Türkiye

First of all, really sorry this has taken so long. But no one's probably reading any more anyway, so whatever.

I'll start you off with the link to the pictures.

When we woke up on the train from Thessaloniki, we were still quite far from Istanbul, though we had trouble finding out exactly how far. We wound up finally getting into the city around 10 AM, I think, which was two hours later than expected. I was really shocked to see how unpunctual the trains were, as the vast majority of my experience with them comes from my time in Holland, where they're like clockwork. Once we arrived, we went to buy as many train tickets for our time in Turkey as we could. Unfortunately, the early ferry and train to Bandirma and then Izmir had been cancelled, so we had to settle for an afternoon one, which meant more time in Istanbul, but no time to see Izmir, which, while allegedly rather boring, is Turkey's third largest city. We didn't get too broke up about it. The bigger disappointment came when we learned that there were no spots left in the sleeper car for the train from Izmir to Ankara. But whatever... Oh! While buying the tickets, a couple came up to Peter and asked him if he was from Houlton (he was wearing his Houlton shirt). He said no, but that he has family there and is from Maine. Turned out they were from North Yarmouth! What are the odds!

So we left the station and headed for our hostel. After getting all our stuff set up there and eating some lunch, we headed over to the hostel where some of our friends from Cairo were staying. Our roommate Stoo and our friends Sam and Adam had all decided to spend their vacation in Istanbul, so we had hoped to meet up with them there. By the time we got to their hostel, however, it was one in the afternoon and they were of course out seeing the city. We moved on, hoping to meet up with them later.

With only one day in Istanbul, it was kinda tough to decide which sites to hit, but we went for the big ones. Our hostel was only about five minutes walk from Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque. The former was closed that day, so we hit up the latter, which is one of the most beautiful structures I've ever seen. It's funny to think back to when I was thirteen and went there. At the time, Istanbul was the most exotic place I'd ever been to, and the Blue Mosque was pretty much the only aspect of Muslim culture I'd ever encountered. This time, Istanbul seemed like Cairo on downers. It's a beautiful city, but it's very Europeanized and incredibly clean. I've decided Cairo is like learning to play an instrument for fun. As a source of entertainment, watching a movie is much easier, but learning an instrument rewards effort. Cities like Athens and Istanbul and really any Western city are awesome, but being in them doesn't give you the same feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, for lack of better terms.

After the Blue Mosque, we went to see the Hippodrome, which was very disappointing. We expected some sort of a big arena that you could go into. It turns out that nowadays it's basically just some part of town that they call the Hippodrome, or something. I dunno... it confused me. Anyway, there were some neatish pillars, one of which was taken from Luxor. All those countries just wish they could be Egypt. Give it up, guys. From there, we walked over to Topkapi Palace, the Versailles of Turkey. It was pretty sprawling and awe-inspiring, especially the Harem. We didn't get enough time to explore all the stuff, but we saw some neat things. Probably the most amusing part was a little museum that claimed to contain Moses' staff and Mohammed's footprint, as well as many other equally incredible objects.

After sitting outside the palace watching boats go through the Bosphorus, we left that part of town and took the (brand new) tram to the Grand Bazaar. This was another thing that overwhelmed me when I saw it eight years ago, but this time around it seemed tame compared to Khan el-Khalili. I didn't buy anything but some shampoo and toothpaste. It was I think at this point that we started to realize we might be getting into some real financial difficulties. When Peter called his mom the morning before (Sunday), she had said she'd put the money in my account as soon as she could, which meant Tuesday, as the banks are obviously closed on Sundays, and Monday was some sort of a stupid American holiday. It was now Monday evening, and we realized that at the rate we were going, if the money didn't happen to make it in the next day, we could run out very quickly. Matt's cash was running low as well, and we didn't know how soon his mom was going to be able to stick some more into my account. But we just crossed our fingers and assumed all would be well.

