We left Thursday night after our midterm for Cappadocia, the region of badass rocks and alien invasions made famous(er) by the shitty Turkish film "Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam," which I have mentioned earlier. Before we left, though, I managed to meet up with Leslie, who was visiting the city for the weekend with the Ankara CLS group. We hit up 7. Kat Teras again and then smoked some hookah off of Istiklal before I headed with Sydney to catch our bus in a very sketchy parking lot near a wedding party place. We met up with the others and to our surprise our bus arrived, as stated on the internet.
The Turks take their buses very seriously, I gather, and have assigned seats like an airplane, and snack and meal service. Our guide's name was Murat, a twenty-something with a degree in tourism and soccer player hair. Our assistant, the guy who brought us tea and snacks, was Fırat. The driver, Sinan. Sinan, judging by his voice, used to smoke 3 packs a day, and has seem some shit. He has a tightly curled white Jewfro and a thick black mustache. He looked like the Turkish Einstein, and was just as wise. Over the course of the weekend, he took a shine to me and started calling me "Havuç Bey," or Mr. Carrot. This I allowed only after expressing my preference for carrot over "red."
The drive out there was pretty rough. I can't really sleep well on moving vehicles, despite the seat next to me being empty. This was exacerbated by the music videos and AtlasJet ads that were looped on the TV screens. I need to find out who sang one of the songs, though, because I think I am going to marry her. Not sure yet, I need to ask her dad. I managed to sleep fitfully in 20-30 minute increments, starting at 4:00am. I woke up at one point to see a massive white body of water outside the bus. It was Turkey's second largest lake! The Salt Lake (Tuz Gölü). I was geeking out because I am reading a book called "Salt," and it was actually on my lap at the time. We stopped twice on the trip, once after being on the road for only 2 hours. It was a creepy, creepy rest stop that looked like a sadder version of a Cracker Barrel gift shop, except with more dried nuts and berries. The highlight of this particular stop was the fact that the bathroom attendant guy who collects your fifty cents when you come out actually fucked up his only task: he gave me a lira back after I gave him a lira. WIN!
Our final stop before getting to our region was at a fancy rest stop near the Salt Lake that featured, among other things, overpriced tea. It was after this stop that we really started getting into the trip's cool bits. The area that Cappadocia occupies is really hilly/mountainous and pretty dry. The land was once full of active volcanoes, and that is why the surface is covered in volcanic rock, which is in turn why the crazy rock formations appeared: pumice is very soft, and is eroded easily by wind and rain. The landscape makes it easy for a surprise to appear around a bend in the road, which is exactly what happened as we approached our first stop, the Ihlara Valley. We rounded a bend and saw a huge rock face jutting out of the earth with dwellings carved into it. Whaaaat? Yeah, the people who used to live here carved holes in cliffs all over the place and lived in them. They were early Christians with a lot to be scared of, apparently, because they built their homes like fifty feet off the ground in the cliffs. I have no idea how they got to the. I didn't see any steps. Maybe they rode dragons. Friendly ones.
The Ihlara Valley was incredible, a 14km long canyon, essentially, full of ancient churches and dwellings. We walked just a bit of it, because to see it all would take all day, but what we did see was awesome. I can't think of a better place to hide your churches than there, except maybe for our third stop: the Underground City! This place was 8 levels of rooms and tunnels...UNDER THE GROUND. Apparently there are as many as six cities like this around there, and in total they housed as many as 20,000+ people. NUTS. You can't tell where it is! All the shit around it was built recently, back in the day it was just a hole, literally, in the middle of a field. There was lots of crouching going on there. It leads me to believe that early Christians were a small, nocturnal species with enormous eyes, well suited to cave dwelling.
The second stop, which I shall describe out of order to keep you on your toes, was the Crater Lake. It was an enormous lake in a crater that I think was formed by an extinct volcano (as the region is full of them). It's surface area was probably .75 sq mi. It was gorgeous. GORGEOUS. We wandered further up and over the hill overlooking it and took pictures of the landscape on the other side. The place seriously looks like Rohan from LOTR. Seriously. It was there that our tour guide, Murat, came up to me and said "I think you know some Turkish." It might have been because I was laughing at his jokes and nodding in understanding at everything he said. He asked me if I or anyone else with me would prefer English (he speaks some) to Turkish explanations, and I told him that we were here to learn Turkish and didn't want to inconvenience the Turks on the trip. So that was settled.
