September 10, 2000,  Mazsalaca, Latvia.  As I write, the music of the ney, a flute used in the ceremonies of whirling dervishes, plays in the background.  I first heard this music in a place called Göreme in Turkey, on a trip I took there at the beginning of August.  Ann and I had just finished touring the centuries-old churches and other rooms cut into the rocks outside Göreme.  One room contained a small art gallery, and this music was playing.  The strange, almost unearthly tones now take me back to that hot, dusty, place full of echoes of the past.  I had never really thought of Turkey as a place I wanted to visit.  But after a cool, rainy summer in Latvia, a cheap charter flight and the promise of hot sun made it appealing.  Then I started to read about all the things to do and see, and I realized that Turkey was indeed a place I wanted to visit.

My journey actually started with a mini-trip to Lithuania since our flight left from the capital, Vilnius.  (Ann is a Peace Corps volunteer in Lithuania.)  By happy chance my friend Andra and her father Valters were planning to take a short excursion to that country with another friend, Gundega, and they invited me along.  Valters is a Latvian-American who now lives in Riga, and Andra, his daughter, was working at a law firm in Riga for the summer.  Gundega, also Latvian-American, is a chemistry professor in Chicago.  We spent a pleasant couple of days, first stopping in Kaunas, then visiting the castle museum at Trakai, and finally coming to Vilnius.  In Vilnius, we wandered the winding streets of the old part of the city,  Gundega and I often stopping to look through archways into courtyards, admiring the gardens or other sights within.  To me Vilnius' old town is a bit friendlier than Riga's.  The architecture is Polish Baroque, and the buildings are two or three stories, often with iron balconies with flower boxes.  Things seem to be on a smaller, more human scale than in Old Riga, where the German-influenced buildings are taller, without the frequent courtyards, and the atmosphere is more businesslike.

One of the best moments came when we stopped at an outdoor cafe to rest and have something to drink.  The others had coffee or tea and I ordered hot chocolate.  Imagine my surprise and delight when the server brought me a small cup (like an espresso cup) full of rich, thick, melted chocolate!  I ate it slowly with the small spoon and felt like I was in heaven.  To be in such good company, in lovely surroundings, on vacation, eating hot chocolate with a spoon!  (Later I looked at the menu and saw that they had both hot chocolate and hot cocoa.  Now I know the difference.)    We spent the night in a hotel that was a dormitory during Soviet times.  The floors and beds were so creaky that I hardly dared move during the night, for fear of disturbing Gundega and Andra.   In the morning it was time for us to part, and for me to join Ann and begin the rest of my journey.

Turkey has been working hard to develop its tourist industry, and the place our charter went to, Kemer, is a product of that development.  We knew this, and were prepared for a town full of hotels, tourists, and private beaches.  The charter cost was inexpensive enough that we could plan to leave the town and our hotel after a few days without feeling any financial remorse.  We flew from Vilnius to Antalya, on the Mediterranean Coast, and then the charter bus took us to Kemer.  Our first view of Turkish countryside was the winding coastal road, mountains with scrub brush or pine forest coming almost down to the sea.  It was hot--about 40 C/104 F --and humid.  Our hotel room seemed luxurious after the dormitory in Vilnius: a simple room with two twin beds, a desk, wardrobe, toilet and shower, and a small balcony.  And air conditioning.  The hotel manager spoke a little English, although they catered mostly to Russian-speaking tourists.

We spent three days in Kemer, relaxing at the beach, swimming in the sea, walking around the town, and getting acclimated.  The town was full of shops and very aggressive shopkeepers.  Walking down the street, we were continually accosted, usually starting with, "Excuse me.  Where are you from?"  At first, we naturally turned to respond, since it's only polite to reply to someone who addresses you.  One of the most difficult things for me during the trip was to learn to ignore people who were talking to me.  Often I would just smile and walk on, since it felt rude to me to ignore them.  But sometimes I felt angry and harassed, and walked by with a frown.  It was not an easy situation.

