Thank you for giving this one last look before permanently moving on to things that are updated more than once every month and a half. A lot has happened in this interval and I apologize for being so derelict in my duties to keep you informed. I've got a back log of enormous, half-finished, grandiloquent posts that really aren't what a blog is meant to be and which have built up into an increasingly self-conscious bottle-neck for me. I'd also half-forgotten that I'm actually going to school, and one of the most prestigious and academically rigorous ones in the Middle East, at that. I'm averaging five hundred pages of reading and one and a half papers a week. Life's only about 67% fun and games.
During the end of the Ramazan** Bayram (the big family reunion Christmas-ish holiday at the end of Ramadan), with pilots doing milk runs returning from family gatherings, one fellow flew nineteen hours sans break and had to be lifted out of the cockpit at the end of his rotation because he could no longer stand. It turned out that all the unrelenting high stress coupled with the uninterrupted sitting position had caused a blood clot to form in his leg that could have easily traveled to his brain at any point. I was alarmed, but not surprised, to learn that he flew for Atlas Jet. And this is how that long aside segways into what I had really meant to write about: my first big intra-Turkey trip. I was able to wrangle two new friends into heading towards all points South West with me. We used Antalya, a small splayed out on the Lycian Coast among many old things as our jumping off point.
Turkey is amply provided for when it comes to transportation. There are four low-cost national carriers and upwards of two-hundred long-haul bus companies (a very welcome switch from greyhound's mediocre monopoly). Atlas Jet's eighty lira direct flight was too good to refuse, although the fact that their online ticket reservation system was broken didn't bode well. While trying to find an alternative way to reserve the tickets I instead stumbled across an article about Atlas Jet's diminished safety standards (with the cost of fuel where it was, cuts had to be made somewhere) and how that had led to two out of their fifteen planes crashing last year (thirteen percent of their entire fleet). Still, as college students we had a larger sense of our own invincibility than we did our financial security, so we opted to hazard it. We bought the tickets at the airport and boarded with five minutes to spare. Per expectations, the plane proved to be rickety and the food anomalous. As we began our descent to Antalya we broke through the clouds onto a vista of impossible steep mountains and blue blue water. This was made all the more breathtaking by some sudden turbulence that sent all the flight attendants running back to their seats and an abandoned drink cart careening down the aisle. I was a bit unnerved but still feeling generally ok about my situation until someone in the cockpit decided that the time had come to put play the soothing elevator music over the intercom from a scratchy tape that I'm sure was labeled "How to relax for your imminent death". As you may have guessed, it proved to be a false alarm. In fact, just two hours later saw me a considerably happier camper rolling around in Mediterranean surf and lolling on the beach.
Our hostel was in the heart of the old city. This being Turkey, the title was pretty apt. The town's walls were an eclectic assortment of Roman, Byzantine, and Seljuk additions with towers betraying each civilization's distinctive flare, which we entered via Hadrian's Gate (circa 130AD). I am beginning to understand how so many Turks get so callously jaded on these sorts of things. Many of the walls were both the perpetrators and recipients of serious litho-cannibalism. Mildly conspicuous marble columns occasionally poked out from the bastions' masonry like asparagus spears from a sandwich. Most were probably over a thousand years old by the time they were toppled and laid like cordwood to bolster the city's defense. Truth be told, you can't really walk out your door without stubbing your toe on some ancient something or another. This has done very little to temper my involuntary "ooh-ing" and "ah-ing," though.
We visited the ruins of Termessos the following day. The city was nestled high up in the steep pine and sage strewn mountains a half hour inland from Anatolia. It was already old when it resisted a siege by Alexander the Great and was granted sovereign ally status by Romans who decided to engulf rather than attempt to capture it. And with good reason. The remains of forty foot walls blocked off the whole approach up the steep valley. Someone had added a second one five hundred meters further up for good measure. The city itself was overgrown with dusty pine forest. Most of the buildings had been shaken into disordered heaps of cut stone by earthquakes, but many impressive façades still stood despite some of their enormous blocks looking like they'd been half pulled out by some timid Jenga player. This being Turkey, we exercised our right to climb all over everything. We had the place almost entirely to ourselves.
The remains of the amphitheater were breathtaking, in large part because of the dramatic background (photos are forthcoming, I swear) but also because it brought home the humanity of the people who must have lived there. An even more profound moment came when my friend noticed an unusual name scratched into one of the massive marble blocks. It belonged to a Greek man named Nicolas M-something and carried the date 1910. This was history-coated-history. It was strange to consider that in little over a decade this man's entire community would likely either be dead or relocated to mainland Greece as part of the post WWI population exchange (despite a history of uninterrupted Greek settlement in the area going back at least twenty-three-hundred years). I'm not the sort of person who feels compelled to immortalize myself through acts of petty vandalism, but I can't help but wonder if I scratched "DAN THE MAN ZIMMER 2008" whether some visitor to Termessos a hundred years from now wouldn't shake his/her/its head and mutter, "Poor bastard must have never seen it coming."