We stopped at a winery in Nevşehir to talk with the owner about local wines, and try some. The red wine was the suck, but the white wine was great. So we got three bottles and enjoyed them later on the balcony of Sydney's hotel room, which had a great view of downtown Ürgüp and a crag with caves on it. For lunch, the lunch that I believe was the start of my troubles, we had a delicious pot roast with eggplant, beef, potatoes, and other stuff that makes me shit. It was really, really good, and the restaurant was gorgeous. The arrangement was like a hamam, sort of, with a central dome and chambers radiating off of it. They had live music in the middle, playing old Ottoman songs. Songs that enchant the bowels. Friday night, the six of us (from my program) wandered the streets of Ürgüp, and found our way to the top of "Wish Hill," which had one of the most incredible, if not the most incredible view I have ever seen. You can see for probably 25 miles in every direction. And we were there as the sun was setting, and casting incredible light and shadows over the mountains and cliffs in the distance. It's the kind of stuff I wish I could share with you all in person. I took a video and some pictures, but they don't do it justice. We could see the top of a mountain off in the distance, behind other mountains, that was covered in snow. We're talking a serious mountain. Mount Erciyes. It is a 12,000ft tall extinct volcano that according to one Roman historian provides a view from the top of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It was certainly the tallest thing I have ever seen from the ground, and I was 70km away from it.
Saturday morning we started the day off right with some sweet panoramic views, I bought some linen pants to wear at home, and was given a nice little Nazar bead by one of the shopkeeps for speaking Turkish with him. Then we headed down toward the Fairy Chimneys, proper. Peribacaları are what the Turks call the stone formations caused by the erosion of the metamorphic rock that covers the region. They have a few main shapes, which you can see in my pictures eventually. We wandered as far into this particular site as we could given the time we had, and managed to get away from everybody else and explore. I also managed to pee in the Anatolian wilderness! An Eagle Scout's dream. The whole place was nuts. People carved houses out of the Fairy Chimneys hundreds, if not a thousand years ago, and many people still live in them today. Some of them even have satellite dishes. I was warned that there were scorpions around, but I luckily didn't see one. If I had, that sonofabitch would have been dead quicker than he could have said "Merhaba." I hate spiders, and scorpions are like the Megazord of the arachnid family. There is absolutely no need for pincers and a stinging tail. None. That is just excessive, like a laser sight on a shotgun.
I have to say, the weather was incredible. I got some sun, naturally, but on Friday it didn't get higher than 72 degrees or so because it was cloudy. Saturday it might have been 80, and Sunday too, but it wasn't humid at all. That was especially handy at the first canyon we visited, where there were probably 300 steps to get in and out. So many steps, in fact, that the Turks all took a cigarette break before attempting them. Everywhere we went involving rocks and the outdoors had variable amounts of climbing, depending on how much fun you wanted to have. It was a bit more manageable for me, with my fear of heights, because instead of sheer rock faces they were sloped steeply instead. It makes a difference, for some reason. After checking out the Fairy Chimneys near Üçhisar, we headed to a halı, or Turkish rug, studio. This place was fancy. Today most of the rugs for sale in Istanbul are made in factories in China, but when they aren't, they are usually made by young girls and women. They usually develop arthritis and eye problems at an early age due to the meticulous detail and knot typing required. This studio, probably one of the more expensive in Turkey, was staffed by women between 20-40 years old. Each had in front of them a loom and a patter to work off of. The owner gave us a presentation on the particularities of Turkish halı rugs versus the Chinese ripoffs and everyone else. It's all about the knot you use, the material you use, and the material that the rug's "skeleton" is made out of. Also, knots per square centimeter are crucial. Their rugs have 400 knots of silk per square centimeter. That means for a rug with the area of 1 square meter, you have 4 million knots. To complete that, it takes one woman working every day an entire YEAR. Their rugs, accordingly cost a shit ton of money. The smallest ones were anywhere between 6,000-10,000 TL. The big ones, fuck. He showed us some in his showroom (after plying us with free wine) that were 100,000+ TL. They were gorgeous, but the highlight of the display were his rug hauling henchmen, each dressed in matching denim shirts and jeans, and each six and a half feet tall and built like Abe Lincoln. We joked that he probably made them himself and calls them "The Twins." While people were looking at the rugs and contemplating not buying them, this gorgeous woman who worked at the studio as a sales rep came over and started talking to me in Turkish, and then when she asked if it was a hard language, I told her German was harder, and then we started speaking German. And then we got married.
