Turkey

Originally I wasn’t particularly excited about visiting Turkey. However, since Egypt was not as impressive as I expected and after I learned more about what Mike had planned for our independent travel I began to really look forward to Turkey. Mike and I were planning to go to Cappadocia, a region of Turkey famous for wine and its beautiful scenery which includes strange geological formations and thousands of man-made caves, some of which date back a thousand years. We were traveling with Hua, Eva, and Carly, the latter two were, like Mike, from Canada. We were planning on staying in a cave hotel and then taking a guided tour around Cappadocia. After two nights in Cappadocia we would fly back to Istanbul and spend a few days exploring the city.

Since we had some time before our 6:55 P.M. flight to Kayserı (the dotless “i" is pronounced as “uh”), Michael, Hua, and I decided to spend some time walking around Istanbul; Hua’s friend Steven was to come along as well. Originally it was just to be the four of us but our group doubled in size. We met up with Greg, Sherri, Lucy, Katie, her boyfriend (who was in Europe at the time and flew to Istanbul to spend a few days with her) and a few others. We found a small cafe/restaurant and ordered some food. I ordered a ’mixed grill’ which consisted of chicken, beef, and lamb with a few hot peppers and some rice on the side. It was spiced so well and tasted so good that I immediately decided Turkey was awesome. Over the next few days I would really come to appreciate Turkey for more reasons than the cuisine.

The port where our ship was docked was located in Beyoĝlu (pronounced bey-oh-loo), the contemporary and cosmopolitan section of Istanbul that lies along the Bosphorus strait adjacent to Sultanhamet, the old section of Istanbul which contains the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia, and other historical sites. Istanbul is unique in that it is the only city in the world that sits on two continents. We wandered around a bit and saw, among other things, the fattest pigeons ever. Around the city women sit at small tables selling bird feed with which you can feed the pigeons (or eat if you were really hungry, I guess), and apparently a lot of people do. In Egypt these pigeons would have made a great meal, but all that the giant pigeons did in Istanbul were congregate in giant flocks where they were least wanted.

Down one very steep cobblestone street we found store upon store that sold satellite dishes and strange electronic devices. Another street featured stores, on both sides of the street, which sold power generators. After I experienced two brief power outages in Turkey I began to see the need for all of those stores. We walked past a music store that sold drums, guitars, and sazs (a saz is a 6-stringed instrument that is similar to a lute), which I was determined to visit before I left the country. We decided to walk down to the Bosphorus strait which required that we use a walkway that ran underneath a busy four lane street. We discovered that in the pedestrian tunnel there were a variety of stores, some of which sold handguns and had them displayed on the wall behind the counter. Once on the other side of the street we watched people fishing and then found a restaurant where we ordered a beer and a hookah (in Turkey they are called nargheli, pronounced nar-ga-lee).

Around 2:30 Hua, Mike, Steven, and I left the others and walked back to the ship. Michael, Hua, and I grabbed our bags, met up with Eva and Carly, and left for the airport. We were originally going to take a taxi but a Turkish woman that Eva and Carly had met earlier recommended that we take the tram instead and she had gave them detailed instructions on how to get to the airport. It turned out to be very easy, and Istanbul’s train and trams were very clean and new-looking, similar to Tokyo’s in that respect. When we got to the airport we had some problems with checking-in. Turkey really only has one airline, Turkish Airlines, and they have automated kiosks where you check in by entering your credit card information, selecting your seat on the plane, and then received a boarding pass.

When Michael entered his credit card information it gave us a strange error, so we had to do it the old-fashioned way. Michael was able to check-in fine, but since both tickets were under his name they would not give me my boarding pass. We had to go to the sales office, get a refund for the one ticket, and re-purchase one under my name. It wasn’t that much of a problem but it was baffling, especially since Mike said that he had entered my name for my ticket on the website. We decided that Turkey would be the last time we bought tickets for each other. The security in the airports in Turkey is even crazier than the U.S., though they don’t make you take your shoes off. There is a checkpoint with an x-ray machine at the entrance to the terminal and then again nearer to the entrance to the gate. Flying to Kayserı I had no problems, but on the way back they were suspicious of the battery-charger for my laptop and made me take everything out of my bag and explain to them that it was not a bomb.