Even though the town itself doesn't have much to recommend it (unless you like shopping and discos), Kemer is in a lovely setting.  Sitting at the beach with the mountains rising behind us and the blue sea in front of us, it was easy to forget the stress of walking past the shops.  The beaches are rocky rather than sandy, so people lie on chairs.  The shore area is divided into private beaches, many associated with a hotel, where you pay to have a chair and umbrella for the day.  The water was warm and very salty, and one of our best swims was one evening after dinner in the light of a full moon.

While in Kemer we took a day trip to Antalya, the large city we had flown into.  Antalya has a historic district of winding streets and old houses that is fun to wander around in.  And they have a great museum with archaeology and anthropology exhibits.  The Roman antiquities were quite stunning.  We were hoping to go to one of the sites of Roman ruins in Turkey during our visit, but unfortunately we never did.  The country is so vast, and there is so much to see, that we weren't able to do everything we wanted to do.  To get to Antalya we rode along with our charter group, since the company was offering  a "free" day tour to the city.  In fact, it was a shopping trip where people were taken from shop to shop.  Apparently this is how many tour companies make their money. They give you cheap airfare and hotel rates, and then sell you excursions and make commission on things you buy during shopping trips.  But as soon as the bus got to the city, Ann and I left the somewhat disgruntled tour guide and went off on our own.

After our ramble around the historic section of the city, we went to a different area (on a tip from a helpful hotel clerk), looking for a place to eat where locals went.  We found a cafe where no English was spoken, and worked with our phrase book to order.  The proprietor seemed delighted at our efforts.  Later she came over and coached us on a few key phrases and how to count to ten.  When we left we felt very proud of ourselves for having managed to communicate well enough to have a great meal and interact with the people in the cafe.

After a few days in Kemer we were ready to leave the resort atmosphere behind and see some of the "real" Turkey.  We decided to go to Cappadocia, an area about 640 km/400 miles from Antalya in the interior of the country.  Using our guide book we picked a destination, Uçhisar, and headed out on the night bus.  Most long-distance bus travel in Turkey seems to happen on these overnight buses.  You can take trains but the buses are apparently faster and more reliable.  The bus we took was modern and as comfortable as a bus can be, with seats that reclined a fair ways back.  When we started out the attendant came around with a splash of lemon cologne water for everyone.  This was followed with a choice of (non-alcoholic) beverage and some cookies.  By about 9:00 p.m. we were heading into the mountains and people were settling down for the night.  Around us were travelers from Belgium and quite a few young people from Australia.  I had an eye mask and ear plugs, and was hoping to get some sleep.  But this was difficult as the bus wound back and forth across switch-backs in the road as it climbed into the mountains.  My head kept snapping from side to side with the jerks of the bus.  The air conditioning did not seem to be on, which I attributed to the fact that we were climbing, and it might have put too much strain on the engine.  In the close, hot atmosphere I finally managed to get to sleep a little after midnight.  Only to be woken when we pulled into a bus station for our first stop.  Most people got off of the bus, visited the toilet, and some even went inside the restaurant for a meal!  Then we were back on the bus for a few hours until we stopped again, this time at what reminded me of a wayside on the U.S. Interstate.  Bright lights, shops, restaurant, attendants hosing down the buses, people in various states of wakefulness wandering around.  Since it was the middle of the night it all seemed a bit surreal.  The stops did provide a chance to stretch, and to try to get some circulation going--both Ann and I found that our feet were very swollen after a few hours on the bus, more so than either of us had ever experienced before.

