 Day
One -- October 3, 1996
Met at airport by Intra Tours representative who drove me into Istanbul.
Arrived at Hotel Nippon quite late, well after 2 a.m. on October 4. On the
way in, the driver runs over a cat trying to cross the road.
Hardly the most auspicious way to start my tour of Turkey. Maybe the ex-critter
was waiting for me on the Phantom Train ten
days later.
Top of Page
Day Two -- October 4, 1996
 8:30
a.m., after perhaps 5 hours sleep, a man from Intra Tours phones me. Wants
to know if I wish to go on a Bosphorus Tour. Cost: $55.00 U.S. I decline.  What I wish for is more sleep. Try to get back to it but don't succeed.
It's a free day on the schedule so I decide to head to Topkapi Palace and
check out the sights (and the museums). There is no tour representative in the
hotel and the receptionist isn't too helpful. Doesn't mention anything about
the private minibuses they call dolmuses in Turkey, which I don't find out about
until a couple of days too later.
I taxi over to the sea (Besiktas) and, after failing to get into the Dolmabahce
Palace because only 35 people are allowed in at any one time and the tour
groups have priority, I try to get a boat to Eminonu near the old town (Sultanahmet).
Guy at the kiosk says the boats don't run there any more. I could take a boat
to the Asian side then another boat to Eminonu district, however. Decide it's
too expensive and grab a bus marked Topkapi. Have to pay twice, at the stand
and on the bus, then it turns out this Topkapi is a town, not a palace.
 Fortunately,
I figure this out in time and jump the bus before it gets too far from where
I want to go. End up walking miles to Sarayburnu Point, where Ataturk's statue
stands, then go into Gulhane Garden. Eventually locate Topkapi and have lunch
at the Medusa. (Nice name, eh?)
 Someone
tells me the museums are inside the palace so, even though I'm scheduled to
go there the next day as part of my Mosques and Mosaics tour, I pay to go
inside. Of course there are no museums inside the palace, unless you consider
Topkapi a museum, that is, -- they're actually in grounds outside it and down
a hill. No signs pointing to them either.
By the time I figure that out,
the Museum of Oriental Antiquities, where the 12th Century B.C. Treaty of Kadesh is kept (the
oldest extant peace treaty in the world, a copy of which is in the foyer of the United Nations
building in New York, and a must-see for any collector of Mithraic esoterica because Mithras is listed as one of its guarantors), is closed and the Archaeological one is closing. I get in for a quick look
around though, no charge.
I can't find the tramway back to Eminonu and end up walking all the way back
there, finally break down, and get a cab. Traffic's terrible and the meter
keeps ticking. Then the driver can't find my hotel. He lets me off at Taksim
Square and some kids show me where the Nippon is, -- but not before they try
to coax me into their carpet shop. Found a place that served lamb chops for
about four dollars that night. It was my one success of the day.
Top of Page
Day 3 -- October 5
The long-anticipated tour officially starts, -- the guide's there but no
bus. We (myself and two older couples from Victoria) have to wait for over
an hour. Turns out the driver was up late and overslept. The guide's okay
but he changes our itinerary. Instead of going to the Grand Bazaar in the
morning after we're finished with the Blue Mosque, the Byzantine Hippodrome, and the fabulous Aghia Sophia Church,  he
takes us to a Carpet Factory where some guy tries to pressure-sell us his
wares.
I walk out but the other four stay and are eventually sucked in to buying
some cheap wool floor mats. Over an hour and half wasted, -- which, given
our delayed start, has cost us most of the morning.
After a late lunch, which I don't remember so it probably wasn't anything special, we did our tour
of the Topkapi Palace and were taken to the Bazaar, which is an amazing warren of shops selling
everything that's legal and probably a lot that isn't.
When we ask about going to the Suleymaniye Mosque, which was on our schedule,
the guide says it wasn't on his itinerary. He took us back to the hotel and,
as for some reason they hadn't been done yet, made arrangements for me to
fly to Ankara the next morning. 
Initially he booked me on the 6:30 a.m. flight but a space became available
on the 7:30 one and that was confirmed. Dinner was at the Nippon. A smorgasbord,
it featured most of the dishes we would be seeing over and over again for
the next seven days.
