Buses

I hate buses, but I heard that the ones in Turkey are good.  Sure they are.  But the roads drive you insane.

I caught a bus from Nevşehir to Ankara (the ride having ended yesterday), a four-plus-hour trip, and it was like a mini-airplane: seating is allocated and ushered, there’s a toilet on board, the reclining seats have televisions, and a steward serves water, tea or coffee, and cake.  Very civilised.

The road, however, is far from polished.  It is re-patched instead of resurfaced and there is literally constant turbulence.  I have to sit in my horse-riding posture or the convulsions of the seat kill my kidneys.  The idea of a drink holder on my seat tray is absurd – my hot tea roils like it’s boiling.  It doesn’t exactly make writing easy, either!  I’m trying to recall travelling on a worse highway.  200km of this gets old fast.

A special entry for all my Relief Rider friends

Farewell my friends!  I’ve just been dropped at the bus station and am on my own for the first time since meeting you all two weeks ago.  I’m so sad to have said goodbye to everyone, but so pleased to have made such good friends.  I am suddenly missing you, but the end of one adventure marks the beginning of another.

You’ll see, of course, that I’m quite behind on my ride updates (come on Ercihan – hot showers in camp are all well and good, but where’s the Wi-Fi?!)  All subsequent RRI posts are dedicated to you all.

Whirling

After the balloon flight we got under way on the ride proper, I on my dappled grey mare Kelebek, all of we dozen or so riding in a line behind the head horseman Ercihan.

After several hours, a large square fort made of stone and flying the Turkish flag came into view as we rode up a grassy hill.  We were approaching a 13th-century stone Karavansaray – a caravan outpost – on the Silk Road, just as traders would have done hundreds of years ago.  We tied the horses up outside the eight-metre-high walls, walked through the tall gate into a large open courtyard with a central fountain, and then into the dark belly of the Karavansaray.  It is like a cathedral inside with a cruciform plan and a domed apex.  It was built in the style of the Siena school of architecture, which seems unlikely in Turkey, but this is the route along which all travelled between Italy and Asia for centuries.

In the centre of the dim church we were quietly seated around a square floor.  One by one, five musicians and five dancers, each in a black cloak and a tall beige fez, entered the square, bowed to the audience, and seated themselves on the floor.  These are the sufis.  An eleventh wore a white fez and sat at the head of the group. 

One of the musicians stood and sang Arabic chants in beguiling oriental scales, and then another played a breathy and moving melody on the ney, a Turkish flute.  Another ney played and the other musicians then joined on drums, a zither-like stringed instrument called a kanun, and an oud which is similar to a lute. 

The five dancers rose and walked slowly around the square, bowing to one another repeatedly before removing their black cloaks to reveal white robes beneath.  Slowly they began to spin.  They moved around the square floor to find their positions – four at the corners and one in the centre.  As they spun faster their floor-length robes bloomed and they raised their arms with open hands, one above their heads in receiving and the other outstretched in giving.  The whirling dervishes spin in the same spot to induce a trance.  White Fez would walk onto the floor to rotate them and, still spinning, they would change positions, one moving to the centre and the others rotating corners.  This spinning to the music and rotating positions would go on for ten minutes before they would pause and stand stock-still, not wobbling or dizzy, and then they would begin again.  Some of the sufis had their eyes half open but fixed, never flickering, while others had theirs closed, intuiting their positions on the floor.  For forty-five minutes this went on with precision, and never did they stumble.

At last they finish dancing and seat themselves on the floor again, and White Fez sings a sermon.  Though it is in Arabic, it is surprisingly moving. 

Sufism is not a religion.  It is a way of living.  It is a culture or a sprituality, but there is no institution, no tenets, and no hierarchy.  Sufis are free, liberated intellectuals, philosophers, and they search for a way to find yourself.  The whirling dervishes are the most formulated example of this, but Sufism is about finding your own way.

Photos

I've uploaded a few photos to my Facebook account.  Any of my Facebook friends will be able to see them, but I think you can also access them here.

Flying

On the morning of our second ride, we went for a hot air balloon flight.  This was meant to be scheduled later in the itinerary, but there was a backlog of balloon passengers due to terrible rains just before we arrived, and it was the only time the balloon company could guarantee us a slot.  We were all up for it, but it made for a very long day.  Our wake-up call was at 4.20am, not that a wake-up call was necessary – our first night in Cappadocia was spent in a cave hotel in Avanos situated next to a mosque which, at 4am, trumpets prayers loud enough to reach the whole town.

Early morning is the only time you can go ballooning because of the rising air as the sun hits the cold ground.  It takes about an hour to get the balloons inflated, and then 20 people pile into the basket and we’re off.

