Maybe this stuff is factory rejects? Prague was a good place for second-hand cameras, somewhat cheaper than the UK: the two things that looked interesting were a 5 x 7 monorail and a Russian medium-format stereo camera. Might get something there if we have any cash left when we get back.
Lots of rather tartily dressed women here with loose permed hair: some are more stylish and would fit in any Western city, others look like store mannequins. I'm not sure if they're Turkish women making an in-your-face protest against the Islamic code or if they're Soviet.
|
came here after a night in Artvin. Marion wanted out of Artvin as fast as possible: we were followed up the stairs of the Karahan Hotel by a man who acted like he was a hotel employee but stuck his hand up her skirt just as we were going through the door - he'd obviously done that regularly before. The whole town seemed exclusively filled with men: we haven't been anywhere where women were so invisible. (Marion compared it to a horrible time she'd spent in Durham the night before the Miners' Gala). We stayed in the Sabah (the Karahan was full and much posher than we wanted anyway). OK but not easy for a woman to wash in - loo and shower separate, handbasin in the hallway. We got the midday bus out after looking at another Georgian flea market: I got a Russian Swiss Army-type knife for 75p, Marion got a Molniya pocket watch for 1 pound 50.
The bus from Trabzon to Artvin was by far the fastest we've been on. The driver overtook anything in sight, ignoring blind corners entirely. We were in the front seats: I thought the first few wheelies might have been for our benefit but he carried on that way the whole distance. The coast beyond Rize lived up to its reputation: an overwhelming pall of gloomy cloud. Hopa wouldn't be exactly a cheery place even under desert sunshine - it's mostly garages and tyre retread shops - but in this weather it makes an average Scottish village on a wet winter Sunday look enticing. Everybody around the bus terminal had almost manic grins, though.
/* The tea industry is everywhere here - every village has a tea processing plant, with a chimney - presumably fired by by tea twigs - pouring out dense black smoke. The hillsides are covered with dark green tea bushes. If they advertise this area as a tourist destination it must be to people from the Mediterranean looking for a land of perpetual gloom.
Since Samsun we've seen a lot of men swimming in the Black Sea, and a few women paddling in their skirts, but not one woman swimming. Yet there are a few women's swimming costumes on sale here. When do they ever get used? */
A violent thunderstorm has broken over Yusufeli as I'm writing this: a wedding has just finished and a woman in a party dress just tried to run across the plank bridge below the hotel. Her heel stuck and she had to pull it out - her husband was running with a baby on his head, not something I'd have cared to do on a rickety wet bridge above a torrent like the Barhal. /* I had the accident in B. Traven's 'The Bridge in the Jungle' at the back of my mind, though the image of the woman in her party dress in the storm was pure Hollywood. */
The two of us have just had a meal of dolma with yogurt followed by fried trout and salad, for 10000 TL each (75p). The hotel (a new one, the Barhal) has a room with shower, toilet and double bed for 60000 TL a night. Everything seems cheaper than anywhere else we've been.
Rijeka had the same sort of goods as most Turkish towns - maybe more fashionable clothing, being so close to Italy - but all at Western prices (or, in the case of shoes at least, much higher). When a typical salary is 200 DM a month this must be a nightmare. Marion saw one old woman in a supermarket whose jaw dropped in horror at the price of toilet paper. The one thing that is really cheap is alcohol, distilled spirits in particular. I got 500 ml of some sort of aniseed-flavoured spirit to knock me out on the bus to Budapest: it sort of worked, but the cap wouldn't close again properly and I left half of it in a park for the local alcoholics to find.
/* Even fruit and vegetables were at the same prices as in Scotland; the market had a pretty good range, and the cheese and meat market was probably better than anything you'd find except in the largest British cities, but also at West European prices. Milan was in shorts when we arrived: his one pair of trousers had been stolen from the washing line. Replacing them was going to cost him more than a week's wages. */
Croata seemed extraordinarily well signposted: the Rijeka-Zagreb road had kilometre markers and every imaginable kind of warning sign. Turkish roads have far less: only one 'falling rocks' sign that I noticed between Trabzon and Yusufeli, despite a massive landslip that obliterated the road for a few hundred metres just before Hopa - they'd bulldozed a diversion out into the Black Sea from the fallen rubble. Maybe there isn't an international standard sign for 'The Entire Hillside Might Drop On Your Head At Any Moment'.