One good thing about the stops was that it provided a chance to use the toilet.  The buses have toilets, but they are kept locked.  One person told me that was because then the bus company didn't have to clean them.  But I also wonder if it didn't have something to do with the fact that they would have been toilets that you sit on rather than squat over, and as such not fitting in with the cultural norms in Turkey.  Now that I've started on this topic, I'll talk a bit more about toilets in Turkey.  I don't know where I acquired this particular bit of "knowledge," but I've always called toilets that are a hole in the floor "Turkish" toilets.  Which means that many of the public facilities in Latvia can be described as "Turkish" toilets. (This is gradually changing: the public toilets in Valmiera were recently "upgraded" to seat toilets.)  But the facilities in Turkey were generally cleaner and more pleasant than similar ones I have seen in Latvia.  There is always a water faucet right near the floor, and a small pitcher to pour water from to clean oneself (and I think to pour water on the--usually porcelain--floor to clean it).  I never found a good explanation of Turkish hygienic practices, so I am only going on what I could guess here.  In some of the tourist facilities in Turkey there were seat toilets as well.  Several times I saw posters with instructions on the inside of the stall door, a drawing of a person sitting on the toilet seat, and another drawing of someone squatting on the seat, the latter with a big red "X" drawn across it.  Overall I came away from the experience of using these toilets with a heightened curiosity about different hygienic practices and how they develop.

So, back to the bus.  It was not long after dawn and we had just left Nevsehir, the largest town in the Cappadocia region.  The bus attendant came by to tell us our stop would be next.  The previous evening she had given us an enigmatic smile when we told her we were going to Uçhisar.  It seemed like she was either impressed with us or thought we were fools.  I thought it was the former until the bus stopped and deposited us on a deserted road, without a human being in sight.  We were in the residential outskirts of a town with no idea where the town center lay.  After the bus was out of sight, Ann and I just looked at each other and laughed and laughed.  It was one of the best moments of the trip.  Eventually we noticed a sign pointing to a tourist information center, so we hoisted our backpacks and started walking.  Soon we found ourselves in the center of a small village, and a few men were starting to appear on the streets.  No shops were open yet, so we walked around a bit.  We headed up a likely-looking cobblestone street and were soon stopped in our tracks by the awesome sight of the valley spread out beneath us.  It reminded us both of the American Southwest, sort of a cross between Bryce Canyon and the Painted Desert.  Fortified with that vision, we decided to head back into the village center and look for breakfast.  Some men, mostly elderly, were sitting drinking tea at a patio cafe, so we sat at the edge and ordered some tea.  Later we figured out that this was probably a tea shop just for men, but the host served us without complaint.

Later I went wandering and found a shop open, Chez Kemal.  There I met Kemal, who was to become an ever-smiling bright spot in our wanderings around Uçhisar.  Most of the tourists who come to Uçhisar are from France, so if locals speak a second language it is usually French.  But Kemal spoke some English too, which was a lucky break for us.  (Although I did have fun practicing my French while we were there.)  He let us put our bags in the bus company office (run by his father).  When we stopped by on our way out to find a place to stay, he told us to go with the woman who was in his shop buying bread and look at her place.  The woman was Demet, and she and her boyfriend Sinan were the innkeepers for the summer at her step-mother's pansyon (small inn), called Tekelli Evi.  She speaks English, so we were able to chat as we walked back up that same cobblestone road, around the edge of the village, and down to the pansyon.  At this point it was about 8:00 in the morning.  Sinan (who lived in the U.S. for five years when he was growing up and speaks great English) showed us the three rooms--they didn't have any guests at that point.  All the rooms were cut into the soft, volcanic rock that is characteristic of the region.  We chose the largest room, which had a curtained sleeping alcove with one bed, a curtained side room with two more beds, a sitting area, and a toilet/shower room (all this and breakfast for about $15 a night per person).  The patio of the pansyon had a panoramic view to the north, and that's where the small tables were for eating breakfast and dinner.

Demet said she would make us breakfast and we collapsed gratefully onto the patio chairs.  While we were sitting there admiring the view we heard bells, and then Sinan was carrying our packs into the courtyard, having had them brought up from the bus office by donkey.  Then we sat at a small table, looking out at the valley and breakfasted on soft-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, a salty, crumbly, feta-like cheese, bread, olives, apricot compote, another fruit compote, and fresh mint tea.   Sinan having the bags brought up and Demet making us breakfast are just two examples of the many kindnesses we experienced on our trip.  After a rest in the cool darkness of our cave room, we spent the day exploring the village.  Then we returned for dinner on the patio.  It was the first real, hot, home-cooked, whole-food meal I had had in almost a week.  Stuffed eggplant and peppers, rice pilaf, bean salad, and a bottle of Turkish wine.  After supper Demet and Sinan joined us for some conversation and talk turned to Istanbul.  Ann and I were asking about places to stay and things to see and do.  Demet disappeared for a while, and when she returned she said that she had called her housemate in Istanbul, and that it was okay if we stayed in her room there.  More kindness.

