, Stephen and the Canadian) embarked on a quest to see if the other boats nearby wanted to join us in the party in the water.
   The first boat we visited declined, but one or two of its passengers engaged us with witty repartee at least. We then decided to swim the other direction to where some other boats were at anchor about 400 feet away. The first vessel was all dark, either all asleep or wisely pretending to be. Around this point Jamie started to advise us with alarm "I don't know if we'll be able to get back mate, we've gone like a mile!" but we just reminded him "you're too loose mate! You're so loose!" and continued on to the further vessel, where we could see some people playing cards on deck.


(Myself, Chris, Michelle (Brisbane) and Nick (the Canadian))

   These persons, it turns out, were that boats Turkish crewmembers, and upon being hailed they turned a flashlight on us and yelled at us to "fuck off!" We immediately turned around but despite our obvious retreat the crewmember continued to shout curses at us. They alleged that their passengers were trying to sleep, but I'd imagine the passengers would have been significantly more disturbed by the crew's yelling at us than our initial hail.
   Anyway, Jamie continued to bewail that we were miles away from our own boat and completely lost. As we headed back home the rest of us reached an unspoken agreement and informed him we just wanted to check out this last boat (which so happened to be ours) and then we'd head home. We told him this time he should actually go up on deck to see if anyone wanted to hang out. We arrived and he approached the boarding ladder, but then actually had the good sense to balk and say "I dunno mate I don't think we shoould be going on someone else's boat" ... and then he was shocked and alarmed when the rest of decided to go up all together. Even as we all stood on deck (he eventually came up after us), he still didn't realize we were on our own boat, saying "this is crazy guys we shouldn't be here!" "ah don't worry, you're so loose mate!" I'm not sure at what point it finally dawned on him that we were back on the Lucky Mar.

   Even coming dripping out of the water at 2am I found I didn't feel cold! The water and the air were both so nice and warm. That night most of us slept on deck. This had been a very awesome day, what excitement would the next several have in store?? To be continued!

Next: In which there are veritable hills of cash, and we go looking for Santa Claus.

   Now, I'm not sure any of you actually read the previous day's entry, Love Is A Treacherous and Desolate Chasm, which was full of exciting adventures and Dr Seussian real life things like a man who lives in a giant tooth shaped rock, but anyway, continuing...

Friday, August 23rd - The Leaving of Göreme
   The thing with waking up in a cave... as I mentioned in the last entry, is it's pitch black, and frigid. And now I had roommates, the two Italian guys, and, predictably, they seemed intent on sleeping till 1pm. Porco deo!
   So I gathered my things in the frigid darkness sometime around maybe 10am and took it up to the office to check out. Then I trotted back down to the bus station, which in Göreme is merely a broad cobbled parking area with the little offices of half a dozen bus lines lined up beside it (seen on right in the below picture).
   Went from office to office saying "Olympos?" until at the last one they still had seats on a bus leaving that day, at 10pm. I was kind of surprised everything else was sold out, but I guess it was a Friday after all. My bus would take me to Antalya, where I'd have to change buses to get to Olympos, but that's entirely on the way anyway. I think it would work out to be about 13 hours.



   But first I had an entire day in Cappadocia. I still feel a little guilty that I should have adventured to the max! and packed this bonus day with seeing the sites of Cappadocia, but I was about ready for a bit of a more relaxed day, and anyway, getting anywhere further than walking distance costs money and I was trying to maintain a shoestring budget. So I spent much of the day chillaxing in the shade. The hotel/hostel I was staying in had a lovely balcony that was shaded by a trellis covered by a vibrant grape vine (loaded with plump grapes). Also explored the canyons back behind Göreme.

   That evening I had dinner at my friend Tolga's restaurant again. This time, as I was eating, who should happen along down the street but Jen the Canadian Photojournalist From Denmark, whom you probably don't recall I met in Istanbul. She joined me with her own new hostel friends, who consisted of a fellow who had just published a book, and a guy who was disappointed to have the most "boring sounding" job of us, a mere engineer!
   After dinner I was off to collect my things and catch the bus! While I was waiting for the bus the bus office attendant asked me about my travel plans. I told him I was thinking of going on a "Blue Cruise" after Olympos and he excitedly said he had a connection and could get me €25 off if I let him make a reservation for me right that minute. I was already pretty sure I wanted to do it and the price he quoted me (€200) was as good as any I'd seen in my previous looking into it so I said sure. How convenient when bus station attendants will eagerly book your future travel plans for you while you're sitting on the curb waiting for the bus! More on the pros and cons of forking out 200 euros to float about, when I can do that for free at home, when we get to that episode in the narrative here (spoiler alert: best decision evar!). But I feel I should mention at this point the epitaph that seemed to be attached to Blue Cruises whenever they were mentioned -- "Australians love it!"


