Istanbul All Over Again

So sorry I haven't written in a while... Sam got here last Monday and I've been pretty busy ever since, so here's what I remember. I spent one more peaceful night on the island, enjoying the sunset and chatting up the locals. On the morning that I left the island I caught the noon ferry headed towards Canakale and met a Turkish guy named Ersin on the boat. He helped me to beat the crowd getting off the boat and onto the scarce bus seats and so on the next ferry ride 30 minutes later across the Bosporus we sat together and talked. He's studying tourism at a university on the island. I think that mostly involves hotel management, related phrases in English, and some simple psychology. He had some other classmates on the boat so I played some songs for all of them too and he invited me to go with him for lunch in Canakale.

He lives with his aunt when not at school, an she owns and cooks at a restaurant in town. The food was really good, and either really cheap or discounted for me. The two of them also invited me to stay at their home for the night so that I could take the bus to Istanbul in the morning and save on a hotel. I reluctantly accepted since I wanted to have some time to use the internet at the hostel for hotel reservations and they didn't have internet at the house. I went to a couple bazaars around town with Ersin and his aunt, Phylis. Later that night Ersin took me over to his friend's house for beer, football, and the use of his wifi.

The next morning, Ersin walked me to the bus station and I headed off for Istanbul, a 5 hour bus ride away. It was a pretty dull time, and when I got into Istanbul I took the subway and tram out to a hostel that I had heard about and called it a night. I just hung out there reading about the Greek islands, possible ferry routes, and waiting for some other travelers to show up in the dormitory so that I'd have someone to talk to. Also that night I figured out that I was wrong about Sam showing up the next day, Sunday, and that she was actually to show up on Monday. So, the next morning I resolved to ferry out to the Asian side of Istanbul (since it's right on the divide between Asia and Europe) because most people don't go over there and it's a place that I probably was not going to go with Sam.

That morning at breakfast I met a couple of Norwegian guys who had exactly the same plan as me. One of them had toured the whole European side of the city on his last trip and wanted to do something different. The other just didn't want to see the normal tourist stuff. Their names were John and Knute. They're on a one month trip together and are covering a lot of ground... just seeing Istanbul and Ephesus in Turkey and the flying to Syria and Egypt. Yea, it's their plan to tour Egypt in July but they claim to have a high tolerance for heat built up from years of sauna use.

I got to sample a special food on the way to the ferry... a grilled fish sandwich with lemon, onions, and lettuce. The guide book lists it off as the most special food in Turkey and I've also see them on an episode of Bizarre Foods. They cook them on boats next to the pier, and the moored boats seem to sway in the waves more than I would think possible. It's hard to believe that they could work on that miserable boat, but they did make some good sandwiches.

On the Asian side of Istanbul we saw a trendy and urban part of the town missed by most. There we innumerable cafes, gourmet food markets, some of the best fish for sale that I've ever seen, and lots of pubs. We spent a lot of time searching for a Turkish coffee but mostly found cafe Americano. See, American coffee is weak (compared to espresso) but is filtered, not bitter, and served in large portions. Espresso is lightly filtered but very strong and Turkish coffee is almost the same but unfiltered. You have to be careful not to drink the last 1/3 of the cup because it's all grounds and sludgy. I've had a lot of Turkish coffee by now and honestly it's never terribly good. Espresso is clearly better in every way but unlike all the European backpackers I meet, I like cafe Americano too. There's just more of it to enjoy.

There wasn't much else to see on the Asian side so we took the ferry back and went to the Taksim neighborhood. Taksim is the trendy, commercial, and expensive neighborhood of Istanbul. There are hundreds of great clothing stores, restaurants of every kind except cheap, and also a few tourist attractions. We just walked around looking at shops and marveling at the crowded streets. Also we stopped for dinner at a cafeteria style restaurant and it was very good. Finally we got some beers and walked around with those before calling it a night.

The next day Sam showed up. I met her at the airport and we traveled through town to get back to the hotel that I had reserved for us. I was pretty happy to see her (it's been almost 4 months) and it's weird but it feels like no time has passed between us. She still looks the same, talks the same, and has the same sense of humor... so has anything changed? Just trivial things. Anyways, it's good to have my closest friend back again, if only for 2 weeks.

