But first, tea.

As soon as I arrive in Istanbul I am already infuriated with it. It is dirty and crumbling and foreign, and I can not figure out where I am.

I think I am starting to burn out. There always comes a point in time, after about two months of travel, that the alien foods, the language difficulties, the social miscues, the constant movement and the long, sweaty stretches between cities and showers begin to tax the appeal of being on the road. I start longing for my own bed in the safe and familiar surroundings of my cosy flat in Sydney. Last week I hit the two-month mark.

I'm looking for a specific patisserie that was recommended to me. It is in Galata, near the famous tower. I figured such an obvious monumental landmark would make navigation easy, and I am not incapable with maps. I have a printed map, Google and GPS on my phone. I even fancy that I'm a decent orienteer. But this 1,600-year-old hilltop quarter answers to no map. I am flummoxed after repeated assaults on it. The surging maze of lanes drapes and twists over the tower's hillside, tossing and tangling me in the ramble of streets.

A sixty-something-looking leather-skinned shoe-shine tries to swindle me in the conniving way of the Turkish tout. After I pick up a dropped shoe brush for him in instinctive common decency, he shakes my hand, asks me where I'm from, and makes to give me a shoe shine in appreciation. I suddenly remember this ruse of intentionally dropping the brush and preying on the decency of innocent tourists. But I am not innocent. I am jaded, lost and shitty.

I protest as he insists my shoe onto his footstool, "No. No! It's not good for my shoes." It's ridiculous; they aren't leather. They are high-tech synthetic outdoor hiking runners designed to allow water to flow through the porous upper, and after hundreds of kilometres of hardcore use, from the wilds of British Columbia to the muddy jungles of Uganda, they are far beyond any hope of scrubbing up a bit.

He counter-protests, "no, it's okay! I am shoe doctor!" and further, as I pull away from his stupid ineffectual brushing and sponging, "no, sorry, I am not finished!"

I'm not buying any of this. I step to walk away and he calls out, "eight lira!" (about A$4). I sigh, irritated with this game, and drop half a lira into his palm, the equivalent of twenty-five cents.

"What is this?" he objects.

"Meh," I shrug and walk away annoyed. An insult, I suppose.

Distracted now. Trying to read the map of Galata's bundles of lanes is like navigating from the scalp of a shag carpet. I finally throw my hands in the air. "The map is not the terrain," I remind myself, and simply meander in circles instead, in which manner I find the patisserie. It was less than a hundred metres away.

It's closed.

Down.

Weary, exasperated and harbouring a growing irritation with the volume of people in the streets, I cut down a side alley in these maniacal laneways and give in to my feet blathering across the roiling cobbles, which ripple like a carpet, until I stumble upon a cozy room called Cha'ya Galata that catches the eye with a seductive sign: "But first, tea."

Tonic.

It comes on a round wooden platter. First flush Assam. The pot is kept warm over a tea light and the leaves have been removed so it doesn't over-steep. A slice of orange is served over the teacup on a bamboo skewer. Warmed milk has its own pot. I have biscuits. I have honey.

Painted on the window is another sign: "You can't buy happiness but you can buy tea, and that's kind of the same thing."

I love Istanbul.

Ablutions

In Greece, the hotels insist you don’t throw your toilet paper in the toilet.  On the islands so far, anyway.  They provide a waste paper basket.  Though I’ve had experience with septic tanks before – the reason for this practice, I assume – I’m still vaguely repulsed at the idea.  The camp toilet on the Turkish relief ride was two foot-boards spanning a hole in the ground, and I somehow found that more coherent.  When out of habit I mistakenly dropped a few squares of paper into my Cretan toilet I had nightmare visions of a sudden septic uprising in the middle of the night.

I’ve had a varied experience with bathing on this trip.  I’ve had cold showers in the back of a caravan, swum in hot springs and splashed in cold springs, dipped in dams, squatted under hoses, squeezed into tiled cupboards masquerading as plumbing fixtures, and melted under one particularly memorable, long, hot hotel shower after two weeks in the saddle.  About the only way I haven’t got wet on this trip is being soaked by rain.  I think one un-sunny day it sprinkled.

The shower in my room in Crete was so small there was no room for even a shower curtain (which is probably so people don’t pull it aside and say: “hey, somebody bricked up this window”).  I got in it and threw my hands up in the air when I was mugged by the faucet, and when I turned around I was startled to run into myself.  The other side of the room got wet when I turned the water on, so I turned the nozzle to the wall and showered under the splashback.

Most hotel rooms provide shower gel and shampoo.  Some of these wondrous bathing treacles are both.  Other shampoo packets say “with conditioner.”  The one in my Crete hotel room said: “with compliments.”  Nonsense.  I showered and shampooed and walked straight out the front door and all they said was “have a nice day.”

