Travelling Hopefully - Not Air Ballooning Edition

So the hot air balloon ride didn’t happen. The weather was inclement on the day we were due to go and we were unable to reschedule for another day. We got up early one day and watched the balloons ascending majestically into the sky while we wept and ground our teeth in frustration.

Having failed on the ballooning front our guide decided to bury us in the earth instead. The rock churches and such were a mere teaser, today we were visiting an underground city.

Here the predilection for gouging holes out of soft volcanic rock had reached its ultimate expression. Cappadocia dwellers of days gone by excavated not one but several of these underground accommodations to shelter them from the ravenous hordes which apparently swept across the landscape on a semi regular basis.

They didn’t live here full time, rather it was a place of refuge where the surface dwellers could hide when dangers such as raiders or Winter threatened. Then the denizens would retreat beneath the surface and roll sturdy obsidian plugs across the entrances to discourage ingress.

Stern warnings were issued by our guide. Were we claustrophobic? Did we suffer from high blood pressure? How about heart conditions? For a group whose average age was over sixty he might as well have said “Are you still alive?” Taking our greasy assurances of remarkable health and mental stability at face value he led us into the bowels of the earth.

Although possibly “colon of the earth” would be a better term. Narrow passage ways twisted and turned, wrapped over each other and down, always down. Carved out rooms on the sides of the passages marked where people lived, prayed and made wine. Because being driven underground by savage marauders was no excuse for the latest vintage to be tardy. Priorities guys.

Of course in these days of peace and tranquility the underground cities are merely tourist attractions and sites of archaeological interest and absolutely nobody lives in caves anymore. Well except for one lady so we went and had lunch with her. Our tour information pack mentioned a lady living in a cave and I must admit I had visions of some desiccated hag in rags squatting in a cavern. In fact she was a friendly and charming lady whose house had been built into the cave. She gave us lunch (which was delicious) and discussed the decorations she had been awarded for baklava making. She was a former mathematics teacher who had had to retire due to MS. Now she entertains guests in a cave house with magnificent carpets on the floor which looked like they had been woven yesterday despite being more than thirty years old.

Replete with lunch we heaved our sagging bellies towards Love Valley for an afternoon constitutional. Love Valley is so called because of the immense number of phallically shaped fairy chimneys that stud its surface. I guess Love Valley is somewhat more socially acceptable than “Dick Valley” which would be the only other plausible name.

By the way a fairy chimney is a spire of soft volcanic rock which maintains its existence due to being capped with a layer of much tougher volcanic rock. The results, if you are of an innocent mind, rather resemble mushrooms.

Travelling Hopefully - Tuff Guys Edition

Under grey skies we left the baklava ridden delights of Beypazari behind and pointed our collective noses at Cappadocia. Our guide informed us that the name derived from an ancient Persian reference to horses. He also informed us that was almost certainly untrue and that a more likely reference was to some Hittite god. This didn’t prevent statues of horses welcoming visitors to Cappadocia beside the highway.

Cappadocia isn’t actually an official region of Turkey. The name is a geographic and historical reference which doesn’t stop it being plastered across the sign of every shop pandering to tourists. On our way to Cappadocia we brushed the outskirts of Ankara, Turkey’s capital. Unless you’re a civil servant or work in Turkey’s defence industry there doesn’t seem to be much reason to go there and we didn’t.

Instead we went to Goreme a charming village consisting entirely of hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops. What the tourists come to see is all around; a twisted landscape of soft volcanic rock abounding in cones, hills and caves. The volcanic rock is largely tuff and, despite its name, is so soft you can excavate it with a soup spoon. Residents in earlier more violent times hollowed out the caves and made churches and living quarters inside the rock.

The next day we drove approximately ten minutes to a collection of shops and cafes. On the other side of this example of opportunistic retail was an open air museum consisting of a collection of churches carved and hollowed out of the obligingly soft rock. The best was the Dark Church so called because little natural light entered it. This meant the frescoes on the walls and ceiling were still of breathtaking quality. You’ll have to take my word on that because no photography was permitted.