That afternoon we visited the Blue Mosque, the most beautiful (from the outside) mosque in all of Turkey. It was built in the 15th century by Mehmet I after he conquered the Byzantines and took the most affluent and beautiful city in the world at the time from them. The Blue Mosque was built very close to the Aya Sofya, the biggest church in Istanbul, and borrows a bit from the style of the exterior. Actually, all mosques built after this point borrow from the style of the Byzantines with their domed high ceilings as domes were a new introduction to Muslim architecture. The interior of the mosque is quite nice too with its painted ceilings, huge chandeliers, and is really inspiring. It's also a functioning mosque so admission is free though tourist women have to wear headscarves. Sam is posing next to one of the mammoth support pillars inside. Outside the mosque a large group of young Turkish girls took their picture with Sam and she was pretty surprised by this but I think it's pretty normal now.

The next day I had a full schedule for us. First stop was the Aya Sofya. It was built in the 5th century AD by emperor Justinian and was the largest enclosed space in the world for over 1000 years. It's genius architects avoided large interior support pillars by making the domed roof out of special hollow bricks made from porous clay on the island of Rhodes. It also has dozens of huge green marble pillars pillaged from a famous temple in Greece, hundreds of miles away. The interior walls were then covered in slabs of curly yellowish marble and many sections were adorned with intricate tile mosaics depicting various religious figures in unique poses and styles since it was so early in Christianity and the styles weren't so nailed down yet. Between the yellow marble, golden tiled mosaics, and tons of gold leaf the whole place has a distinct yellow glow to it.

This is my favorite building in the world and I think that a lot of other people must have shared my opinion for the place to have lasted this long through the centuries and many wars. Of course when the Ottomans conquered the city in 1453 they converted the building to a mosque, but that involved only the simplest of modifications... mostly they painted over the mosaics and added a stone to indicate the direction of Mecca. Sam loved it too.

After that we headed over to the grand bazaar to do a little shopping. It's a huge labyrinth of covered alleyways lined with shops that's very old and very famous. Of course huge numbers of tourists go there and a lot of the shops are focused just on that market, but many real business is done there too and it's an important part of Istanbul culture. It was also a good chance for me to show off all that I've learned in the arts of haggling and I helped her get a bracelet, a few souvenirs for friends, and we got a knockoff purse too. We must have visited a dozen shops to buy each one of those items, but that's an important part of the haggling process. Also helpful is my ability to count and ask for student discounts in Turkish.

By then it was getting pretty warm so we hit the Basilica Cistern next. It was one of the highlights the last time we visited and it did not disappoint this time either. It's an old underground water storage depot, built by the Romans, and then forgotten for 1500 years. In modern times it was rediscovered by a German scientist investigating rumors of holes in people's basement that produced fresh water if a bucket was lowered. Some people reported catching fish in the buckets as well. The scientist found an entrance to the cistern and now it's a great place to enjoy the cool and creepy atmospheric lighting on a warm summer day. There are of course monstrously fat carp swimming around the pools and several of the supporting columns were recycled from previous temples and have some character to them. A couple of them have Medusa heads but they don't seem to bother the fish.

For dinner we went to the bridge crossing the Golden Horn, a famous stretch of water, and underneath are dozens of fish restaurants with live music. We chose one of them and had a pretty good, though pricey, dinner with several fishy appetizers and a Black Scorpion fish as the main course. There was live music too of course, and a lot of the Turkish guests got up and did group line dances until we were so sick of the noise that we left.

On our last full day in Istanbul we did the last great tourist attraction of great importance, Topkapi Palace. It was the home of the Sultans for the last 500 years and was a bit of a city unto itself. It housed hundreds of servants, craftsmen, guards, and had huge workshops for making jewelry, food, weapons, and any special orders for the Sultan. The Sultan had many advisers who held countless meetings to resolve state issues and the Sultan would occasionally listen in on the meetings through a brass grate and couple call for private audiences with his advisers to give direct orders. This was partially to preserve the imperial mystique but also because in subsequent generations the princes would seldom receive a real education and were largely unable to govern effectively. This is because the many concubines of the Sultan would murder each others children to advance their own, and so mothers would often just lock the princes in their rooms and not allow visitors.

Sam got to visit the harem of the Sultan, which I did not because I didn't want to pay for the ticket. I saw it the last time I was in town. The women of the harem would be educated in history, politics, music, and other arts in order to better entertain the Sultan. They also served as important but unofficial advisers and some of the listened in on state business and would tell the Sultan what to do since they were a bright and educated bunch on their own.

That all took a lot of time, and so we wanted to finish up the day in the Taksim neighborhood. Sam said that it reminded her of SoHo which is the highest compliment that she can give a place. We got dinner at one of those cafeteria style restaurants (Lokantasis) and then walked around with some beers. There was a free concert being put on in the neighborhood and we listened in on some of that before heading home.