We took the tram back from the bazaar and while walking to our hostel, would ya believe it?, we ran into Stoo, Adam, and Sam. We walked back with them to their hostel and made our evening plans, and we also discovered that some of the girls we hang out with were staying in our very hostel! We went back and ran into them there, and after shooting the breeze for a bit, got our stuff ready for one of the most exciting experiences of the trip: a Turkish bath! Peter briefly described it in a previous entry, but I'll remind you. In a Turkish bath, you take off your clothes and put on just a towel, and then you go into a large stone sauna and sit for a while, exfoliating and whatnot. After that, you are given soap and a coarse rag to clean yourself, or if you pay a little more, a Turkish guy will do it for you. Matt wasn't quite comfortable with that part of the deal, but Peter and I were on board! It sounds a little weird, but everything we'd heard about it said that it was an amazingly relaxing experience, as well as a compulsory part of being in Turkey. And it was incredible. The sauna was very comfortable, and after laying there for ten minutes or so, we were motioned over by our respective bathers. They started by massaging our chests, backs, arms, and legs, which felt really good after a few days of carrying around heavy backpacks. Then they scrubbed our skin, which removed the last layer of the sunburn I'd acquired in the Sinai a couple weeks prior. After that they doused us with cool water and scrubbed us down. Finally, they rinsed us off again and we were allowed to sit around for as much longer as we wanted. The Turkish bath we went to, or hammam as they're called locally, is one of the oldest in Istanbul, from around the 15th century I believe, and it was incredibly beautiful just to lay on the warm stones and stare up at the dome. When we'd finally had enough, we went and changed into clean clothes and sat around drinking fresh squeezed juice. Fantastic. I've never felt that clean in my life.

We headed back to the hostel to meet the guys for dinner/festivities. It turned out they'd already eaten, but some of the girls were hungry, so we went to get some food. We found a cute little place in a side alley that was pretty decent. All in all a very pleasant time had by all. We returned to our hostel, which is apparently Istanbul's central partying spot for backpackers. There were lots of people out front drinking and smoking sheesha and generally having a good time. The guys were there, already pretty drunk, and believe it or not, Jay was there, too! He was in the middle of his own wild trip around the Middle East, had just gotten in to Istanbul, was taking a cab to his hostel, and he drove by the guys sitting on the street drinking. He jumped out of the cab long enough to say hi, ran back and dropped off his stuff, and then joined them. It was pretty ridiculous. Anyway, we sat around and most people drank or kept drinking, though I didn't really feel like it just then. There were so many Australians and New Zealanders, apparently because of Anzac Day, which commemorates the defeat of the Allied forces at Gallipoli during WWI. Every year, thousands of Aussies and Kiwis flock to Istanbul to make a pilgrimage to the site where many of their ancestors died trying to get supports past the Ottoman Empire to the Russians. Ataturk and his Ottoman troops, however, did a very good job at holding them off, though the battle lasted nine months and left a third of a million people dead. So there's your little history lesson. It would have been neat to go and see the battlefields, and they're right next to Troy, so we coulda hit that too, but I wouldn't have wanted to have done it at the absolute busiest time of the year. We didn't have time anyway.

So after our lovely night with the boys, we said goodbye for two weeks and went to bed. The next morning, we got up, had breakfast, checked out, and went to see a few more sites before our noon ferry. First we did the Aya Sophia, which is overwhelmingly impressive but much uglier than the Blue Mosque, which sits across from it. Matt liked it better, though. After spending an hour or so there, we headed for the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, which had lots of cool rugs and Quran stands and whatnot. Overall I found it to be a fairly boring museum though. And so we headed off to the dock to grab our ferry and bid farewell to Istanbul. We only got a day there, but I feel like we saw a lot of good stuff and got a pretty good feel for it. It definitely deserves a longer stay though. Oh well, next time.

