Sunday, July 31, 2011

Litoranea and Specchia

The Litoranea, a narrow and winding clifftop road on the coast bounded by stone walls that run for miles, took me down from Otranto through Porto Badisco, Castro, and on to San Maria de Leuca.  The sea was steely and the sky was grey, and much of the way it rained heavily as I slalomed through roadside sprays of pink and white oleander and lush green trees, listening to Bronx River Parkway and Chris Joss.  Cool.

In Leuca I tried to find a B&B recommended in my Lonely Planet, but was told by the waitress of the cafe which now occupies the building that it closed last year.  However, she happened to run a B&B herself five kilometres out of town in Morciano, to which she gave me directions.  Well, it was fifteen kilometres, not five, and the breeze-block town was depressing as hell, so I kept going until I hit a little town called Specchia.  In the last hour of light I saw a sign for B&B Vento Solare.  I rang the number and spent all my Italian enquiring if a room was available.  After I concluded that it was, the conversation descended into: “Pronto.”  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”  “Che?  No capisco.”  “Um… parla inglese?”  “Dov’è lei?”  Well, I found my way and found myself talking to the proprietress’ mother, who spoke no English, while I waited for the proprietress’ son to arrive, who did.  She was very pleasant, but the conversation was stilted and agonisingly slow as I fumbled through my phrasebook, telling her that I’m here on holiday, that Salento is pretty, that her garden is pretty, that I am hungry.  There’s nothing like necessity for learning quickly.

The next day I got a bloody €39 parking ticket in San Cesárea Terme.  The municipal police in Salento prowl for tourists in the high season.  I parked briefly in a lot clearly marked for parking but not for the need to purchase a ticket from the one hidden ticket machine.  I was there for all of ten minutes while I was declined access to my money by a cash machine up the road.

Baia dei Turchi

Just north of Otranto is the Baia dei Turchi, the Turkish Bay, with beautiful beaches concealed from the road.  Sheltered from the hot sun, I entered a pleasant grove of sparse and tall pines and immediately came across a bloke in a makeshift roofless bamboo hut selling drinks and sandwiches.  Next to him was another bloke in a hammock strung between two trees.  After a few minutes walking the grove grows suddenly dense.  I walked a worn dirt track through a tight green tunnel and emerged at a low cliff.  Below me spread the long and narrow beaches, some with rows of fixed umbrellas made of dried palm fronds and others with scattered umbrellas of random colours, against turquoise water.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

11

Hanging a wrinkled shirt in the bathroom while you shower just results in a damp, wrinkled shirt.

Friday, July 29, 2011

The REAL top ten

Allow me to let you in on a travel myth: rolling your clothes instead of folding them when you pack does not prevent wrinkles.  Some travel writer just came up with this little gem to pad out a top ten list of travel tips, and it’s since become part of travel lore.  Well it’s bullshit, and I am throwing down the gauntlet.  I will buy a ticket to Milan to get a new shirt custom tailored for the first person to show me a shirt pulled from baggage rolled and wrinkle-free.

Here’s the real top ten travel tips:

  1. Laundry.  Fuck.
  2. Eurail passes are a rip-off.  It isn’t hard to buy a train ticket in Europe.  It’s harder to buy a bloody lottery ticket.  You still have to book a seat regardless.  Just save your money.
  3. Flying makes you fart.  It does.  The body is pressure-sealed (or your lungs would deflate) and just as your ears pop, so do your intestines.  Everybody is either suppressing or releasing, which is either uncomfortable or embarrassing.  And there’s nothing you can do.  Just don’t eat sauerkraut or sit next to Germans.
  4. You still need to do that laundry, and the hotel wants to charge you €4.50 for one shirt.
  5. The next myth to be invented is the secret to stylish backpacking.  I’ll preempt it: either travel with sherpas or prepare to look like a goose.
  6. Mobile phone: use it sparingly just to book hotels and for emergencies.  If you need to use it seriously, buy a pre-paid SIM card in the country you visit.  And data over the air for your iPhone?  Forget it.  There is no affordable solution but to use Wi-Fi.  Which is everywhere.  Except Seville.
  7. Your priority of transportation in Europe for comfort should be:
    1. train
    2. ferry
    3. car
    4. walk
    5. dragged behind a tractor through blackberry briars and rose bushes
    6. bus
  8. Jet lagged?  For crying out loud, you can put up without alcohol for 12 hours.  Don’t drink on the plane.  It’s a bitch for jetlag.  Brits in particular are shocking for taking this as licence to get shit-faced.  Drink water, all the time.  And then when you arrive, don’t sleep until it’s dark.  Next day: no jet lag.  Voilà.
  9. For every week, allocate half a day to doing laundry at a laundromat.  Unless you’re in Greece, Turkey or southern Spain, where there are no laundromats because it’s so cheap just to drop it off and have it done.
  10. Create a budget and stick to it.  When you get back, you will have only spent triple.  Be grateful.