We had to get up really early to catch the ferry out of town. I heard about a shortcut when going from Istanbul to Kusadesi where you take a ferry to Bursa and then a bus from there. Without the shortcut, it's a 9 hour bus ride. With the ferry in between, it was still a good 9 or 10 hours of travel time, but at least it had some variety. We got in and checked into a hotel with a pretty fair price of $25 a night for a huge room with a balcony and private bath. Later that night we went out for kebabs but had to hike into town pretty far to find a restaurant that was serving mostly Turkish people. Those ones have the best kebabs.

Kusadesi is a serious tourist town and when we got in there was a cruise ship docked at the port, 100 yards from downtown. The waterfront is totally covered with shops selling knockoffs purses, leather coats, shoes, jewelry, and tacky tourist junk. Most of the restaurants specialize in fish and chips (for the British cruisers) and bastardized Turkish cuisine. It's also twice the price of the stuff the locals eat so I won't do it. I'd rather go to a local place and order way too much... that's more satisfying for me.

The next morning we got up early to go to Ephesus. We took a bus to the ottogar and then another to get to the ancient site. Ephesus was a rich Greek city in it's day and when the Romans took it over it flourished for a couple hundred more years. The problem was, the harbor got silted up and turned into a malaria riddled swamp. That had a negative effect on the local populous and the city was abandoned. It has since been rebuilt in modern times to some degree... they put up a few of the buildings that had fallen over and it's actually one of the nicest Greek sites in Asia.

The first thing to see there is the huge theater. I wonder if St Paul preached at this very theater? Anyways, he wrote the letters to the Ephesians while he was imprisoned in Rome around 62 AD. Ephesus was a very important center of early Christianity. Nearby the city is a shrine that Mary supposedly spent her last years at.

We also got to see the famous library of Ephesus. It's a two story building and was built by one of the rulers in honor of his father who must have loved scholarly pursuits. I donb't have much to say about it but it was a lovely old building. Oh, I heard that some archeologists believe that there's a tunnel connecting it to the brothel across the street. I've also heard that it's BS. You decide.

Other sites include the public toilets, a large room with about 30 toilet holes in a stone bench that had running water underneath. They also had shared sea sponges for washing up. We also walked along several column lined streets trying to find as much shade as possible since it was extremely hot and all the water we had didn't seem to make much of a difference. We nearly got heat stroke but eventually we finished up the tour. While waiting for the bus back to town I picked mulberries from the nearby trees. They look like white blackberries and taste very sweet.

Later in the afternoon we hit the hamam, or Turkish bath. It's a very traditional thing in all of the middle east, and it's something that they learned from the Romans who were quite fond of it too. Basically you strip down, wrap in a towel, and sit in a sauna for a good long time. Then, a hairy Turkish guy washes your hair and then scrubs down your whole body with an abrasive pad to exfoliate the skin. After a rinse, he then soaps you up with a huge sponge and then gives a quick massage. Finally, you wash off again and then dry off in the 'cold room' where they bring you an apple tea. Good times, but Sam didn't care for the hairy Turkish guy exfoliating her. This is an unusual hamam for being co-ed. That night we also had a group dinner at the hotel with a bunch of Aussies but it wasn't particularly good.

The next morning we sailed for the Greek island of Samos, but I'm going to end this here. Sam said that she might like to write a guest post, so I'll let her cover the Greek islands... a rich source of narration.

A Little Island Time

Well, it's only been a day since my last post but I have some free time so let's do this. This morning I woke up early but then I slapped myself and went back to sleep. I'm not working here! Later in the morning I took my breakfast and then hitchhiked to the town in the center of the island, about 4km from my "beach" hotel. There's really no beach to speak of. The center town, that everyone calls Merkez though that's not what my map claims, has only 8600 people living on it, and it's about 80% of the island's population. It's small like I said, but not so cute.

I asked some people in a tea house which road to head down to hitchhike to the next town on my list, Tepekuy, but they advised me that there is no traffic to the eastern half of the island and that it's impossible to hitch. One of the guys in the cafe offered to drive me to the nearby Greek town of Zetinli for a few bucks so I did that. It was a short ride, maybe 5 km but I appreciated getting my bearings at least so that I could walk back.

