It’s been
more than 2 months since Terri and I headed off from Bali to Turkey for a
three-week exploration of that country. We had to do this since we were not
allowed to transit through Singapore to reach New Zealand if we had been in
Indonesia (then a covid-19 hotspot) within the previous 3 weeks, and Turkey was
one of the few countries that would let us in and which had direct flights from
Jakarta. We had to rearrange our flights to New Zealand and our highly coveted
and rare spots in New Zealand’s Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) system,
but luckily we had enough forewarning of the Singapore situation to get that
all done.
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Hittite statue, Ankara Museum
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So it was that on August 12
th we found ourselves arriving at the crack of dawn into Istanbul’s vast new airport and then catching an onward flight to Ankara.
Istanbul airport was notably quiet, but our Ankara flight was fairly full. We
caught a taxi into the centre of town and settled into a shabby hotel in the
old town of Ankara. It was my fourth trip to Turkey, after previous visits in
1994, 2008 and
2009, but I hadn’t been back to Ankara since that first 1994
trip and I was amazed at how much the city has grown, sprawling outward over
the outlying hills in endless serried ranks of mid-rise apartment blocks.
Our plan was
to rent a car for the duration of our trip, but we had had difficulty finding a
reasonably-priced rental online or at Ankara airport, so we spent part of that
day pounding the pavement on Libya Caddesi, home to more than a dozen local car
rental firms, eventually turning up a promising rental for 4900 Turkish lira
(TL), or about 490 euros, for 18 days. We shook hands on the deal, but didn’t
sign anything, and were mildly apprehensive that we would turn up in two days’
time to find no car waiting for us.
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| Hittite grave goods from Alaca Hoyuk |
The Turkish
lira has been sliding steadily against major currencies for a few years,
largely a result of some idiosyncratic economic policies pursued by Turkey’s
populist autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It’s now at 10 lira to the
euro, one fifth of its value in 2008 and 2009. On my first trip to Turkey in
1994, the old lira had just collapsed in value from 7000 to 30,000 to the US
dollar and hotels, food and transport were ridiculously inexpensive for me. In
2008 and 2009 Turkey was noticeably more expensive, probably the same price or
more expensive than neighbouring Greece. This time around it was 1994 all over
again, with food and fuel ridiculous bargains for those of us fortunate enough
to have hard currency to exchange; I suspect that for ordinary Turks earning
salaries in lira, the country is still really expensive. (I was told that 90
lira, or 9 euros, is a typical daily wage for retail workers and waiters in
Turkey these days, and it has to be hard to survive on that sort of salary.) We
went for a lavish late lunch after our car rental expedition, feasting on
varieties of grilled meat and a profusion of salads and bread for 150 lira,
before returning to our hotel for a jet-lag-induced nap.
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| Cuneiform letter |
We spent a
full day prowling around Ankara the next day, playing tourist. The highlight
was the epic Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, full of artistic treasures from
Catal Hoyuk, Alaca Hoyuk and Kultepe (three places we were about to visit) and
Carchemish and Urartu (which we weren’t going to see). The museum is really
well laid out, with striking display cases full of bronze, gold, pottery and
wall paintings, and we were almost overwhelmed with the sheer volume of
information and the profusion of sites. We also checked out the castle district
just above the museum (decrepit, but full of atmosphere and with great views
over the urban ocean of Ankara and its 6 million inhabitants) and the
underwhelming Roman ruins of the Temple of Augustus (hidden behind a popular
historic mosque) and the Baths of Caracalla (really just a field of ruins).
The next
morning we arrived at the car rental place to find that our car wasn’t there.
This was, however, not entirely the fault of the owner of the agency, as the
day before the previous renter had totalled the car in a spectacular highway
crash. He set us up with a car for the same price at an agency just down the
street and by 12:30 we were driving away from Ankara (a rather hair-raising
experience given the big-city traffic), headed east towards the ancient Hittite
capital of Hattusa. Once we were out of the metropolis, traffic was relatively
light and driving got a lot easier.
Hanging With The Hittites
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| Lion Gate, Hattusa |
I have been
fascinated by history and archaeology since I was quite young. I once took a
course in high school, taught by the redoubtable Mrs. Schindelhauer, called
Origins of Culture, that combined archaeology, ancient history, linguistics and
mythology. I loved the course, and many of the cultures we studied still
fascinate me. I don’t remember whether the Hittites were on our curriculum, but
if they weren’t, they should have been. The Hittites were one of the big boys
on the Bronze Age block in the ancient Near East in the second millennium BC,
and maintained an extensive network of trade networks with the Egyptians, the
Assyrians, the Mitanni and the Mycenaean Greeks. I had never visited any of
their historical sites, and so I was looking forward to Hattusa.
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| Postern Gate, Hattusa |
When we
arrived there mid-afternoon, I was blown away. Bronze Age sites are often just
mounds, full of interesting bits of pottery but offering much less to the
imagination than a classical Roman or Greek city. Hattusa was not like this.
For one thing, it’s huge, requiring a car to get around the sprawling ruins
that climb up the rocky hillside. We drove steeply uphill, past ruins that we
would return to later, arriving at the Lion Gate, one of the principal
entrances into the city. The impressive city wall has been reconstructed,
running many hundreds of metres uphill, and the Lion Gate punctured the wall in
the characteristic parabolic style of Hittite entrances. There were two lions
flanking the entrance, facing outward to impress arriving visitors; one had
been extensively reconstructed, but the other seemed original. The gateway was
as impressive as many Egyptian entranceways, and set the stage for what was to
come.
More steep
driving uphill brought us to the apex of the city wall and the Sphinx Gate. The
sphinxes on either side of the entranceway were impressive (and rather Egyptian
in style), but the postern gate was far more striking. This consisted of a long
underground tunnel passing below the wall for a good fifty metres of darkness
before emerging at the foot of a steep stone glacis flanking the Sphinx Gate.
It’s not clear whether this was supposed to be some sort of security feature or
whether the engineering was supposed to awe visitors from far away; all the
Hittite cities we visited seemed to have a similar postern gate.
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| King Gate, Hattusa |
We clambered
around happily, then drove down the opposite side of the ancient wall to
another parabolic doorway, the King’s Gate, featuring a figure in a short kilt
flanking the gap in the wall; it’s not clear whether this was a king or a
depiction of a god. We took more photos, then continued downhill past a large
series of temples (Hattusa was said to have more than thirty temples, each
dedicated to a different divinity). As we returned to the level of the
surrounding countryside, we saw a replica of what archaeologists think the city
walls looked like when they were standing, and found a section of Bronze Age
city street leading to the largest temple in the entire city. It really gave me
the feeling of walking through a Bronze Age city, and was perhaps the most
atmospheric part of the entire ruins. We left with a keen sense of what a
large, imposing city Hattusa must have been in its heyday 3400 years ago.