The flight was routine, and when we got to the tiny airport at Keyserı, a driver from the hotel was waiting with a sign that had Eva’s name on it. She was so excited to have someone waiting for her with a sign that she had a picture taken with our driver holding the sign. It was a little more than hour to Ayvali where the hotel was located. The driver drove really fast, keeping mostly to the dotted white line that separated the lanes. The road was mostly deserted so it made for an exciting ride. As he drove we tried to engage in a conversation but his English was poor. Hua was sitting in the front of the van so he spoke the most to him (though when we asked him later what the driver said to him he said he had no clue). The driver told us his name but we couldn’t pronounce it and subsequently forgot it, but he also told us that it meant ‘happy’ in English, so we decided to call him that instead. He seemed to take a liking to us and he promised to come by to our hotel room at 11 P.M. the following night with some local wine.

When we got the Ayvali Happy had to navigate the van through this tiny, hilly, cobble-stone street which had small stone houses on either side of it. We all thought that he was going to take out a taillight or a side-view mirror trying to get the van through a few of the tighter spaces, but he got through with no problems. We crossed a small stone bridge over a miniature gorge and the hotel rose up in front of us. Gamarisu Cave Hotel was a small hotel (only 20 rooms or so) that had been converted from a 1000-year-old monastery that was built into the cliffs. Cave hotels were a popular accommodation in Cappadocia (pronounced, and often spelled locally, Cappadokya) but Gamarisu had to be one of the better ones. It did not have all the fancy amenities of a luxury hotel but it felt like I was sleeping in a Turkish village (it was right next to one, after all), especially since the “lobby” looked like the dining room of any Cappadocian home.

The staff invited us in to sit at the wooden dining table and then offered some apple tea. Apple tea, we later found out, was only served to tourists in Turkey, though we suspected that it was probably once a traditional drink that had lost favor once tourists caught on to it. Either way it was delicious and it really warms you when it is chilly outside. Being from Los Angeles, Hua was especially grateful, since he had never experienced an air temperature below 65 or so. With a crisp fall breeze blowing and the temperature dropping into the low 40s, he was certain he was going to freeze to death. I didn’t expect that I would actually miss the cold weather but when I first stepped outside in Istanbul I realized that I liked cooler weather. In Cappadocia where all the birch and other trees had leaves that were turning from green to various shades of yellow, orange, and brown, autumn was in full-swing and the changing leaf-color along with the crisp cool air felt perfect.

The manager came and introduced himself, gave us the keys to our room and then offered us dinner which we ate after dropping our things off in our room. We had rented a ‘superior deluxe’ suite which included two bed rooms, attached by a living room with a fireplace. All of this was in a cave that was carved out of rock. The rock in Cappadocia is called tuff which is a type of volcanic rock that looks like sandstone and like sandstone is very easy to carve. As we would learn on our guided tour the next day, early Christians had made thousands of churches and dwelling places in the mountains and cliffs of Anatolia (the region in central Turkey which includes Cappadocia) in order to escape the Romans and later the Arabs who had invaded Turkey. After walking towards the village at midnight we turned back deciding it was too dark for pictures and too late at night considering that we had to meet our guide at 9:30 A.M. for our tour.

In the morning we ate a traditional Cappadocian breakfast which included olives, cheese, sausages, yoghurt and pastries. We were originally supposed to meet our guide at 9:30, but after breakfast we were told to wait until 10:00. Our guide turned out to be a 30-year-old Turkish woman who spoke excellent English. She had been doing guided tours of the Cappadocian region for English-speaking tourists for 6 years. Unfortunately I forgot her name so I will refer to her simply as “our guide”. As we drove from the hotel to the first stop on our tour she explained the itinerary. When we had signed up for the tour using the internet we were not told what the tour included, so up until she told us it was a complete mystery.

Our first stop was to the underground city near Kaymaklı (pronounced like ki-mok-luh), which contains eight levels only five of which are open to the public. The underground cities date back thousands of years, the cave entrance to this “city” dates back to the time of the Hittites making it 4,000 years old or so. The cities were originally built by early Christians who were escaping persecution from the Romans who would periodically sweep the countryside looking for them. When Arabs invaded Turkey and spread Islam the Greek orthodox Christians extended their underground cities and hid from the Arabs.