When I get back to Istanbul in early August, one of the last things I’m going to do in Europe is visit a Turkish hamam, for which the Ottomans were famous.  There you don’t have merely an entire room to bathe in, you have three, each a different temperature.  After sweating into a rubbery relaxation, you’re finished off by a pounding into submission they call a massage.

Day of the Carpet Sellers

“Rugs!  Rugs!”

It was like carrying a bag of brains. 

Carpets sold in Turkey are rolled and packed into a lightweight black bag that somehow every carpet seller in the country uses as a standard.  When I left the shop with one in hand, all the carpet sellers who hide among the living on Istanbul street corners and footpaths swarmed and descended on me.  “How much?  How much?”

Other sellers can gauge how much of a sucker you are by what you bought and how much you paid, and will entice you to their own store to take a bite themselves.  They all say the same things: “What are you looking for?  Where are you from?  How much did you pay?  Let me offer you tea.”

The second one was enlightening when I realised I’d heard these same seductions before.  By the third one it was boring.  By the fourth one it was annoying and he wouldn’t let me be.  I really wanted to get rid of this damn albatross and was desperately seeking the post office to ship it home.  (Backpackers are lousy shoppers; they can’t accumulate things.)  By number five I was really jack, and had run out of polite patience.

“What are you looking for?”

“Peace and quiet.”

He shambled alongside me.  “Where are you from?”

“Australia.”

“Love the kangaroos.  Love the koalas.”

“I’m from Canada.”

Confused pause.  “Do you have a wife?”

“No.”

“A girlfriend.”

“No.”

“Ah, you are single!”

“No.”

Confused pause.  “Would you like…”

I did an abrupt 180° turn but he stuck with me.  “Would you like…”  I managed to shake him with another 180° and fled.

Carpet sellers

The carpet sellers in Istanbul are a plague.  They’re smooth operators who will milk you for money if you aren’t on your toes.  Initially it’s hard to distinguish them from regular locals who are friendly enough to say hello and help you find your way.  Turks throughout the country are friendly and welcoming, but you’ll quickly come to realise that those who approach you in Istanbul will generally help you first (“What are you looking for?”), make conversation next (“Where are you from?”) and then ask you afterwards to come to their shop (“It’s very close.”)  It’s at first disarming, but soon tedious and annoying.

The first one of the day got me.

At eight in the morning in Sultanahmet, the touristy part of old Istanbul between the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofia, fresh off the plane, sleep-deprived and completely unaware of the carpet-seller phenomenon, I was approached by a friendly bloke who asked me where I’m from.  “Oh,” he said.  “I have family in Sydney, in Liverpool.”  He showed me the two entrances to the Blue Mosque (one for tourists, the other for locals) and the Sultan’s balcony, and then uttered the line I would subsequently hear more times than I could count: “I have a shop.  Would you like to see it?”

I naively thought, “okay, this bloke has helped me out. The least I can do is look at his shop.”  On my first day after eighteen months back on the road I forgot how wary the traveller has to be in a big city.

I’ve heard it said before that in Middle Eastern cultures it’s unlucky not to make a sale to the first customer of the day.  This may be folkloric but is also a likely sales ploy (“You’re very lucky; we will give you a discount to make the sale.”  The line that “you’re lucky” for one reason or another regularly pops up in the sales bargaining).

It was clear he did not intend to let me out of the shop without selling me something.  I did see a rug which I commented was nice so I thought, all right, he wants to bargain but I’ll give some ridiculous price that he won’t accept.  And that’s how I wound up with a US$1200-priced rug for US$400 (A$375).  It seems I underestimated how vastly the prices are inflated.

The guy said afterwards that he didn’t make a profit just so he could make the first sale.  Perhaps.  I did apparently get a good deal, according to the other sellers who asked me the price of the carpet I was carrying.

Turks

Turks are friendly, generous, helpful people. They are even more so in the tourist parts of Istanbul because they (i.e., the shop owners) understand better than any other Europeans that tourists equal business, though it is not so cynical as that. They still draw upon their natural hospitality.
As a photographer I'm pleased at how open Turks are to having their photo taken. I generally ask first, and the answer ranges from a shrugging "of course, why not?" to welcoming eagerness.
Most refreshing of all is that there are no hang-ups about shooting kids. The innocence of children makes them great subjects, but in the West (outside Europe, anyway) there is a paranoid politically-correct protectiveness. Once, on a shooting excursion in Sydney's Hyde Park, a group of photography students and I were accosted by a father whose children, some hundred metres away, happened to fall in the range of our lenses. We were so taken aback and uncomprehending that he thought we were an organised group of voyeur paedophiles that nobody had the wherewithal to tell him to go fuck himself before he disappeared.