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Hittite paved street, lower city of Hattusa
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| Hittite relief, Yazilikaya |
Before
driving off, we visited a nearby site, Yazilikaya, which seems to have been a
ritual centre. It features a number of carved reliefs, mostly of gods and
kings, that reminded me strongly in style and composition of the Achaemenid
Persian carvings I saw in Iran back in 2009. The antiquity of the art and its
technical skill were both impressive. We got back into the car exuberant with
our first exposure to Hittite culture, and drove north towards Alaca Hoyuk in
search of a place to camp. We followed directions in the iOverlander app to a
spot on the edge of a farmer’s field, set up our tent and cooked dinner under
the stars, happy with our first day of exploring Turkey.
The next
morning’s activities got off to a delayed start when we arrived at Alaca
Hoyuk’s gate to find that Terri had misplaced her glasses. We retraced our route
5 km back to our campsite, searched around there, then drove back towards the
ruins, watching the road, since we suspected that the glasses had been left on
the roof. Sure enough, we found the glasses on the road, halfway back to Alaca
Hoyuk. Sadly, they had been run over, and one of the lenses had completely
disappeared.
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| Sphinx Gate, Alaca Hoyuk |
After that ill-omened beginning, Alaca Hoyuk was a wonderful
followup to Hattusa. It’s a much more compact site, basically a large mound,
but has its own sphinx gate and subterranean postern gate (with a right-angled
turn in it, making it even darker and spookier than the one at Hattusa). There
are grain silos, foundations of temples and several cool reliefs, including one
of the king sacrificing, and another of a musician and two acrobats in action.
The main attraction, though, were the pre-Hittite Early Bronze Age tombs that
were excavated below the Hittite layers. They have been reconstructed and
filled with replicas of the grave goods that were found (we had seen the
originals in the Ankara museum a couple of days before), and give a real
feeling for the funerary customs of the time. All the tombs are oriented the
same way, with a body found in the same corner of each tomb, lying on the same
side of the body in each case. The grave goods included a few bronze statues of
deer (or bulls?) that are striking and are often used as symbols for the entire
Hittite civilization.
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Early Bronze Age grave (reconstruction), Alaca Hoyuk
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Relief of musician and acrobats, Alaca Hoyuk
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Alisar Hoyuk
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From Alaca
Hoyuk we drove to nearby Alaca town and spent a frustrating time trying to buy “ispirto”,
which we thought was white fuel for camping stoves but which proved to be
methylated spirits (which don’t burn well in my MSR stove). We also tried to
buy gasoline to burn in the stove, but were informed that for security reasons,
the gas station was not allowed to sell fuel in separated containers (?!?). In
the process, we ended up buying a portable charcoal grill which ended up
serving us very well for the rest of the trip, as well as some pretty dire
Turkish wine. Our next destination was Alisar Hoyuk, another Hittite site, but when
we got there, we couldn’t find the archaeological site. We sat in a grove of
trees and had a picnic while I searched on Google Earth for anything that
looked like a mound. I found it, on the other side of the main highway from
where we had turned off, and we backtracked to find a completely unmarked,
unmaintained mound that had been excavated in the past, as witnessed by deep
trenches cut into the ground. The soil was covered in potsherds, and Terri
found what we thought was probably a Neolithic scraper for scraping hides; it
fit into her hand with ergonomic perfection. We drove off towards the site of
Kayalipinar, but ominous rainclouds in the distance convinced us to cut our
trip short and we searched out a remote campsite at the edge of a farmer’s pasture.
It was an idyllic spot to set up our tent and grill up lamb chops on our new
hibachi.
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Possible stone scraper, Alisar Hoyuk
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| Kayalipinar |
The next
morning, as we were packing up after a leisurely breakfast, a farmer drove by
on the nearby dirt track, stopped and called out to us. We were worried that he
was going to scold us for camping on his land, but instead he welcomed us and
asked us to come to his house for breakfast. We explained (as best we could,
given a lack of common language) that we were about to leave, and thanked him
for his offer. A few minutes later he returned and gave us a loaf of bread and a
huge chunk of home-made cheese, the first of numerous examples of Turkish
hospitality that we would experience.
It was a
long day of driving that day as we made progress towards the northeastern
corner of the country and the Kackar Mountains. Our first stop was at the ruins
of Kayalipinar, located in an idyllic valley whose irrigated green fields
contrasted vividly with the stark stony hills around. We discovered that this
was the Halys River, famous in classical history as the location of a decisive
battle between the Persians and the Lydians in which Croesus, King of Lydia,
misinterpreted the ambiguous words of the Delphic Oracle: “If you invade the
Persian Empire, you will destroy a great kingdom.” Only after his defeat did he
realize that he had destroyed his own great kingdom. Kayalipinar was another
Hittite city and, like Alisar, the site is completely abandoned. There wasn’t a
lot to see aside from the replica of a Hittite relief and something that looked
a lot like a filled-in postern gate. We gazed out across the farm fields and
tried to picture what the area must have been like in Hittite times. We also
did the first of a number of Facebook Live videos (a great idea by Terri),
showing off the area and talking briefly about its history.
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First distant view of the mountains of the Black Sea coast
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We left
Kayalipinar behind and drove further east into the hypermodern sprawl of Sivas,
one of the major cities of eastern Turkey. There were no historical sites to
see, but there was a supermarket, an ATM and a gas station to replenish our
cooler, our wallets and our fuel supply. We drove further east, past
wheatfields awaiting harvesting, through stark rock canyons, over a
2200-metre-high pass and finally onto a series of small back roads that
constituted a short cut to the Black Sea coast. Towards the end of the day we
came out along a narrow canyon which widened here and there enough to build a
few villages. At the edge of one of these oases, we found a perfect campsite
down beside the rushing river. We grilled chicken legs and fried up a vegetable
omelette over the coals of a driftwood campfire, and sat out under the stars,
soaking up the atmosphere.
The Mists of Kackar
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| Fresco from Soumela Monastery |
We drove
further through narrow canyons and over high passes the next morning before
finally popping out over one final pass onto the descent towards the major city
of Trabzon. The weather changed at the top, and we drove into fog and mist. At
the crest of the pass we stopped to buy honey and nuts and pastries from a
vendor who had travelled several times to Georgia, and who threw in a big bag
of delicious plums for free. We descended along a road that had suddenly turned
into a major divided highway, and turned off for the uphill sidetrip to Soumela
Monastery.