Otranto, Italy

A night ferry took me from the west coast of Greece to the heel of Italy, a country where at last I could at least fumble my way through the language.  I had a a four-bed shared cabin booked (in fact, I had two; the previous one sailed while I was in Santorini), but I was the only one in it.  High season in Europe is funny.  It’s busy everywhere, except for little undiscovered pockets.

An eight-hour journey and a six-hour sleep got me to Brindisi at 7am, where I picked up a rental car and headed south.  My first night was nearly spent in the car in Otranto, a popular destination on Puglia’s eastern coast, where six hotels turned me away.  It was a Saturday and I didn’t have a reservation.  I finally found a decent place with a room, the friendly Hotel Minerva, on a side street for €75.  I showered and changed out of shorts and into jeans and wandered into the old town for dinner.

I was heading to a simple pizzeria by the Porta Terra which was recommended in my guidebook, but was arrested at the Piazza del Popolo by two guitarists, a female singer and some cool bossa nova.  All passers-by were stopping to listen, lingering and applauding, and when a prime table was vacated just as I arrived I took it as a cue that this was where I should eat tonight.  They were so good.  I could have closed my eyes when they did The Girl From Ipanema and believed I was watching Antonio Carlos Jobim and João and Astrud Gilberto.  The lead guitarist was a lefty, and not only did he play a right-handed guitar upside-down à la Jimi Hendrix, but it was strung upside-down as well, standard for a right-handed player, which means he deliberately learned all his chords and scales inverted!  Very strange.  And he was really good.

Otranto’s Spanish-built and sympathetically restored castle is today used as a gallery, where the next day I enjoyed a Salvador Dalí exhibit.  I’m usually ambivalent about Dalí and the surrealist movement of the 1930s, but this was sculpture, etchings and sketches from later in his life.


Thursday, July 28, 2011

Romania by proxy

In Meteora I ran into a bloke from Romania.  Then he got up, we exchanged addresses, and he told me his name was Neculai (Nicholas) and was also travelling alone.  My Romanian is, of course, inferior par excellence, and being a gracious acquaintance I allowed him to practise entirely his English, which he learned from television.  It sometimes took us forever to convey an idea but, bless him, without his efforts we would just have stared at each other.  We saw two monasteries together and he encouraged me to flout the “no photography” rule until I was busted one too many times by the decent but exasperated monitor and slunk sheepishly away.  He was driving across Greece in his car, which was also his kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, and parlour after dinner when he entertained me with music on his stereo and a bottle of cognac parked on the side of the road.  I brought along a couple of beers and some Greek retsina, which neither of us have had before but concluded tasted like dirty hiking sock rinsewater.  The cognac was lovely, though.  Alexandrio, or something.  Who knows.  After cognac, beer and retsina, I was lucky to remember the way back to my hotel.

Delayed broadcast for your protection

Running behind on the blog again, by five or six days.  If anyone is friends with me on Facebook, my comments there are usually up to date, albeit brief.  I also get a couple of photos up now and again.

Meteora

The monasteries of Meteora in central Greece are built atop towering, sheer rocks. It's a marvel the medieval monks managed it, and it's testimony to their engineering skills. Originally 24 in number, the six monasteries that remain are well-preserved. Indeed, they are still occupied (and have surprisingly modern comforts—electricity, water, heating, and even elevators and small cable cars), though most of the week they are a tourist attraction rather than a place of contemplation. Each closes one day of the week in rotation to function as a monastery.

Busloads of tour groups would arrive and overwhelm the smaller cloisters. The larger ones absorbed them. Other tourists arrived by car, and some by public bus. Only one arrived by foot on the centuries-old stone paths winding through the forests at the foot of the towering rocks.

I visited three of the six monasteries and found exquisite frescoes in all.  St. Nikolas, the smallest and least preserved, is the most charming. The main chapel has a fresco of Judgement Day with God at the top, heaven on the left, and on the right a river of fire and souls flowing down into the mouth of the devil, an enormous fanged serpentine creature.

Kastraki

In Meteora, I stayed in the village of Kastraki. It has a clock tower. Some clocks play a simple melody on the quarter hour, but at 6.15pm, as I sat for an early dinner, the church bell rung just once.  So at 6.30pm I expected the same. Instead, it rang for perhaps three full minutes with no melody (there is only one bell, harsh and sharp sounding) and with no discernible rhythm. It was what you'd expect to hear if you let loose in the bell tower a toddler with Herculean arms and a steel mallet. It was fast, loud, long and very annoying, and yet when I looked around at the locals whiling away the evening in the outside dining area, nobody batted an eye. This must be the demented half-hour chime of the Kastraki clock. At 6.45pm it does nothing at all, and at 7pm it simply tolls seven times.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Athens to Meteora

The ferry from Santorini arrived past midnight and my train to Meteora was leaving at 8.30am.  I spent eight hours in Athens.  Five-and-a-half of those were in my hotel room and three of those in my hotel room bed.  There was a later train, but the five-hour journey would get me into Meteora in the dark.  Buses also drove the route throughout the day, but there is just no comparison to train travel.

