The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

Two weeks.  One country.  Five people.  Three thousand kilometers.  Three pairs of sunglasses lost.  Sunscreen.  Goats.  An excessive number of kebabs.  And as many historical monuments as a land settled for over twelve centuries could throw at us.

If you're into that sort of thing, you can read the diary on your e-reader of choice.

Day One: Trabzon and Sümela Monastery
In which our heros assemble and visit a monastery clinging to the side of a mountain.  Also, impromptu mountain dancing.

Day Two: A Lesson In Turkish Automotive Adventure. Afterwards, Erzurum.
Our heros brave the Turkish roads, heading to the city Erzurum where they find a madrassa, and three kumbats.  They also figure out what a kumbat is.

Day Three: Scavenger Hunts For Car-Bound Tourists.
Driven crazy by boredom, the adventurers play a scavenger hunt in the car.  Spoiler alert:  the winner of this game is this blogger's girlfriend, who always wins everything.

Day Four: Mardin, Too Marvelous.
The heroic travelers venture to the hilltop town of Mardin, overlooking the Mesopotamian plain.  This is pretty marvelous.

Day Five: Urfa, A City Of Pilgrims, A City Of People.
The birthplace of Abraham.  Cannibal fish.  Columns.  A spice market.  What more do you want from your travel writing?  Bears?  Well there are no bears.  Tough luck.

Day Six: Gobekli Tepe To Gaziantep, The Old To The New.
The heros find the oldest temple in the world, and then see a lot of mosaics.  Because they're cool like that.

Days Seven And Eight: Roads. The Decapitated Gods Of Mount Nemrut. More Roads. 
Sunrise over the tomb of a once-great king is sandwiched between a ton of driving.  In an excised scene, the heros are ripped off by a hotelier who looks like a mob boss gone to seed.  But you have to use your imaginations for that, because this scene has been edited away, in favor of the more picturesque bits of travel more appreciable by the masses.  Also, a whimsical ranking of Eastern Turkey.


Day Nine: The Mysteries of Cappadocia, Unanswered and Beautiful.

The province of Cappadocia is incredibly beautiful, and the heroes join other tourists in appreciating this beauty.

 Day Ten: Beneath Cappadocia.
A venture into an underground city leads to a discovery--underground cities are dark and a little scary.  But mostly dark.


Day Eleven: Konya. Rumi. Peace. Tourism.
The city of Konya is a site of pilgrimage and veneration and high school field trips and grumpy old ladies.


Day Twelve: Sunburned Myth: Pamukkale and Aphrodisias.
The heroes venture to two sites of world-heritage-worthy beauty and wonder, and get hideously sunburned in the process.

Day Thirteen: All Inclusive, Wi-Fi Extra.
Taking a break from cultural-minded explorations, the travelers check into an all-inclusive beach resort, where they feel alienated, drink too much, and end up winning a bottle of wine in a contest of stupid tricks, then leave, half-thinking that none of it even happened.

Day Fourteen: The Day Of Ruins. Ephesus And After Ephesus.
Pro-tip:  Ruins described in this section are a metaphor for how the travelers felt after two solid weeks of beauteous sight-seeing.  Also there are real ruins.  The approach of civilization is symbolized by a Starbucks at a road-side strip-mall.

Day Fourteen: The Day Of Ruins. Ephesus And After Ephesus. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day fourteen of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We woke up that morning with headaches, thirsty, feeling like we had just passed through a strange dream where we were honorary citizens of a fairyland where the days were not days and if you ate the food you would loose all ambition and memory….

We checked out of the resort hotel, ripped off the orange wristbands, and then drove fifteen kilometers to the ruins of Ephesus.

Once a city of 250,000 people, one of twelve cities in Ionian League, one of the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation, its Temple Of Artemis one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Ephesus was a great city of antiquity.  Now the great theater is in shambles.  The houses of the citzens are buried in the undistinguished earth.  Only a single pillar of the fantastic temple remains.

Between the parking lot and the ticket office a dusty road was lined with shops selling over-priced trinkets and food.  A man called in the diaphragm-forced monotonous call of street-hawkers “Cold water ice cream fresh orange juice” over and over without ever stopping for breath.  Lines of tourists were pouring out of the site, feeling the late morning heat.  It was hot.  We tried to find shade where we could.