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| Soumela Monastery in the omnipresent mist |
I had
wanted to visit this site, one of the most famous Greek Orthodox monasteries in
the world, for decades, ever since I saw pictures of it in National Geographic.
It is the most famous tourist attraction along Turkey’s Black Sea coast and as
such it was absolutely crawling with Turkish domestic tourists. We parked in a
vast carpark and caught a shuttle bus up into the mist before disembarking and
walking along a short hiking trail to the monastery. It’s a surprisingly small
place inside; most of the complex is dormitories for the monks, rising some six
stories high and clinging to the precipitous cliffs, but only one part of one
floor of the dormitories is open to the public. There are two small churches
and a tiny chapel in the courtyard behind, and that’s about it. With the vast
throng of tourists, it was very crowded and it was hard to get a sense of the
serenity or isolation that must have been features of the monastery when it was
in operation. The monks left, along with most of the Greek inhabitants of
Turkey, during the great population exchange
in 1923 following the Greek invasion of Turkey just after the end of
World War One. The monastery is run now as a cultural museum, so there was none
of the incense-wreathed atmosphere of an active Orthodox church. On the way
out, we diverted a few hundred metres to a subsidiary monastery which provided
us with the iconic view of Soumela playing peek-a-boo with us through the
curtains of mist.
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Painted church facade, Soumela Monastery
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With that,
we retreated to the car and continued downhill towards Trabzon, a big city
packed with concrete apartment buildings. We continued along the motorway that
hugs the Black Sea shore, wondering why on earth this region is so popular with
Turkish holidaymakers. What little natural charm it once had has long since been
buried under concrete, with almost continuous urban sprawl along the coast,
lapping upwards high into the steep green hills that line the shore. There is a
lot of industrial development as well, and the towns seemed bereft of any
visible charm or atmosphere. There aren’t even any decent beaches that we could
see. We decided that finding a wild campsite would be impossible, and so we
opted for an inexpensive hotel, the Mori Sport Hotel, in Iyidere, partway
between Trabzon and Rize. It proved to be a great base, with comfortable rooms
and a big swimming pool. It felt good to shower after a few days of sleeping
rough, and we went out for a lavish supper of grilled meat that set us back 12
euros in total.
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First hike in the Kackar Mountains
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From
Iyidere our route headed further east to the city of Rize, and then up a valley
towards the mountain resort town of Ayder. In Rize we stopped to top up on a
few groceries and were, for the first time, able to buy gasoline for my MSR
stove by showing my passport and having the details recorded for reporting to
the police. The road was wide and newly paved, perfect for tour buses. Ayder is
very much on the domestic tourism itineraries for this region, and the road was
lined with whitewater rafting outfits, tea plantations and big tourist
restaurants specializing in coach tours.
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| Gentian |
When we got to Ayder, it reminded me
of a down-market French ski resort, full of new hotels and with no parking to
be found. We ground our way uphill to the top end of the village and found (we
thought) a place to stay in a hotel that catered mostly to Arabic-speaking
guests. We decided that we would have breakfast while we waited for our room to
come free. It was a nice breakfast (omelette, sausages, olives, tea, bread) but
we were charged more for the breakfast (15 euros) than we had paid for a huge
supper the night before. To top it all off, it turned out that there was no
room at the inn either, and we ended up leaving our car parked in front of the
hotel while we caught a lift up to the end of the mountain road to do some
hiking, hoping that there would be a place available at a nearby hotel when we
came back later that afternoon.
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Segurigera orientalis
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We had
briefly contemplated driving our 2-wheel-drive low-clearance sedan up the road
towards Kavrun Yaylasi (Kavrun Meadows; “yayla” is the same word as the Kyrgyz
“jailoo”, a high-altitude grazing area for flocks that spend summers up there
and winters back down in the lowlands). As we bumped along an increasingly
steep, rutted and muddy track, we were glad that we were paying a few euros for
someone else to damage their minibus. It took nearly an hour to make it 10 km
and 1000 vertical metres uphill. We leapt out, shouldered daypacks and took off
for a few hours of hiking under sunny blue skies.
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Maree on the trail in the Kackars
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The hiking
that afternoon was idyllic. We climbed steeply above the untidy jumble of the
yayla and followed a tumbling mountain stream steadily uphill towards distant
granite spires. The Kackar massif tops out at 3900 metres and keeps snow (and
tiny, retreating glaciers) all summer long in shady areas. We were well below
this level, walking through grass liberally flecked with variegated patches of
wildflowers, most of them familiar from two years of hiking in Georgia (the
Georgian frontier lies only 100 km to the east). We ambled along contentedly
until we reached a lookout point over a series of glacial tarns, where we
stopped for photos and to contemplate the dramatic alpine scenery before
turning around and trotting smartly downhill, hoping that we hadn’t missed the
return journey of the minibus. Luckily the driver was in no hurry to leave on
schedule, so we were in plenty of time to catch a lift back to Ayder through
mist and drizzle that was rising inexorably from below. In Ayder we found a
really nice hotel room behind our original choice. We spent the afternoon and
evening packing our gear for our planned 3-day trek around the Kackar massif
starting the next morning, and were in bed early, tired by the first real
exercise we’d done in over a week.
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Yours truly at the top of our Kackar hike
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The next
morning we had a long wait before the morning minibus back to Kavrun, so we
breakfasted again at the same restaurant as the previous day, where a rather
embarrassed waiter told us that we could have the same breakfast for 5 euros to
make up for the outrageous price he had charged us the day before. We threw our
packs, laden with tent, sleeping bags and mats, cooking gear, fuel and warm
clothes, into the vehicle and set off uphill again. We had not been able to
check the weather forecast the day before (there was no phone signal at our
hotel), but the previous day’s forecast was for light drizzle early, clearing
by 1 pm. When we got to Kavrun, it was certainly drizzling, although perhaps
more heavily than advertised. Undeterred we set off uphill into the fog,
following a river upstream.