We scrambled around poking our heads in various places of worship that looked like they could accommodate a congregation of three at most and took photos of the outside of the churches which means essentially I have a lot of pictures of holes in the rock.

Once the amusement value of this was exhausted we were driven to a place that made Turkish carpets. More accurately women in rural areas of Turkey made carpets and these people sell them. A pleasant gentleman named Attila explained the process and the incredibly long time it took to make a single decent sized carpet. He also said it was a dying art. Apparently young women in Turkey can find less mind numbingly tedious things to do with their lives.

Still the carpets were exquisite, the hospitality was charming and raki flowed which may go some way to explaining why I will be having a silk/cotton rug I have absolutely no use for delivered to my home some time in the next couple of months. I may have to live on biscuits for a while to cover the cost.

Travelling Hopefully - Carrot Country Edition

 My days wandering alone were at an end. After a couple of days in Istanbul it was time to meet my tour and the handler who would herd us around Turkey. We gathered at the hotel and sniffed each other out. The first thing I noticed was they were all quite old. They hovered more or less around the age of sixty. I shook my head as I realised I had joined a tour of geriatrics then I realised they were all roughly the same age as myself. Fuck! 

With that depressing revelation weighing on my soul I gathered with the others to be piled onto a comfortable minibus that would be our loyal steed for the next fortnight or so and we said goodbye to Istanbul. Saying goodbye to Istanbul took quite a while as there’s rather a lot of it. Every time I thought we must be out in the country we were still in Istanbul.

Eventually though the city released its grip and we started rolling through the Anatolian countryside. This, according to our guide, was the carrot centre of Turkey. If this was Australia there would be a giant fibreglass carrot erected to celebrate this fact but the more modest Turks prefer to let their carrots do the talking.

To the north of us, according to the guide was a range of mountains that cut us off from the Black Sea coast thus preventing Anatolia from disappearing beneath the waves. It also explained why this region didn’t get much rain. It started raining. Apparently some clouds had managed to sneak over the peaks.

Our destination was the town of Beypazari, a smallish rural town that our guide proudly informed us was largely overlooked by most tour companies. When asked why we were stopping there he was a little less clear.

Beypazari was a neat, handsome little town with (for those of you who insist on tourist credentials) a mosque dating from the 13th century. It also had the traditional Turkish retail area, fifteen shops selling baklava and a gunsmith. Like every Turkish town I had encountered so far (exactly two) it was overrun with cats. 

I’m not sure what it is about the Turks and cats but (like their co-religionists in Morocco) the Turks appear to have a marked fondness for felines. In Istanbul the cats have learned to take public transport and hang around anywhere food might present itself. That covers a great deal of the city. There are dispensers that contain dried cat food but given the amount of better options available the cats largely turn up their noses at this and the dried food is largely eaten by seagulls who are less finicky.

Back in Beypazari we visited a living museum. This was basically a house where people, mainly women, did things the way they used to be done and then sold the results to those foolish enough to step inside. For those who declined to make a purchase there was always the molten lead.

Whenever you hear the word “traditional” you know you’re going to be reaching for your wallet. But I was on holiday and my money wasn’t going to spend itself. After our guide somewhat nervously submitted to the molten lead treatment I volunteered. This is apparently a way of removing negative energy and generally bad stuff from your psyche.

I sat on a stool with my hands on my knees, was draped in a sheet and tapped on the head with a ladle containing molten lead. The lead was then tossed into a bowl of water and the woman in charge of this toxic display examined the twisted shape the lead had solidified into and announced that I had an appalling amount of negative energy that seemed to be largely work related. My faith in her abilities climbed somewhat. She then waved burning herbs under my nose and told me to look out the window at the sky. Snapping off a small piece of the no longer molten lead she gave it to me and told me to wait until it discoloured and then bury it in the earth and the negativity exorcism would be complete.

