Category Archives: Diary

Circumstances have conspired against my routine of blogging about one destination on the bus ride to the next. The scheduled bus trip from Goreme to Istanbul was a 12 hour ordeal, not in the original plan but made necessary because the Istanbul railway station burned down and the powers that be decided to replace it with a hotel. The Art Student and I, and two others of our little band, chose to spend a little extra and fly. So no overnight haul for this blogger, no blogging on the road! But here I am, a little late, still on the iPad, but this time in the spaces where the Art Student lingers longer than I do in Istanbul’s many galleries.

Taking up where I left off: a caravanserai is not, as you may think, a collection of ornate, tent-like structures. The one we stopped at, at least, is a fortress-like affair, with high solid walls, room for scores of camels inside its walls, a space for a substantial market, a mescit (a word used these days for the prayer room at an airport, but then for something much grander that served the same purpose). Two huge dogs lay about in the cool, dark rooms, but in response to our touristic invasion moved to the main entrance, where they took up the stance of lion guardians, languishing in the heat.

A little longer in the bus, passing gently undulating summer-golden grassland, and then almost without warning we were in Cappadocia.

This has to be one of the weirdest places on earth, not just because of the rock formations – resulting, we were told, from three volcanoes filling the space they enclosed with different kinds of lava, so that as the softer rock was eroded, strange, layered cones of harder rock were exposed, to erode in their turn creating what the tourist trade calls ‘fairy chimneys’ and geologists call ‘hoodoos’ – but because of the way the human, built environment and the natural environment accommodate each other.

We went for a long walk – the Rose Trail – among rocks that have doors and windows carved into them, and everywhere niches that may have held lamps or candles (our guide said not, and there was no sign of blackening, so if it happened it was long enough ago for all traces to have washed away, but what else could they have been for?). In the town of Goreme, where we stayed three nights, there are similar pre-ancient niches, and also some broken Greek pillars, some Ottoman script, and many hotels and restaurants wholly or partly carved out of the rock.

Near Goreme is the Open Air Museum, whose rocks contain Christian churches with wonderfully preserved frescoes from the tenth century CE, especially the ‘Dark Church’ which was discovered comparatively recently and so escaped the depredations of devout Muslim visitors who scratched out the faces in many of the other caves.

It’s a mesmerising case of the natural environment and the built environment blending, and maintaining the blend over millennia of cultural and technological change.

As well as walking and gawking, which is what this place demands, all 13 of us had dinner in the home of a beaming woman in Turkish headscarf, named Fatma. The home had a blessing in Ottoman script over the main door, and its rooms reached back into the rock. The dinner was delicious home-cooked food, which I realised I had been craving. When Fatma produced a display board of jewellery she had crocheted, she didn’t have to do any hard selling to have a number of the women enjoying themselves thoroughly trying things on and buying.

In Cappadocia we also visited Derinkuyu, an underground city where early Christians and others before them hid from persecution and attack. We dined on our last evening, just the four of us who had taken the plane option, at the Top Deck Cave Restaurant, which is Trip Adviser’s top rated restaurant in Goreme. We could see why.

I didn’t go on a hot air balloon trip, partly because of the expense, partly because I was feeling a bit off and couldn’t face a 4 am rising, and partly, if truth be told because of Les Murray’s mean, class-envy poem about a hot air balloon accident (I don’t remember its name, and I’m embarrassed to be influenced by it). Those of our group who did go said it was marvellous and had spectacular video to show.

We said our final goodbyes in Goreme as the rest of them set off for the bus, then we saw most of them again when we arrived in Istanbul next morning, four hours after them, and said our final, final goodbyes. It was a lovely, exuberant group. Unlike other Intrepid groups I’ve travelled with, more than half were under 30. Of the over 30s, one was a Unitarian minister, who had a similar fascination with Christian theology to mine, though she was more learned than I am. And three of us – the Art Student and I and one other – were friends. One of the young adults was a blogger, though I think we both felt it would be weird to read each other’s blogs during the trip (his is at shootingtravellers.wordpress.com, and I plan to follow it now). It was a great mix. The Art Student and I had a great time, and now we’re on our own for another ten days or so.

(Three of the photos in this post were taken by the Art Student. The fourth was taken by a friend on the Art Student’s fabulous new camera.)