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| The start of rainy cold misery |
As we
trudged along the rain, far from tapering off, seemed to be getting heavier. We
followed the GPS signal and map on my smartphone, and yet we still managed to
veer off the proper trail, heading steeply uphill towards a mountain climbing
basecamp rather than along the lower path that followed the main river. We
turned around to retrace our steps and find the proper route, and almost
immediately two things occurred to change our plans. First of all we
encountered a group of Turkish mountaineers who told us cheerfully that 90 mm of
rain was forecast that afternoon and evening, and then while we were talking to
them, thunder began to boom around us. We decided that we didn’t want to be
hiking through a spectacular lightning storm, so we beat a hasty retreat
through rain that rapidly became torrential and very cold indeed; in fact it
got so cold that it turned to hail which stung as it hammered down onto our
heads and faces! My phone was in my shorts pocket, and got so soaked by water
running off my raincoat that it never worked again. Terri was extremely unhappy
about the amount of lightning and the nearness of the strikes, so we made very
brisk time indeed back down to Kavrun, where we found a small café and sat
there drinking soup, dripping water and trying to warm up until our minibus
driver announced our departure. We returned to Ayder, rapidly put our packs
into the car and drove straight back to Iyidere; our three-day trek had lasted
barely three hours! We were glad to have seen the Kackars (again, I had first
seen them featured long ago in a National Geographic article) and to have done
some hiking, but it seemed as though there was almost daily heavy rain, mist
and fog, so it might well have been three very soggy days indeed. We spread our
clothes out around the room to dry and headed back to our grilled meat
restaurant for another sizeable feed.
Return to Cappadocia
From here
we retreated back towards Ankara, fleeing the crowds, the ugly urban-industrial
sprawl and the incessant rain, heading for empty spaces, dry weather and more
archaeological sites back on the Anatolian Plateau. We spent a long day driving
back through Erzincan and Sivas, along brand-new motorways (some of them were
still having their lane markings painted as we drove along them). After 540
kilometres of driving, we pitched our tent on a dirt track above a small
village west of Sivas, looking out over sere hills and small patches of
irrigation in the valley bottoms. It was an idyllic spot to watch a nearly full
moon rise and to grill chicken breasts garnished with the wild thyme that
carpeted the hillsides.
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The letter of a seriously annoyed king
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We were
headed towards the tourist mecca of Cappadocia, but we had some historical
sites to visit first. We got to Kultepe fairly early and were amazed to have
the entire site to ourselves, other than a small archaeological team, and not
to have to pay an admission fee. It’s a big site, closer in size to Hattusa
than to Alaca Hoyuk, and a very important one too. It was a major Hittite
centre, and also had a colony of Assyrian merchants living in the lower town
(the Karum) below the mound of the upper city (Kanesh) and its palaces. There’s
a series of palaces excavated in the upper town, although they’re not visually
very impressive. The site sprawls quite extensively, and we wandered around for
a while before running into the archaeology team that’s excavating the site.
One of their postdoctoral fellows, a Brazilian based at the Sorbonne in Paris,
took time to chat with us and fill us in on their work. They’re currently
investigating the pre-Hittite early Bronze Age city at the lowest levels of the
mound, trying to understand the social and economic picture of that early
period. She pointed out the yellow flame-damaged mud-brick of the palaces (all
consumed by fire at the end of the Hittite period) and directed us to the
Karum, which we hadn’t heard about and would have missed without her advice.
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Reconstructed house, Kanesh Kunum, Kultepe
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We paused
to do a Facebook Live video, talking about the historical details revealed in
some excellent signboards scattered around the site. Kanesh seems to have been
the key Early Bronze Age site of the region, and it was the capture of Kanesh
by the Hittites that propelled them into supremacy in central Anatolia. There
are 23,500 cuneiform tablets that were discovered in the lower city (the Karum)
which paint a picture of life in ancient Kultepe and the wider Anatolian world.
One letter, from a local ruler of the kingdom of Mama named Anum-hirbi to the
ruler of Kanesh, is a litany of complaint about border infringements and
promises not kept.
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| Gateway to a Selcuk medressah, Kayseri |
The Karum
was a surprisingly large suburb, stretching hundreds of metres in a dense
labyrinth of rectangular houses linked by narrow streets. Here the visiting
Assyrian merchants set up house, keeping their trade goods inside their houses.
When the colony burned down, their record-keeping tablets were baked into hard,
durable form for archaeologists to dig up millennia later. We saw graves,
houses, a temple and, most interesting of all, a modern reconstruction by
experimental archaeologists of what these houses must have looked like when
they were still standing.
Kultepe is
on the outskirts of the major city of Kayseri (ancient Caesarea), and we were
soon in the sprawling suburbs, searching for somewhere to restock our
food supplies. We ended up in a large shopping mall where I tried
(unsuccessfully) to have my phone touch screen repaired. We then drove into the
historic centre of the city (a rather hair-raising experience), tried unsuccessfully to find a
commercial parking lot and ended up parked behind a gaggle of apartment
buildings. I had been to Kayseri before, back in 1994, and I remembered it as
having a number of interesting buildings from the Seljuk period (the 11th
and 12th centuries). Terri and I did a whirlwind walking tour,
seeing graceful old mosques and medressahs. We ended up in a medressah
repurposed as an artisans’ market, while in the fortress we found the excellent
archaeological museum where we spent a wonderful hour learning about the many
ancient sites of Kayseri province.
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Goddess idol, Kayseri Museum
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Our first view of the balloons
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Kayseri is
less than an hour from Goreme, the tourist capital of Cappadocia, and before
sunset we had established ourselves in a cheap-but-cheerful commercial
campground on the outskirts of the town. It would be our base for the next
three nights, and we celebrated by grilling lambchops over a very slow charcoal
fire and drinking the first really good red wine we’d found in Turkey
(Cappadocia is the major wine-producing region of the country).
We were
awoken early the next morning by loud roaring sounds that we eventually and
groggily realized must be the famous hot air balloons of Cappadocia. We crawled
out of the tent and found enormous balloons towering above us as they inflated
in the field next to the campground, or floating perilously close above us. We
wandered out to take photos, and ended up being offered the traditional
end-of-flight glass of champagne by a balloon crew that had landed nearby.
Terri had never been ballooning before, so we resolved to go the next morning
with the company (Royal Balloons) who had given us champagne. (An example of a
successful marketing strategy!) It was amazing how many balloons were in the
air; I counted over 100, and there must have been even more, since not all of
them were in the air at the same time, and some were launched quite far away
and were hidden by the convoluted terrain.
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Balloon wedding pictures
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| Campground kitties, Goreme |
After
breakfast we used the children’s swing sets to do a workout with the gymnastic
rings we were carrying around with us, then had a long and refreshing swim
before the day’s crowds began to arrive. The campground had several cats and
kittens wandering around, and since we were missing our beloved Bali cats
Ginger Bear and Mama Cat, we spent some time feeding them milk and letting them
munch on our lamb bones. Eventually we called Royal Balloon and went to pay for
our balloon ride at their office in town (a lovely early birthday present for
me from Terri!). We spent the afternoon walking through the fantastically
shaped “fairy chimneys” of Rose Valley and Red Valley, past isolated vineyards,
ancient eroding churches and modern pigeon coops carved into the soft volcanic
tufa of the area. It was visually stunning and great fun, although much hotter
than we had become used to over the previous ten days. That evening, after grilling up chicken, we wandered across the road to try to photograph the full moon rising over the distinctive fairy chimneys of Cappadocia.
