After a night at Gellibolu, we drove up to Eridne on the Greek-Turkish border. The 'western' part of Turkey is quite different, and looks a bit like the land use patterns in France or Germany. Lots of broad acre agriculture with intensive irrigation. Sunflowers, corn and other broad scale crops, different from the small plot farming through most of eastern Turkey.
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| Mosque in Eridne |
Eridne was a capital city prior to Constantinople's ascension. There is a museum in the mosque.
Quite a bottleneck passage for invasions, Greece is 17km to the north-west, Bulgaria is 22km to the north-east.
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| Extensive gardens around Eridne mosque |
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Market under the mosque
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Service? in the mosque
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We stayed for a service. Lots of bowing and iman singing. Strict segregation of the sexes, men down the front, women cloistered at the back.
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| Ceiling of mosque |
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| Museum tableaux |
After Eridne, we made the run down into Istanbul. Driving in Istanbul is always a nightmare. Turkish drivers believe that three cars can easily occupy one lane simultaneously. We found the airport but didn't have a clue where to go. Tried Skyping numerous non-english speakers in Turkish Airways to attempt to locate the cargo office. It being Sunday, we were told to come back Monday.
So we set off to find a hotel near the airport. We must have circumnavigated the airport about 4 times, trying to get to this hotel. Blindly following Google Maps, it led us to a place where the hotel should have been.... but was not! Finally, we parked the car in a lane off the main road, and walked to the hotel. We would never have been able to drive there, it's entrance is right off the expressway.
Next day, it began. Our entry into the Turkish bureaucratic hive mind. We found the cargo terminal, which had about 1000 unlabelled offices. We enquired in several, and found some-one who sketched out the procedure for us: go to the airline to pay entry fee, go to customs to get 'noticed', go to the luggage to get it inspected by customs, go back to customs to be assessed for import duties, collect luggage and leave. Even getting this information took multiple phone calls, visits by our friend to several unlabelled offices, excited discussions that we were not privy to, and lots of hand-waving. We were told we could have an agent do it for us for around USD$100, or we could 'have a go' ourselves. We elected the latter because the money seemed a little steep, in then end, $100 was dirt cheap.
Seven hours later, we actually completed this process. In the end, we visited over 30 different officials, had triplicate and pentuplicate forms painstakingly assembled with real carbons, hand filled in, and then dis-assembled and re-assembled into piles going in different directions. We waited outside mysterious offices with hordes of bustling Turkish agents, vying to have our forms noticed. Unpredictably, a hand would reach out and grab our forms, which were signed by the 'higher manager' inside. We would then be directed by sign language and a babble of Turkish to the next office, photocopier, luggage terminal, customs inspector or whatever, and the process would repeat. It went on forever!
Halfway through, we were actually taken to see our luggage, which was unceremoniously inspected, poked and prodded. Several questions, such as computer?, modem?, screwdriver? sought to label the valuable items. We were then taken away again, and another insufferable round of offices, forms and officials began. Just when my life-time's allocation of patience was completely exhausted, and I started muttering obscenities under my breath at each and every new official, the last forms were stamped in quadruplicate, and the luggage was ours. We had a sheath of over 30 forms, copies of passports, stamps, receipts, you'd-never-guess-what's.... as a memento of our struggles. One Turkish official actually slapped me on the back, as a kind of congratulation that we'd actually finished. I must say, we would never have gotten through this ordeal without a great deal of help and good-will from a lot of Turkish people who went out of their way to help the bumbling foreigners who obviously didn't have a clue how their system worked.
Anyway, devoid of any remaining patience, we beat a hasty retreat from Istanbul, heading across the most traffic packed bridges for all time, across the Bosphorus, and into the middle east, to visit Chris and Kim Shephard, friends of ours from Casino, who were now teaching and living in Koc college south of Istanbul. After further hours playing car tag footie in bumper to bumper traffic, we escaped to the freeway south. We were armed with the KGS card which let us through the toll booths (We'd learned how to access this card through bitter experience in a previous visit). However, we made a slight error in leaving one of the tangled free-way exits. This took us to a toll-booth , where we presented our card to the automated machine, and then to a road which, horrifyingly, diverged from the 'thin blue line of sanity', which was our track that we religiously followed on Google Maps on the iPad. Realizing we were going the wrong way, we went through another turn-around, which took us to another toll-booth.
Now, these automated toll-booths must have some limited amount of intelligence, as this particular booth recognised that we were attempting an impossible sequence of booths, trying to go through a previous booth after the after booth (if you can gather my drift). It locked up solid, flashing red lights, and would not let us through. Help, trapped, there was no escape. We looked for an 'official', of which there were none. We couldn't drive backwards down the freeway, and our forward passage was blocked. What to do ???? After muttering Inshallah, and similar oaths several times, I managed to squeeze the car past the barrier in another lane. Horns blared, lights flashed as we sped away, but at least we were now going forward again.
We had a great stay with Chris and Kim, in their island of academic sanity. Next, we headed south through the middle of Turkey, back to the southern coast.
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| Ottoman hotel in Kutahya |
We stopped for the night in Kutahya, and found a delightfully restored Ottoman hotel to stay in.
I think we were the only guests, and successfully bargained a cheaper rate to stay.
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| Front door |
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| Hallway |
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| Old Ottoman houses |
We wandered around the old unrestored streets, marvelling at the similarities between Ottoman architecture and Tudor streets in English villages.
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| Old style plumbing, no taps |
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| More houses |
Next day, we drove down to Antayla on the coast. Antayla is a tourist town perched on spectacular cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. We found a great pensione in the old town, and bonded with the staff.
Lovely people at pensione
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| Steep hills down to the boat harbour |
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Entrance to harbour
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Meeg's and I had a romantic meal in an over-priced restaurant perched high on the cliff over the harbour. Magic views. The restaurant was a building wedged into the medieval fortress wall which surrounded the harbour.
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| Historical building for restaurant |
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| A moment to remember? |
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| Small mosque |
We spent a day just wandering around Antayla, enjoying not driving for a change. We realized that we much preferred sailing as a mode of transport, even though it was painstakingly slow.
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| Antalya |
And then, with the car to return, we drove back to Fethiye. We detoured to Oludeniz, a famous holiday destination for Turks, with a beach and a lagoon. All the usual tourist accroutements, including hundreds of para-gliders landing on the beach, one every few seconds. And so to home, and back to our little floating island of safety. We had survived the hive mind!