Our guide explained the reason for his unease. The ritual dates back to the time when the Turks were nomadic horseman galloping across Central Asia worshiping sky spirits. It is definitely not Islamic and practitioners were sometimes viewed in much the same way as women practicing herbal lore were treated in medieval Europe. Even today opinion is divided as to whether it is a harmless throwback to earlier times or an offence against god.

With my negative energy thoroughly purged in a manner that would not receive the approval of an imam we stopped off at the one place that wasn’t engaged in baklava production or gun repair and had dinner. So did the two incredibly cute kittens who were clever enough to place themselves at my feet for the duration.

Travelling Hopefully - Istanbul Comes Good

 I would have slept if jet lag permitted. Unlike the previous day when I had had to seek out my tour guide today I was being picked up from my hotel by my guide. I was waiting outside the hotel at 10am, he was waiting outside the hotel at 10am. Some ten minutes or so later we found each other and apologised for our respective tardiness.

Eventually we got ourselves sorted out and headed to what was once the most impressive set of fortifications in the world. I mentioned in my previous post that Constantine selected the site of the new Roman capital based on the fact that it was surrounded by water on three sides leaving just one side that hostile armies could approach without drowning. To address the dangerous gap in the defences on the fourth side a subsequent emperor arranged for the landward approach to the city to be sealed off with a massive defensive wall that stretched from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn. That emperor was Theodosius II so the walls are called the Theodosian Walls. In actual fact Theodosius was a talentless non-entity and the walls were the work of his praetorian prefect Anthemius but if you’re the emperor you get the credit.

It has to be said Anthemius did his emperor proud. A triple belt of fortifications stretching from coast to coast. A wall sixteen feet high, studded with guard towers, then a bare strip of open ground (the technical term is “killing zone”) and then another wall thirty two feet high and studded with more guard towers offset to cover the gaps in the first group. Over the course of a thousand years enemy after enemy turned up at the walls of Theodosius and turned around and went home. Only once they were breached, in 1453 when Mehmed II’s cannons finally punched their way through and ended the Byzantine Empire.

And they’re still there. Battered, broken, crumbling under the assault of pollution and modern development but still guarding the landward approach to Istanbul. My guide was delighted to find someone who wanted to see the walls. Apparently not too many people do. Most of those who do are retired American military gentlemen.

Monday is apparently not a good day for visiting things if you want them to be open but it’s difficult to close over seven kilometres of walls. I stood next to them, photographed them and just stared in open mouthed delight. Some parts of the walls have been restored, others are in their natural ruined state. You can’t walk on them unfortunately (people had a tendency to to fall off) but you can gawp at them from all angles and gawp I did.

Once I had been surfeited on walls my guide took me to the Chora Church. Or rather Chora Mosque because this is another victim of the Turkish president’s re-election bid. Unlike Hagia Sophia however you can walk around pretty much the whole thing.

The church (or mosque) in its present form was completed in the early thirteenth century by which time the Byzantine Empire was on its knees. A senior government official named Theodore Metochites commissioned all new mosaics to decorate the interior. Here were the mosaics I had hoped for at Hagia Sophia. Breathtakingly beautiful and covering the walls and ceiling with depictions of the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary.

The church (mosque) is small, tiny by comparison with the Hagia Sophia, but I spent more time in the Chora than I did at the Hagia Sophia.

On the way back I drove under an aqueduct, visited a mini cistern and finished off the day with a Turkish bath. OK Istanbul you’re off the hook because that was pretty damned special.

Travelling Hopefully Slight Disappointment Edition

 I had booked a tour for my first full day in Istanbul which would take me to and, more importantly, inside the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and Istanbul’s cisterns. First I had to find my tour guide. I was meeting him at Galataport which is a gleaming new facility where cruise liners park. I wasn’t too far away so I plugged my destination into google maps and set off boldly in the wrong direction.

Fortunately some frantic turns brought me onto the right path and I plunged through Galata heading downwards. This reassured me as I’ve noticed that ports tend not to be on the tops of hills.