A guy stopped me on the street
while I was on my evening constitutional, asked me the time and where I was from. After I told
him Canada, he said they had better girls here, -- did I want to meet one in my hotel room? I
didn't so he asked me if I wanted a joint.
The last time a complete stranger asked me that on a
street was over twenty years ago in La Paz, Baja Mexico. That guy turned out to be a policeman.
NOTE: The Aghia Sophia,
the Blue Mosque, and the well-covering
pictured above are of course variations of the beehive-shaped Tholos Guest Houses I'm so fond of.
Top of Page
Day 4 -- October 6, 1996
While the other four Canadians had to take an overnight train from Istanbul,
I flew to Ankara as per previous arrangements. I was met by a new guide, an
attractive woman in her mid-twenties. Immediately noticeably, bared bellybuttons
not being a common sight in the Ankara airport, she wore a surprisingly, to
my mind, too-short tee-shirt.
She told me to wait because more people were flying in on a later flight.
While I was dutifully doing so I noticed a leather belly bag on a chair nearby.
I considered turning it in since abandoned bags in a Middle East airport do
not inspire confidence. What I did instead was go outside and have a smoke. 
A man in a pale blue uniform, a janitor I figured, picked up the bag and I
thought nothing more of it until the guide asked me if I'd seen it. I told her
I had and described the man who picked it up. Turned out the bag was hers and
contained all her identification, her credit cards, the money for entrances
to the various sites we would be visiting, and her guide badge.
Over an hour later, after the other flight arrived, and after I'd been interviewed
by the police and failed to identify about a dozen janitors they paraded before
us (you know what they say about Turks -- no doubt the same thing they say
about us), we finally got on the bus. It was about fifteen years old and hadn't
seen just better days, it felt to have seen better millennia.
Half the tour were Spaniards, and the English guide didn't speak their language, so they had their
own guide. The four other Canadians were picked up at a downtown hotel where they'd been
waiting for something like four hours and the tour finally got underway.
We went to the Ataturk Mausoleum (Ataturk means 'Father of the Turks', just
like Attila the Hun's name meant 'Little Father', -- makes you wonder about
the Tower of Babel). Then, all too briefly, we had a seemingly timed, by the
guide, race through the Hittite Museum, which
while definitely bullish might have been fascinating
had I enough real time to look through it thoroughly. Neither place, not the
mausoleum nor the museum, was on my itinerary.
 We
had lunch then waited another two hours for a second bus to take the Spaniards.
It never showed so we struck out with the Spanish guide doing most of the talking
and never in English. Later we had another long delay. Someone said the second
bus was still expected but again it never showed. After a long drive we arrived
around 9 or 10 p.m. at our hotel.
It was somewhere in Cappadocia, Nevsehir I think, though for some reason I
never got a tour packet, map, list of hotels or anything like that. (Everyone
else did, including the four other Canadians.) We, the five Canadians, the
guide, and the driver, stayed at the same hotel as the Spaniards.
The others, seven or eight Australians, three white South Africans (who still
refer to the vast majority of its inhabitants as 'our blacks', among other
things), and a couple of elderly Americans stayed at different places. Everyone
else says we were scheduled to spend two nights at the same hotels but the
guide, the one who makes it clear she's the one who counts the most, says
otherwise.
Top of Page
Day 5 -- October 7, 1996
This is the day I was looking forward to the most, -- Goreme National Park
with its open air museum, fairy chimneys reputedly caused by differential erosion as opposed to actual faeries (Drat!),
nearby underground cities (something like
six hundred of them, we were told; their inhabitants being the inspiration
for our word Troglodyte), and heads where there shouldn't be heads almost
everywhere I went.  
NOTE: It was in one of the Troglodyte
Churches that I came across a Circled-X, which
as every phant (PHANTACEA PHAN) knows is the Mark of Cain,
Slayer of Abel. Of course I doubt that 3rd Century Troggs were reading PHANTACEA even on what passed for the Worldwide Web in their day; i.e., the kind made
by spiders.