We spent the next few days exploring the area.  We walked about 45 minutes through a valley to get to Göreme.  Along the path there were tombs and ruins of dwellings cut into the rocks above us.  A few wildflowers, including mint and chicory, were blooming, but most had succumbed to the heat.  In retrospect, we probably pushed ourselves too hard given how hot it was (at or above 38 C/ 100 F degrees each day), but we just kept plugging away, trying to see what we could.  In addition to the open-air museum in Göreme, we visited an underground city in Kaymakli and the town of Avanos, known for its pottery.  Most of our travel was in dolmuses, the local transport vans that go from town to town for a very reasonable price.  Even though the rocky nature of the landscape makes it seem improbable, it is an agricultural area.  While we were there apricots were being harvested and put out to dry on the rooftops.  We saw wagon loads of some straw-like plants being brought into Uçhisar and dumped in the streets.  Later we figured out that they were chickpeas.  The women do most of the agricultural labor and the men drive the tractors and wagons.

On the subject of women.  One of the disappointments of our trip was that we didn't get to interact with very many women.  In the coastal resort areas and the bigger cities women are around, although in Kemer there were few women working in jobs that required contact with customers.  But in the interior we interacted almost exclusively with men (Demet being the exception).  Waiters, shopkeepers, bus drivers, postal clerks, and museum personnel were all men, except for one woman working in the museum shop in Göreme.  Most women were wearing scarves and a few had half their faces veiled.  (In Istanbul we saw many women wearing scarves, long dresses, and overcoats in the extreme heat.  Strangely, they wore sandals which allowed their bare feet to show.)  I only felt out of place in Kaymakli, which was the most rural, non-touristy town we went to.  A place of perhaps 1,000 people.  I realized as we were walking on the main street that we were the only women in sight.  And the stares from the men sitting on the sidewalks outside the shops were not friendly.  It was the only time on the trip that I wished I was wearing a skirt.  We had been prepared to dress modestly in Turkey but after seeing the way people dressed in the coastal resort areas and the tourist-frequented areas of Cappadocia I had become quite comfortable wearing shorts.  (Some of the outfits worn by the female tourists in Kemer were shocking even to me.)   I would like to go back to Turkey sometime and spend more time with Turkish women, to find out more about how they live and what they are like.

We could easily have spent another week in Cappadocia.  It would have been great to get up early, go for a hike, come back and eat lunch, rest during the hot afternoon, dozing and reading, then get up and take another walk at dusk and have a leisurely dinner somewhere.   As it was, our days were full and we arrived back at the room in the evening too exhausted from the heat to do much more than read a page or two of a book before falling asleep.

We did end up staying a day longer than we had planned so that Ann could realize a long-standing dream and go for a ride in a hot-air balloon.  We had visited the company office in Göreme a few days before and met Kaili and Lars and some of the crew at Kapadokya Balloons.  They are great people, and were very kind to Ann and I in the matter of prices.  I wasn't planning to go on the flight, and was looking forward to being on the ground and chasing the balloons with the crew, but Kaili's and Lars' generosity allowed me to go up as well.  There were two balloons and about 15 people in all.  We were picked up at the pansyon before dawn and had hot drinks at the office while pre-flight wind tests were done.  One of the people going on the flight was Nancy, a returned Peace Corps volunteer from Kenya who was traveling with her friend Danielle, another PCV.  We ended up running into them several times in Istanbul too.