From all that I've heard, the acropolis is about the only thing going for Athens, and in mid-July it's teeming in the humid heat with tourists.  I abandoned plans to see it so that I could spend those two extra nights in Santorini, which sounds like complete folly, but, as much as I would like to stand in the agora where Socrates challenged his listeners to think, it's a decision I don't regret.  I'll leave it for another trip.  There is certainly reason to return to Greece.

And so at 6am, with insufficient sleep under my eyelids, I hauled myself out of bed, put away as much breakfast as my addled body could stomach, checked out of the Savoy Hotel, and was wheeled to the train station by my backpack.

The train into the shrub-studded mountains of central Greece passed through charming, unkempt rural stations, the sidings always loaded with ancient wooden cattle cars with boards missing and paint so peeled by the sun that they looked as if somebody had whittled them for tinder, feathering them with a knife so they'd take a spark.  A man a few  seats away gently whistled, tousling the string of prayer beads which so many Greek men carry.  My carriage was less than half full, none of them tourists, all of them Greek and sharing casual comments with one another.  It was a pleasant change after spending the last three weeks in major tourist spots.

We passed the only indication on my trip so far that Greece is in econominc troubles: a long stretch of modern highway half complete, a ribbon of clean new concrete spreading over compacted earth and supporting columns with sections of bridge missing, empty tunnels punched through hills, cranes standing idle, and the entire site deserted.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Leaving Santorini

I was dragged away protesting by the bus from Oia and shuttled under duress to the awaiting Athens ferry.  There I was treated to the strangest sight.

As the foot passengers queued to enter the gangways either side of the vehicle ramp, four men came scuttling out of the car deck. They were carrying what looked like someone on a stretcher, judging by the care with which they were handling the load, but it seemed too small and too heavy to be a person. As they approached, it came into view: strapped to a wooden pallet beneath a wet blanket was a giant sea turtle, alert and looking around with small head movements to assess the predicament he'd found himself in, which was no doubt as much a mystery to him as it was to any of us. The ferry stewards halted the queue of passengers and the turtle-burdened four conveyed the confused creature back into the ferry and disappeared up into the passenger decks. Maybe he had a first class cabin.

When all the aquatic reptiles and sea fauna carried on litters were comfortably aboard, we cattle charged up the stairs and spread through the vessel in a game of musical chairs, fastening ourselves to seats and then looking around and wondering if we should abandon this one for the really good one in the corner, chancing it, losing it, turning back and being foiled and charging up stairs to the next deck where perhaps better seats were counting down. The limited lounge areas that quickly swelled with bodies and backpacks were augmented with seating in a burger restaurant, Goody's, which attracted packs of holidaying teenagers. The only place to read a book or get any writing done was on the outside decks. Here there were plenty of seats, ingeniously designed for a Mediterranean ship to be an unbearable greenhouse: all perspex walls, plastic ceiling and airflow non-existent. Who would want fresh air on the open sea? It is clearly a clever ploy to drive you to upgrade your ticket for another €16.50 to access the cool, quiet, comfortable and civilised business class "distinguished lounge" on deck six, which is precisely what I did.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Impulse

That night I reorganised my schedule for the following fortnight, an exercise which cost me €120 in abandoned bookings, and priced rooms in Oia. They averaged €220 a night. Ouch. This was going to be a hell of an expensive impulse. But, as I always reason, memories last a lifetime and the cost of things you forget.

I got lucky in the morning and found a villa with a private balcony and a luxury pool for €160. Rooms are often discounted when you turn up at the last minute.  The risk, of course, is being turned away if they have no vacancy, but I was surprised to find quite a bit of availability, albeit peicemeal, in the high season.

So I had an unusual two-day vacation from my holiday, doing something I don't normally do: lounging poolside in the shade of an umbrella beneath a palm tree, reading a book and drinking beer (which, okay, I do). If I was going to do it, this was the place. A few couples and families joined me by the pool (I'm certain I was the only single person in all the Oia villas).  Though we all spoke different languages there was a camaraderie of shared indulgence between us. When one couple laughed we all smiled, and there was a generous familiarity between us. I even got it, why people holiday like this.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Oia

I missed the bus to Oia in the confusing Fira "bus station"—a parking lot with buses facing all directions and backing over waiting passengers—because the bus labelled "Oia" wasn't going to Oia at all. Bugger it, I thought, I'm going to rent a quad bike. Tourists zip all over the island on them and they looked like so much fun I was already tempted. And they're cheap: my excellent little hotel in Fira (San Giorgio Villas) connected me with a rental for €20 a day. It was a blast. I wound my way around the weaving, narrow road out to Oia at a top speed of 60kmh, which felt positively breakneck to me.