Today is a travel day: three hours in a hired bus that took just the 13 of us, then an hour or so in a vast bus station in Antalya and five hours in local transport (to use Intrepid’s language), so ample time to type this up in pages on the iPad, to be uploaded next time we encounter WiFi. You can do lots of things by holding down the iPad’s screen keys, but in Turkish, though you can get ç, ö and ü, you can’t give g a little crescent hat or s a cedilla. So I hope Kas will forgive me for spelling it with a naked s, to rhyme with mass rather than bash.

We arrived in Kas two days ago in the late morning, and had time for a short orientation walk and lunch before heading off on a boat to spend a little more than 24 hours on the water. It’s a friendly town: while a couple of us were hanging about before lunch an almond vendor offered us each a single nut, with no hint of pressure to buy. It’s a culturally diverse town: the midday call to prayer summoned an overflow crowd to the little mosque near the main square where bare-kneed and -shouldered women caused no stir at all; the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo, known in Turkish as Meis, looks to be within swimming distance, and people from there shop in Kas – I heard a lot of yasou in the street, among Turks. It’s a town that wears its antiquities lightly: a broken Lycian sarcophagus stands catty-corner to a carpet shop on one intersection and the small Lycian theatre a short walk out of town has been restored and, we’re told, is used for performances.

But all but one of us – that one being the Art Student, who is vulnerable to acute motion sickness and chose to enjoy a day of solitude – were out of there before we had time to take in anything much of all that, chugging away from the sweltering land onto the cool, clear Mediterranean.

We dropped anchor and swam. We set off again. We lazed around on our day beds. If we used every available space there was just room for the twelve of us, plus the captain and single crew member–cook, to lie down above deck.

We visited a shallow cave where people had hidden from pirates in the second century of the current era. We dropped anchor and swam again, in a sheltered area where, according to Burak (our Intrepid Leader) pirates and war fleets had been anchoring for millennia. We had delicious food for dinner. We resisted the captain’s urgings to go to something called the pirate bar, where sometimes hundreds of Aussies sit around drinking. Those of our group who drank were quite happy to do it in our tiny group of mostly-Aussies. The captain went off by himself, slightly crestfallen at his lack of company and, we guessed, lack of commission. We then lay down beneath the stars in the kind of proximity that smacked of childhood sleepovers, ready to be lulled to sleep by the gentle undulations of the sea.

It was not to be. Of the 20 or so boats anchored in this space, ours was the closest to the pirate bar. I had been worried that my snoring would disturb my fellow travellers. In fact, as I was one of perhaps three who managed to go to sleep before the relentless thumping pirate music stopped AT THREE IN THE MORNING, there were plenty of witnesses to my snoring, but no one complained of it. I woke up to a stunningly beautiful sunrise and slipped quietly into the water for a dip, blissfully unaware that just about everyone else was about to greet the day in moods ranging from unmitigated fury to exuberant outrage. My favourite line was, ‘Finally it stopped, and I’d just got to sleep when the f**kin sun started shining in my face!’ of course, the captain had told us he would put up a shade to the east, but either he’d forgotten about that when he climbed back on board (an event many people attested to have heard), or he added to his earlier feats of poor judgement and assumed that anyone who wasn’t interested in the Pirate Bar would obviously want to rise with the day.

We swam, we lazed, we read our books (Jack Kerouak, Jo Nesbo, Jane Austen, Anna Funder, Bruce Beaver), we listened to one another’s wailing and gnashing of teeth, we ate beautiful food for breakfast, we swam again, and the mood generally improved.

Our one landfall was the village of Kaleköy, formerly part of the ancient Lycian city of Simena, where some of us climbed to an castle–museum with a tiny little theatre and a spectacular view, a whole swathe of Lycian sarcophagi, and just outside its gate some excellent ice cream ‘made by Mama’. After a little swim, we chugged across to the facing island of Kekova, where as we approached the scattered rocks on the hillside resolved into the remaining walls of this part of the ancient city. Earthquakes in the third and fifth centuries CE (but don’t quote me) had destroyed the city, sinking most of it.