The city's necropolis occupied the entire upper tier of the valley. A thousand years of civilization means fifty generations of people in need of an eternal resting place. The valley was littered with what must have been thousands of large stone bread boxes with steepled granite lids. Invariably, every lid was ajar or a corner of the sarcophagus had been smashed open. My grave-robbing career was over a thousand years before it began.
Our exploration of the long dead's gingerbread houses lead us well off the path as we searched for bigger tombs and better bas reliefs. We were startled when someone shouted at us in Turkish. We looked around. No one. The man shouted again and we looked up to see someone gesturing at us from a forlorn guard tower a half kilometer further up the canyon. His words were lost in echos, but the big rifle the man was gesticulating with spoke volumes. I scampered back to the trail half-expecting to hear bullets pinging off the stones around me. We regrouped, winded, dirty, and scratched from our hurry to stop doing whatever it was that upset the gunman. We looked up at his tower. To our surprise, he'd put his weapon down and was dancing, arms above his head. A second later he broke into a warbling song. Evidently my Turkish has not progressed to the point where I can differentiate between "Desist or be shot" and "allow me to entertain you, my strange guests." Cant' stop me from trying
A running theme in my adventures has been a failure to appreciate distances. I'm always a bit surprised when what looks like only an inch on the map metamorphoses into a four hour bus trip. Well, we traveled a long inch from Antalya to the resort town of Fethiye and didn't get there till mid afternoon. Fethiye is a tourist trap built in the seventies alongside a series pebble beaches with a dozen Greek islands a day trip away. The beaches are a bright white and serve as a perfect camouflage for the stout pallid flab of the British Islanders lolling on them like a legion of beached walruses (an illusion furthered by the men's mustaches). The town was literally England's newest colonial outpost. Everything was priced in pounds, restaurants served fish and chips, and some of the tourist agents spoke with a weird glottal-stopping half-cockney accent. Interesting, yes. What I came for, no. We bypassed most of the town and headed south fifteen kilometers along soaring bluffs to George House**, a lovely family run hostel situated at the top of Butterfly Valley.
As best I have been able to tell, Butterfly Valley has no Turkish name, but rather was settled in the late sixties by an international commune of hippies. It is now populated by a small community of their heterogeneous, yoga practicing and pot growing offspring, many of whom may not have left the valley their entire lives (not that I can fault them for this). Geologically, it is a pie slice taken out of the mountain in which the berry filling on either side is instead three-hundred meters of cliffs and the lip of the pie pan is a pristine beach and absurdly blue water. We arrived too late to hazard a trip down the improvised trail.
A storm blew in during the small hours that night. The power went out. Rain blew in sideways. The lightning struck every two or three seconds, to the point that I was, with no exaggeration, actually able to read by its purple incandescence. It was a sight.
The next morning we learned that this was the first significant rain they'd had there in four months, and that it would now be much too dangerous to hazard a trip down. Uncertain of whether I'd ever be back, I formally absolved our hosteler Hassan of any culpability for our impending deaths, twisted my friends arms, and descended. Whoever had demarcated it had had the sick humor to do so by way of splashes of bright red paint that looked at home on the set of a cheap horror film. The trail of gore led us along smooth, mud-slick ledges of boot-polished stone and down rope-railed crevasses with hundred of feet of open air on either side. It quickly became apparent that this trail was best suited to adventurers of the cloven-hoofed variety. As if to highlight this, a very diarrhetic goat must have recently passed by, leaving its own series of greenish-brown splashes to compliment the trail markers. This not only smelled horrible but rendered already slick rocks virtually frictionless. However, despite a litany of complaints and the occasional accusation of attempted murder on my part from a party who will go nameless, we took it slow, each only fell once, and made it into the valley just in time for the last of the previous night's clouds to blow away. Once again, the Mediterranean provided ample reward for any near death encounter incurred in reaching it. Paradoxically, we made it back up in half the time.
It was a fourteen hour overnight bus back to Istanbul. The buses here are quite an experience. More on them forthcoming. And it will be forthcoming, thank you doubters. I will, henceforth, make every effort to have updates weekly.
*The Ottomans, having ruled the entire Middle East for the majority of their existence, reserved the right to arbitrarily change letters in common words as a way of reasserting their authority.
*Incidentally, there is no one named George associated with the place... although it is located on the edge of a "gorge." One has to wonder.
2 comments:
First!
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No, but seriously. Come home.
Your posts are SO long...yet I love them!
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