The flight took us over serrated towers of stone and into valleys where we were surrounded by caves dug into the tufa rock.  We went up into the high mist dissolving in the sun and floated with perhaps 40 other balloons.

The Ride

This is how it works.

We set out in the morning on horseback and ride four to six hours along trails through grasslands and hills, along rivers and over mountains.  The Cappadocian landscape is dry, dusty and scrubby grassland (I believe it is classed as desert), and is not dissimilar to country New South Wales except that it is more rocky and hilly.

When we arrive at our designated campsite for the day, our support truck is already there with the outfitter’s crew setting up camp.  They pitch a dozen tents with foam mattresses and sleeping bags, and hang oil lanterns outside each.  These guys work hard to make camping easy for us.  The truck is a mobile kitchen and shower, complete with hot water and decent pressure.  Unbelievable!  It’s bespoke-built by the Turkish outfitter, Ercihan.  There’s power on board for recharging camera batteries and laptops, and a table seating ten folds down from the side of the truck under an awning.  I’ve done a lot of camping, and this is really luxurious compared to boiling a billy on the fire and jumping in a river to wash.

The food is fantastic.  We are eating so well.  Last night was tender and juicy chicken barbecued over the coals next to the campfire, the night before that was barbecued lamb, and before that was trout with garlic, lemon and rosemary.  There’s cucumber and tomato salad, yogourt, olives, and always plenty of bread, and it’s all cooked and cleaned up for us by the crew.  Then we typically finish the night around the campfire drinking beer and wine and raki, known as “lion’s milk,” an aniseed-tasting clear liqueur that turns opaque white when cut with water.

Disconnected!

My apologies to my readership.  I’ve been in rural Turkey without internet access and have been completely unable to update my blog.  I bought a SIM card from Turkcell with a data package so that I could ‘tweet’ to Twitter and do the occasional blog update, but I haven’t been able to get the damn thing to work. 

So you’re only reading this and any following entries because I managed to find Wi-Fi in a town somewhere for my laptop.  As I write I’m encamped in a tent surrounded by little more than trees, wind, river and horses.

First ride

Friday afternoon we took our first ride.  It was only an hour, a short ride out and back to the ranch, so that we can release all our built-up nervous anticipation of a fortnight ride, and to get acquainted with our horses and their dynamic together, and our own dynamic as a group.  We are riding English.  I’m pleased with my horse, Kelebek.  She’s smart, sweet-mannered and sensitive.  She hardly needs any leg; I can steer her just with neck rein and shifting my weight.  Towards the end of the ride she slipped, or was bitten by a horsefly and startled, or something.  Her rear leg buckled and she swung her head sharply around to the left and half-collapsed.  It was all in a split-second and was the kind of situation where a rider can come off a horse, but I was pleased to be told by one of the other riders that I was “a natural” for staying on.

Avanos

On the afternoon of my arrival, the team of us stopped into an open-air market in the small town of Avanos, where we are staying before we commence on the ride proper.  In all my travels, I have never been to a more authentic place than that market. 

Avanos is off the tourist circuit.  No tourists come here, which means the locals have no tourism hangover, no cynicism of travellers.  These are townsfolk in rural Turkey simply buying their food at the dusty market.  There are bright red tomatoes – some torn open so you can see their quality – yellow melons, pale green squashes, strawberries, two kinds of cherries, cucumbers, corn, beans, on and on, all straight from the farms of Cappadocia.  Row after row of fresh produce gives way, oddly, to shoes.  Hundreds of kinds of shoes.  Then sacks of rustic orange and turmeric yellow spices, nuts, seeds, sheafs of dried herbs and tea.  Leatherwork.  Toys.  Barrows of twisted, glazed breads.

But the most memorable part is the people.  They are mildly curious about the presence of a tourist, but they go about their business with polite indifference.  They smile when you say merhaba – hello – and are happy to oblige when I ask to take their photo (by smiling and shaking the camera at them with raised eyebrows – such is the sophistication of my Turkish).  And the children are hilarious.  There’s no learned trepidation over strangers, here; they are wholly children, cheeky and innocent.  One little boy stopped and smiled at the white guy with the camera gear and I snapped his photo before he ran off.  Two precocious eight-year-old girls spoke English very well and playfully posed for photos by our group.  It was a really lovely, authentic thing.

Alright, I’m going!

Observations from the Sydney airport…

I’ve been a little wistful lately about leaving, but when I tried to dawdle through the Sydney airport I was abused with bad adult contemporary saxophone à la Kenny G from the loudspeakers as if the city was driving me out.  I am going on record to say it is my most hated genre of music.  How is it that saxophone can be simultaneously so John-Coltrane-good and so Kenny-G-bad?