Saturday night was the night of violent illness, but despite that I still went to the Türk Gecesi, or Turk night, with the group, and paid 30 TL for an open bar and unlimited appetizers, of which I had none. No drinks, no food. I just watched the dancing and fought back the onslaught of lord knows what. One of the dancers was hotter than hot, she was hot Hot HOT! Anyway, I could write like 10 different papers about that event. It was the epitome of Orientalism (excluding perhaps outright colonization). It was completely objectifying, especially the belly dancing that came later. Granted, I appreciate the belly dancing for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the bellies. Their muscle control is enviable from a martial arts standpoint, too. Anyway, I married the hottest of the dancers. Outside of the restaurant (where I went to get some air) I could see hundreds of stars. It wasn't the thousands I was hoping for, but it was certainly an improvement over Istanbul. All the Turkish women in our group expressed concern that I wasn't enjoying myself at the Türk Gecesi, but I explained that I was ill. They all were really nice about it. I guess it's not taboo to say diarrhea here, because they were all asking me about it. Hell, maybe they LIKE talking about it. Wouldn't that be fucked up? After we got back, I spent the night in the bathroom, listening to Turkish pop songs on the music video network. One of the songs was a really offensive song about a woman who decided that she wanted to make this guy's food for him and wipe the sweat off his brow and pamper him and obey him. Maybe that's what made me sicker. That and some bad meat.
Sunday I felt a lot better, but refrained from eating much of anything besides some French Fries. We went to the Göreme Open Air Museum, which is kind of the über-touristy spot in the region, but also a fascinating place full of old churches and dwellings. There are pigeon dwellings carved into the cliffs all over the region, and at Göreme, Murat told us that one reason was that the pigeon eggs were used to make the paint for the frescos in the old churches. Most of the paintings were actually really bad, like a five year-old did them, but some were fantastic. The fantastic ones were not done in simple red paint. I mean, the bad ones were REALLY bad. But think about it, the people who carved houses on cliffs out of solid rock were probably not the most graceful people on earth, and certainly could be expected to be a bit rough-handed. While we were there we paid homage to "Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam" by taking some pictures holding up rocks and punching Michael. When people walked past we explained what was going on, and they laughed. Everybody knows the movie here. Before Göreme, though, we hit up a pottery plant. Same deal as the rug place. Give us tea and try and get us to buy shit. We watched a guy make a pot. It was really cool, actually. One of the salesmen sounded like that guy in "Casablanca" that gets arrested. He was creepy as fuck. He kept bugging me and saying he'd give me half-price on anything in the store. His eyes were bloodshot and I wanted to leave.
After Göreme, we hit the road back to Istanbul. Along the way, we stopped at the Tuz Gölü and got a chance to walk in it, etc. It was hot there, because the whole beach was salt crystals reflecting the sun at me. I chatted with Murat and Fırat about movies involving the earth being destroyed. It was pleasant. On the ride back, we watched a movie called "Ottoman Republic," which operated on the premise that Atatürk died as a boy, and Turkey never happened. It started off funny, but like many Turkish movies, it became serious and nationalistic. The plot involved the Ottoman Empire remaining an American mandate, and the Sultan being the puppet of the Americans, who were the villains. At one point, one of the Princes Islands was going to be given to Greece (a very clear appeal to current nationalist sentiments, because there is a Greek Orthodox monastery there that Turkey needs to re-open if they want into the EU). At another point, the Sultan gives his support to the resistance movement and is promptly forced to abdicate. The movie ends sadly, and with the Sultan saying "If only there could have been a strong leader, a hero to liberate us from the beginning." Then it cuts back to Salonica in 1888, as it did at the beginning, and showed little boy Atatürk getting back up (he fell out of a tree at the beginning). Some of the Turks on the bus were actually crying. WTF. It was so stupid. I asked one of the guys my age what he thought, and he called it a lot of nonsense. Of course, he later told me he doesn't drink and that he lives in Eyüp, which is a really conservative religious neighborhood near Fatih. So maybe he doesn't like the Atatürkism that was prevalent in the film.
But to be fair, the second movie was NATIONAL TREASURE DUBBED INTO TURKISH. Yes! It's so good. It provided a nice counterpoint to the Turkish nationalism, but did so with a plot and special effects. Very nice! It ended just as we reached Istanbul. The trip back lasted a lot longer than the trip there, since it was during the day. We left at 2:00pm and got back at midnight. We walked from where the bus dropped us to Taksim and caught two cabs. I told the drivers very specifically how I wanted to go back to campus, and he started to disobey me and I was like "Didn't I say to go from Beşiktaş?" And he was like "Beşiktaş?" As if he was going to go a quicker way. My ass. I know exactly where he was going to take us. Fucker. Anyway, we got back without being screwed, and now I begin the long process of adding photos to Flickr. I highly recommend anyone who ever comes to Turkey comes to Cappadocia. It was the perfect weekend trip. Gorgeous, interesting, full of history. Just don't eat bad meat.
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ReplyDeletealso, just received TS clearance!!!!!!!!
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