Zetinli was a larger town in the past but a lot of people left the island in 1925 during the population exchange that I'll surely discuss later. Also, a lot more people left in 1993 when the military used eminent domain to take most of the town's olive orchards occupying flat ground so that they could build a small air base. There are only about 50 permanent residents left, and they're all old men. This was all explained to me by the owner of the local coffee house, a Greek man who moves here every summer to sell coffee to tourists. While there I had a few cups and also ate my lunch of bread and olives that I picked up from the store for $1.

Oh, I also hiked up a mountain behind the town, or at least I went up as far as I could. I foolishly went out in shorts and sandals assuming that there would be some shepherds trails but instead I had to blaze my own way through the thorny bushes. The goats cleared out some routes and a lot of the bush was flowering Rockrose which doesn't scratch so it was ok. We've got Rockrose in our garden back home, but I love they color they have here.

Half way up the mountain I found a small hut with a tree to rest under so I parked it for a long while enjoying the view. There was also a spring of fresh water up there coming out of a pipe so I filled up my water bottle. I've been drinking tap water for a long time now and I have yet to get sick. Still, I've got some antibiotics prepared for the fateful day that I do get struck down.

Like I mentioned earlier, there's not much traffic to the Eastern half of the island. That's because all that's there are some old ghost towns and only taxi driven tourists want to see them. There are ghost towns throughout western Turkey actually, and they all have to do with the Turkish War of Independence that ended in 1925. This is a complicated issue, but here's how I understand it. The Ottomans (Turks) were on the losing side of WWI and immediately after the war the Allies took over the the Dardanelles like they tried to previously in Gallipoli. Also, they promised a lot of Ottoman territory to the Greeks. See, the Greeks saw themselves as the decedents of the Byzantines and it was their dream to remake it by taking back Istanbul and western Turkey for the Christians. To that end, they invaded Turkey and tried to destroy the new Turkish Republic that was founded by Mustaffa Kemal. The Greeks lost however and in 1925 the war was ended with a population exchange. The Orthodox Turks were forced to move to Greece and the Muslim Greeks were forced to move to Turkey. That's the peace brokered by the UN. The Greeks got almost all the islands and the Turks got the mainland. There were a lot more Orthodox Turks than Muslim Greeks however, so many of the Orthodox tons in Western Turkey were left vacant and many are still abandoned to this day.

I'm finishing up this next post where I'm with Sam, and hopefully I'll be able to post that today.

Battlefields, New And Old

The last few days have almost been slightly depressing. Not that I haven't been having a good time, but the subject matter of the tours has gotten a little grim since I did back to back Troy and Gallipoli. So much historical death and destruction; You better believe this will be a history lesson! The hostel that I had checked into does tours of Troy but I wanted to cheap out and go it alone. Unfortunately Troy has a bit of a bad reputation for being in such poor condition so most cheap backpackers will cheap out at full strength and not go at all, so I failed to find anyone who would go there with me. Really the only reason to go there at all is because it conjures up such elaborate images in the hearts of those people back home who don't know that it's one of the least inspiring ruins in the Mediterranean.

I took a bus 30 minutes to the drop off point for Troy and found the entrance price to be cheaper than what the people trying to sell me all inclusive tours said it would be. That figures. The first thing to see in there is the famed Trojan Horse, or at least some crude approximation of it. This one was fun though because you can climb up inside of it like I did for the picture. Back in town, they had what the horse from the 2004 Brad Pitt movie Troy. The movie version looks best so that's the shape that most of the souvenir venders sell in model form.

Thankfully this site has the best sign placards yet, with pictures of what some of the rock piles might have looked like before they got buried with thousands of years of debris. Ah hell, let's launch into the history lesson. The troy that people know about is the one that was sacked by the Macedonians around 1000 BC. The story is pretty long (read the Iliad) but basically prince Paris of Troy abducted queen Hellen of Macedonia. The Greeks then launched an 8 year war to get her back and after a long and unsuccessful siege, they managed to break into the fortress by way of subterfuge. Of course in real life Troy was a rich city state that controlled access to the Dardanelles (waterway connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean) and the Greeks went to war over trade, not Hellen, but the end result is the same. This Troy that was sacked by the Greeks is called Troy VII and there are a total of 9 versions of the city Troy that were built on top of each other over thousands of years. This happened because of needs to expand and enlarge the citadel and because an earthquake every few hundred years had flattening effects.