Fira, with its tall and narrow white-rendered stone lanes and view of the caldera, is spectacular. But Oia (pronounced "ee-ah") is breathtaking. Those photos you see of Santorini with the little blue-roofed churches in the cluster of brilliant white houses? They're all taken at Oia. Fira with its noisy clubs is party town for the kids. Oia is where the adults go.

I spotted a sign reading "Perivolas traditional houses" as I buzzed into town. That sounded like a good start. I turned off the road, parked the quad, and wandered along a stone footpath in the vividly hot Mediterranean sun. It snaked atop a tumble of whitewashed stone villas down the cliff with doors and windows of bright red or blue, past topless women and their bronzed men lounging under palms by luxury swimming pools, all overlooking the immense, sea-filled crater of the volcano far below. Oia is the kind of place that, when you see it, you abandon everything else. She is the siren of Santorini. I was so incredibly tempted to tear up my ticket to Athens for the following day and stay.

The tight clutches of cafes, restaurants and hotels barnacled onto the western point are kept supplied by men with fully-laden dollies of alcohol, soft drinks and produce. These men labour up and down meandering seams of stone paths that twist down the sea-facing cliffs, zippered together with broad steps, and every day trains of burdened donkeys tote the refuse all back out again.

Oia has a tenth of Fira's bustle. Here it was at the start of the high season in mid-July and it was completely chilled, except in the evening when the tourists arrived from Fira by the busload to see the famed sunset on the water. My advice to anyone visiting Santorini is to see Fira, but then get to Oia and stay there.

I did.

Greek in Japanese

The bloke at the hotel recommends a few restaurants without a view of the caldera, the great volcanic crater filled with Aegean Sea, because those with a view are expensive.  I appreciate that he’s trying to do me a favour, but what’s the point of coming all the way to Santorini and forgoing the view?  I hunt out the most expensive restaurant I can find and order crayfish risotto with truffles and a bottle of pinot grigio.

It’s an early dinner—I didn’t have lunch, apart from a cheese pie on the ferry—and there’s only one other group on the restaurant terrace: three elderly Japanese men, all with short-brimmed drawstring cloth hats and cameras slung across T-shirts over long white spandex sleeves.  They speak neither English nor Greek, yet manage in the most extraordinary way to order drinks. 

“Chuwana coffee,” one says to the waiter, which rather sounds like someone’s had a lend of him.

“You want a coffee?” the waiter asks.

“Chuwana coffee,” he replies.

“D’you wanna coffee?”

“Chuwana coffee.”

“Chuwana coffee?”

“Chuwana coffee.”

Miraculously, they come in this way to an understanding that the man wants iced coffee.  This waiter is good.  Another orders: “iced tea, hot.”

“You want hot tea?”

“No, lemon.”

“Kampai?”

“Do you know city name?”

“This is classical Greek music.”

“What is city name?”

“My name is Sony.”

“Sony?!”

It is the most confusing conversation I’d ever eavesdropped on and yet everyone is good-natured and laughs and seems to get what they want, a round of iced coffees and teas.  When they finish they rise to leave and, with much amused bewilderment, look for the waiter to pay the bill, calling: “Sony!  Sony!”

Santorini (Thira)

A procession of buses, rental cars, semi-trailer transport and minivans ferrying hotel passengers scales the sigma of switchbacks up the cliff face from Santorini harbour.  I’m in one of the minivans.  Collected from the ferry boat, I’m being taken to my hotel in Fira.

Fira is the capital of Thira, the Greek name for the island.  Santorini, though predominant, is in fact the Italian name.  In ancient times the capital city (acropolis) was Thira, now ruins.  This all gets a little bit confusing to the non-Greek speaker, particularly as the Greek letter for F is Φ and the letter for the “th” sound is θ.  It’s a good thing everybody speaks English.

I’ve been lazy with my language in Greece.  So far I’ve only been to heavily touristed areas where English is the lingua franca, and there hasn’t been a need for me to consult my Greek phrasebook.  Usually I make an effort anyway, but it involves learning another alphabet and, well hell, I’m also trying to learn bloody shorthand and I’ve got to give myself a break somewhere.  But, in Rhodes and Santorini especially, there are more signs in English than there are in Greek.  It’s abundantly clear that the industry is tourism.  On the way into Fira we pass a restaurant with a sign reading: “Señor Zorba Mexican Restaurant—All you can eat BBQ ribs.”  American tourism.

Monday, July 18, 2011

The Aegean

I suspect it's a cliché to say it, but the colours of the Aegean waters are strikingly beautiful in their variety. It's remarkable that, if you were to dip a glass into the water at the shore and another in the middle of the vast sea, a substance of which two samples are identically transparent can vary in colour so dramatically from overlapping shades of peacock blue and turquoise at the beachside to the deep sea's lazuline cobalt at noon and purplish ultramarine at sunset.

