We both woke up very depressed and flopped till mid-morning: Marion's theory is that eating eggs after a long break from them can do that, mine is that this is high enough for a slight lowering of oxygen level to be detectable. Anyway we got over it.
Walked up the valley towards Hevek. The cultivated strip is much narrower and more discontinuous here than down at Yusufeli, with a narrower range of things being grown. The whole valley was milling with butterflies: we must have have seen dozens of species and tens of thousands of individuals. Presumably because pesticides haven't got here. But very few birds; there must be more further up, as we came here with two Germans who were walking over the mountains to look at vultures. There are adverts in the hotel for hunting trips - wild boar are free; ibex, bear and lynx cost real money. One of the guys round the hotel is a professional hunter with a company that runs shoots here and in Bulgaria.
We were given a free lunch by some farmworkers when we'd walked halfway towards Hevek - boiled runner beans in a gravy with traces of tomato in it, salad, bread, and trout from the stream, fried, with noodles, both being sprinkled with sugar. I had my doubts but it tasted wonderful. Got a lift about halfway back with some electricity workers. The standard technique for working with HT here (the lines looked like 3300 V) seems to be manipulating live wires with immensely thick rubber gloves. Rather them than me.
The other side of the valley being full of butterflies is that it was also full of moths. Our window had a hole in it so they came in whenever the light was on. We must have had ten different species blundering around us, several of which seemed determined to get into bed with us. And I squashed a wriggly thing two inches long like a giant pink earwig.
We had an immense feed of fried trout caught by the local shopkeeper - the only trout I've had that could compare was from a restaurant in in Lisbon, much more elaborate. I suspect we won't even be asked to pay for that meal.
We both got ill in the night. I had a couple of bursts of mild diarrhoea and threw up violently, Marion had mild diarrhoea and just felt rotten until mid-afternoon. Not too bad as Turkish bugs go.
Marion seems to have cracked her coccyx in the fall near Yusufeli; it still hurts and there's no bruise.
The Valley of Lost Galoshes: we went up to look at the Georgian church above Barhal - similar to Dortkilise but in much better shape and with no outbuildings. Locked, the muhtar is the only person with a key, he's down in Yusufeli till this evening, and we're going at dawn tomorrow. The path and stream were strewn with old shoes, mainly torn galoshes; unless the fact that the village school is up there has something to do with this, I can't imagine why. The local shop has an immense stock of them.
We've been asking people about the employment and demographic situation in the villages around here: all are losing population, almost everyone goes to work in one of the big cities of western Turkey as soon as they leave school. Practically nobody from Barhal goes on to high school. About all we saw being exported from Yusufeli was a truckload of apples; presumably other fruit is, but nowhere near enough to keep a town of 4,000 in work. The TEK workers said they expected to retire at 40, and said it as if it was an accomplishment that Turks could do that while we had to wait till we were 65. So the result is that the village has almost no young adults: everyone between 13 and 40 is away working in Istanbul, Izmir, Germany, Belgium,...
The mosque here doesn't seem to do the ezan /* Muslim call to prayer */ very often. The only one we've heard was at midday. Or maybe they get Dial-ACall -To-Prayer and the phone's only just been fixed? - the Georgian church used to be the mosque until recently, and its tannoy is hooked up to a phone line. I thought that was cheating.
Blisters. Trainers are the best footwear for this kind of holiday but the heel join inside isn't well engineered. I spent the night with bits of Marion's embroidery thread through each blister, a trick I learned from Beate who learnt it from her mother from the Sudetenland - it drains them very effectively but I've never heard of anyone else doing it. It looks rather weird. /* The offending shoes were Hi-Tec Silver Shadows, but a slightly cheaper model than the XA4's I used on our last trip here. */
/* Veysel, the proprietor of one of the village shops, obviously fancied Marion a lot. She bought some fabric and other stuff from him and each time she went in he gave her a pile of henna as well for free. */
Barhal seems to be too small to have a statue of Ataturk. There isn't even one by the school. Amazing.
[ Name and address of two agricultural workers whose photo I took, posing with their pesticide spray. I don't know what the stuff was yet, but they weren't using any protective clothing at all with it. ]
[ More names and addresses, transferred from a bit of paper, of people I took pictures of in Trabzon. ]
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Several times we've seen enormous donkey turds on the road, packed with cherry stones. It must have taken a good bucketful of cherries to produce each splat. I have never been anywhere where such a variety of fruit and vegetable are grown all together: Marion's been noting it all on her pocket recorder, but pretty near everything imaginable seems to grow here. And one thing we'd never imagined: fresh sesame, 'tut'. /* That's what Marion and I thought they were at the time because of their seed structure; they were really mulberries. 'Dut' according to the dictionary, but that's not how people here say it. */ These look like small grubs, and are white to purplish when ripe; they have a blackberrylike structure with each blob containing a seed. They're very sweet with a nutty aftertaste. There's no way you'd ever get to taste them outside an area that grows them.