By the time the Byzantines came to rule Troy, it was no longer a wealthy or important city and probably the temples were long since destroyed. The city lapsed into decay and was abandoned and eventually a hill of dirt covered everything that was once Troy. One of the reasons that these temples were flattened, besides earthquakes, was that after the fall of the Roman Empire, the mining industry collapsed and the price of metal increased dramatically. This forced local people to tear down old stone temples to claim the iron braces that helped hold together the marble columns and ceilings. It's amazing how much metal was needed to hold these structures together.

In 1868, a wealthy German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann (who was obsessed with the Iliad) became convinced that this hill was the site of ancient Troy after meeting an English archeologist who had made a few test digs at the site and determined it to be of unnatural origin. From reading the Iliad, Schliemann believed this to be the area that it would have been and he paid to have the site dug up. In a controversial move to archeology majors, he dug a 10 meter wide trench straight through the heart of the hill until he hit bedrock. Not the slow methodical kind of digging we're used to seeing but rather a mad dash for anything that would make headlines. From there he found that there were different layers of the city and after finding some gold treasure he declared victory and carted his find off to Germany. The treasure was taken to Russia at the end of WWII and can now be seen in Moscow (I've seen it).

Wow, that was a lot of history. I could go on about the blind poet Homer and the Iliad but you can just go Google it if you care. I took a long stroll through the site and got some pictures of some walls, more walls, a small theater, and a bunch of carved marble slabs that would have been the roof of a great temple at some point. Eventually I got bored and overwhelmed by all the Japanese tour groups and had to take the bus back to town. After a stroll along the waterfront I went back to the hostel and tried to learn as much as I could before visiting Gallipoli the next day.

I already knew that it was the scene of a major WWI battle, but watching the movie Gallipoli staring Mel Gibson helped. They show it every night at my hostel. You see, Gallipoli was a huge disaster for the Allied forces in WWI and the Australians and New Zealanders in particular remember the event vividly. To summarize, it was a failed D-Day that stretched into a 9 month bloodbath. They celebrate ANZAC day on April 25th (the date of the first Allied landings) and it's like their 4th of July. It's traditional for Aussies and Kiwis to travel to Tukey for the holiday and get drunk and loud and overcrowded. Normally, between 10 and 25 thousand of them show up though it was low this year because of the volcano cancelling flights.

What's that, you want me to tell you more of the history? It would be my pleasure. In WWI, Turkey (the Ottomans as they were then known) sided with the Germans. The Russians were with the Allies and Britain wanted to supply them through the Dardanelles so that they could open up a South Eastern front against the Germans. The plan was to make an amphibious landing at Gallipoli and to march north and take control of Istanbul. Doing this would both take Turkey out of the war and open up the supply route. In the first try, Churchill (who was admiral of the English Navy at the time) sent a combined fleet to sail up the waterway and shoot the hell out of any Turks. They ran into sea mines and several large cannons that the Turks took from their outdated ships and moved to land. Several battleships were lost and the Allies retreated. A couple months later they came back with an army and on April 25th the ANZACs (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) landed and took control of a thin strip of land. The spot they landed (a steep cliff) was not so good and they were pinned there for many months. The British and the French (as well as a bunch of Indians) landed at different sites and over the course of the battle they didn't make too much progress. It was trench warfare at its worst and in some places the trenches were as close as 8 meters.

The first site on the tour was Kabatepe, where most of the Ottoman Army was waiting for the invaders. It was a wide easy beach and the obvious point of attack but the Allies never landed there, instead choosing a point about 4 km to the North. It's also the site of the first of many Allied cemeteries. It's said that Gallipoli was the last of the 'gentleman battles' where both sides respected each other. There were periodic ceasefires to remove the bodies and there are some stories about a Turkish soldier who carried a wounded Australian back to the Allied trench and then went back to his own. This story was told by a former Australian Prime Minister so it's probably true in some form.

Next we went to ANZAC cove where they actually did land. The government built a wide road through the area that really destroys what the place would have looked like, but the tour buses can get through more easily I guess. It's really stupid. Anyways, when the ANZACs landed, the Turkish commander on duty, the soon to be famous Mustaffa Kemal (Attaturk), would not wait for orders from his general and ordered his 3000 men to attack. They didn't care for the idea since there were over 10000 invaders on the beach, but Mustaffa gave this order: "I don't command you to fight, I command you to die, because in that time our reinforcements will arrive" and as legend goes they all fought to the last man. It was a good move since it contained the invaders at the beach.