The entrance of Ephesus will be familiar to anyone who has visited a Roman ruin.  There were milestones, grave stele, sarcophagi with chunks taken out of them like they’d been gnawing, and the unmatched ancient detritus of an old city—mantles, columns, capitals, bricks and the like, made into semi-organized piles for the archaeologists to sift through at some point in the future.

As my friends looked at the informational plaques in front of a small collection of Roman milestones, I studied the other tourists.  Most were down the path, out of the ruins.  They looked drained and tired, done with the ancient ruins behind them, done with grave stele and informational plaques, done with the sun, waving brochures in front of their faces to cool themselves, marching on, their only hope the tour bus waiting in the parking lot and maybe a ridiculously-priced fresh orange juice from the man in the tourist bazaar to give them a little refreshment.  Is this what we travel for, I wondered?  To limp back to our hotel rooms with empty faces and cameras full of photos?  I saw nobody who could be mistaken for happiness.  I saw no sense of epiphany.—No openness in people’s eyes.  No excitement or curiosity or wonder.  I just saw faces sweaty, red and bloated from the heat.

I remembered seeing a tour group motto: ‘Create Your Best Memories.’  And maybe that’s what we were doing at Ephesus.—We were making memories.  It didn’t matter that now we were hot, tired, and uninspired.  I didn’t matter that at the moment we felt like a piece of wrinkled laundry hanging on a clothesline in the hot sun.  It mattered that we had seen the lost grandeur of a once-bustling city, and held that image in our minds, and that later in the comfort of a dinner party we could tell our friends about it.

Ahead of us on the path was the huge amphitheater, the rows of seats stretching high up the hill.  This was one of the biggest ampitheaters in the ancient world, able to seat 44,000 people.  Now a smattering of sight-seers climbed the rows.  A blue crane framed it, part of the structure covered in scaffolding and mesh.

We went into the theater and my friends fanned out with their cameras drawn, looking for a memorable image,  But the only thing I felt was the profound and rising heat.  I hid in a small shadowy corridor, fanning myself with my hat, watching the other people crawling around in the sun.

The acoustics of the theater are still great, and as we prepared to leave for the next monument, a Korean tour group gathered in the center of what had once been a stage and like that all at once they started to sing.  Their voices were humble and beautiful, carrying clearly up to the others on the higher seats.  “Saranghe,” the song repeated.  “I love you.”

And then it was out of the shade to be returned again to the sweaty sun.  The path was lined with mantles with lines of dentals and egg-and-darts.  Clay plumbing eased its way out of the dry dirt.  Around us was history.  I looked for shade.

The biggest symbol of Ephesus today is the great Library of Celsus, whose magnificent facade faced the east so that early-rising students repairing there to study could make use of the light of the morning sun.  As the rest of the sun-worn tourists meandered up the stairs, I found a pocket of shadow in a depression next to an old wall.  There I crouched and appreciated the library.  Eight columns decorated with almost every effect available to the Roman mason made up the first floor.  Four statues of toga-clad women stood between each pair of columns, representing the virtues, looking out with Roman stoicism at the melting mass of sight-seers below them.  It was wonderful.  I didn’t have to use my imagination to wonder at how the library had once looked.  It had looked like this, with people craning their heads to look at the top—only it was in a bit better repair.

Once we had inscribed enough memories to feel satisfied, we walked to the Terraced Houses, which required the purchase of an extra ticket.

It was worth it, and not just because the complex was covered with a roof that kept the sun off us for long enough that we could feel human again.  The Terraced Houses are a well-excavated stretch pf the rich part of town.  The first house we look at a reconstructed pericourt—an interior courtyard—with a basin, a broken aedicula, the walls hung with plaster stained ochre and yellow, bits of cracked marble tile arranged on boards put on stacked blue milk crates.  Archeologists here are sifting through 120,000 jig-sawed shards of marble floor, trying to piece the court back together again.  A cat prowled its way across the floor—off-limits to humans—looked up at us, and meowed.

The marble wall of the next pericourt had been completed, and it is stunning.  We walked up the terraces, beneath the clear plexiglass walkway mosaics clear in white and black.  On the walls of the houses were stunning frescos in white, maroon and orange, with a drooping vine providing a splash of green.  Heads with lank hair and gaping mouths, ribbons in curls and whorls.  Birds surrounded by flowers, a cupid, a posed Apollo, a room of the nine muses where each panel had a different muse, the paint still fresh after two thousand years.  Two thousand years of burial.  Two thousand years since the artist’s brush touched the wall.  Two thousand years since those rooms were background for human life.