The ferry was pretty boring once we got used to how awesomely fast it was, and it was awesomely fast. We crossed the Sea of Marmara in two hours and arrived in Bandirma around 2:30. Our train to Izmir was leaving a little over an hour after that, and since we were hungry, we decided to get some food. Reasonable boys, us. Peter's mom was slated to put the money in that morning, which means mid to late afternoon in Turkey, at some point while we were on the train, so while we were in Bandirma we had to make do with what little money remained to us. I wasn't even sure if there was enough left in my account to make another withdrawal at an ATM. Between the three of us we had a little over twenty lira, which should have been enough for lunch. We sat down at a restaurant in the train station and had a modest meal, but we foolishly did not ask for prices or check a menu. With about fifteen minutes remaining until our train's departure, we called for the bill. The waiter came over and began tallying everything up on a napkin. We watched him as he wrote the price of each thing we had eaten. All was going well, we'd reached maybe ten lira, until he hit our main courses, which totaled more than twenty lira alone! The three of us looked at each other, our faces written all over with "Oh shit," and we managed to communicate to the waiter that we didn't have enough money. We asked him to guide me to an ATM, and he pointed to Peter's watch. Thinking he wanted Peter to give him the watch in return for the meal, Peter shook his head. He just wanted to know how much time we had until our train left though. Seeing that we had a little over ten minutes, he motioned to me to follow him. We'd all expected him to take me across the street or something. Instead, we jumped in his car and shot across town to an ATM. There was no parking nearby, so he parked where he could and I got out and ran to the machine, where there was of course a line, though thankfully not a huge one. When it was my turn, I went to do the transaction, praying it would go through. I requested fifty lira, and the machine told me to wait. I listened attentively, and when I heard the machine begin to count money, it was the most relieved I'd been in a very, very long time.

So I ran back to the car and we rushed back to the train station. Jumping out of the car, I flashed the money at Matt and Peter, who in turn showed me faces as relieved as mine. We paid and got on the train in time. It wasn't until we were safely moving away from Bandirma that we started to lament how absurdly overpriced that lunch was. But oh well, we made it. People have since asked me if I was ever afraid in the Middle East, and I always say no. But that's a lie. That was the one time I was afraid.

The train plodded through northwestern Turkey for the next eight hours or so. It was pleasant enough, and the scenery was really beautiful. Instead of reading any of the many books I had to finish before my return to Cairo, I took this opportunity to digest just about every page of the background and history sections of my Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. It was good to get a deeper understanding of the whole region.

The train didn't actually take us all the way to Izmir. The tracks right around the city were being worked on or something, so it dropped us off about half an hour north, and we took a bus the rest of the way. At this point, we were just about out of money, and the walk from the train station to an ATM was a very tense one. We got there, and I decided first to check my balance, which the ATM was unable to do. A lot of ATMs in the Middle East don't take my card, so our first reaction was to leave that machine, thinking my card was unusable in it. We started to look for another ATM, which normally wouldn't have been a big deal, except that it was almost 10 PM, and Izmir wasn't our final stop. We had to get to our hotel in Kusadasi, which was still an hour and a half or so away, and we didn't know how late the buses ran. It was then that it occurred to me that perhaps that ATM just couldn't do a balance check. Jogging back over to it, I tried to take out a pretty big sum, thinking that this would let us know if Peter's money had gone in. When we heard the machine counting, we all squealed with joy (maybe not Matt) and ran to get a cab to the bus station. We caught a bus to Kusadasi that was leaving right then, and we got to our hostel no problem. There we were treated like kings, since it still wasn't quite tourist season, and we were some of the only people staying in the hostel. After having some dinner, we went to bed.