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Cappadocian fairy chimney landscape
 | Rose Valley
 | Terri in Rose Valley
 | Cappadocian vineyard
 | Walking into Rose Valley
 | Natural rock passageway
 | Magical Cappadocian landscape
 | Fairy chimneys
 | Full moon rising over Cappadocia
 | Cappadocian full moon
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| Pre-dawn flight preparations |
Our second
full day in Cappadocia saw us up at 4:15 to go ballooning. We got picked up,
taken to the company offices for a welcome early breakfast, and then driven to
the balloons, already being inflated with hot air blasted out of gas-fired jets
that lit up the pre-dawn in various shades of yellow and orange. By 5:40 our
balloon was aloft, long before sunrise, and we rocketed high up before
returning closer to ground level to sweep through some of the deeply incised
canyons, sometimes tickling treetops and grazing rock pinnacles. It was fun and
exhilarating and a completely mass-tourist thing to do, and we had a wonderful
time. We watched the sun rise and set the bright colours of the balloons
aflame, and looked into the distance towards Mt. Erciyes, the 3900-metre
volcano that gave rise to this unique landscape. By 7 am we were headed for our
landing, pursued below us by the ground crew. We hit the ground with
substantial sideways speed, but our pilot landed us upright and kept us there
long enough for the ground crew to catch up and load us onto their truck. We
clambered out, sipped our champagne and babbled excitedly to our fellow
passengers about the experience before being driven back to our campsite, both
of us buzzing with adrenaline and fun.
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Looking down on other balloons
 | Terri looking very pleased with the balloon flight
 | Cappadocian plateau, badlands and valley
 | Balloons and full moon
 | Wall-to-wall balloons
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Enchanting landscape
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We had a
lavish fry-up of eggs and sausages before taking advantage of the early start
to the day to get going early on another hike, this one up the Pigeon Valley
towards the nearby town of Uchisar. There were essentially no other people on
the hike, and we walked along marvelling at the fabulous rock formations and
churches before climbing up into the fairytale architecture of Uchisar and its
towering “castle”, with sweeping views out over the landscape. We wandered
through the streets and then back, via the deserted Zemi Valley, to Goreme.
That afternoon we drove over to the third tourist town of Cappadocia, Urgup, and
did a wine tasting at a vineyard there; we left with a trunkful of Cappadocian
wines to see us through to the end of our Turkish sojourn. A dinner of takeout
doner kebabs, washed down with a bottle of Cappadocian red, sent us to bed
early and a bit tired out from walking.
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Pigeon Valley
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| Kaymakli |
We woke up
on August 24th with only 10 days to go before our flight to New
Zealand. We did another pull-up workout on the playground equipment and had a
quick dip in the pool before hitting the road. We headed southwest out of
Goreme, stopping first at the underground city of Kaymakli. I remember being
enormously impressed with the underground labyrinth of Kaymakli back in 1994.
This time around, although the rooms and physical layout were equally
impressive, the crowding was terrible, and in the context of covid-19 it was a
potential superspreader event, especially given the number of European and
Russian tourists without masks. As well I was less convinced that people had
actually lived underground here; it seemed more likely that this was just
underground storage for grain and oil and a place to stable animals out of the
winter cold.
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Ihlara Valley
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We beat a hasty retreat from the hordes and kept driving west
towards the Ihlara Valley, recommended to me by my dromomaniacal friend Kent Foster. We parked at one end of the valley, paid the admission fee and ambled
down into the valley, a slash of green incised deeply into a very brown and
rocky landscape. The first half of the trek was full of daytrippers by the
hundreds, but we took the opposite bank of the stream and had very few fellow
trekkers on our side. The walk was pleasant, through riverine forest beside a
crystalline stream, with occasional rock-hewn chapels up above the river. At
the halfway point the path came out in an untidy gaggle of riverside
restaurants, and after that we had the entire valley to ourselves, except for a
pair of elderly cowherds tending their animals. The second half of the trek was
idyllic, with the valley walls retreating slightly to leave a riparian strip of
pasture and bush to walk through. We stopped at one point to eat some of the
juiciest blackberries I have ever tasted, and it was late afternoon when we
emerged at the village of Yaprakhisar and hitchhiked back along the main road
to our car. We picked up the car and then stopped for a takeout dinner of
grilled lamb and a magnificent salad in a local restaurant run by an
interesting local guy who had worked for two decades in Germany. We carried it
back to a spot we had scouted out at the end of our hike, where we camped
beside the river in an isolated meadow, ate our dinner and sat watching the
stars pop into view overhead.
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Ihlara Valley hike
To the Dawn of Civilization
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| Scenery near Yaprakhisar |
The next
morning we checked out a nearby Christian chapel carved from the soft volcanic
rock which was just above our campsite, then drove out past a series of
impressive fairy chimneys before hitting the main road. It was a busy day full
of sights. We were on our way towards a famous caravanserai at Sultanhani when
we spotted a brown sign (for tourist attractions) marked “Asikli Hoyuk”. We
knew nothing about the site, but we knew by now that “hoyuk” means the same
thing as “tell” in Arabic: an archaeological mound. We diverted a few
kilometres off our route and were immensely glad that we did.
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Terri atop Asikli Hoyuk
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Asikli Hoyuk is
one of the very oldest sedentary villages found anywhere, dating back to 8400
BC. Its location, atop a small hill overlooking a rapidly flowing stream, would
have been perfect for a group of people making the transition from hunting,
fishing and gathering to agricultural existence. The very lowest levels showed
circular semi-subterranean huts, but within a few centuries these had morphed
into a series of cubist adobe huts crowded cheek-by-jowl with their neighbours.
There were no streets in this later layout; entrance to houses was through a
hole in the roof, and access to the outside world was across the neighbours’
rooftops. The later incarnation of the town had big common spaces with limed
floors that had been resurfaced several hundred times, perhaps annually for big
ceremonial occasions. The inhabitants seem to have cultivated early strains of
einkorn and emmer wheat (the wild antecedents of our modern wheat) and to have
buried their dead under the floors of their houses. My favourite part of the
site was the experimental archaeology section, where students have built
replicas of the early and later Asikli houses, complete with selections of
plants found in the dig and plantations of einkorn wheat in the gardens
outside. I walked away much more knowledgeable about early Anatolian
urbanization than I was an hour earlier.
