No more old men pottering about with hoes, no more trees for little girls to climb in galoshes, just bare hillsides and dead water.
The frogs here are LOUD. Marion found them quite disturbing: I rather enjoyed them. We've come across lots of them hopping in and out of irrigation ditches, and a few flat ones on the road. This place hasn't yet joined in the world-wide frog extinction, it seems.
Walked down to the garden again today with Serife, Marion and Neriman. Serife worked the irrigation: an hour a week is all it takes. It's a brilliant piece of work: the large channels at the roadside feed into a network of smaller channels, gated by an assortment of rocks, planks, buckets, and plastic bags. A few seconds' work moving things at three points, and the garden's watered. The slopes are precisely arranged so that each plot gets an equal amount. She sprinkled a small amount of fertilizer (some white powder) round some of the plants. None of the grunt the average British allotment holder puts into it.
Back to Bulgaria: we only went through it along the main road, but still it looked quite different from any other place we've been. Cultivation seems a weird mixture of monoculture and chaos: huge fields of grain with haphazard plots between and around them, with these plots themselves all mixed up - crops obviously left to reseed year after year, so last year's and this year's crop end up in the same plot in randomly varying proportions. It probably works but it certainly doesn't look pretty. All the buildings look scruffy in the same way as some of the Czech ones, but to a far greater extent. While Turkish buildings tend to look halffinished for years, these hadn't been painted or even had their windows cleaned for decades: whole factories left to rust. The contrast was greatest at the Turkish border, where you suddenly get sunflower fields with militarily sharp edges, brand-new apartment blocks painted blinding white - Marion made a remark about communism having collapsed while fascism hadn't, which was way over the top but I can see why someone might get that idea.
I came back to the teahouse after leaving Marion with Serife, Neriman and another girl of about 12. They seem to have gone off home to eat (I left deliberately so Marion could get a chance to see more of women's life here). I came back to a political argument over the radio news: Erbakan threatening to bomb Iraq for supporting a Kurdish group, I think. Cemil was talking with three friends: he's a Social Democrat, one was a Demirel supporter /* conservative */, another backed Ecevit /* social democrat */, and the other Turkes /* fascist */. All very amicable.
/* I got my camera busted through an excess of generosity at Tekkale. We couldn't walk anywhere in the area without being given fruit - stuff with real taste that made EC-regulation fruit look like plastic. We were walking around the terraced gardens high on the hillside when a man in the terrace above called down and offered us some apples and apricots. He handed me down a huge armful, far more than I could hold; an apple dropped straight into my Minolta Autocord TLR and bent the magnifier. */
[ Several names and addresses of people whose pictures I took at the Tekkale festival on Saturday, and of a small girl with a pet rabbit who I also took of by the roadside later in the day... ]
On the bus, Sunday - just went through Ardesen. There was a local office of the Refah Partisi. Comfort Party??? Another one in Pazar. /* This is usually translated 'Welfare Party'; it's the Islamic party - it's surprising they have such prominent representation given how secular the Laz tend to be. */
More Georgian market shopping: got a bottle of Georgian champagne for 1 pound (15000 TL) at the tiny market in Yusufeli on Thursday - drank it on the beach where the Barhal and Coruh rivers meet. Today, in Trabzon, acquired: 4 meters of striped cotton for cushion covers, 12000 TL; another Soviet pocket watch with a railway motif, 55000 TL; a pocket-watch-sized circular slide rule, 50000 TL; 3 Swiss army knives (Victorinox lookalikes with 13 whizzbangs), 25000 TL each; another big multipurpose knife like the one I got in Artvin, 10000 TL; and 75 cl of a 1980-vintage fizzy red wine from Azerbaijan, 20000 TL. This stuff is really superb, far better than any of the fizzy Italian reds I've tried.
The Dutch birdwatchers said the top floor of the Karahan in Artvin was also taken over by ex-Soviet prostitutes. That goes a long way towards explaining what happened to Marion and why the main street for blocks around was totally devoid of women. And maybe it explains what the ultra-cheap bus fares for Turks to visit Georgia are for: intra-Third-World sex tourism. It turns out that there were even Georgian prostitutes in the Aydin Hotel that occupies the floor above the Hotel Barhal in Yusufeli, which explains two things - the stares we got through our window, which looks into a teahouse across the street that seems to be patronized by most of the hajicapped old men of the village, and the three who waved to me going up the stairs when I was in the lobby once. They turned on an intense flash of sexual magnetism. At the time I just thought they were French or Italian rafters coming in after a night out drinking, and that I was being a dirty old man. Seemingly not.
/* Explanation of where rafting comes in: the Coruh river from Ispir to Artvin is apparently one of the best in the world for white-water rafting. Cemil Albayrak made part of his income guiding parties at this (he has some sort of certificate in it). Yusufeli is the obvious place to break the trip, and we met one party (Belgians and French Canadians, I think) who were doing just that. */
This trade must be having a terribly destructive effect on male-female relationships all across north-east Turkey. I find myself trying to classify unheadscarfed women in the street as either Soviet prostitutes, Western tourists or Westernized Turkish women: and I don't find it easy until they open their mouths - even then I can't identify Georgian very well from small snippets. I don't suppose Turkish men find it much easier. Marion's been wearing a headscarf a lot of the time, though deliberately not in the traditional Turkish way - a headscarf is an obvious first line of defence here for any Turkish woman; being mistaken for a Georgian must be horrible.