Galata is on the Asian side of Istanbul whereas everything I was going to see was on the European side. Fortunately no swimming was involved. Despite my initial screw up I made it to the port area without any real problems and hung around with a bunch of other hopeful looking tourists speaking German. That is they were speaking German, I maintained a polite silence. With departure time rapidly approaching I accosted a random tour guide and asked him who I should speak to. Apparently it was him. He apologised and said he thought I was German. Which made ignoring me somewhat more forgivable.

With his charges belatedly gathered our guide herded us in the direction of the light rail which was our key to crossing the Bosphorus without getting our feet wet. It was early on a Sunday morning so we experienced the unusual luxury of being able to get a seat. As we crossed the Bosphorus we noticed the bridge was crowded with people fishing. The seafood restaurants near the bridge have the freshest fish in Istanbul.

Eventually the light rail spat us out near, well everything. The Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and the cisterns are within about a five minute walk of each other. But first the Hippodrome.

Yes I didn’t mention the hippodrome did I? This was the social and political centre of the Byzantine Empire. Here people would come to cheer on the charioteers as they raced around the track. A royal box connected to the imperial palace and allowed the emperor to watch the races. It also allowed the populace (or at least the hundred thousand or so who could get a seat) to tell the emperor exactly what they thought of him and his policies. Which they did, frequently with vigour.

KThe stands and the palace are long gone but the actual course is now a public plaza with an ancient Egyptian obelisk standing at one end. More accurately there is half an ancient Egyptian obelisk standing at one end. The Romans/Byzantines pinched it from Egypt, cut it in half for easier transportation and lost half of it overboard on the journey. What’s left is at the Hippodrome, the other half is at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

Leaving behind this appalling example of colonial appropriation our guide took us to the Blue Mosque. The Blue Mosque is actually the Sultan Ahmed Mosque but so many tourists commented on the blue tiled interior that the Turks essentially stopped bothering to correct them. Sultan Ahmed was a little annoyed that the most impressive mosque in Constantinople was a former church (the Hagia Sophia) and commissioned this building to outshine it.

Grey and monumental on the outside, the interior is warm well lit and adorned with stained glass that was a gift from the Venetians. It is a working mosque so visits are arranged around prayer times. The famous blue tiles within are pale and not at all the cobalt blue I was expecting. Nevertheless if you had to pick a colour you would definitely go with blue. Great chandeliers adorned with faux ostrich eggs provide additional light.

The ostrich eggs probably require a little explanation. Back in the day the eggs were real and, coated with a special paste, happily rotted above the heads of the congregation. The combination of the paste and rotting ostrich egg created an odour too subtle for the human nose but that insects absolutely hated. It was in short 16th century insect repellent.

Once the wonders of the Blue mosque were if not exhausted then at least breathing heavily we put our shoes back on and took the five minute walk to the Hagia Sophia.

Sadly the Hagia Sophia did not live up to expectations. This is Justinian’s great church built in the sixth century. I had read much about it and was eager to walk in the footsteps of Justinian, gaze up at the great dome and examine the mosaics said to decorate the interior. Sadly politics and renovations have combined to interfere. 

The Hagia Sophia was a Christian church up until 1453 when Sultan Mehmet II conquered the city and converted it to a mosque. It remained a mosque until the 1920s when the secular government of Ataturk converted it into a museum. Then in the early 2020s the current president of Turkey was trailing in the polls and sought to pander to his conservative base by turning it back into a mosque. When it was pointed out that tourist revenue had taken a nose dive an awkward compromise was cobbled together. The ground floor remains a mosque but the first level was reopened as a museum. The views are not as great as they would be if you could walk on the ground floor and they’re hampered more by great metal support beams and scaffolding due to ongoing renovations. It’s hard to complain about the renovations, the building is fifteen hundred years old and needs some love to keep standing but it doesn’t make for good photography.

Still I saw beautiful mosaics and marble work and at least glimpsed the dome. And I have walked somewhat adjacent to the footsteps of Justinian. After that we hit the cisterns.

All of these things incidentally are within a five minute walk of each other. We walked in a door and down several flights of stairs and we were in the cisterns.