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Asikli Hoyuk replica hut (early phase)
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Asikli Hoyuk replica hut (later phase)
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Interior of the winter quarters at Sultanhani caravanserai
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From there
we stopped in at two Seljuk-era caravanserais, a small one at Agzikarahan and a
much larger one at Sultanhani. Agzikarahan was locked, but we drove around the
perimeter, admiring the elaborately sculpted entranceway so typical of the
Seljuk style. Sultanhani was much larger and more elaborate, and much more on
the tourist trail, although it was still free of charge to visit. The
architecture of the interior was striking, with a very cubist raised mosque in
the centre of the courtyard, and a large, beautifully designed winter quarters
for traders at one end. I could imagine Marco Polo, his father and his uncle
bedding down for the night here in 1271 as they began their three-year overland
odyssey to Mongol China.
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Main gate of Sultanhani caravanserai
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Torched palaces at Acem Hoyuk
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Our last historical
site for the day was Acem Hoyuk, which proved to be another fabulous spot to
learn about early Anatolian history. It was a major city during the Assyrian
Trading Colonies period, perhaps even bigger than Kultepe/Kanesh. It has
yielded far fewer cuneiform tablets than Kultepe, largely because its Kanum
(Assyrian merchants’ colony) lies under the houses of the modern village,
precluding extensive excavation. Its palaces looked the same as those at
Kultepe, as they also all burned to the ground, leaving the characteristic
sulphurous yellow colour and contorted outlines we had seen at Kultepe. We were
the only tourists at the site, and we ran into Dr. Yalcin Kamis, the excavation
director, a professor at Nevsehir University. He was very generous with his
time and answered a host of our fairly naïve questions about the history of the
site, the region and the Hittite/Assyrian Trading Colonies period in general. I
walked away much more informed than I had been when I entered Acem Hoyuk.
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Terri and Dr. Yalcin Kamis at Acem Hoyuk
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Tuz Golu and its causeway road
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We weren’t
done yet with the day’s explorations. We had seen photos of pink water in a
large inland salt lake to the north, so we raced north along the highway hoping
for a spectacular photo opportunity. As it turned out, while there is a large
salt lake (Tuz Golu), it’s much less pink and pristine and spectacular than
Instagram photos make it appear. We drove along the shore on the motorway,
trying to find a spot at which we could camp, and where the waters would look
amazing, but found neither. In the end we drove across the lake on a rough
causeway, past the enormous industrial salt works that disfigure much of the
lakeshore, and we ended up camped on the shore of a much smaller salt lake
(Duden Golu) a few kilometres inland from the main lake. We fried up mushrooms,
cheese and sausage and watched the stars overhead, spotting 4 meteors (from the
Perseid meteor shower) and 3 satellites before calling it a night.
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Flamingoes take flight on Duden Golu
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Before
driving off the next morning, Terri and I went for a long walk along the dry
bed of the salt lake towards the open water that we could see in the distance.
After trudging for a few kilometres across the salt flats, we finally got to
the muddy edge of the vestigial lake which was full of flamingoes and geese and
four cranes who loomed large over their smaller neighbours. They were startled
by our presence and took flight in a huge, chaotic wave that made for a
memorable spectacle. After a long walk back to our car, we drove off in the
opposite direction to our arrival the night before, and in no time at all found
ourselves in a sizeable provincial town, Kulu, where we stopped for groceries
before jumping onto the main highway back south towards Konya. We drove through
heavy traffic and a dust haze whipped up by the summer winds off the parched
landscape and within an hour found ourselves at Catal Hoyuk.
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| Catal Hoyuk under its protective roof |
If you know
anything at all about human prehistory, chances are that you’ve read about
Catal Hoyuk, one of the earliest and best-known prehistoric sites in the world.
It’s been excavated since the 1950s, and the spectacular artistic finds and
burial practices have captivated people (and textbook writers) for decades.
Terri and I found that Catal Hoyuk is to a certain extent a prisoner of its own
fame and success. It’s visited by hordes of tourists and schoolchildren every
year, and boasts an impressive visitor’s centre and reconstructed buildings.
Unfortunately the level of communication is very much pitched towards
elementary school students rather than interested and educated adults, so it
feels very much as though you’re being talked down to by the signboards.
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| Reproduction of a famous Catal Hoyuk wall painting |
This
carping aside, though, Catal Hoyuk is very impressive, with two separate mounds
yielding houses and burials that talk to us over the intervening millennia.
Catal Hoyuk is actually a full millennium younger than Asikli Hoyuk, but its
artistic products, particularly the wall paintings of vultures and supernatural
creatures and hunting scenes, are unique and make for great textbook pages.
Just as during the second phase of habitation at Asikli Hoyuk, Catal Hoyuk’s
houses are cubical and rammed cheek-by-jowl with their neighbours, with
rooftops playing the role of streets. Ancestors seem to have been buried under
the floors of most houses, and occasionally the preserved and adorned heads of
ancestors seem to have been used in ritual purposes. We stood at the bottom of
the larger mound and gazed up at the levels of structures and ritual spaces and
were awestruck at the sheer weight of (pre-)history that loomed above us.
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Vultures and the dead; reproduction of Catal Hoyuk painting
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Boncuklu Hoyuk excavation
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Having
recorded another Facebook Live video, we raced off through the oppressive dusty
heat (Catal Hoyuk’s surroundings have become a lot less fertile and welcoming
than they were in the 8th millennium BC!) to a nearby site mentioned
on a signboard, Boncuklu Hoyuk. Boncuklu was the antithesis of Catal: we were
the only tourists, there was no visitor’s centre or strictly enforced walking
path, and the excavation director for the site, Dr. Ian Baird of Liverpool
University, spent a half-hour showing us around the tiny excavation site and
talking about prehistory in Anatolia in general, and Boncuklu in particular.