The wedding video has got to Yusufeli: the first thing that drew our attention to the one last night was a video light at the front of the hall.
|
*we've been wandering up and down the valley with Marion doing her usual food-spotting and me taking photographs. I'm finally getting up to my usual speed of picture taking: all through Eastern Europe I didn't see much that I wanted to make a picture of. Local agricultural practices are more my style, together with the strange landscape - there's a thin ribbon of cultivation beside the Coruh and Barhal rivers, and the hills are spaghetti Western country - a wild tangle of buttes and scree that the Ministry of Forests is trying to cover with trees. The trees only seem to get to a reasonable size quite high up. (All around here there are official notices from the MoF saying 'Please Love Trees' in dozens of different ways).
We walked up the Barhal River towards the nearest Georgian castle yesterday - Marion slipped and got badly bruised so we didn't go all that far. The castle is parked on an insane crag: getting to it looks like a fairly difficult rock climb. The garden plots round here grow an incredible range of things: paddy rice, maize, wheat, hay, beans, olives, apricots, apples, pears, peaches, pomegranates, mulberries, brassicas, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, melons, almonds, walnuts, sunflowers, grapes, clover (for honey?), plums, aubergines - is there anywhere else in the world where such a variety of crops is possible? A few cows and chickens, some donkeys and horses as pack animals, but the only sheep we've seen was a pet.
|
two-hour ride up here from Yusufeli in the rain in a packed dolmus /* minibus */. One elderly man spent the whole trip sitting on a donkey saddle; he got out partway to collect a bear trap from a blacksmith's and left shortly before Barhal in the middle of nowhere with his bear trap, a scythe and two huge bags of lentils. The donkey saddle went back to Yusufeli; maybe it's a permanent fixture on the dolmus. I forgot my tripod at the Yusufeli stop; the driver was totally unhelpful and the phone here is out of order so I can only hope it's somewhere around Yusufeli when we get back.
We are getting a bit miffed at the tone and inaccuracy of the Rough Guide for here. It both overstates the badness of the road here - I've driven over worse in New Zealand - and ignores the fact that building any sort of road to a place as remote as this is a significant engineering achievement. And keeping it open despite heavy rain and falling rock won't be easy, either. And their comments about the road to the Georgian church at Dortkilise are just unintelligible - the road works are a mile away and there is no bridge under construction.
Dortkilise is where we went yesterday, almost accidentally. We just intended to walk down the river in that direction but not actually to it; after wandering past the rice paddies in the heat we got a lift to Tekkale and met the muhtar /* elected village headman */ in his teahouse. He took us up to Dortkilise - we'd never have found it on our own - with a taxi taking us most of the way and a government van of some sort taking us back. He invited us back to his place later in the week for a village festival in the Tekkale yaylas /* a yayla is a high-altitude chalet only occupied in summer */; his wife has a kind of rheumatism Marion thinks might respond to dietary treatment, so we'll see what we can do when we're back from Barhal.
We went to Sumela monastery near Trabzon when we were there: better in the postcards than in the actuality, though the situation is spectacular. Most of it was closed off and full of scaffolding for restoration work. This looked rather dubious: lots of men hacking away with pickaxes but no archaeologist in charge - it seems they just want it to look nice for the tourists and to hell with historical accuracy. The frescoes are only in reasonable condition on the ceiling - the walls are almost obliterated by graffiti, almost all Turkish names (unlike Aya Sofya in Istanbul, where nearly all the graffiti is Western). Also some Western names written slightly wrong and a few Greek ones dated 1875 or thereabouts but obviously more recent - is this some strange dating system, someone trying a bizarre fake, or what?
Cemil Ozyurt's hotel/restaurant in Barhal is built almost over the river - while writing this the water has changed from clear to diarrhoea-brown, presumably from the rain. The change took only a few minutes; a few hours later it's still brown. The smaller stream that joins it is still clear. Landslip?
/* Cemil Ozyurt's place is a hotel/bakery/teahouse/restaurant in one, a haphazard construction in an architectural style that reminded me of nothing so much as Ancient Hippie Californian. Cemil is about 50 and Marion says he's a terrible flirt. It only cost us 30000 TL a night for a small room with a double bed. */
The way things are built right at the edge of the water looks hazardous by Scottish standards - in the Highlands a flash flood would demolish anything built that way in a few decades - but many of these river-edge constructions, and the masonry used for channelling in places, seem quite old. The river must be more predictable than it looks. Otherwise half the hotels in Yusufeli would be piles of wreckage with the light bits washed up around Artvin by now.
[ Names and addresses of several men who posed for their picture beside a truck of the road to Hevek... ]
|
|