After that we went to another cemetery and then yet another high up on a mountain ridge called Lone Pine. All the other trees were cut down to make trenches. The Australians held this point for a while and there were some intense battles. The Mel Gibson movie highlights a famous moment when 4 successive waves of Australian youths charged from the trenches and were all cut down before making it to the other side. Gruesome stuff. One soldier sent home a pine cone from the tree, which later died, and it's the grandson of that tree that's growing there now, brought back from Australia by a veteran.

Finally we visited a site where Mustaffa Kemal was hit in the chest by a piece of shrapnel, while giving a speech, but was saved by the pocket watch over his heart. There were also some old trenches nearby, but they're like 90 years old so it's no surprise that they're not in great condition. We finished up with a short trip to a museum with lots of photographs, bomb shells, and uniforms to look at. I was pretty worn out by the end of the day, but I had made friends with a couple Aussies on the tour, and a young German guy named Micheal so we all went out for dinner and beers. Michael just traveled down from the Balkans where I'll be going after Greece so I tried to get some advice from him but he never actually left any of the capitols that he traveled between. He was just interested in drinking it seems, but I still liked him.

The next morning I got up early and caught the ferry out to the island of Gokceada. It's Turkey's largest island (they lost most of them to the Greeks in 1925, another story) though most of the inhabitants are Greek Orthodox which is very unusual. After getting to land I took a bus to the North side of the island which is popular for its beach but upon arrival I see no beach. There is a small strip of hotels next to a harbor and there are some nearby hills to climb up.

I climbed one of them in the afternoon heat and found the landscape to be a mixture of scree (loose rock fragments on a slope) and thorn bushes. I think the buses look really cool though so I'm not disappointed. They come in different shades of grey and green and aren't something that I'm going to tackle in my sandals and shorts so I didn't get as far as I would have liked.

After that I went back to my hotel room and took a long nap before parking myself at the only cafe with internet for dinner. I've been here for hours drinking cherry juice and catching up on emails. The sunset was lovely and in the evening several venders started selling jewlery near the water and a few dozen Turkish tourists showed up. I thought that I was the only one in town during the day. Tomorrow I'm going to hitchhike inland and explore some of the other valleys. After that I'm going to head up to Istanbul to meet Sam at the airport. I've got to say that I'm pretty excited to see her... I could use some company and I can't think of anyone better to fill that role. Also, it's been almost 4 months since I last saw her and it's been pretty tough for me. Yep, good things are on the horizon.

Ruins of Pergamum

Hi again. Ostin and I made a try at the waterfall that we were told about, but it was a much longer hike than was suggested. We heard that it was 10 minutes, but it ended up taking at least 2 hours each way. I've got a feeling that we were talking about different places. We found a section of the Lycean Trail that led up the valley from the beach and out hostel and into a narrow canyon that got pretty steep.

Along the way we picked up the company of a local dog that we named Shorthound in honor of my tradition of calling local kids that follow me Shortround. It's an Indiana Jones reference if you didn't know. Well, the trail ended pretty rapidly but it's hard to get lost in a canyon and Shorthound knew the way, so we pressed on. The canyon was thick with oleander, sycamore, and pine and had a small stream running down the middle.

At several points the canyon compressed and we'd have to scramble along steep and smooth rocks on the sides to keep from going in the water but also there were times that we had to ford the stream anyways. Shorthound had no problem getting over the steep parts if she had a running start, but Ostin and I were in flipflops and hiked a lot of it barefoot. Finally we got to a waterfall that we thought was too dangerous to climb around so we called it the top and turned around to head home.

On the way back we picked wild Thyme and Sage but we couldn't find a lamb to roast so it all went to waste. Turan made us a special dinner that night... 2 small sea bass each and a lot of sides. Definitely his best meal of the 3 nights we were there.

The next morning we packed up and headed out to catch a bus into town. The hike up to the bus was truly brutal with all my stuff and I was soaked by the time we caught the bus at 10:30. From there we went back to Fethiye and Ostin went inland to Pamukkale and I went north to Bergama. It was a really long day of bus rides and when I got into town that night I was impressed by how much ground I was able to cover.

I met an Australian backpacker at my hostel named Anna. We were the only guests in the dorm and so we went out to dinner and to chat. She's a doctor and had some good tips about how to heal a pretty nasty cut I've got on my hand. I waited a few hours to ask her about it after learning that she's a doc and she told me that she hates bringing up the fact that she's one because she gets overwhelmed with queries for advice whe people find out. Mine just happens to be one of the less gross things that she needs to discuss in backpacker health. Anyways, she's been on the trail for 9 months already and is heading home in 3 more after he hits up Spain and some parts of Africa.