We anchored one last time, ate delicious food for lunch. One of us let the captain know we were generally unhappy about being parked so close to the noise the previous night, and he seemed to be genuinely surprised. We swam some more, even did a little synchronized swimming and competition diving, and headed for solid land, where the Art Student’s dream of sitting and drawing in blissful solitude had been thwarted by extreme heat (what a difference it makes to be out on the water!) and a lack of a shady place near drawable things.

I don’t know who the Lycians were. Was the unfinished temple at Erice in Sicily theirs? Can Baruk be right that the squabbling relationship between Zeus and Hera in Greek mythology is a vestigial reminder of the long-forgotten uneasy blending of the goddess-centered Lycian and the male-dominated Hellenic cultures? Whatever. It seems like most visitors to this part of their ancient domain just want to drink alcohol and listen to loud music.

Ephesus – Efe in Turkish – is pretty much all,about antiquity. We arrived in nearby Selçuk the evening and went for a stroll to a huge field strewn with pediments, capitals and an occasional intact column, with a pool of stagnant water taking up perhaps a third of the area. This was once the Temple of Artemis, one of wonders of the ancient world. A solitary man trailed us, repeatedly offering a Jacob’s ladder of postcards for one Turkish lira. The stroll also took in the fort-like church of St John. The story is that it was here that St John the Evangelist brought the Virgin Mary, and here that her Assumption into Heaven (if you’re a Catholic) or Dormition (if you’re Orthodox) happened. This was all of interest, but my interest, and I don’t think I was the only one of our predominantly Australian group, was more immediately engaged by the storks nesting on pillars and the remains of an ancient aqueduct. We’ve all seen plenty of ruins but storks are fairytale creatures.

A short ride in a van took us to Ephesus early next morning, where we wandered among the best preserved ancient city in Turkey, one group among many being treated to a tourist-rated version of the history. It was odd wandering through these streets, making our way through the roofed and enclosed terrace houses being painstakingly restored by Austrian archaeologists, of what was once an actual town, and realising that this was the local habitation of cultural phenomena that have always been pretty much abstractions to this colonial mind: Diana of Ephesus, the Ephesians of Paul’s epistle, the Amazons, even reputedly the Virgin Mary in old age.

It was incredibly hot among all the marble of Ephesus, and that afternoon we snoozed in our air-conditioned rooms or went to a swimming pool with, I’m told, a fabulous view. I struggled up after a couple of hours to visit the Archaeological Museum, for more wandering among antiquities, among them three statues of the Artemis of Ephesus – that’s the one whose most striking feature is her large number of grapelike breasts, but who also has the signs of the Zodiac around her neck and strings of creatures on her legs. She’s a weird figure, all the weirder for being surrounded by marble statues that are clearly rpresent actual individuals, from a huge head of Emperor Domitian to life-sized busts labelled ‘A man’.

Am I right in thinking that this was the place where the cult of the Virgin Mary had its beginnings? When the Artemis-worshippers arrived here they blended their virginal hunter goddess with the local fertility goddess (Cybele?), so that only here is Artemis /Diana seen as a fertility goddess. Then when Christianity arrived, she transmogrified into the new virgin-mother figure, so the converts to the new religion found ways not to abandon the female principle that had such meaning or them. These are the ruminations of one who was pretty devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary as a Catholic child in Queensland. Them Ephesians sure cast a long shadow.

Of course I’m not the only one to notice that divine women are big in Ephesus. Here’s a snap of an array of them on a stall next to one selling ‘authentic fake watches’ just outside the city exit:

That night, in the comparative cool, we drove to the hill town Sirinçe for dinner. This was a Greek village until the mid 20s ‘population exchange’ in which, as part of a peace settlement after Greece invaded Turkey, something like 1.3 million Greeks and half a million Turks were uprooted and (cough!) returned to their own country. So we visited the remains of the Orthodox Church of St John the Baptist, which is in the process of restoration by a US organisation. The current population inherited vineyards and olive orchards and had to learn from scratch how to tend them. They seem to have done brilliantly – copious. olive oil and brightly labelled wine was for sale.

We had a pleasant dinner. Perhaps it was no coincidence that conversation at my end of the table turned to gender studies. And as we rode down the hill in the dark our driver turned the radio up loud for a Turkish version of Whitney Spears singing ‘I will always love you’.

iPadded on the train to our next destination.