This was a different view of Roman life than the one you could usually see from the monuments and graves.  This was a personal Rome, a Rome of pleasures and daily life and dinner parties.  Staring up at a fine mosaic of a lion and a calf’s head, I could imagine people walking over it, talking about some important Roman thing, nodding, coming to agreement.  In my imagination I filled the rooms with people bathing, playing sleeping, welcoming visitors, arguing, laughing, dreaming.  Some of the walls had been scratched with graffiti from Roman times.  Names, poems, declarations of love.  I wondered what ruins our civilization might lead, and whether future generations would faithfully preserve the scrawls we left on bathroom walls.

When we left the Terraced Houses, the heat was even fuller, and we made our wilted way up the steep climb of the Curestes Street, ignoring the temples and columns that lined our way.  At the top I waited in the shade of a fig tree while my friends looked around the upper half of the city by themselves.  I was too hot, too tired, my head full of too many dreams to look at any more ruins.

-&-

Then the rest of the day was full of driving.  Ephesus was the last big tourist site of our trip, and we felt too tired, too broken to glut ourselves on Pergamon or Troy, both of which lie further north.  We talked, but we really wanted to sleep.  We drove, but we really wanted to go home.  The next day we would board a car ferry and go back to Istanbul, to the city in whose wonders we had worked and slept.  But we weren’t sad.  We had seen beauty, we had seen Turkey, and it was time to be ourselves again, to lay on our couches, open up our books, and forget about the wonders of the past.

-&-

View Larger Map

The next day, on the way to the car ferry, we saw the first signs that we were nearing the great metropolis where we made our home.  A Starbucks in an off-road strip mall.  The first Starbucks of the whole trip.  We pulled in and got lattes.  We were back home.


Liked what you read? You can get the whole series as an e-book.  Buy it for a friend.  Maybe they'll think you're cool.

Day Thirteen: All Inclusive, Wi-Fi Extra. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day thirteen of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We checked into the hotel, and after collecting our money and passports and handing out keycards, the receptionist wrapped orange plastic bands around our wrists with small ceremony.  That was our initiation, even if we failed to realize it.  By virtue of those orange pieces of plastic, we has the right to all the pleasures and indulgences on offer.

The hundreds of people packed into the towering seven-story hotel buildings and the 354 hotel rooms, all were initiates like us, and all were devoted to the simple pleasures of open bars, buffet meals and swimming.  There were five restaurants, snacks in the afternoons from two cafe, a bar where drinks were free until midnight, and a nightclub which we never dared enter.

Our room looked out at the Aegean sea, which lapped hungrily at the 300 meter long strand of private beach bounded by the hotel.  The beds were large and comfy, and beside it next to the button for the beside reading light was a button which cycled through mood lighting:  red, blue, white, green.

Our first night there we spoke with a middle-aged British man at the bar.  It was obvious that he had spent the entire five days of his holiday trying to get the bartender’s attention, loading up on one free drink after another while his wife nervously laughed beside him.  We asked him if he had visited Ephesus, the ancient Greek city not more than ten minutes drive away.  He frowned and said no.  It turned out that he hadn’t left the hotel at all since he got there.  “I travel a lot for my job,” he explained.  “I’m just here to relax.”  I’ll admit it.  I scoffed at him.  Getting trapped here seemed like a moral failing, one that we would be immune to.

People asked us how many weeks we were staying and when we explained that we were only here for a day we got odd looks, like a day wasn’t even a unit of time—like we were mere fever dreams, to pass by harmlessly in the well-slept night.

The first thing we did was get massages.  At this point, it was already noon.  My masseuse covered me with a towel, folding it over piece by piece to lay bare whatever region of my body he was working on.  And it was work that the man was doing.  His forehead glistened with sweat.  He grunted softly with effort as his fingers pressed into the knotted meat of my back, and sighed as he rubbed oil into my sun-dried skin.

The most I moved was to flip over so he could get at my front.  I felt like a commodity, a lifeless, intentionless lump of relaxed material.  I had no will and no responsibilities.  It felt good.

After he finished, I was told to relax.  No problem.  I lay face down on the massage table, my breath slightly choked by the towel plugging up the face hole, but not choked enough to make me worry about it.  My thoughts stilled.  I stayed like that for an indefinite amount of time.