That night we also met an English couple that talked at length about how great the ruins of Pergamum are and told us about a hole in the fence that they used to hike back to town. Of course this struck us as a way that we could enter through and avoid the $15 entrance fee. The ruins are about 2 km away from the hotel at the top of a hill, so of course we were going to go there anyways. So the next morning we followed a shepherds trail to the hole in the fence and kept a close eye out for officials.

Pergamum was a huge and important city in the ancient world. You see, after Alexander the Great died his territory was fought over by his generals for many years. One of the 3 generals who came to control the 3 great territories captured a huge horde of treasure worth over 9000 talents. I have now idea how much that is, but I think it's huge. Anyways, he entrusted it to one of his commanders in the city of Pergamum but then died in a subsequent battle. The treasure stayed and over several generations the city grew in wealth and importance and had the second greatest library in the ancient world after Alexandria. So the city had a Greek period that I just covered, but during Roman times it lost some influence and one of the kings willed the city away to Rome upon his death. A tax free zone was negotiated and the city on the hill became massively wealthy once more. In Byzantine and Ottoman times it declined and was lost to time.

Later on in the 19th century the Germans excavated it and carted off the best statues and pieces of gold that they found. What was left was reconstructed to some degree and is today pretty impressive in scale and in the quality of its buildings. We saw the gymnasium (the largest in the Hellenistic era), the library, several theaters, and several great temples. They weren't in great shape, but the foundations survived and some of the pillars are still there.

After lunch we set off to see another great ruin, the Red Basilica. It was originally a huge temple built in the 2nd century AD used to worship the Egyptian gods Serapis, Isis, and Harpocrates. It was pretty important and St John wrote that it was one of the 7 churches of the Apocalypse and also singled it out as the Devil's throne. When Christianity came into fashion, they did not convert the temple into a church but rather built a smaller basilica inside of it for whatever reason. It's in pretty bad shape today, but I got some sense of it's awesome scale.

We also walked a long ways to the other side of town to visit another famous ruin, the Asclpion. It was a huge medical complex that would treat anyone who wasn't pregnant or dying. The didn't perform miracles, just non fatal ailments like skin maladies and I dunno what. Basically they would have you drink from various sacred pools and sleep in special chambers. Some chambers would control the light levels to try and heal and others resonated the sounds of flowing water to ease the mind. When you'd wake up, mystics would analyze the dreams to come up with a prescription. It was very famous and had some really huge temples. We could not avoid the entrance fee however and also had to endure the the rain.

The town itself is pretty nice, without any huge buildings and generally has friendly people. I laughed when we were finding a good place for lunch and accepted some samples that turned out to be grilled liver. Anna choked and spit it out while I just choked it down and grimmaced. Anyways, the next morning we set off to go to the bus station together because we happen to be going the same direction, to Troy and Gallipoli. This involves traveling to the city of Canakkale which is more or less between the two and a good base for expeditions.

The ride up was uneventful and we checked into the first hostel listed in LP since it was just starting to rain. In retrospect I regret this because I don't really care for the hotel too much, but I guess my issues are with things that are had to detect anyways, like that the wifi is crap and the plugs in the rooms can't hold a charger properly. They also sell guided tours of Troy and Gallipoli out of the hostel but they're a little expensive. I might have to do the Gallipoli tour since it's really impossible to tour on your own, but I'll take a public bus to troy and do without the narration. The only other thing that I feel like mentioning is that we went out to dinner at a place that looked like it had a great Iskender kebab and it was truly legendary. Iskender is made of thin slices of lamb mixed with chopped bread and roasted peppers and then topped with a savory tomato sauce. A big pile of firm yogurt is added to the side and you've got Iskender. It's awesome. Actually, I think that I've talked about Iskender before, but this one was the first great one.

Oceanic Musings

As promised last time, Ostin (he insists I spell it this way) and I headed out to the remote beach community of Kabak. It's what I pictured Olympos to be like before I got there... very remote and very quiet, save for the thump of hippie drums at night. Well, this place is all that though it's still a little early in the season and there aren't many people here. I see that as a plus. I guess that I wanted to have some languid quiet to go to after the boat trip.

Honestly, on the boat things were a bit much for me. I feel like an old man saying this, but things were just a little too loud and I didn't feel comfortable having animated discussions about Will Ferrel, Lonely Island, and drinking games. Is this what maturity is like? Not likely. Nah, I just like smaller groups where one can stay on one subject for a longer period of time and I don't have to interject comments with lightning speed. Actually when I hung out with most of the people one on one I liked them all mostly but together it was too much.