Boncuklu is as old as Asikli Hoyuk (8400-7400 BC) and DNA from some of
Boncuklu’s inhabitants shows up thousands of years later in the first farmer
immigrants to Europe. The houses are like those in early Asikli, circular huts
semi-sunk into the ground, with ancestors buried beneath the southeast end of
the hut and hearths diametrically opposite in the northwest end. Interestingly
the bodies of lower-status individuals buried in garbage middens (rather than
under huts) seem to have had a different diet from those buried in huts, with
the midden burials showing more marsh-based diet of fish and snails and frogs
and turtles, and less big game. We watched his graduate students patiently
excavating lime-paved floors with trowels and dental picks and toothbrushes,
pausing from time to time to get Dr. Baird to take an official photo of
anything new and noteworthy. As at Asikli Hoyuk there were some experimental
archaeological replicas of huts, and also some plantations of emmer wheat and
other marsh vegetation. Boncuklu was once at the edge of a fertile marsh full
of ducks and other game birds; now it is in the midst of a hot, dusty,
unpleasant agricultural plain. We thanked Dr. Baird for his help and retreated,
wilted by the fierce heat, to a small hotel in Konya for a shower, air
conditioning and some takeout doner kebabs.
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Terri and Dr. Ian Baird at Boncuklu Hoyuk
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| Seraffedin Mosque, Konya |
Konya is a
neat city. I remember liking it a lot back in 1994, and it’s become lovelier,
with a lot of civic improvements following on from a general increase in
economic prosperity over the intervening decades. Known as Iconium in Roman
times, it became a major centre of Seljuk rule later on, but it’s most famous
now as the home of the mystic Persian-language poet Rumi, much beloved of
Western celebrities like Madonna and Coldplay. Known in Turkish as the Mevlana,
his life and history exert a huge pull on tourists today, attracting them to
Konya in droves. On the morning of August 27th we set off from the
hotel on a whistle-stop walking tour to see some of the top attractions of the
town. We saw the attractive Ottoman exterior of the Mevlana Museum, the Rococo
lavishness of the late-19th century Azizia Mosque, the more
austerely classical Ottoman Serafeddin Mosque and then the tomb and mosque of
Shams-i-Tabrizi who is revered as the spiritual guide and teacher of Rumi. A
low hill, manicured into an attractive modern park, held the large and plain
Seljuk Alaadin Mosque, while across the street lurked the truncated minaret of
the Ince Minaret Mosque. Konya, like so many mid-sized Turkish cities, has seen
a boom in municipal construction and beautification, and we walked along the
main circular boulevard towards the Archaeological Museum through a
construction site where parks and walkways were being added beside the lanes of
traffic. The Archaeological Museum was small and disappointing, a stark
contrast to the outstanding museums in Ankara and Kayseri. There were lots of
marble Roman sarcophagi, many featuring the Labours of Hercules, and some
original pieces of wall painting and burial goods from nearby Catal Hoyuk.
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The Ince Minaret, Konya
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The Labours of Hercules
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We ambled
back to the hotel to drive out of town, only to find that our car trunk
wouldn’t open. After much headscratching and attempts by various folks to help,
we were finally advised to take it to the main Fiat dealership on the outskirts
of town. We followed Google Maps to a huge building with an outsized service
centre in the back. There were a lot of cars waiting to be serviced, but when
we explained our problem with the aid of Google Translate, we were whisked into
the shop where a mechanic skilfully broke into the trunk from behind the back seats
(we hadn’t been able to figure out how to move them forward, and there was a
trick to it), then found the electrical fault that had caused the problem and
rapidly fixed it. Our car was phenomenally dusty from driving on dirt roads,
and after finishing with the trunk, the mechanic took an air hose and
methodically blew all the dust out of the doors and the interior of the car.
When we went to pay, the gentleman in the reception waved away our credit card.
“You are our guest! No charge." I’m not sure whether it was a known fault under
warranty, or whether they were simply taking pity on two hapless and dusty
travellers, but it was a welcome surprise. We drove off smiling.
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Child burial from Catal Hoyuk
In Search of the Phrygians
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Typican Phrygian tomb interior
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The last
few days of our explorations were devoted to searching out another lesser-known
ancient culture, the Phrygians. They are more recent than the Hittites (and
much, much more recent than the folks who inhabited Catal Hoyuk and Boncuklu
Hoyuk) and lived in the area just to the west of Ankara in the centuries before
the arrival of the Persian Empire. I didn’t know much about their culture other
than that they were always depicted in Persian and Greek reliefs wearing
distinctive soft caps, and that their most famous king was Midas, he of the
golden touch. We drove out of Konya across a dusty plain through enervating
summer heat and were relieved when the road gained altitude and climbed into
limestone hills with cooler temperatures and shady forests. We turned onto a
small, dusty road and checked out and rejected a couple of campsites before
settling into a secluded spot just off the track, nestled in a grove of pine
trees. We grilled chicken over charcoal while sipping a fine Cappadocian red
wine and watched the stars come out, glad to be off the Konya Plain.
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Our first Phrygian tomb
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The next
morning we drove towards the King Midas Monument at Yazilikaya, through a
pleasant landscape of stony hills, meadows and pine forests. Before we got to
Yazilikaya, though, we turned off to follow a sign towards Phrygian tombs. We
parked the car and walked a couple of kilometres; we took a couple of wrong
turns, but eventually found ourself at a complex of cave tombs excavated into
outcrops, a bit reminiscent of Cappadocia but with much harder rock. The
scenery was photogenic, with bleached blond grass, azure skies and grey and
orange rock. Some of the tombs were quite large, perhaps family plots, with big
rectangular spaces divided into arched spaces for a dozen or more bodies. We
strolled back to the car pleased with our impromptu diversion.
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| The Midas Monument, Yazilikaya |
Yazilikaya
(Turkish for “inscribed rock”; I just realized that this name is the same as
that given to site of the Hittite reliefs outside Hattusa) was spectacular,
much more impressive than I was expecting. We drove into a tiny village of
modest farm houses surrounded by lush orchards, and immediately our eyes were
drawn upward to the huge orange-tinged rock face on the hill above the town,
where we could see signs of ancient stonemasonry. We parked the car and set off
to investigate. We climbed up towards our destination, which revealed itself to
be a vast flat façade of a monument, chiselled into the stone of a steep
outcrop. Enormous effort had been expended in creating a structure that seemed
lifted straight out of Petra, with a classical roofline that would have not
have been out of place on the Parthenon. As we gazed up at it, we saw a line of
incised writing in an unfamiliar alphabet, Paleo-Phrygian. It was unfamiliar,
but not completely unknown; in fact, it looked a lot like an ancestor of the
ancient Greek alphabet, although partly written from right to left. The
textured stonework of the façade was intricate and beautiful, and we stood
below it, gazing up in admiration as clouds of swallows swooped and circled in
a mad whirligig of feathers and frolic. We strolled a little further along the
base of the cliff and found a tree full of the most delicious small yellow
plums to which we devoted twenty blissful minutes.