Saturday, August 24th - Journey to Olympos
   Since I wasn't on one of the premier bus lines such as Metro, my bus wasn't quite in top top shape, and the AC didn't seem to be working quite properly, and despite having fortified myself with a glass or two of Cappadocian wine before departing, I wasn't able to sleep very well. In the morning I found us driving down curvy switchbacks in a mountainous area, with the Mediterranean Sea in the distance ahead of us. Arriving at the bus stop in Antalya I was a bit concerned that I'd be able to make the transfer easily, but I asked the first station attendant I could find "Olympos??" and showed him my ticket and he hurried me across the fairly busy station to a waiting minibus that was just moments from departing.
   That minibus took me winding down the coast for another two hours or so until it deposited us at what appeared to be a cafe in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by steep forested mountains, overlooking a precipitous valley descending down to the sea. I had been advised of this though, that from Antalya we'd be taken to a juncture where we'd have to catch another bus down to Olympos, by the sea. Here there were a lot of people waiting, and I was a bit anxious because I didn't know when a shuttle bus would come. In the little kitchen of the cafe women were making fresh handmade flatbread and people were ordering what looked like pretty good plates of food. I was reluctant to order, suspecting that I'd get an order in and at just that moment the shuttle would turn up.
   I finally gave in and ordered something, trying to point at something someone else was eating to indicate thats what I wanted. For some reason what I got looked nothing like what I had tried to indicate (I don't even remember what I was trying for but I got the standard doner kebab wrapped in a flatbread like a burrito, good but boring, compared to the more interesting thing I had hoped for) ... and naturally no sooner had they handed it to me than a shuttle bus showed up.
   I tried looking hopeful and saying "Olympos" to the driver but he seemed intent on ignoring me and I decided maybe he was just collecting specific people who had already made reservations, as a bunch of people were readily clambering in. Finally when it was just about full he motioned for me to load my stuff and board. Kebaburrito in hand I clambered aboard.
   Anxiousness was not to be completely discarded with yet though, since I didn't actually have anywhere specific in Olympos in mind. I'd looked online at the list of best reviewed hostels in the valley, but I didn't know where they were in relation to eachother and from where I was standing in the crowded mini-bus I couldn't see passing names very well. I think the driver tried to ask me where I was bound but I of course had no hostel name to tell him. I was glad I didn't just get off at the first one though, because it was miles away from the bottom of the valley. Rode the bus to the end, and on disembarking (and paying just a couple liras (fortunately, UNlike Egypt, you don't ever have to worry you'll be surprised with an exorbitant price at the end of a journey in Turkey)), I was relieved to recognize the name of one of the top two reviewed hostels, Bagrams, and went in and booked a bed.



OLYMPOS
   First off, I know what you're thinking, and no, this is not THE Olympus. It turns out there are six mountains by that name in Greece, three in Turkey, one in Cyprus, in addition to at least eight in the US and one on Mars. One of them is decidedly "THE" Mt Olympus and apparently nibot (my grinch-like brother) has that one covered already.
   But that's not to say this Olympos isn't without legendary history of its own! It was from this mountain that in the Odyssey Poseidon apparently looked out to sea and saw Odysseus and decided to fuck with him. The city was a pirate haven for a brief time in the first century BC until a Roman commander, accompanied by a young Julius Caeser, defeated the pirates and added the city to the Roman domain. Wikipedia notes that "The pirate Zenicetes set fire to his own house and perished" -- I assume there's a story here.
   The extensive ruins of the ancient Roman & Byzantine town are still very visible and interesting. As you can see from the above picture, they're surrounded by dense foliage some have described as "jungle."
   Most exciting of all, and the reason I'd been looking forward to visiting the place really, is that nearby is the home of the legendary monster the chimera! The Chimaera is still about, and I was determined to meet it!