In terms of seeing heads where there shouldn't be heads, it's one of my favourite
things to do. I've started a collection of them over in the Faeries Webpage. Why there? Because, as phants also know, heads where there shouldn't
be heads is about the only way you'll see faeries in this day and age; faeries
as in former-faeries, that is.
The other bus did arrive and we were finally split away from the Spanish
group, who had had a few run-ins with some of the hot-tempered Australians
the day before. (Everyone had their horror stories about the tour, the delays,
the failed pickups, the cabs, buses, and even flights they had to fork out
for out of their own pockets after their tour companies screwed up.)
Unfortunately, we got carted off to yet another carpet factory (must be closing in on a half-dozen of them by now) for a couple of hours. That was
something myself and the other Canadians had no interest in after Istanbul, so we ended up sitting
outside in the bus (though I managed to find a chair in the shade).
 I
was wearing tan-coloured shorts and was leaning forward reading a book when
a bunch of Turkish youths ran by, -- they seemed to think I was very funny
because, from what I could pick up, I looked like I was sit-shitting on an
open air toilet. Hah. Hah.
Again we, mild-mannered Canadians that we were, were the last off the bus and stayed at a hotel that the others said wasn't on their itinerary. The one consolation was that the loud, all-too-brassy, stand up for ourselves even if it means standing on someone else, Aussies were stuck
in hotels that weren't on their agenda either.
I sat with the guide at dinner. Her name was Ruya, she finally got around
to telling us that first day, and she described herself as an Islamic Feminist.
Which struck me as somewhat odd given what little I knew about Islam. 
Turned out I knew a bit more about it than she did. For example, she said
she'd never heard of the Aga Khan or the Ismailian Sect or the Old Man of
the Mountains or the Hashishim Assassins famous from the Crusade Era. Perhaps
her school teachers skipped suchlike unsavoury details. And here I thought
it was the guide's job to instruct those she guided.
Ruya was also very critical of Greeks; tried to tell me they were the ones
supporting the Kurdish extremists in Eastern Turkey (aka Kurdistan, though
never out loud). I pointed out that the States didn't bomb the Greeks but
didn't bother telling her I was a quarter-Greek myself.
 The
other thing that was fairly obvious from talking to her was that she didn't
like being a Tour Guide. Which, in fairness to this Islamic Feminist,
was at least moderately understandable given that some of the male Turkish
guides seem to give her an inordinately hard time because she has a job that,
presumably by rights, should belong to a man.
In any case, it was pretty clear she thought she deserved better. Had done
a fair bit of traveling outside of Turkey and told us she wanted to emigrate
to Canada. I found out later she told the Aussies that she wanted to emigrate
to their country too, -- Australia, Melbourne in particular, apparently has
the largest population of Turks outside of Turkey. (And here I thought it
was Germany.)
Top of Page
Day 6 -- October 8, 1996
This day was the longest drive on the tour. Maybe ten hours sitting on the bus. I think it was
today that we were taken for an extended, entirely unscheduled, stay at the ceramics/pottery factory, but I'm not sure.
What I do recall is that we were supposed to be booked into a hotel up at
Pamukkale. Though we knew we'd arrive around ten o'clock again, we were all
looking forward to soaking in a Thermal Springs swimming pool. 
Unfortunately, the agency forgot to make reservations for either us, the Canadians,
or the Spaniards on the other bus. We ended up having to stay in the city
of Denizli some ten miles away.
Then we had to get up especially early, around 5:30 a.m., in order to have breakfast in time
to go back up to Pamukkale and pick up the Australians, who got their proper hotel for the first
time on the trip.
And got to soak in the Thermal Tubs to boot. (I could have booted them, --
out of sheer jealousy, if nothing else.)
Top of Page
Day 7 -- October 9, 1996
My itinerary said we'd have time 'for swimming in the warm waters
of the thermal pools of Pamukkale.'  What
it didn't say was that the pools were never more than shin-deep. Consequently,
no one was doing any swimming. However, a few people, ones not in our tour
group, managed to do some high-powered laying on their backs in the nicely
tepid water.
Don't recall anything else of this day, though it might have been today we stopped first at an
angora factory, where the guide bought a sweater after an hour's deliberation, and we went to a
candy manufacturer immediately afterwards.