In the dawn light we made our way to the launch site.  While the crew filled the balloons with air using huge fans, Kaili instructed us on how to behave during the ride and at the landing.   Then we climbed into the baskets and the balloons were launched.  It was quiet and peaceful as we rose into the air, and the ride was much gentler than I thought it would be.   We drifted over Göreme and some surrounding valleys, and also went down into the valleys and quite near to some of the rock formations.  We brushed the tops of some apricot and walnut trees and picked some nuts and fruit.  It was an indescribable sensation--incredible to see the beauty of that landscape from the air.  We flew for about an hour, going past Uçhisar and eventually landing near a vineyard.  The landing was pretty amazing: they set the baskets down right onto the trailers that they were transported on.  The crew affixed flowers to one of the baskets, and we had a champagne and cherry juice cocktail and sweet breads, and chatted about the ride.

It was a bit sad to have to go back to Tekelli Evi and pack our bags.  But the place was also changing.  Eight Italian women had arrived the night before, and our room was being taken by some travelers from Taiwan.  I know it wasn't great for business, but it was nice having the place all to ourselves the three nights we were there.  I had had such lovely mornings doing yoga and meditating on the rooftop at dawn.  Now we had to leave that peaceful scene behind and move on to the completely different world of Istanbul.  Coming out of Kemal's shop for the last time, we were both embraced and given a kiss on the cheek and a big smile by an elderly woman we had not met before.  I do not know who she was, but her farewell only added to my good feelings about the village of Uçhisar.

So, another all-night bus ride, a bit more uncomfortable than the first.  An unfortunate woman with some kind of intestinal ailment spent the first few hours of the ride sitting in the stairwell at the back retching into a plastic bag. It didn't make for a very pleasant ride for any of us, but I really felt bad for her.  We were on what appeared to be a tollway, and our few stops were at brightly-lit complexes of restaurants and shops and fuel pumps.  At one there were about 10 buses parked in a line, and drowsy passengers wandering around, sitting on the steps, going inside for a bit to eat, browsing the shops.  I was hoping to buy some bread, and finally found some small bags of sliced bread at the front of a cafeteria line.  I picked one up and started to walk to the cashier, but the man behind the counter made it clear that I could not buy the bread.  At first I didn't understand.  Then I figured out that it only came with the meals.  I tried to explain that I only wanted bread, to no avail.  Finally I put the bag down and was heading out the door, when he picked it up and handed it to me, waving me away.  More kindness.

When dawn came we were driving near water, and soon we were going past one high-rise apartment building after another.  It was about 6:30 a.m., and I figured we were in Istanbul.  An hour later we were still driving, past one high-rise apartment building after another, and then finally we were at the bus station.  Istanbul is a city of 11.5 million people, a number which I really can't comprehend.  The bus station is a city in itself, but luckily we didn't have to navigate it because right outside our bus there was a bus company shuttle to the tourist district.  They packed about 15 people and their bags into a van that was supposed to seat about nine.  One man had to stand for the entire ride, which took about a half hour.

I'm afraid I don't have many good things to say about Istanbul.  I am not a fan of big cities to begin with, and big cities when they are hot and humid and full of vehicle exhaust and people smoking cigarettes are even less appealing to me.  We saw a few of the main sights, the best of which was the Kariye Church with its amazing mosaics.  Demet's apartment was in a century-old courtyard apartment building that was not in the best of repair.  But we were grateful for the sanctuary, and for the welcome given us by her housemate Erdinç (pronounced Erdinçh), who is a painter and art teacher.  It never really cooled down, even at night, and I was feeling hot all the time.  After spending about five hours exploring Topkapi Palace, I had to lay down on a park bench and thought I might have heat stroke.  Later, in the Blue Mosque, we met Mehmet, a man whose tour company specializes in educational tours for Americans.  We were sitting on the floor and he was explaining some of the features of the mosque when I mentioned that I was tired of being hot.  He felt my forehead and said I had a fever.  Suddenly everything made sense: why I was hot all the time, why I felt so tired, why I wasn't having fun any more.  I was ill!  I had been pushing myself, thinking it was just the heat.  Mehmet ended up giving us a ride back to the apartment in a taxi (more kindness), and I spent about 7 hours lying on the couch, listening to classical music, letting myself rest.  Ann had gone out for the evening, and Erdinç was very kind, checking on me periodically and making me tea.  At that point my temperature was 38.5 C (about 101 F), and I know it had been higher earlier in the day.  During the night the fever broke, but I was pretty weak the next day.  I still don't know what was wrong with me.  I'm just thankful that I had a good place to rest and recover.