The cave networks were extensive, most village homes had tunnels which led to the cities, and the Kaymalı underground city in particular could support a population in the thousands for several months if necessary (though most people cannot live underground that long before psychological problems set in). Inside the underground city there are window-holes everywhere, it’s almost like walking through a giant piece of Swiss cheese. There are cutouts in the walls for storage and troughs for wine-making. There are numerous living quarters for families of various sizes and one room was a church with an alter cut out of the rock and a fading cross carved in one wall. In another room the walls were blackened from smoke, it was the communal kitchen. There is also a ventilation shaft running through the whole underground city that was also commonly used as a communication conduit which was easier than running up to different levels to tell someone something.

As we descended it got warmer and warmer. The lower levels of the caves apparently stay at a comfortable 16°C (approximately 64°F) year-round which is a lot warmer than it was outside. I was recording video as we were walking through a narrow winding tunnel that sloped gently downhill to the 4th level when all of the lights went out. No one had any idea what was going on. I had to use the light from the screen on my digital camera to walk the rest of the way through the tunnel. Our tour guide said this had never happened before and since we only had one weak flashlight we stuck together in the room for a bit. When there was no sign that the lights would be coming back on any time soon we began to make our way to another room. After 10 minutes or so the lights came back on and then promptly turned off again. It happened again, and again, and finally after 4 or 5 times of this they stayed on.

By the time we left the underground city I had already taken close to 100 pictures! On the way to the city our guide mentioned another tour the next day which we didn’t know anything about. She said it would cost another 160 Euros and if we wanted another tour we would have to let her know soon. Outside of the underground city we convened and decided that we were already enjoying this tour so much that we wanted another tour tomorrow. Besides, it was more convenient to have someone drive you around to sites that they know are worth seeing rather than figuring things out yourselves which could result in a lot of lost time, and we only had two days in Cappadocia. We also met some American college students who were studying in Cairo for a semester and had come to Turkey as tourists. It’s always nice to meet someone from home in a foreign country and even better if they happen to be around the same age.

Our next three stops included monasteries/churches that were built into the sides of hills. I don’t remember their names though one had a yellow sign with black lettering that said, rather ominously, “church with snakes”. It turned out that that particular church had a fresco of St. George defeating a three-headed snake. All three of the churches were impressive, with frescos dating from the 9-12th centuries. Around the churches and monasteries there were holes cut into the rock for pigeons which the monks and nuns used for their excrement which was a good fertilizer. Cappadocia was once a volcanic region and as a result the soil is poor in nitrogen and other chemical elements making it difficult to grow crops under normal conditions.

The frescos in the churches depicted saints as well as various scenes from the life of Christ. Unfortunately most of the frescos were covered in graffiti from the past few centuries. I found some dates from the mid-1800s carved into the frescos. In some of the churches the faces of all the people were scratched out or pock-marked which had been done by Muslims centuries ago because the depiction of idols is forbidden in Islam. Not being very religious I was not awed by the churches in any spiritual sense but I was really impressed with the architecture. In order to carve the churches the builders would wet the rock making it softer and then chip away at it. Even though it was relatively soft rock this could not have been an easy task. Carving out the underground cities must have been even more daunting.

For lunch we ate at a small restaurant near the village of Soğanlı (pronounced so-an-luh) which served the best food I had in Turkey. The appetizers were reminiscent of Italian cuisine, an amazing crumbly cheese, olives, and a dish of peppers and things in oil were served with bread, butter, and honey. Our tour guide explained that the cheese is usually eaten with butter and honey on it which tasted a lot better than it sounds. Interestingly, what we thought was olive oil and vinegar in jars on the table turned out to be olive oil and pomegranate sauce. We were served amazing lentil soup and then for my main course I had chicken that had been cooked in a clay pot and smothered in cheese.

After lunch we bought some hand-made dolls which the village is supposed known for and then walked through the village. It was the middle of the afternoon and it was deserted except for dogs, cats, and chickens which roamed the dusty streets in between the stone houses. Like most of the villages in Cappadocia, the houses were built when the caves the villagers had been living in started to collapse. Many caves in the region are still used to store grain and potatoes. After wandering around the village for a bit we drove to Mustafapaşa which used to be a city of mostly Greeks until 1924 when Ataturk initiated a citizen exchange program with Greece which resulted in Turks in Greece being resettled in Sinasos (which was renamed to Mustafapaşa) and the Greeks being moved back to Greece. This was part of Ataturk’s “Turkey for the Turks” program that resulted in the Armenian genocide, a topic which is rarely mentioned in Turkey today. As a result of the Greek legacy most of the buildings in Mustafapaşa are 18-19^th century Greek in style. We visited a hotel that was once a large Greek house which had original 19^th frescos on the walls.