Two hours after boarding the morning ferry to Santorini, Crete disappears.  In every direction now the water meets the sky.  To the west the firmament is a pale powder blue and to the east it’s almost white.  Crete lies over the southern edge of the sea, betrayed only by a faint beige burst on the horizon of smog and ambient heat twisting and coiling into the sky like a daylight nebula.

Out in the middle of these two great unbroken hemispheres of blue we pass a solitary sailboat.  Why does this amaze me?  I’m sitting aboard a vessel which is the descendant of these very such craft which populated the Greek islands for millennia.

Crete

I was only in Crete for two days, which seems very brief considering the 13-hour ferry ride to get there and the 5-hour ride to get away, but I wanted to see the remains of the Minoan civilisation. The Heraklion archaeological museum contains a Minoan collection second only to the national museum in Athens. It also, as I discovered, has been closed for five years for renovation. Lonely Planet needs to release an updated guide.

It does at least have a small but rich temporary exhibit open for €4 so I settled for what there was, which was very good. The following day was spent at the semi-reconstructed ancient Minoan palace complex of Knossos. It's just outside Heraklion and is justifiably its biggest tourist draw.

Beware of Greeks' beering gaffs

Greeks can't pour beer. They don't tilt the glass. Then they stare in frustration at how a six-inch head formed and serve you half a glass of foam. In Australia they'd be tossed out of the pub by the patron.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Ablutions

In Greece, the hotels insist you don’t throw your toilet paper in the toilet.  On the islands so far, anyway.  They provide a waste paper basket.  Though I’ve had experience with septic tanks before – the reason for this practice, I assume – I’m still vaguely repulsed at the idea.  The camp toilet on the Turkish relief ride was two foot-boards spanning a hole in the ground, and I somehow found that more coherent.  When out of habit I mistakenly dropped a few squares of paper into my Cretan toilet I had nightmare visions of a sudden septic uprising in the middle of the night.

I’ve had a varied experience with bathing on this trip.  I’ve had cold showers in the back of a caravan, swum in hot springs and splashed in cold springs, dipped in dams, squatted under hoses, squeezed into tiled cupboards masquerading as plumbing fixtures, and melted under one particularly memorable, long, hot hotel shower after two weeks in the saddle.  About the only way I haven’t got wet on this trip is being soaked by rain.  I think one un-sunny day it sprinkled.

The shower in my room in Crete was so small there was no room for even a shower curtain (which is probably so people don’t pull it aside and say: “hey, somebody bricked up this window”).  I got in it and threw my hands up in the air when I was mugged by the faucet, and when I turned around I was startled to run into myself.  The other side of the room got wet when I turned the water on, so I turned the nozzle to the wall and showered under the splashback.

Most hotel rooms provide shower gel and shampoo.  Some of these wondrous bathing treacles are both.  Other shampoo packets say “with conditioner.”  The one in my Crete hotel room said: “with compliments.”  Nonsense.  I showered and shampooed and walked straight out the front door and all they said was “have a nice day.”

When I get back to Istanbul in early August, one of the last things I’m going to do in Europe is visit a Turkish hamam, for which the Ottomans were famous.  There you don’t have merely an entire room to bathe in, you have three, each a different temperature.  After sweating into a rubbery relaxation, you’re finished off by a pounding into submission they call a massage.

The ferry from Rhodes to Crete

The ferry leaves from Akantia harbour, one of three in Rhodes Town.  It is 33°C and cloudless, and semi-industrial Akantia is hot, dusty, and shadeless with trucks and freight trailers splitting the backpackers and ferry passengers on the oily road who arrive on foot.  They’ve probably been told, as I have, to arrive an hour before the ferry departs, but it isn’t here and we all crowd into the little shade from the overhead sun that the ticket booths provide.

It finally arrives and everyone clambers aboard.  This is going to be a thirteen-hour trip arriving at 4.30am, so I scout as peaceful a spot as I can for a few hours kip later on.  Seated at the table next to me, however, is an unshaven thirty-something-old Greek bloke (Greek men all must shave with the handle end of blunt butter knives).  He is talking non-stop at the top of his voice to two wordless women across the table as if they’re on a mobile phone half a continent away.  His monologue is relentless.  Food doesn’t stop him; he talks right through it.  His voice is so obtrusive that others at tables around us stare at him.  He appears to enjoy the undivided attention he must think he commands, not realising that to disregard him is like trying to ignore a jet engine while standing on the runway.  I move across the lounge next to a family with a baby for some peace.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Rhodes

To leave Turkey I caught a bus from Selçuk to Marmaris and a ferry to the Greek island of Rhodes, arriving in Rhodes Town on a Friday night with no hotel booking. This was a risky business—Rhodes is a very popular destination, especially on a weekend—but I was lucky and found a room for four days until I could catch the next ferry to Crete.