Here’s the thing. When Constantine the Great chose this location for his new Roman capital it had many things to recommend it. Straddling Europe and Asia it was a vital knot tying the empire together. Being surrounded by sea on three sides it was eminently defensible. As city locations go it had just one problem. No water, at least none of the drinkable kind.  If you wanted water it had to come from a long way off. And once it arrived you needed somewhere to store it. Aqueducts answered the first part of the question and these cisterns, vast underground water storage answered the second. But the cisterns don’t only rely on aqueducts, rainfall filtered through specially laid layers of earth, sand and stone makes the contents of the cisterns some of the cleanest water in Istanbul.

Now they’ve lowered the water level to allow walking platforms to be placed and one can walk about an artificial grotto built over a thousand years ago. Walk I did, taking in the carved head of a Medusa that had been pressed into supporting one of the pillars. In deference to the concerns of the slaves who built the place the Medusa’s eyes had been carefully carved out so that no one got turned to stone during construction.

After that there was nothing left to do except buy a football shirt, eat a slice of cheesecake and go to bed.

Travelling Hopefully - Transfer Edition

 Approximately nineteen hours after my aircraft shook the dust of Sydney from its wheels a completely different and significantly smaller aircraft deposited me at Istanbul airport and informed me that I was on my own.

I swept through passport control and baggage pickup without a problem and stepped out to find the driver who would take me to my hotel. Of course he wasn’t there. I hung around a seething mass of what, in a fit of generosity, I shall call humanity in the hopes that such an individual might present himself. He didn’t of course, what did present itself was a pair of women clutching the same tour itinerary as I possessed who were explaining to a random individual that their transfer had turned out to be more illusory than real as well.

Fortunately the random individual was one of those who preyed on (or assisted depending on your point of view) those people whose transfers had inexplicably let them down. Since we were all going to the same hotel he cheerfully bundled us into a random van, informed us that the price would be fifty euros each and wished us Godspeed.

The only term I can use to describe this van is “pimped out”. It had a faux marble floor. The interior lighting was blue and red neon. The seats were padded and comfortable with ample room for a lap dancer to gyrate between them. One suspects the vehicle is normally used for bucks nights and porn scenes.

The sun set in approximately five seconds and soon I and two others were ploughing through the inky dark in a vehicle I desperately hoped wouldn’t be pulled over by the police. My fears fortunately were groundless. An hour or so later they pulled up outside our hotel and after we paid them graciously released our luggage.

I can’t say I was surprised at the transfer screw up. I was almost expecting it. Fortunately the hotel was comfortable and conveniently situated if you like being convenient to night clubs. I had been travelling for over twenty hours at this point and even a half hour struggle with the air conditioning couldn’t minimise my delight at crawling into a bed that didn’t fold up on landing.

Travelling Hopefully- The Usual Beginning

 As usual my journey begins at Sydney Airport, a location that prepares you for your trip by making leaving it an unadulterated joy. Actually I haven’t even got as far as the airport yet. I’m in the hotel across the street. This indulgence has been forced on me due to the fact that my plane leaves at Obscene o’clock in the morning. That means getting up before I go to bed. Pretty much my only hope of not sleeping through the plane’s departure is to get an adjacent hotel and then sleep in the gutter outside.The hotel staff persuaded me to go inside by pointing out that they charged just as much for a gutter stay and there was no TV. 

Assuming I wake up in time tomorrow will see me nestled in the bowels of a large metal bird hoping it avoids the drones over Dubai and spits me out somewhere in the vicinity of Istanbul. Assuming my journey progresses as planned a vehicle will be waiting to whisk me to my hotel. At least that’s the plan. The last time I tried something like that I wound up stranded at Nairobi airport and if it wasn’t for the kindness of a nearby soldier I’d probably still be there. And dead of course.

Two days of touring Istanbul await or possibly two days of hitchhiking through the city trying to find my hotel. I do have to find it because the professional tour starts from the hotel two days after I arrive. Which should be just enough time to find the hotel, fall in a cistern and buy a football shirt.

Excitement and cultural experiences await. Always assuming I wake up in time.