The next morning, we all threw on our bathing suits and walked to the beach to try for a swim in the Aegean. When I was thirteen, Kusadasi was one of the ports my cruise ship pulled in to, and I've always regretted that I didn't get enough time to go swimming in the beautiful beaches of that town. Eight years later, however, I had a lot of trouble even finding a beach. Instead we explored the remains of an old pirate castle on an island just off the coast. We headed back to our hostel after that to check out, but first I called a few places to find out about taking a ferry to Cyprus should we get turned away at the Syrian border. As our hopeful entry into Syria drew nearer, I became more and more nervous about not getting in. The places I called did not help my anxiety. The ferry I had hoped to take to Cyprus as a contingency plan would not be running until May, though they did give me the number for a ferry that ran from another town along the Mediterranean coast. This was better than nothing, but the more I thought about our alternate plan, the more expensive and difficult I realized it would be. Ferries from Turkey to Cyprus are pretty cheap, but they really don't exist from Cyprus to Israel, and while I believe there is one to Port Said in Egypt, that one is rather pricey. To make matters worse, Cyprus is divided into halves based on political disputes between the Turks and the Greeks over the island. All Turkish ferries go to the Northeastern half, Turkish Cyprus, a country which is unrecognized by every other country in the world save for Turkey. Therefore, all ferries and cruise ships to Israel and Egypt obviously leave from Greek Cyprus. We'd have to cross a disputed border in order to get out of the country, and while the border is becoming demilitarized and easier to cross, it just didn't seem particularly fun. At this point I began spending every spare moment praying that we would make it into Syria.

We also went to an internet cafe that morning in Kusadasi where wrote an email to my mom letting her know what had happened and asking her if she could put a little more money in my account to help us get through until everything got worked out. After that I checked my online banking to confirm that Peter's mom had in fact put the money in. I found that money had indeed gone in, but only $500. That was more than enough to get us out of the rut we were in, but Peter had asked his mom to transfer $2000 of his money to the account. Assuming the $500 was from Peter's mom, he wrote to her asking her to put the rest in at some point fairly soon, and we kept going.

After checking out, we took a minibus to Selcuk, another big backpacking town, and the closest spot to Ephesus, our big destination in the region. Though we only spent about half an hour in Selcuk proper, two pretty hilarious events took place. The first concerned our luggage. Every place we'd go, we'd find a spot to leave our backpacks because, as I mentioned in the Greece entry, they were a bitch to lug around with us. We asked the folks where we purchased bus tickets back to Izmir for that evening if we could leave them there, and they motioned toward the back of the office at a spot where we could put them. Peter and I had no problem setting our bags down, but Matt somehow lost his balance as he got rid of his. Reaching out toward a curtain hanging from the wall to steady himself, he soon discovered that there was in fact no wall behind said curtain. The curtain was instead covering a little nook within which there were more bags. Matt started to fall into the curtain and he lashed out at anything around him to keep himself up. As he fell farther in, he tripped again over the bags which were inside. Finally after about fifteen seconds of delayed falling, he hit the ground somewhere behind the curtain. I saw the whole thing, and by this point, I was laughing so hard I was crying. My laughter and the noise of Matt's fall drew the attention of Peter as well as the Turkish guys working at the bus station. As soon as every one realized what had happened, they were laughing just as hard, and the Turkish guys were all explaining it in laughter-riddled Turkish to the others who hadn't been around. Matt got back on his feet and walked out proudly. "Laugh it up, asshole!" he said to me with his hands in the air. And laugh it up I did. It was probably one of the five funniest things I've ever seen in my life, and I laughed all the way down the street to the ATM where the next hilarious thing happened.

Actually this one wasn't nearly as hilarious, and at the time, it was somewhat frightening. I got some money out of the ATM, only to forget to take my card as I walked away. Fortunately there was a group of nice Turks behind us who got our attention and I retrieved my card without it being eaten by the machine or, heaven forbid, stolen. That was pretty stupid, but once we were in the clear, it was pretty funny. If I'd lost that card, then we really woulda been up shit creek.

So we walked from Selcuk to Ephesus, which was only a couple kilometers. On the way, we stopped at the remains of the Temple of Artemis, which was once one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Unfortunately all that remains of it is some rubble and one column, but I actually found that really awesome, and it led to some musings about what American ruins tourists will be exploring two thousand years from now, and what will be left of them.