Rhodes is a walled medieval town, apparently the largest inhabited in Europe, and its business is commercial tourism. The main drag goes on forever with souvenirs, jewellery, up-market fashion, down-market trinkets and carpets, and is punctuated by squares filled with restaurants, cafes and bars with families and couples and groups of holidaying students. Local children zip between them all on mopeds.

But there are also quiet lanes. On the Saturday, a hot, clear, bright blue summer day (as they all bloody are!),  I sat at a foldaway table and drank bottled beer from a glass beneath an umbrella in a weed-strewn, pebble-stone lane of stone buildings rendered in a crumbling pale yellow mortar with terracotta tiled awnings and weathered wooden doors. The tourist crowds jostled just two lanes away but here the only impetus was a light breeze pushing the crumpled paper wrapper from my gyros around on my plate.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Comments

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Ways tourists make themselves look stupid

THEY: wear those inflatable neck pillows made for airplane seats while they walk around in the airport. 
I SAY: wear it around town.  Go clubbing.

THEY: wear a backpack on their front. 
I SAY: wear a full-sized expedition backpack on your front.

THEY: wear their sunglasses dropped over their mouths. 
I SAY: eat.

Day of the Carpet Sellers

“Rugs!  Rugs!”

It was like carrying a bag of brains. 

Carpets sold in Turkey are rolled and packed into a lightweight black bag that somehow every carpet seller in the country uses as a standard.  When I left the shop with one in hand, all the carpet sellers who hide among the living on Istanbul street corners and footpaths swarmed and descended on me.  “How much?  How much?”

Other sellers can gauge how much of a sucker you are by what you bought and how much you paid, and will entice you to their own store to take a bite themselves.  They all say the same things: “What are you looking for?  Where are you from?  How much did you pay?  Let me offer you tea.”

The second one was enlightening when I realised I’d heard these same seductions before.  By the third one it was boring.  By the fourth one it was annoying and he wouldn’t let me be.  I really wanted to get rid of this damn albatross and was desperately seeking the post office to ship it home.  (Backpackers are lousy shoppers; they can’t accumulate things.)  By number five I was really jack, and had run out of polite patience.

“What are you looking for?”

“Peace and quiet.”

He shambled alongside me.  “Where are you from?”

“Australia.”

“Love the kangaroos.  Love the koalas.”

“I’m from Canada.”

Confused pause.  “Do you have a wife?”

“No.”

“A girlfriend.”

“No.”

“Ah, you are single!”

“No.”

Confused pause.  “Would you like…”

I did an abrupt 180° turn but he stuck with me.  “Would you like…”  I managed to shake him with another 180° and fled.

The Muslim call to prayer

Throughout Turkey, a Muslim but secular nation, the call to prayer can be heard several times a day from the innumerable mosques.  Each regional area has a “central command” mosque which delivers the call to prayer over a network at the right minute of the day to the other mosques in the area, which then broadcast it from loudspeakers.

All the other Relief Riders commented on how beautiful they found the calls to be.  I am going to beg to differ.  It was very likely beautiful a hundred years ago when the call to prayer was made by the power of the haj’s lungs from the minaret, but anything broadcast by loudspeaker is instantly robbed of aesthetic quality and becomes a raucous and knife-edged racket.  It’s as if there are six “fun runs” organised in your neighbourhood every day.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Black Wednesday

As usual, people woke within an hour or two of sunrise, stretched their sleepy muscles around camp, and socialised a little over a breakfast table of boiled eggs, olives, fresh tomatoes and cucumber, bread and cheeses, and çay, Turkish tea, before packing up and setting out on the horses.

We rode up through the hillside cobblestones of Bayramhaci and into a spectacular narrow valley flanked by tall straw-coloured stone outcrops atop steep hills of scrub-grass.  It was straight out of a John Ford western.
One of the horses, Megan, was irritated by a saddle sore and had been acting up.  Riding into the last camp she kicked Alexander’s horse as a car was passing him on the road.  Fortunately he’s a well-experienced rider and it was quickly under control.

But on the morning of Black Wednesday it was a different story.  Megan was being ridden behind the lead rider and wrangler, Ercihan, and next to Barbara, one of three inexperienced riders on this trip.  The ride was only an hour old and the horses were fresh, well-spaced and uncrowded, but halfway along the narrow valley Megan suddenly reeled and leapt without any provocation.  Barb, in striking distance, tried to veer away but the cranky mare, out of control of her rider, kicked and landed a shod hoof on Barb’s shin.  With an “oof” we knew she was struck.

Unable to bear weight on her leg to balance herself, she slipped out of the saddle onto the rocky trail and rolled over in pain.  Ercihan and Alexander, the ride organisers, were to her in an instant.  It was a sombre and worried mood in the team as she was assessed for a fractured leg.  Her toes were pointing in the right direction but it looked like there was an eggplant under the skin.