Today I'm relaxing at my hostel that overlooks the beach from a few hundred yards back and I can't hear anything but the crashing waves and the hum of a refrigerator. A mild breeze keeps me cool and disturbs the tiny ants crawling on the table and sometimes between the keys on my netbook. I can smell pine and olive trees and can taste the salt on the air. There are no cars here and I feel pretty great about that too.

My Argentine friend Ostin is keeping me company today, but he's in a bit of a quiet mood since he's still wrapped up in a murder novel and we already finished the two bottles of wine that we brought with us from town. In the picture he's displaying great affection for the real Turkish coffee they serve here instead of the usual Nescafe. He's the same age as me, but he left home 2.5 years ago to travel in New Zealand. He took a job shortly after at a hotel as a concierge, selling tours to tourists, recalling names on sight, and generally making people fell easy. He's a charismatic guy though not overly talkative if the moment calls for some quiet. He also worked as a bar tender at an Aspen resort for a year but despite the great lifestyle that it held, potential visa problems prevents him from ever seeing it as a permanent plan. You can manage a hotel for 10 years there and one day be denied a visa for no reason at all. That's not a good thing to have hanging over your head.

He's into both both North and South American music and really likes a combination called Bossa n' Beatles. Check out this link on youtube for a sample. Apart from the hotel work, he's also been traveling hard for the last 9 months and visited most of SE Asia and a lot of China. It sounds like he's had a great time, but he's picked up some strange habits from traveling. First of all he asks for a student discount for everything from food to bus fares to hostels. I'm going to do that too... nobody asks to see a student card except for government museums. Also, he started saving pack weight by abandoning underwear entirely. I'm not prepared to do that just yet though my pack is pretty heavy.

He heard about this place from another backpacker that he met. They described it as paradise. We took a series of buses from the last place we were at, Kas, and eventually got dropped off on the side of the road, high up on a cliff overlooking the sea. After hiking down a small trail for 30 minutes we found a series of tiny hostels clinging to the steep slopes of the canyon. They all do half board, so the breakfast and dinner are included, and all of them rent out tiny wooden shacks with rather uncomfortable beds or wooden platforms to set up your own tent on. Some of them are as much as $80 per person and are pretty luxurious but we found one for $20 each that skimps on the yoga classes, pool, and shaded hammocks. Still, we've got a kitchen area to sit at that has a good view and the bathrooms aren't too bad. Also there's free wifi. Some of the places to stay aren't so much hostels as they are camp grounds with toilets and juice bars. These ones attract a more rustic seeking backpacker. Usually these people have dreadlocks and specialized clothing that basically came from an organic Hot Topic. It's funny how the hippies nowadays really do have a uniform look to them.

Yesterday we slept for 11 hours and then after breakfast we went to the beach and claimed a spot under some shade. I played ukulele with a guy who had some drums and maracas and Ostin played with some of the many dogs on the beach. Most of the dogs belong to someone, but the Turkish guy, Turan, who runs our hostel says that he saw a pack of domestic dogs catch and eat a wild goat last winter. They seem pretty friendly at the beach, and one of the black schnauzers has real dreads. Adorable, but dirty. I swam the day before but this day I did not because I'm trying to let a few small wounds heal.

Later that night, Ostin and I talked with Turan for a good long time. He's been working for different hotels for almost a decade and he's just 25 now. His dream is to move to Germany and to start an organic restaurant because he's a pretty good cook. Also, 5 months ago he finished his mandatory military service for 1.5 years. Turkey has 2500 soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and he was unlucky enough to be picked for this duty. I think that Turkey probably had to send troops as a NATO obligation. He said that he saw a lot of fighting up in the mountains and that the Peshmarga that he was fighting against were crazy people. He says that they have no shoes, they hike the mountains in small bands, and shoot anyone they see. They aren't interested in a peaceful life and only live to fight. That's what he says at least. Anyways, the Peshmarga are Kurdish fighters (according to Wikipedia) and as far as I know aren't in Afghanistan so I don't really know who the hell was shooting at him.

Today Ostin and I are lazing around again. I'm working on my blog, he's readying, and later on I'll wash some laundry and hang it out to dry. I hear that there's a small waterfall to hike to. The cliffs here are very steep so I hope it's not too far. I'll let you know if anything interesting happens, but I hope that nothing does.