Our final stop on the tour was an archaeological site in the middle of a field. A roman bath had been discovered there a few years ago and not many people knew about it. It wasn’t in our Lonely Planet guidebook and you were only allowed access if accompanied by a guide from a few of the local tourist offices. We were told that we absolutely could not take photographs. When we got there our guide explained a bit about the discovery of the baths and pointed out various sections of the baths. Excavation had stopped until the following summer but it was thought that much of the land we were walking on probably contained more Roman ruins beneath. We walked to another section of the ruins where a security guard held up a ribbon that cordoned off the area and let us walk under it. This section featured an amazingly well preserved mosaic and the foundation of what had been a sort of meeting-room for the local government (if I recall correctly).

By now it was close to 4:30, the scheduled end of our tour. We drove to the nearby town of Ürgüp where the driver and the guide dropped us off with the agreement that the driver would pick us up at 9 P.M. to take us back to the hotel. We went to a small café and ordered apple tea and Turkish coffee, and then browsed the nearby stores. Then we went to a liquor store and bought two bottles of local red wine and a small bottle of raki, which is a grape-based anise-flavored drink that tastes similar to Sambuca. While we were walking around looking for a specific restaurant we ran into two people that we had seen in Soğanlı. We walked around with them for 20 minutes or so trying to find a restaurant that they were looking for but we never found it. They walked us to a restaurant they had eaten at the night before and then they decided to join us.

During our walk in circles around Ürgüp, and later during dinner, we learned that Lou and Kris (or is it Chris?) were from San Francisco and that they were not married. I think we all assumed they were married or dating since they were an Asian-American man and women from San Francisco traveling together. Kris was doing some traveling overseas and did not want to travel alone so she asked some friends back home if any of them wanted to join her, and Lou agreed. They had just been to Israel and were now spending some time in Turkey. Over dinner we learned that they were both well-traveled having been to many countries in Asia and Europe. Lou was a 30-year-old mechanical engineer who obviously had enough money to afford to travel. During dinner we discussed food from various countries and talked about which countries we liked best and so forth.

After a great dinner (I had this ‘grilled salad’ which consisted of grilled peppers, tomatoes, tons of garlic and some other tasty things as an appetizer) we said our goodbyes and then walked to a pastry shop and got a few pastries before meeting our driver at the bus station. Back at the hotel we went to the lobby where they had two computers and wireless internet access. While we were planning what to do in Spain a saz player, a drummer, and the hotel manager (who played spoons) played traditional Turkish music. I recorded a few songs on video and then I asked if I could try playing the saz. I had no idea what scales or chords they used so anything I played sounded terrible but it was fun nonetheless.

Later in our cave room we opened the bottles of wine and listened to some music while waiting for Happy to come over. We called to have someone bring wood for the fire place and eventually, around 11, Happy came to our room with a crate full of logs. Our decision to purchase wine was a wise one because, for some reason, Happy did not have the wine he had promised. He spent a good 10 minutes holding a torch of some kind up to the logs in the fireplace to get the fire going. Afterwards he sat down with us and we offered him some wine and raki.

As Happy drank wine and then Raki he began to get really crazy, made all the worse by his inability to communicate with us well in English. He insisted that we put on some music he could dance to so I put on Radiohead’s new album ‘In Rainbows’. He attempted to dance to the first song, “15 Steps”, for a bit and then he convinced Hua to join him. That didn’t last long before Happy started giggling profusely and tried to explain to us that when Hua danced he looked like the actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, except he said it like this: “He wandeem, he wandeem”. We had no idea what he was saying so he elaborated, “wandeem, cinema, tae kwan do” and he stood there with a martial arts pose. When we just shook our heads in confusion he fell to the ground and we weren’t sure whether he was laughing or crying. At some point in the continuing madness one of us finally figured out what he was trying to say. On another occasion he got very serious and asked us, "Are any of you Jewish?" When we all said no he said, "Good!" It was totally random and very strange.