We ate at the buffet, loading our plates too high with salad greens, fried whiting, sardines, olives, curried turkey, pide, cheese, fruit, and cake.  We ate not because we were hungry, but because it was time to eat.  And eating wasn’t exactly a pleasure, it was an oblivion.  We shoveled food into our mouths, not talking, looking at nothing, pausing only to order another beer or refill our water glasses.

Then it was to the swimming pool.  We played in the water, diving down to the bottom of the pool where there were windows looking out on the cafe below and waving at the people.  Time passed in the water.  Then we laid in the shade, reading.  Time passed in the hot shade.

I drank.  It was free, so I drank.  I drank a lot.  I drank more than I had all year.  I drank so much that I couldn’t hope to count how much I drank.  I started at eleven with a beer, and by two I had reached a nervous tipsiness with helps of generous glasses of raki, gin and tonics, and something I ordered by just slurring ‘green drink’ at the bartender.  I managed to maintain this tipsiness until a little bit after dinner, ducking away from my friends to order whiskey and cokes and sucking them down to the ice by the poolside.

Everything was catered to us.  When you left the bar, two staff members stood politely at the door to pour the drink from your glass into a plastic cup so that if in your drunken stupor you dropped your drink, your glass wouldn’t break.  Nothing was denied you.  Extra food, more alcohol in your cocktails, a game of darts, a pillow for the sun-chair.  A tribe of orange-shirted staff called animators prowled the pools and the bar-area throughout the day, rounding people up for games of volleyball and bocce ball, always smiling, always leading people in chants, their eyes glinting with unnatural enthusiasm.

Two things were refused:  time, and the rest of the world.  And these were refused with an evangelical insistence.  There were no clocks anywhere, and the sun hung high and bright in the sky, giving the resort the look of an eternal afternoon.  We had no idea what time it was, how long we had been at the poolside for, how long it was until dinner and then sleep.  And since everything was provided for you at the hotel, why would you need to go anywhere else?  Why would you need to visit the supermarket?  There was a convenience store in the shopping arcade strung between the reception and the main dining room.  Why would you need to see the ruins of the great city of Ephesus down the road?  They were just stones, and here there was life and young women in bikinis.  Why would you need to talk to your friends?  Fun was here, joy was here, contentment was here.

The only thing that you needed to pay for was wifi, and that was only available on the first floor lobby with a pitifully weak signal.  A few men opened black IBM laptops at the circular tables, struggling for a connection.  We told ourselves we would get the internet, check our e-mails, ponder the next leg of our journey.

But we never got around to it.  Wifi would connect us to the outside world, where we could read e-mails from work and talk to our families.  As we settled into our sleepy acceptance of food and drinks and sunlight, the desire we had to talk to anyone else dwindled, flickered, and died.

Like that, we were overcome with the time-blind hedonism of the resort.  It felt like we had been there a week and that we would be there forever—or at least until the end of summer—but we had only been there for eighteen hours, and we would leave the next morning.

-&-

At night, my friend was chosen for a competition.  Boys against girls.  Five a side.  They sat on the stage of the theater, young men and women from all different countries.  The men were drink-worn, wearing sporty clothes and competitive faces.  The girls were in high heels and dresses.  They played a series of games.  A drinking race.  A paper airplane competition.  A game where they raced to blow up balloons and then sit on the balloons to pop them.  A game where they tried to get as many people as possible to stand in a small space.  The games were impossible and absurd, but as soon as the competition started, I was fired up.  I wanted my friend to win.  I cheered.  I sipped from my drink.  The Fabio-haired Animator clapped his hands and chanted “Tempo!  Tempo!” as if it was a magic word, and it felt like a magic word.

The staff would ask me how I was doing and all I could do was shrug.  Of course I was doing good.  I wasn’t working.  I had all my needs catered for me.  How could I suffer from anything?

And when I said this, they would nod like they understood.

But they were at work.  And their work was to cater to the grotesqueries of my pleasure.

There were swarms of waiters in white and black button-up shirts and bow-ties manning the buffets, refilling drinks, cleaning the filthy tablecloths, trying to keep proud expressions on their faces.  There were bartenders forever rushing from one drunk man to another, getting them slowly and profoundly drunk.  There were the Animators, organizing their seven hundredth game of bocce ball, calling out to everyone to have a good time.  This was their work, and I felt like it was awful.  But then my sleepy hunger would lap ay my mind, and I would just lift myself up, hulk myself over to the bar, and order another free drink.  Like that I achieved freedom from worry.


The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

You can also get the whole series as an e-book.