Ephesus was just as awesome as I remembered it, and Peter and Matt had a grand old time walking around it too. It was a beautiful day, and in spite of it not being tourist season yet, there were a shitload of people there, especially Asians. So many Asian tourists in Turkey! We left the main center of Ephesus and continued walking around, exploring some of the other ruins nearby which I'd missed eight years ago. It was a really nice time, and we even snuck into the off-limits section of some ruins, though they didn't make it very hard for us to do so.

We decided to start heading back to Selcuk to catch our bus. We thought we had plenty of time to do so, but we had to walk around the hill against which Ephesus is set, and it took us longer than expected. If we'd walked, we probably would've made it, though it would've been close. Initially we decided to get a cab, but there were none to be found, so we decided to hitch-hike. I'd read a little about hitch-hiking in the Middle East in the Lonely Planet, and while the book didn't recommend it, it said that it's most of the time very safe and much more common than in the States. So we stuck our thumbs out, or rather we pointed at the road, which is the way you hitch-hike in the Middle East since putting your thumb up is considered vaguely offensive. After a couple cars went by, a family in their truck pulled over. I leaned in the window and said "Otogar," which is Turkish for bus station, and the driver motioned to the bed. We hopped in and off we went. It was awesome! The best part was there was a little kid who was making faces at us from the cab the whole time. We got to the otogar with plenty of time to spare, and we felt oh-so-resourceful too.

Getting back into Izmir, we grabbed something to eat before our overnight train to Ankara left. Once again we had to take a bus to the train, but once we were on, it was pretty comfortable, though we were all still a little miffed that we'd failed to nab spots in the sleeper. We made it though. The train was of course a couple hours late, but we weren't too upset. What I was upset about was the fact that the Lonely Planet has maps of tiny ass little towns in Turkey that no backpacker would ever have to deal with and yet it has no map of Ankara, the capital of the country and it's second biggest city. Needless to say we had a little trouble finding our way around, but once we got the metro worked out and found the center of the city, which turned out to be very close to the train station, we were okay. First we went to an internet cafe, where we discovered that Peter's mom hadn't put any money in yet, and that $500 that had saved our asses in Izmir had been my mom just putting some money in because she was concerned and wanted to make sure I was doing okay. I hadn't told her anything about Peter's issue, and the money had gone in before I sent her that email. Of course, that morning, she got the email and thought that the $500 hadn't been enough, so she rushed over and put another $500 in. Peter's mom, it turned out, wanted to wait for his father to get back from a trip out of the state before she dealt with Peter's money. I guess Peter didn't make the gravity of the situation clear enough to her. He did after that though, and the email he sent kept her up all night worrying. It was definitely a bit of a SNAFU, but we made it out alive and stayed liquid and after that, all of our parents, Matt's included, were so worried about us that we had plenty of money. Pretty ridiculous.

So we went to see a couple of Ankara's sites. We started with the Museum of Anatolian Culture, which basically chronicles everything that has gone down in the region from the dawn of humankind onward. It was really sweet actually. There were cave paintings and goddess mother statues (the fat little fertile chick), Hittite reliefs and relics, Greek pottery, Roman statues. It was probably my favorite museum of the trip and one of my favorite museums I've ever been to.

From there we headed up to the Citadel, where Matt got hassled by kids for money and we were afforded a beautiful view of all of Ankara. When we first entered the city, my opinion of it had not been very high. It seemed kind of dingy and fake compared to Istanbul, but after the museum and the citadel, I liked it a lot more. So we headed back down the hill to the metro, which we took to Ataturk's Mausoleum, which looked really sweet, and I felt like we owed it to the guy after seeing his picture so much all over the country, but we were too late and it was closed. We got some dinner and went to wait for our bus to Goreme, our gateway to Cappadocia. I sat in front of two very friendly Dutch women who were also going to Cappadocia, and I got to speak very terrible Dutch to them and talk to them a little about travel in Europe and the Middle East until we were hushed by the "flight attendants," for lack of a better term. The buses in Turkey are ridonk. They really have flight attendants, or people who basically fulfill an equivalent function. You get a snack and some water, and they come around with disinfectant with which you wash your hands and your face. Also, they always show a movie or the news. Crazy! We got to Goreme pretty late and went straight to our hostel, where we were staying in a cave! I had been really excited about this, but it proved to be somewhat disappointing. It seemed more like a damp basement than a cave. Oh well. It was nice enough.