   Also it has a "nice" beach. The water was lovely, but the beach was all a-pebble. Hordes of backpackers seemed to love it though, so maybe I'm just tremendously spoilt by having grown up near the beaches of Southern California and then more recently lived not 100 yards from miles of gorgeous sandy tropical beaches in Australia.
   Olympos valley is a national park, which means permanent buildings cannot be constructed there, apparently. As such, hostelliers instead construct crude sheds and market them as "treehouses!!" as if it's an exciting and novel opportunity. I guess some are actually up in trees but I didn't see them. Bagrams was just a series of these shacks. Mine had six beds crammed in it, and if you turned off the AC it quickly became stifling, but there was no reason not to run the AC any time you were in there, and it worked well. Bagrams, like most of these "treehouses!" hostels, has a large common area with many divans and hammocks, in the dappled shade of trees or under canopies, where backpackers lounged endlessly all day drinking Efes.

   After getting sorted out and booking (through the hostel front desk) a chimera expedition for later in the evening, I explored the ruins for awhile, and then went swimming. The gravelly beach may not have impressed me but the water was delightful and boy was it hot out. I am NOT big on cold water -- the oceans of So Cal I usually consider too cold to frolick in, but when the water is inviting, as it was, I'm all about it. I swam around the point on which the ruins of a Genoese fortress stood and back.
   Back to the hostel, and the delicious complimentary buffet dinner which the hostel provided as a matter of course. All the hostels in Olympos apparently offer this, and as they don't check to see that you're actually from that hostel, I had run into some people earlier in my trip who said they'd eaten at a different hostel every night to compare. Breakfast incidentally was also complimentary (omelettes made to order!), but lunch was not ... and as dinner didn't come out till 9 or so (Europeans!) it could be a long wait for those who were trying to avoid paying for lunch.

   After dinner those of us who were going Chimera hunting all boarded another little minibus and trundled off into the night. One has to go at night since, you know, the Chimera is a fire breathing monster, so you need to go while its dark so you can see the flames. I think we just went to the next valley over, but as this involved going back up to the main highway and winding back down again I think it took around 40 minutes. I found myself surrounded by Australians.
   From where we were deposited it was a fair bit of a hike up rough stairs on the side of the mountain in the dark (fortunately we were provided with flashlights). I don't know, half a mile? Glad I had good hiking shoes. I wish I could tell you about our surroundings but it was dark, all I know is there were trees.
   Finally up ahead we saw the yellow orange glow of flames, and heard the screams of the chimera's victims we had arrived!

[SUDDEN CLIFFHANGER MOMENT TO BE CONTINUED!!!]



Ruins of the city destroyed by the fire breathing beast???

   Picking up right where we left off, I left Istanbul on July 5th and flew to New York. I had barely departed before Asli and I started to contemplate that really there was no reason I shouldn't've stayed longer, as I didn't have anywhere else a I particularly urgently needed to be.

   In the mean time, though, I adventured in New York City for a few days with the legendary zia_narratora ("Tea Berry Blue" if anyone is actually coming here from the facebook link)(heroic champion of many a facebook poke war) (pictured above: the awesome view of the city from her "subway" stop). Among other things we visited the "PS1" Museum of Modern Art, which was really neat, and the Industry City Distiller, which uses some really innovative processes to produce a better product on a shoestring budget than most large scale distilleries.

Monday, August 5th
   After returning to California though, I found I seemed to have left my heart among the sunny sunflower fields of Turkey, however, and plans for a return were soon in the works. Almost exactly a month after leaving, I was on my way back again, this time Asli and I looked forward to spending a whole month together.

   This time the cheapest flight ($1,253.42 round trip) was on aeroflot, via Moscow. Interesting facts: aeroflot doesn't serve ginger ale, but they're really on top of going up and down the aisles with a samovar of hot tea.