As usual we five Canadians were the last off the bus and the first onto
it the next morning in Kusadashi. But at least we were on the Aegean Coast.
Unfortunately it was raining.
Top of Page
Day 8 -- October 10, 1996
Today was another day I was looking forward to. We were supposed to visit Ephesus
in the morning then return to the hotel for an afternoon of shopping or lazing
on the beach, which was what I intended to do even if the weather still wasn't
particularly brilliant. 
Ephesus has great ruins, some of the best I've ever seen. Gave me lots of opportunities for the art shots you see scattered around this page. Not to mention a reminder of how things really worked in the Glorious Days of Classical Greece and Imperial Rome.
Rather, who really worked in the inglorious daze
of Classical Greece, Imperial Rome, and just about every other 'advanced
civilization' in history. (Pit-troughs beneath latrines were swamped out by slaves. Albeit, presumably, when their masters weren't
shit-sitting atop them.)
St Paul wrote Epistles to the Ephesians while one St John supposedly
wrote Revelations here. Another St John supposedly looked after the Virgin
Mary in her dotage hereabouts -- before she died, according to Ruya, or got
assumed into heaven, according to those of us who knew better. (Me? Since
religion and reason seldom go hand-in-hand, I'd been silent on matters theological
for a couple of days now.)
Perhaps ironically it was once the Sacred City of Asiatic Artemis, who was
anything but virginal, and definitely not to be confused with the Greek's
virgin huntress of the same name.  Sooth
said (silently, as per last parentheses), Asiatic Artemis was akin to Babylonian
Ishtar, Phoenician Astarte, and Cypriot Aphrodite in that she was not just
a Mother Goddess but a Love Goddess.
She was a multiple-breasted papess and the
women in her city reportedly had to spend time in a Temple of Love (read: lust-nest) to show their devotion to her. In PHANTACEA terms therefore, sex-loving Afrites like Mnemosyne D'Angelo and Roxanne 'Hot Rox' Kinesis might just as easily have been called Artemites. 
NOTE: I should point out that when I was in Vienna earlier
in the trip in quest of the Spear of Destiny (which is supposed to be in the Hofburg but wasn't on display that I could
find), I checked out the adjacent Ephesus Museum.
Which was where I snapped the Ephesian Artemis as well
as the other Medusa that appears on this
page. (The Greek Artemis is from Versailles.)
Somewhat bizarrely the museum guide in Vienna claimed
Artemis' multi-breasts were actually severed testicles. I'll let you form
your own opinions but, myself, I think
they look more similar to the pap-like landforms in the Goreme National Park pictured above than
anything else.
After picking up some new tourists at the ferry and exploring Ephesus, again with no time given to check out the museum and all its statuary, what we ended up doing was going to a leather goods manufacturer,
unscheduled, and driving onto to Izmir (Smyrna) for the night. (This was on the Australians' itinerary but it wasn't on mine, nor on that of the other Canadians.)
No beach for Jim this trip, -- at least not in Turkey. (After the tour I was
heading to Crete, via, well, we're still getting to that!)
Top of Page
Day 9 -- October 11, 1996
For some reason we ended up going to Troy today rather than tomorrow as scheduled.
We got there as the sun was setting and were hustled through it by our guide,
who made a point of telling us that the Trojan War was a myth and that the Greeks
never did conquer Troy.
She said this despite a lot of evidence to the contrary but she was at least consistent in her grating
antipathy towards the Greeks.
(Apparently Ruya's parents or grandparents had been kicked out of Salonica,
which someone said was named after Alexander the Great's sister, as part of
the tormenting dual-resettlement process ethnic Greeks and Turks went through
in the early 1920s after the League of Nations, as was its wont, buggered
up.)
Top of Page
Day 10 -- October 12, 1996
 The
real reason we crammed Troy onto the tail end of yesterday turned out to be
twofold. Firstly, the guide wanted to catch the earliest ferry across the
Dardanelle so we'd be in Istanbul all the sooner and, secondly, so that the
Australians could visit Gallipoli, the sight of a major-league slaughter of
their forefathers during the First World War. (Our Aussies didn't blame the
Turks for massacring their countrymen, -- they blamed the Brits for sending
them there in the first place.) 