Ercihan squatted atop one of the hills and rang an ambulance with his mobile phone.  The rest of us dismounted and pulled our horses into the shade.  When the ambulance came into his sight, he raced down the hill, swung onto his horse, and galloped back up and over the crest to intercept it and lead it to the group.  Within the hour, Barb was stretchered into the ambulance and, with Alexander along, trundled down the track and whisked away.

Carpet sellers

The carpet sellers in Istanbul are a plague.  They’re smooth operators who will milk you for money if you aren’t on your toes.  Initially it’s hard to distinguish them from regular locals who are friendly enough to say hello and help you find your way.  Turks throughout the country are friendly and welcoming, but you’ll quickly come to realise that those who approach you in Istanbul will generally help you first (“What are you looking for?”), make conversation next (“Where are you from?”) and then ask you afterwards to come to their shop (“It’s very close.”)  It’s at first disarming, but soon tedious and annoying.

The first one of the day got me.

At eight in the morning in Sultanahmet, the touristy part of old Istanbul between the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofia, fresh off the plane, sleep-deprived and completely unaware of the carpet-seller phenomenon, I was approached by a friendly bloke who asked me where I’m from.  “Oh,” he said.  “I have family in Sydney, in Liverpool.”  He showed me the two entrances to the Blue Mosque (one for tourists, the other for locals) and the Sultan’s balcony, and then uttered the line I would subsequently hear more times than I could count: “I have a shop.  Would you like to see it?”

I naively thought, “okay, this bloke has helped me out. The least I can do is look at his shop.”  On my first day after eighteen months back on the road I forgot how wary the traveller has to be in a big city.

I’ve heard it said before that in Middle Eastern cultures it’s unlucky not to make a sale to the first customer of the day.  This may be folkloric but is also a likely sales ploy (“You’re very lucky; we will give you a discount to make the sale.”  The line that “you’re lucky” for one reason or another regularly pops up in the sales bargaining).

It was clear he did not intend to let me out of the shop without selling me something.  I did see a rug which I commented was nice so I thought, all right, he wants to bargain but I’ll give some ridiculous price that he won’t accept.  And that’s how I wound up with a US$1200-priced rug for US$400 (A$375).  It seems I underestimated how vastly the prices are inflated.

The guy said afterwards that he didn’t make a profit just so he could make the first sale.  Perhaps.  I did apparently get a good deal, according to the other sellers who asked me the price of the carpet I was carrying.

Saturday, July 09, 2011

Have we met?

Writing a blog is a kind of baring of the soul.  We all are chameleons of a kind: we show different sides of our personalities to different people, and we do it selectively and in a controlled way.  Not so when writing a blog.  My audience is everyone and anyone, and I reveal myself haphazardly.  It is a freeing but forcible liberation.  Perhaps that’s how it has to be.

Bathe, shave, dine and swim

Everyone on the ride had their favourite campsites, and the Bayramhaci camp at the lake was popular.  Ercihan, the outfitter and head horseman, told us we had no permission to swim in the dam but after a five-hour ride in the 30°C+ sun he couldn’t keep a number of us out.  The water was so cool and refreshing I felt reborn.

That evening Ercihan surprised us when his friend Tenzil, a barber in Avanos, arrived at the camp with his straight razor and strong hands.  Turkish barbers are also masseurs, and a Turkish barber experience is essential to know Turkey.  Everyone had a shoulder, neck and head rub and the blokes had a straight razor shave, all with fragrant oils and aftershave like mango and lemon.  Marc, the French Relief Riders photographer, was talked into shaving his head.

We had another beautiful dinner of fresh salads and barbecued lamb with beer and bottles of wine on a terrace with a view of the sunset over the valley lake.  Though it’s only a short walk up the hill from the camp, we were driven up in one of the support vehicles, a minivan.  The terrace sits above hot spring swimming pools, and after dinner we all went for a swim.

After towelling off and returning to the van we learned it wouldn’t start.  We strolled back to the camp in the dark.

It was the eve of Black Wednesday.

Friday, July 08, 2011

How not to panic

Backpacking is at times controlled panic.  Sometimes you’re running to catch a train on time or worried you’ve missed the right bus stop, but most commonly it’s the small and frequent moments when you open your pack and can’t find your mobile phone or your journal of meticulous notes.  Before rifling through your pack with adrenaline surging you have to take a deep breath and trust that you just put your passport in the wrong pocket or your wallet has sunk to the bottom.  Nine times out of ten it’s there.

On the tenth time, panic.

Thursday, July 07, 2011

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Bayramhaci camp

We broke camp and set out at 8.30am in the hot sun.  Along the Red River we had shade, riding through farmland of wheat, squash and melons, of olives and grapes, and the rain from the days before we arrived in Cappadocia settled the dust.  To get to Bayramhaci we had to ride into the hills and over the high ground outside Saridir, a steep climb into grassland and wildflowers: red poppies, white morning glory, yellow euphorbia and blue cornflowers.  I sat tall in the saddle up the slopes and leaned forward, holding Kelebek’s mane.