   The first two weeks we didn't have terribly many exciting adventures, since we were seeing this as less a vacation and more just being together. She had classes every day on any account, and was nearing the end of the the last term at academy to get her unlimited (the biggest of ships) mate license. I was mainly studying for the GRE myself.
   On the weekend we did take the bus to Izmit, where her dad lives. He is an excellent cook and prepared some delicious food, such as this menemen:




Friday, August 16th
   After the second week, Asli was in her final week of academy and had lots of studying to do and was planning on a marathon of study sessions with her classmates, so it was decided that I would go out adventuring on my own.
   I moved into a hostel just a biscuit toss from the Hagia Sophia in old town (Sultanahmet). One thing I noticed immediately, which would be true throughout my travels in Turkey, is that the hostels seemed to have a lot of interesting people traveling by themselves -- which greatly facilitated making friends. I met a french engineer currently living in Vienna, a fellow who works for IMDB (that's THE IMDB, the internet movie database!) in Seattle (did you know everyone there takes several days every month just to watch movies? and get paid for it??), an Asian Canadian photojournalist currently residing in Denmark, and an Australian girl who just graduated uni, and we all went out as a group.
   Having been in town awhile already, I acted a bit as a tour guide, taking my new friends to all the must-see places. On a few occasions I had to translate the Australian girl's slang into "normal english" for the others. (:
   We all had kokoreç from one of the many places selling it -- lamb or goat offal wrapped in intestines (kind of like haggis?). It was.. kind of greasy.



   Outside the New Mosque (opened 1665) there was a big rally for Egypt, since the Muslim Brotherhood had just been overthrown there and Cairo was in a pretty high state of unrest.

   As you may know there'd also been persistent riots in Turkey, in the area of Taksim Square. It had been awhile since the worst of it, but I was curious if anything was still afoot. Its supposed to be worst on Saturday nights, so Saturday evening I headed to the famous Taksim Square:



   I assume this sidewalk damage is from the riots. Other than a fairly large number of riot police standing by / lounging about in the grass of Gezi Park, Taksim Square seemed pretty orderly, though I left by 7pm which may have been too early. Gezi Park itself, which sparked the riots when the government tried to demolish it to build a shopping center, is quite lovely.

   Istiklal street, the pedestrian-only street that stretches towards old town from Taksim (and is lined with mainly high end shops) was packed with people enjoying the warm summer evening. In a few places very talented musicians played for tips. About halfway down the street I found a large number of young people who appeared to be holding a vigil for those killed in the Taksim Square riots, and just beside them was another contingent of riot police:



   On Monday morning I bought a bus ticket to Cappadocia and then to kill some time I took the light rail to the Topkapi stop because the sign said "Museum of 1453", though I hadn't been able to find any reference to such a museum in any of the guide books. I had to know what this mysterious museum was!



   Well 1453 is of course the year the Ottomans captured Constantinople, and as you can see, there were tourists there!
   The "Museum of 1453" is apparently brand spanking new, which is why it isn't in the guide books, and in addition to a bunch of informational signs about the conquest (written in Turkish, and the english-language audio-tour just tells you the vague gist of what each sign says, which is rather irritating), the museum has a giant diorama/panorama room, that you enter through stairs in the floor to give you an uninterrupted 360 degree view of the battle. What's kind of neat is the museum is in the exact place the panorama puts you in, so when you exit the museum the massive walls of Contantinople are right there where they were in the panorama, still looking impressive. They're still mainly intact, though a major roadway cuts through them near there.

   That afternoon I caught one of the little shuttle buses to the main autogar (bus Terminal). The Istanbul autogar is like being in the cavernous lower levels of some dystopian metropolis. Or perhaps a giant parking structure, that actually has free standing buildings in it that don't even touch the roof above. And you can walk for hundreds of yards from one bus line's station to another without leaving the grimy subterranean gloom. I was soon whisked away, however, on one of the many luxurious cross-country buses for the overnight transit to Cappadocia, central Turkey.

   Fırst of all Iid lıke to thank everyone who,s gıvın me comments lately an apologıze for not havıng tıme to respond to nearly any of themç As you can ımagıne, Iim not near a computer a lot here (: but I do have tıme to take a quıck look at what new comments come ın and do apprecıate them!


Today (Tuesday, 20th of October)
   Complımentary breakfast on the hotel terrace agaın, fresh fruıts and such. All bread here has been delıcıous. Noted what appeared to be Vespula germanıca (ıe the yellowjackets we have ın Calıfornıa) tryıng to make off wıth our jam.