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Paleo-Phrygian script
 | The world's tastiest plums
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Atop the ruins of Yazilikaya
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We eventually
pulled ourselves away from our plum-scrumping and continued our explorations.
We had thought that the Midas Monument was all there was to see, but we hadn’t
done our homework. A path led along the base of the cliff before angling uphill
to disclose a vast spread of ruins. This had been a city, the major ceremonial
and religious site of the Phrygians, and they had left a lot behind. We spent
two hot but happy hours clambering up and around structures carved into the
solid rock. Our favourites were the vast and cavernous underground cisterns
with their precipitous staircases leading down into the welcome shaded coolness
of their depths. The city had had impressive waterworks (necessary if you’re
going to build a city atop a rocky hilltop), and an ancient spring provided
much needed water after two hours of sweaty ruins-exploring. On the way back to
the starting point we passed a series of underground tombs and another partially-built
monumental façade that was the smaller twin of the first one.
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The entrance to a subterranean cistern
 | Incomplete monument, Yazilikaya
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Phrygian tomb near Yazilikaya
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That
afternoon we explored a few more outlying tombs; the entire area is honeycombed
with funerary complexes, so we picked a couple at random, hoping to find one
where we could easily camp. The first one was where I realized that the
Proto-Phrygian inscription was more-or-less decipherable knowing the Greek
alphabet. The next tomb was set picturesquely partway up a cliff, providing
sweeping views out over the valley; the stonework inside the tomb was impressive.
The final tomb was at the end of a rocky track that was at the limit of what our
car could handle, and was perhaps the most picturesque of all, with a series of
tombs carved seemingly at random into a large rock outcrop. We scrambled up and
into as many as we could, marvelling at the construction and admiring the shafts
of light that pierced the darkness. Like many ancient societies, most of what
remains of the Phrygians seems to be graves, since they devoted such immense
effort into crafting imposing tombs.
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Phrygian tomb near Yazilikaya
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Sweaty,
tired but exultant at our day with the Phrygians we gave up on camping near the
tombs and started driving north along the dirt road towards Eskisehir. The
valley was fairly densely settled, but as we climbed over a rise we were
surrounded by pine forests which provided a fine tent spot for the evening.
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The ruins of Gordion
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We had one
final major sight to visit before returning to Ankara and starting the long
journey to New Zealand. While Yazilikaya was the religious centre of the
Phrygian kingdom, the political capital lay to the east, in ancient Gordion. We
made our way there the next morning, via a stop in the major regional city of
Eskisehir for a workout in a local park and to visit the ancient site of
Dorylaeum. Dorylaeum was hard to find as it was mislabeled on Google Maps, but
we eventually located it on satellite view. It was utterly abandoned, a desolate
mound beside a highway in an industrial area near the airport. It had clearly
been heavily excavated over the years, but there were no signs or displays,
just potsherds and bits of marble crumbling out of the earth and a few deep
archaeological trenches. It was a major town in Roman and Byzantine times, site
of a key battle during the First Crusade, and we could see what must have been
the lower town and agora/forum across the road, but it didn’t offer us much to
look at, so we saddled up and drove towards Gordion.
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| Maybe the world's oldest geometric floor mosaic |
Gordion was
fabulous. We drove into town in the late afternoon and went directly to the
main excavation site, which sprawled untidily across the top of a large mound.
This was the city which was said to have been founded by Gordias, the father of
King Midas, sometime around 800 BC. It featured some impressive Cyclopean stonework
in its entrance gate, and a series of big “palaces” which seem, in the Minoan
style, to have been big industrial complexes as much as they were royal dwelling
places. This was clearly the capital of a wealthy and powerful kingdom; their
wealth was derived from gold mines (hence the story of the Midas Touch) and
trade, and, as at Yazilikaya, much of the wealth was devoted to crafting
funerary monuments. Standing atop the ruins, we could see at least a dozen
conical mounds rising above the valley floor, each of them a large tumulus
constructed atop the grave of a king or prominent noble. One mound in
particular stood out above the rest; known as the Midas Mound, it seems more
likely that Midas built it to mark the grave of his father Gordias.
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| The entrance to the Midas/Gordias tumulus |
We drove towards
the mound, stopping in at the small site museum to admire the archaeological
finds. The most spectacular display was of a large geometrically inspired floor
mosaic found in a Phrygian house, said to be the oldest such mosaic found
anywhere. Terri, who’s taken up mosaic-making this year, was entranced. There
was a newer Greek-era mosaic as well, along with a couple of Phrygian tombs made
from cut stone that looked a bit Egyptian. Just before it closed for the day,
we scuttled across the road to the Midas/Gordias Mound and entered an
80-metre-long underground tunnel that led under the rubble to the grave in the
heart of the tumulus. It was constructed of massive timber beams that are,
improbably, still preserved intact. We weren’t allowed into the grave itself,
but peered in fascination through the steel bars at the 3800-year-old wooden
structure. It was yet another example of impressive ancient workmanship, and we
retreated to the road impressed. We camped that night on the lower slopes of another
tumulus, surrounded by ancient history and modern farm fields, grilling up lamb
and sitting out under the stars contemplating the ebb and flow of history.
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Wooden tomb chamber, Gordion
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| Victory Day parade, Ankara |
And that,
more or less, was that. We drove into Ankara the next morning, getting caught
in horrendous traffic, unable to reach our hotel (we had splashed out on a Radisson
hotel room since the depressed lira had made it affordable) because of street
closures for the annual Victory Day parade. We parked on a street full of shops
selling toilets and bathroom fittings and walked to the hotel, begging our way
through the police checkpoints. We spent the next day and a half relaxing in
our hotel before flying to Istanbul, where we got PCR tests in a vast facility
in the airport (the results were ready in only 2 hours, which makes me wonder
why other PCR tests take so long to produce results) and hung out in another,
shabbier Radisson near the old airport. And then we were off, flying Singapore
Airlines to Singapore and onto Auckland, our Turkish adventure at an end.
Turkey was
very good to us on this trip. It was unexpectedly inexpensive due to the
devaluation of the lira (thank you President Erdogan!), and provided us both with
a host of historical sites that were new to both of us. Even areas that we had both
visited in the past, like Cappadocia, had new surprises in store for us. We
camped wild a lot of the time, and Turkey is a country well suited to this sort
of travel. The history that we encountered was fabulous in its breadth and in
its antiquity. We didn’t even touch the classical Greek/Roman sites of the
Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, and I’m sure there are plenty of fascinating
spots to explore if we find ourselves back in Turkey in the future, perhaps at the
wheel of our 4x4 camper Stanley.