At another point he told Hua that he looked like a cow, and at another point he kept laughing and saying things to us in Turkish as if we knew what he was saying. Suddenly he decided he wanted to play a card game but all he knew were Turkish card games. He decided to play with Carly but since he couldn’t explain the rules she had no idea what was going on. As we were all watching them play, the manager of the hotel walked in. He looked at Happy, then at us, and then said a few words to Happy. He sat down next to us and tried to explain the card game they were playing. When Carly appeared to have won a few games Happy got upset and exclaimed, "I can't believe I lose to a girl!" Hua asked the manager what kind of music he listened to and he said he liked hip-hop so we put on some Dr. Dre to which he exclaimed, “I like this song”. Who would have thought we would go half-way around the world only to drink and listen to hip-hop with middle-aged Turkish men?

On our last day in Cappadocia we started late and subsequently met our tour guide late. Our tour today started off with Imagination Valley which has a bunch of unique geological rock formations (called fairy chimneys, you’ll understand when you see the pictures) that supposedly look like various objects and persons though I couldn’t tell. We then visited another set of caves in which I climbed up through a narrow tunnel in the ceiling with the aid of handholds carved into the walls to access the otherwise inaccessible second floor. That was followed by a trip to the “open-air museum” which is a collection of some 30 cave-churches and a cave-monastery. One such church was unique because the ceiling had collapsed midway through construction leaving it exposed to the outside.

The final stop on our tour featured a breathtaking panoramic view of the rock formations of Cappadocia. In the distance we could see a snow-capped mountain which judging by its apparent size might as well have been Mt. Everest. Michael and I climbed down into the hills and explored some caves on our own for a bit as the sunset made the landscape in the distance glow pink. Our tour guide took us back to Ürgüp where we had to retrieve Mr. Carrot from the tourist office. Mike had placed Mr. Carrot on the mantle above the fireplace back at the cave hotel and forgot it when we checked out. Our tour guide arranged to have him dropped off at her office and sure enough he was there when we arrived. We said goodbye to our wonderful guide and spent the brief amount of time we had in Ürgüp at a pastry shop.

We flew back to Istanbul that day and dedicated our fourth day in Turkey to an exploration of the city. Mike, Eva, Carly, and I visited the Blue Mosque, Aya Sopia (known as Hagia Sophia in Greek), and the Grand Bazaar (which has some 4,000 shops). Aya Sophia was under renovation which was a bit of a disappointment and none of us wanted to go into the Blue Mosque. It was a rainy, cold day, and after everything we’d seen in Cappadocia the monuments of Istanbul seemed unexciting by comparison. In the late afternoon as it began to pour Mike, Eva, and I (Carly had enough sense to go back to the ship) walked through the Spice Bazaar which, since it was situated on an incline, was like walking uphill through a river.

The highlight of my last day in Turkey was a visit to Topkapı (pronounced something like top-kap-uh) Palace. I accompanied Eva, Carly, and some other people. Topkapı Palace is immense; we didn’t see the entire thing even though we spent several hours there. In the evening we walked around doing some shopping, I spent some time browsing music stores for a cheap saz but they were either too cheap or too expensive. During our few days in Istanbul we got accustomed to their transit system. They have some of the nicest, newest, and cleanest trains I’ve been in (aside from Japan) and since they run on the streets (like trolleys) you get to see the city as you travel.

Turkey ended up being one of my favorite countries. I came with no preconceived notions and left with a feeling that Istanbul is a great city and Turkey is more than worthy to be a part of the European Union. The main obstacle to their entrance thus far has been the reluctance of countries such as France. Since France has the largest Muslim population of any EU nation there is a fear there of the possibility of further Muslim immigration upon Turkey’s acceptance into the EU. This instinctual fear of Muslims is ridiculous especially since Turkey is very much a secular country (their government is influenced by religion even less than America’s). There’s also the pesky problem of Turkey’s inability to acknowledge or discuss the Armenian genocide. Of course, you don’t hear too many people complaining about the 27-72 million people that died during the Cultural Revolution in China (both the low and high estimates make this the worst disaster in terms of human lives lost in the history of the world). That aside, Turkey is a wonderful country that I would love to return to some day.