I had been looking forward to seeing the Egyptian Spice Market and the Covered Bazaar in Istanbul.  As it turned out, the Spice Market was mostly souvenir shops with a few spice shops sandwiched in between.  And we left the covered bazaar after about 15 minutes.  It was just more of the same stuff we had been seeing everywhere else, with more tourists, higher prices, and more aggressive shopkeepers.  Actually, the walk through the market district between the Spice Market and the Bazaar was more interesting than either place.  The narrow streets were crowded with shops which seemed to be grouped by category.  We walked through blocks of shops selling fabric, then shops selling clothing.  These places seemed to be frequented by regular citizens rather than tourists.  Some shops carried the elaborate costumes worn by boys when they go on parade on the way to their circumcision ceremony.

After being ill, I couldn't face another all-night bus ride, so I spent the extra money and flew back to Antalya.  Ann opted for the bus, and ended up spending 14 hours in transit rather than 12 due to an accident delay.  All in all, I felt like I could have skipped Istanbul, and would have been happier spending more time in Cappadocia.  Given more time and money and lower temperatures, I think the city could be enjoyable, but if I go back to Turkey there are other places I would rather visit.  It was a relief to get back to slower-paced Kemer and the air-conditioned comfort of our hotel room.  We spent our last few days relaxing, shopping for souvenirs, swimming, and taking a half-day excursion to a nearby undeveloped beach at Olympos.

On our last night in Kemer, we walked around trying to spend the last of our Turkish millions (a million Lira is about $1.65).  Ann wanted to go for a last moonlight swim.  I opted to just sit and watch, since I'm not as fond of salt water as she is.  There were some strange-looking people in the water near us. At first I thought they were animals.  Then I realized they were women, in blouses, skirts and scarves, playing in the waves.  Their menfolk were sitting on chairs nearby, smoking cigarettes, keeping watch.

In the morning we had to be ready early for the charter bus to the airport.  The charter guide spoke Russian into a microphone on the way, telling jokes and chatting.  Evaluation forms were passed around, but only in Russian, so we didn't have a chance to give any feedback.  Once we had checked our bags, Ann and I tried to find some breakfast but the airport didn't have a full-service restaurant open at that hour.  So we went to a coffeeshop counter to get a snack.  I asked the clerk the prices of the different options: croissant, nut bread, other kinds of pastries.  I counted my coins and had enough money for nut bread, so that's what I chose.  As I was getting ready to walk away, the young man handed me a cup of coffee with a lovely smile.   My heart glowing, almost in tears, I walked to the table and had my breakfast.  I normally don't drink coffee, but that was one of the most delicious cups I have ever had.

It's difficult to compress two weeks of experience into an account of this type.  Turkey is such an interesting, complex place.   The negatives like cigarette smoke and over-aggressive shopkeepers were far outweighed by the beautiful scenery, delicious food, kind people, and historical and cultural aspects.  Rather than give a diary of everything we did, I have tried here to recount parts of the trip that would give a good overview and some interesting details.  If you would like more information about anything I have written, or have specific questions, please feel free to ask me.  I hope someday you will have a chance to travel there and experience it for yourself.

There are many good Websites with information about traveling to Turkey.  Here are a few:

Photos: http://www.anthroarcheart.org/troy.htm

Uçhisar:  http://www.hitit.co.uk/tosee/cappy/Uchisar.html, http://yanki.webjump.com/ucasar.htm

Official Turkey tourism site: http://www.turizm.gov.tr

Other Turkey travel sites:  http://www.travelturkey.com/plantrip.htm,  http://www.twarp.com

Also see:

Tekelli Evi: http://www.geocities.com/tekelli

Kapadokya Balloons: http://www.kapadokyaballoons.com

You can see a few of my photos on my Website at:  http://members.tripod.com/brehm.sarah
 

The Ney music CD is called: Ney Taksimleri by M.Sadreddin Ozcimi (Kalite Plak disk 022).