When we woke up the next day we found ourselves totally unequipped to resist the temptation of renting mopeds, so we did. And it was probably the best decision we ever made. We each paid thirty lira and got the scooters for five blissful hours. First we rode them over to the Goreme Open Air Museum, which is the region's main attraction. Cappadocia is tough to describe. It's kind of a place you have to see and experience to appreciate, but basically the terrain looks like something you'd see in a fairy tale. It's the kind of place that makes you wish you understood geology. There's all these weird natural rock spires and caves and stuff, and about a thousand years ago or so, people started carving churches and houses into these caves, and so now it really looks like something you'd see in a fairy tale. I just pictured all these midgets and fairies running around the place. It was pretty cool. It may have deserved more time than we gave it, but we were really excited about getting back to the mopeds, so we left after maybe forty-five minutes. Cappadocia is a huge region, and we decided just to drive around exploring. The roads were pretty empty, so it was just very relaxing cruising around and looking at the whacky scenery. We also took the mopeds off-roading a little. Probably not the best decision, but we had a great time, and we didn't break anything, neither on the bikes nor on ourselves. After driving around for a couple hours, we decided to climb some of the whacky looking hills. It turns out that part of the reason the rocks are molded into such strange formations is that they're very soft and easily broken and shaped, which made climbing the cliff faces incredibly difficult. You'd grab onto a rock to pull yourself up and the rock would just crumble into a million pieces, and then you'd start sliding down. Plants were the key, as they gave the soil some integrity, but many of the plants were sharp and pokey, probably to keep people and animals from dislodging their root systems while climbing them. Peter and I had some trouble as a result, but Matt scurried up the hill like he was born and bred on it. I gave up after a little while and I wanted to get more out of our mopeds before we had to return them anyway, but Matt went for the summit, which turned out to be farther away than he had thought. He made it though. On the way back out, we had to do a little off-roading to get back to the on-roading, and Matt made a turn too fast and fell off the moped. Not a huge deal because we were all falling off here and there, but just as he did it, a big tour bus packed with people drove by and they all laughed at him. It was great.

So we kept driving and saw a few more things before returning the bikes. We were pretty exhausted after a day of driving and climbing in the hot weather, so we went to get some dinner before the most dreaded commute of the trip... a twelve hour bus ride to Antakya, right on the border with Syria. Originally we'd planned to stay two nights in Goreme, but I'd thought Antakya was closer than it in fact was. When we found out how long it would take us to get there, we decided to take the overnight bus. There was some misunderstanding with our tickets when we transfered in Kaysari, but we got that cleared up. The bus ride was of course pretty uncomfortable, though I was surprised by how much sleep I got. We got to Antakya around 8 AM and hopped on a bus headed to Aleppo, our first destination in Syria, should we get that far. Of course, since we were Americans, we had to forfeit the Syrian part of our journey because we would take so long at the border, and there was a chance we might not get in, though it was heartening to find that the ticket salesman and the drivers batted no eye when they saw we had American passports and we were going to Syria without a visa.

It only took forty-five minutes or so to get from Antakya to the border. Oh, and by the way, Antakya is the biblical Antioch, where Christians were first called Christians, so there you go. We got to the border and said goodbye to Turkey, got our exit stamps, and I was relieved to read the terms of the visa and see that we had thirty full days since the issue of our Turkish visas to return to the country and use it again, which meant if we got refused entry to Syria, we wouldn't have to buy a new Turkish visa. And so we walked to the Syrian border and into the offices to apply for our visas. Our time in Turkey was over, so we hoped.