   Went and explored the ruıns of Epheseus, a nearby ımportant hıstorıcal Byzantıne/Roman townç Also the Vırgın Mary ıs saıd to have lıved there after that Jesus guy dıed. The sea ıs close by (though we couldnit see ıt) and there were large tourıst crowds from cruıse shıps that had apparently stopped ın.

   Also explored a necropolıs called "Grotto of the Seven Sleepers." As usual we were mıschıevıous and found a cave ın ıt that went a faır bıt back and explored ıtç

   And there was also the ruıns of a large basılıca that we exploredç And a museum wıth fınds from all these nearby sıtesç In conclusıon, ıt's a great place to see a lot of ruıns.

   The hotel here started out as a rug store and then opened up a hotel, but stıll also sells rugs. Talked to one of the owners about the rugs, apparently ıt ıs tradıtıon that ın the vıllages the gırls weave these rugs durıng the wınter, so each one ıs hand crafted accordıng to a specıfıc famıly tradıtıon of that gırl's famılyç The rug salesman was extremely nıce.
   It also turns out hıs father was a beekeeper (ın addıtıon to sellıng rugs?). He had 450 hıves, but lost half of the to Varroa mıtes ın the 70s and gave up. When Varroa mıtes reached the Unıted States ın the 90s ıt was devastatıng and 98% of the wıld honeybees were saıd to have been wıped out (but they have sınce bounced back) and commercıal beekeepers regularly lost more than half theır bees. Colony Collapse Dısorder has nothıng on that.
   Needless to say ıt was extremely ınterestıng. We compared notes on how we kept bees and he asked me how we keep wasps out, somethnıg that had been a problem for us earlıer thıs year. Very neat.
   So ıf you want a really nıce Turkısh rug, come to Selcuk. (:


Pıcture of the Day

I met a gıant wasp! In the ruıns of Epheseus.

I'm told they call ıt a Donkey Wasp here.




I also met and photographed a yellowjacket (as noted), a box turtle, and yes even a snaıl. (:

"My friend!! Where are you from?" the swarthy man in a suit standing outside the Hagia Sophia greeted us with an expansive gesture and even more expansive grin.
   I automatically looked at the ground and kept walking, as did my friends Aaron and Amalie, but next thing I know Mark is talking to him.
   We stand around awkwardly for a moment waiting for Mark to extricate himself but he only sinks deeper in trying to explain to the man why he doesn't want to partake of his "Turkish hospitality!" and go with him to his rug store where there'll be "no pressure!" and ":D"

   I wander across the square and take some photos of the nearby Blue Mosque. I come back and the man has switched to acting deeply offended by Mark's refusal of his "hospitality," while Mark desperately tries to dig himself out of a hole he doesn't seem to realize will inevitably get deeper.
   Conveniently my shoe needs to be tied to I attend to that in front of them, which brings attention to my combat boots, something I was hoping would maybe intimidate the smarmy businessman a little at least.

"Oh you are a soldier! Where from!" the man's reaction is immediate and pronounced.

"Oh no, he just wears those because they're utilitarian" quickly explains Mark.

::FACEPALM!::

   Finally we somehow manage to extract Mark from the conversation and make our escape. Even then he comments on feeling guilty over disappointing the friendly man. Silly, silly, lad.

   One must constantly avoid eye contact with shopkeepers here, and avoid responding to anyone that comes up to you peddling wares, lest they will mercilessly attempt to inveigle their trinkets upon you. (If asked anything in English and for some reason not in a position to ignore them completely, my trick is to respond with "jag prata inte engelska!")

   But this got me thinking, why is it that the streets here and many other places are so rife with scammers and pickpockets trying to empty your pockets with their devious gestures, but the United States seems completely devoid of this villiany? Don't get me wrong I've encountered every trıck nı the book at SOME poınt ın the US, but not at the rıfe and ın your face levels ıt ıs here. EVEN ın downtown Hollywood or Vegas.
   All I could come up with is that perhaps it's the much maligned gun culture -- keep that kind of shenanigans up anywhere in the United States, even if you try to only target tourists, and eventually you'll annoy someone who will blow you away. Or at least punch you in the face.


Related Picture of the Day

Blue Mosque, Istanbul

Not the best picture but it is the specific picture I took in the middle of the above incident (which occured this past Frday)