We did arrive in Istanbul in the late afternoon but there were endless delays
in traffic, waiting for the guide and driver to contact their office, and
dropping off various people at their individual hotels and hostels, mostly
in the packed old town of Sultanahmet. Tempers were flaring again and the
guide was becoming very frustrated -- and more than a little annoyed, particularly
with some of the Australians, who were no more happy with her.
Something like three hours after arriving in Istanbul we were dropped off at
the Nippon Hotel again. Something like a whole day had been lost with all these
added-up delays. As a result, overall, even though I got to see just about everything
but the Suleymaniye Mosque, and a bit more, I ended up essentially disappointed
with the fullness of the tour. One thing I certainly didn't expect was that
the worst was yet to come.
Yet it was. The killed, consequently ex-critterish, cat,
and the Phantom Train, awaited me!
Top of Page
Day 11 -- October 13, 1996
 
It should have been so simple. The driver from Intra Tours came to get me and
drove me to the train station. Then we found out there was no train to Thessaloniki
(Salonica). Not at ten o'clock in the morning at least, -- and this despite
the fact my Tour Company had booked me on one. (Guess they foresaw I'd be dead
by then because only ghosts, like that of the cat on the first night in Turkey,
can ride a Phantom Train.)
I was assured there was an actual train at 11:30 that night, however. So
the driver took me back to the Nippon. I tried phoning Intra Tours then, since
it was the company that booked my trip back in August, Omega Tours' office
in Istanbul. Because it was Sunday, both were closed. I had the desk clerk
phone the train station and she learned that if I took the night train I wouldn't
get to Salonica in time to catch my plane for Crete the next morning.
 If
I didn't catch that plane, I'd have to find my way to Athens because there
wasn't another plane from Salonica to Crete until Friday. Which would have
cost me even more money in traveling expenses, a cancellation fee for my scheduled
flight, and probably lost me my car reservation in Crete, which I had already
paid for, as well.
Another clerk phoned a private bus company but it wasn't operating, again
because it was Sunday. None of them were. He tried Turkish Air, except they
had no flights. Olympic Airlines did, but all he was getting was a recorded
message. He advised me to take a cab to the airport, which is a good distance
outside the massive city (something like 150 km by 120 km and with twelve
million people in it, I was told), track down the Olympic staff, and get on
the flight. This I did, but it was already full-up. I therefore had to take
a cab back into the city (spending nearly 4,000,000 Turkish Lira {TL} or roughly
$40.00 U.S. on the round trip).
The Nippon's desk clerks (give him, and her, all due credit) made some more
inquiries for me and a reservation on the public bus to Ipsala near the Greek
border. I took another cab to the Otogar (500,000 TL) and caught the bus (550,000
TL). From Ipsala I had to take a cab to the border (1,000,000 TL for a ten minute
ride, -- Turks might all be millionaires but, like I previously heard about
Prague and Moscow, their taxies were controlled by the real money-millionaires,
the Turkish Mafia).
Anyhow, once I got there, I had to call a Greek cab from the other side to
come and get me as I wasn't allowed to walk across the border and there was
no bus on the other side of this No Man's Land for Nomads in any case. That
cab took me all the way to Alexandropoli, a distance of 40 km and at a cost
of 6000 Greek Drachmas (DX -- about $25.00 U.S.) then another 5200 DX ($21.00
U.S.) for a bus to Salonica.
 
On top of that, once I finally arrived there at 3 a.m., after 13 hours of not
entirely uncomfortable traveling, a taxi driver charged me 300 DX ($1.20 U.S.)
to take me to my hotel, which turned out to be just around the corner from
the bus station. Actually, by then, I thought I was getting a pretty good
deal. And, on top of even that, the hotel had still held my room for me, --
I must be leading a blessed life. All in all though, I calculate I spent approximately
$110.00 U.S. dollars making up for the Phantom Train.
And to think that, back in Canada, it was Thanksgiving. Boy, did I feel like a Turkey. (Sorry, --
couldn't resist!)
Top of Page
|