God, is that whole country reduced to flea markets and whoring?
Snakes. When we went to the Albayraks' garden on Friday we came across a lizard and a snake a few seconds apart. Serife immediately started heaving huge rocks at the snake. It was a harmless-looking brown thing less than two feet long. She didn't say it was poisonous: just 'Yilan!' was enough. I hope she missed.
We got a bat flying round the teahouse. I was in the inner room translating at the time, so I didn't see it, but I don't think it was molested. Seems bats are OK.
We're both covered with mosquito bites from the stay at Cemil's. Most of mine don't itch much (prior exposure?) but Marion's been really suffering. We've just about run out of the ferociously powerful anaesthetic ointment I bought in Samsun in 1981. Pharmacies are closed today so I can't buy any more. /* I bought another few years' supply later; good stuff and totally unavailable in the UK - why not, given the existence of Scottish midges, I can't imagine. */
The bus ride from Yusufeli down to Artvin is along the side of a steep gorge all the way, with a torrential river below, below, unstable rock above, huge oncoming trucks, the bus overtaking everything in sight and at one point 33KV lines sagging to about 20 feet above the road. We're at the front of the bus where we can read all the cheery Muslim stickers /* above the windscreen */ (the 10 x 2 cm ones printed on a diffraction-grating background) which say things like 'The Last Stop Is The Black Earth' ('Son Durak Kara Toprak'). Just what you want to read in that situation. Are they for real or are the drivers deeply into graveyard humour? Or both?
Serife gave Marion a bag of dried mulberries. They'd make a superb sweetish snack food: crunchy with a nutty aftertaste. We've been thinking about how they might be marketed in the UK so as best to help the local economy. The Artvinlis would get far more for them if they were marketed that way than they do for the mulberry jam they export now. Snack food packaging is well within local technological capabilities.
I don't believe the Georgian 'castle' that gives Tekkale its name is really a castle at all. Sloping roof? No arrowslits? It looks far more like a church: there was no way to launch defensive weaponry from it.
Anadolu Hotel, off Yerebatan Caddesi, Istanbul, Tuesday - this place was great two years ago: now it's a shitheap. They demand (aggressively) money in advance. There are no towels in the rooms. Only one sheet per bed and the pillow covers obviously dirty. No slippers for the Turkish toilet and no toilet paper for the Western one. Sheets ripped in places. Awful Western-style music in the hotel bar, which charges more for beer than anywhere else we've been in Turkey. Western toilet blocked. Bedding feels damp. All the guests but us seem to be in their teens or early 20s - presumably they don't know that Turkish hotels can and should provide a lot more for the money. The place is in the Rough Guide and presumably other guidebooks so they've stopped trying.
We moved to the Aya Sofya (Yerebatan Caddesi). Same price, much cleaner, quieter and friendlier, our own shower.
We bought some more things we'd been intending to get in Turkey for a long time: tea glasses and a heavy-duty orange squeezer of the sort they use in the street stalls around Istanbul - these are better than anything you can get in the UK. I got a Turkish-made G clarinet: rather crudely made but sounds OK and the price was right (500000 TL, about 35 pounds).
I'm writing this on the train through Serbia between Nis and Beograd. Uneventful trip so far: the staff at Sirkeci station in Istanbul were being their usually cluelessly unhelpful selves, but (after asking some Western tourists for their European rail timetable, which the Sirkeci staff don't have) it seems we arrive in Budapest just before midnight, too late to connect to the Prague train. Bugger. This carriage is going to Warsaw and is mostly empty now - a lot of people got off in Sofia, including the three young Dutch men who shared our couchette and were also heading to Prague, but via Romania because they'd promised their mothers they wouldn't go through Yugoslavia... good grief. /* Marion thought they had nice legs, anyway. */
There's a little square off Istiklal Caddesi just above the Tunel that has a small Turkish-and-foreign-language second-hand bookshop and an immense population of cats. Marion fell for a little white kitten last time so we thought we'd look it up: there was a young white cat there that was probably the same one but it didn't want to talk to us. Most of the others just lay in the sun and asked to have their tummies tickled. There was a huge pile of kittens sleeping in a drain grille at the bottom of a tree. Marion counted 23 cats in the square (maybe 20 metres on a side). We also made friends with a fluffy grey kitten in Yusufeli, the Albayraks' family of a female and 3 kittens, and a kitten in Eminonu that seemed to spend its time a couple of catlengths from the new tramline. It's always nice to have so many cats around in Turkey. What noise do Turkish cats make, anyway? My dictionary doesn't list either 'purr' or 'meow'. /* 'to purr' is the same word as 'to mutter' or 'to grumble': 'mirildamak'. Can't find 'meow' - just use 'bagirmak' ('to cry out') perhaps? */
The new tramline is amazing. Each of the 4 carriages holds 48 sitting, 288 standing. There are 5 trams on the line by Marion's count and the trip from Sirkeci to Aksaray takes about 15 minutes. That's one hell of an efficient way of moving bodies around the city centre. And it's free.
A piece of graffiti by the railway line: VOLIM SARAJEVO RDE ZLA @ /* The @ being the international anarchy symbol. */ We've passed a couple of tanks. |