Descending the mountain was equally steep, and I felt like Tom Burlinson in a tame version of that climactic scene in The Man From Snowy River, leaning back with one hand up for balance as my horse nosed her way down.

We arrived at camp on the shores of a dam-flooded valley lake after five hours.  The hard-working outfitter’s crew had already set up the tents and lunch was under way in the kitchen of the custom-made caravan. 

Via emetic

I hate Turkish roads!

Here I am again on a long bus trip – five hours from Istanbul to Gallipoli – and I am feeling sick from the constant kidney-pounding turbulence.  I generally travel well and never get car-sick, which should give you some insight into the state of these roads.  It makes me wonder how I would ever fare in a place like India or Guatemala.  Surely I’m not a travel wuss?  If I’m going to call myself a travel writer I better man up.

Relief Riders: dental camps

Relief Riders is bringing dental expertise to rural Cappadocian towns and villages.  Medical care in Turkey is quite good, but dental is not.  Announcements in the towns are played for two weeks on the radio, and word is spread through the haj, or imam, and the muhtar, the elected mayor. 

We have with us one dentist from Avanos in Cappadocia who conducts screening, and at a later date the patients will travel to Avanos to receive the treatment.  Our role as Relief Riders is to register the patients as they arrive, then usher them to a waiting room and call them as their turn comes. 

In between we socialise with them in our broken phrase-book Turkish and hand signals.  Often the children speak a bit of English.  We also have an invaluable translator with us, Cihat, a young man of 25 from the Turkish-Georgian border who studied English in İzmir and spent a year in Kansas City, USA.

We set up the dental centres in clinics or municipal offices, or whatever space the muhtar finds for us.  On this maiden Turkish tour our “fearless leader” Alexander, the founder, chairman and CEO of Relief Riders, wants to start out small and scale up in subsequent years.  In India, where Relief Riders has been operating since 2003 and treatment such as gynaecological and opthalmic care is provided in camp, staff see 200-300 people in a day.  In one record session they treated 869 people.  At our first dental camp in Saridir we saw 38 patients.

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Examination

I wasn't in Istanbul today. I was in my cramped, windowless, internet-patchy hotel room studying for and taking my journalism subediting exam. I romanced a bottle of wine over dinner when I finished. Seems to be a favourite pastime.

Off to Gallipoli tomorrow, and a week on the Turkish coast.

Monday, July 04, 2011

Turks

Turks are friendly, generous, helpful people. They are even more so in the tourist parts of Istanbul because they (i.e., the shop owners) understand better than any other Europeans that tourists equal business, though it is not so cynical as that. They still draw upon their natural hospitality.
As a photographer I'm pleased at how open Turks are to having their photo taken. I generally ask first, and the answer ranges from a shrugging "of course, why not?" to welcoming eagerness.
Most refreshing of all is that there are no hang-ups about shooting kids. The innocence of children makes them great subjects, but in the West (outside Europe, anyway) there is a paranoid politically-correct protectiveness. Once, on a shooting excursion in Sydney's Hyde Park, a group of photography students and I were accosted by a father whose children, some hundred metres away, happened to fall in the range of our lenses. We were so taken aback and uncomprehending that he thought we were an organised group of voyeur paedophiles that nobody had the wherewithal to tell him to go fuck himself before he disappeared.

Saturday, July 02, 2011

Buses

I hate buses, but I heard that the ones in Turkey are good.  Sure they are.  But the roads drive you insane.

I caught a bus from Nevşehir to Ankara (the ride having ended yesterday), a four-plus-hour trip, and it was like a mini-airplane: seating is allocated and ushered, there’s a toilet on board, the reclining seats have televisions, and a steward serves water, tea or coffee, and cake.  Very civilised.

The road, however, is far from polished.  It is re-patched instead of resurfaced and there is literally constant turbulence.  I have to sit in my horse-riding posture or the convulsions of the seat kill my kidneys.  The idea of a drink holder on my seat tray is absurd – my hot tea roils like it’s boiling.  It doesn’t exactly make writing easy, either!  I’m trying to recall travelling on a worse highway.  200km of this gets old fast.

A special entry for all my Relief Rider friends

Farewell my friends!  I’ve just been dropped at the bus station and am on my own for the first time since meeting you all two weeks ago.  I’m so sad to have said goodbye to everyone, but so pleased to have made such good friends.  I am suddenly missing you, but the end of one adventure marks the beginning of another.

You’ll see, of course, that I’m quite behind on my ride updates (come on Ercihan – hot showers in camp are all well and good, but where’s the Wi-Fi?!)  All subsequent RRI posts are dedicated to you all.