We left Barhal early this morning; on the same dolmus there was a boy just leaving primary school to go to Istanbul. He had a very emotional send-off from his grandmother and several middle-aged women. There were two older boys in the dolmus who seemed to be part of the same family, but none of the emotion seemed to centre on them; I'd guess they had already left and were going back to Istanbul after a visit. They looked dull and leaden beside their brother, who was in and out of the dolmus as we waited for it to leave, in tears one minute and playiong with the dog the next. One more to the ten-million-odd population of Istanbul. Hope he makes it.
And nobody here seems angry about all this. It seems like the whole province is dying with a kindly, beatific smile on its face. The logical endpoint of this for all these gardens and rice paddies and villages to end up like the Scottish Highlands, razed flat to a desolation of sheep and game with armed guards controlling who goes in. Which might be a nightmare but so is the capitalist world system.
Turkish bus-driver etiquette: always stop for at least ten minutes longer than the passengers expect but then roar off with a few seconds' warning. If you don't get at least one traveller leaping through the door after it's started moving you haven't done it right.
Last night Marion left her embroidery needle at the teahouse table and two boys followed her across the street to return it. My tripod turned up in Yusufeli: a shopkeeper at the bus stop had kept it for 4 days. When we went for an all-day walk at Barhal I left the key in the door of our hotel room, with all our passports and tickets inside: of course it was all there when we got back, I never expected anything else. After the hassle of Prague and Budapest, where everyone seems terminally paranoid about thieves all the time and with good reason, this culture comes as a huge relief.
We're staying at Cemil Albayrak's guest house for his festival. 'His' festival because he's the muhtar and seems to be doing most of the organizing: when we arrived he was running around like a flea in a fit. He unwound enough after his wife came back that we all went to look round his garden - a bit bigger than an average British allotment but with a far greater variety of stuff growing. Marion slipped and landed on her bum again but thought the visit was more than worth it. Three things growing that I couldn't find in the dictionary: reyhan, pirpir, serali. I'll try the big dictionaries at home when I get back. /* No luck, I still don't know what they were; the first two are pot-herbs and the last a kind of bean. */
Neriman Albayrak /* name written in a child's handwriting */ is Cemil's terminally cute daughter who is, together with her mother, giving Marion a lesson in how to embroider borders on headscarves. She's 8. She collected some fresh sesame /* mulberries */ for us out of the tree beside the restaurant this evening: scrambling over wobbly branches above a 20- foot drop in galoshes.
There seems to be a local belief that eating yogurt with fish can poison you. Is this universal in Turkey?
Milan's mother had the idea that the way we should go from Rijeka to Turkey was by boat to Dubrovnik and then to Greece. The direct boat to Greece didn't run any more but there was a regular service to Dubrovnik, mainly bringing relief supplies. Dubrovnik was still being shelled and didn't have any electricity. If I was on my own I'd have tried it: there must be relief boats coming the other way from Greece.
Bulgaria got left out of this diary so far. No contest for Least Friendly Border Crossing. Transit visas cost only 20 marks - Marion had been told 20 pounds by the London embassy staff. Border post in a rocky gorge with (Marion said) the smelliest toilet she's used in the whole trip by way of welcome. Duty-free shop with a minimal range of spirits and cigarettes, which the Hungarians snapped up regardless.
The Dutch man staying here says that the Genya, the first hotel we asked at in Artvin, is 'full of Russian hookers'.
[ name and address of someone I took a photo of ]
The Dutch couple have been totally obnoxious. The man made a big show of walking out on Cemil's saz playing (he was pretty good, too): when offered honey with their yogurt they said 'no, we have sugar with it at home' and got Cemil to send his son Engin home (about a mile away) to get powdered sugar. This morning I found a Gregor-Samsa-sized cockroach in the bath: I seriously considered going outside to their tent and leaving it in their shoes. /* Marion assumed they were American, but then Marion tends to assume all obnoxious tourists are American... */
Two more Dutch people turned up in the teahouse today - butterfly collectors. One was a psychologist, the other a marine biologist. We'd seen them going back and forth between Barhal and Yusufeli several times. They've been coming to Turkey every year for 15 years: they say they probably have the biggest collection of Turkish butterflies in the world. They're writing it up: they don't think anybody in Turkey is doing anything comparable. They didn't think that with the level of information available to Turkish scientists and their limited means, that anyone outside Europe would be able to do comparable work. They know of one entomologist in a provincial Turkish university who was doing good work on butterflies, but his knowledge of research outside Turkey was so limited he didn't even know of their own work.
The made one remark I found really depressing: that hydro scemes were meant to cover almost every river in Turkey. Even if that's a huge exaggeration, it made me think of all the communities like this one - gardens, rice paddies, vineyards, orchards, houses... that are going to be drowned. |
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