Aneel's Travelogue

I went to REI today and discovered that they won't repair the broken clip on my venerable Tour backpack. The guy at the customer service desk told me they wouldn't be able to source the part they'd need. They offered me a refund of the price I paid for it ($89), but it seemed ridiculous to be refunded for an item that's given me five years of hard use across five continents (REI's records show that it was purchased in January of 2005).

I've picked up a new REI Vagabond travel pack. The Tour was 2400 cubic inches + 800 cubic inches of expansion pocket. The Vagabond is 2800 cubic inches. I hope the extra space isn't too tempting. I tried a bunch of other packs, but the smaller ones (like the Lookout 40) didn't fit the length of my torso as well.

I also picked up an REI Flash 18 ultralight daypack, with an eye to replacing my old Pak Rat daypack. The Flash 18 is basically a glorified stuff sack with straps, so it should take up much less space in my travel pack when not in use. It has an opening for a hydration unit, which is nice for things like hikes and dive boat rides.

One of the main reasons I used my daypack on my last trip was for bus rides. I'm happy to let my clothes and random stuff sit in the belly of a bus all day as it gets loaded and unloaded at each station, but I'm too paranoid to leave my laptop down there. The Pak Rat was just a tiny bit too small for my laptop. It fit, but only if the laptop went in after a spacer like my document case. The new one is so unstructured that it won't matter.

It was still snowing for my last day in Istanbul, spoiling the last chance for a cruise up the Bosporus on this trip. Maybe next time I'm here, the weather will cooperate. Maybe next time, I won't come in the dead of winter.

I totally failed to sleep before needing to leave for the airport, and not for want of trying. I finally just gave up at 2am, packed, and caught a taxi to the airport. Alitalia hadn't opened their check-in desk, so that meant sitting around for a while. I searched in vain for a drop box for the last of my post cards, so I left them (stamped) on the counter of the not-yet-open post office kiosk. Hopefully they'll be found and mailed.

I dozed a little on the way to Rome. My layover there was almost the perfect length. Long enough to get through security (for the third time that morning. In Istanbul, you have to clear security before they'll even let you in the terminal, and then again before they'll let you on a plane), find my gate, get a snack, change my Turkish Lira for Euros, and pick up some Italian candy that my sister likes, but not long enough to get bored or fall asleep.

I slept fitfully through the transatlantic flight. I was too tired to get a lot of reading done, so I finished the trip with about half of a book to spare. Phew.

Anaka picked me up at the airport, where we got a snack and waited for my father's flight from Tel Aviv to arrive. I don't know how it happened that we were both returning within a couple hours of each other, since I know we didn't actually choose the flights for that. Lucky.

I decided that I wasn't actually up for spending 6+ hours of today traveling for a day trip to Edirne. It was snowing pretty steadily for most of the day, big wet flakes that mostly melted as soon as they landed. I wandered around Beyoğlu a bit, mostly in search of food, and tried to spend most of my time indoors.

One of my errands today was to find a post office. Turned out to be trickier than I'd anticipated. The one the guidebook mentions on Istiklal Cadessi appears to have closed. There are remnants of some post office signs, but they're mostly covered or removed. The next nearest post office was supposed to be in Karaköy, but it turned out to be tricky to find.

It's hard to tell which streets will appear in the guidebook's maps. They definitely don't include every little alley, and often don't label midsized streets. And the street name signs aren't always easy to locate, so even if you're on the right street, you might not know it. After eliminating the more promising-looking candidates, I turned down a small street near the fish market and found the post office across from a store selling chainsaws.

There's been a visible police presence in this part of town all day. On my way to lunch, a man grabbed me by the shoulder. It turned out he was a policeman, and had probably been asking me where I was going, or telling me to stop, but I had no idea. He patted me down for weapons and let me go on my way.

This evening, on my way to dinner, I passed a large group of police in full riot gear, with gas masks ready. They were moving at walking speed down the major street. A little way further, I came across a protest march. Lots of chanting slogans, a few signs, and some tiki torches. They seemed to be centered around the Galatsaray Lycée. I don't know what it was about, but apparently it stayed calm. I saw the crowd disperse near Tünel, and the police vans drove down towards Galata Tower.

It's funny that, having purposely gotten a hotel on this side of the Golden Horn, I ended up spending most of today on the other side. I dropped by the offices of a local arts group that the guidebook had recommended for authentic semas (whirling dervish ceremonies) and arranged to visit one in the evening.

I had lunch at the Pudding Shop that, according to the newspaper articles from the late 80s that they print on their placemats, was once the starting point for hippies traveling through Iran and Afghanistan. It's a little odd that they'd put these particular articles on their placemats, since they have a "well, this was once an important cultural landmark, but now it's just an ordinary restaurant" tone. It was pretty good, but not outstanding.

I whiled away the afternoon in the Grand Bazaar. It's a dangerous place to do that, but I have been steeled against that kind of thing by the markets of Morocco, so I managed to not buy any carpets and didn't end up with anything that I immediately regretted.

The ceremony was very much like congregational religious ceremonies I've attended in the past, but in a language I didn't understand. Maybe there was a bit more singing than I would see in an average church. Very normal. Little boys getting into arguments in the waiting room while their parents prayed. Toddlers running between their parents and throwing tantrums and having to be taken outside. The actual whirling was interesting to watch, and it did seem that the men who were whirling were in a trance state, but there was a weird feeling of disconnection between what they were doing and what everyone else there was doing. I had expected more of a vibe of interaction between them and the congregation. Oddly, I think I might have gotten more context if I'd gone to a non-authentic performance. I'd been given a description of the ceremony and some background reading, but no explanations as it happened.

One of the recurring themes of this trip has been "why am I visiting all of this religious stuff?" Ancient temples. Byzantine churches. Mosques. Sufi ceremonies. None of it means anything to me on a religious level, so why bother? I think that it comes down to the fact that religion has been the artistic focus (and to some extent the scientific focus; a lot of the displays in the technology museum I visited were framed as "Islam encourages knowledge about Allah's creation") here for so long that many of the artifacts that have been preserved or maintained have been so because of their religious significance. If I'm interested in the greatest dome for a thousand years, or the most intricate decorations, they're going to be religious.

I guess the counterexample is the Grand Bazaar, come to think of it. It's definitely the most vital ancient place I've visited in Istanbul. And the most vital modern place has definitely been the bustling shopping district between Taksim Square and Tünel. There's definitely a lot of turnover in each place, less permanence, but they're where people are actually living their lives.

The plan for today was to watch the world camel wrestling championship and then catch a train to a plane to Istanbul. Sadly, it was raining heavily in the morning, and apparently camels hate mud. So they'll probably have the wrestling next Sunday. I wandered around the ruined Basilica of St. John to fill some time. It was quite wet.

I ended up running into a bunch of people I'd seen before. First was couple from Wisconsin who I'd run into in Pamukkale, and who'd been on the bus to Selçuk (or rather the Bus to Aydın, and the minibus to Selçuk). They were at the bus station, where they'd discovered the lack of camel wrestling just before I did. They're headed to Istanbul to take the night train to Thessaloniki to go to Meteora. When I mentioned that I was flying to Istanbul instead of taking a bus, and they found out how cheap that was, they started wondering how cheap it would be to just fly to Athens. Probably a lot cheaper than two days of travel including a night train.

Second was a Spaniard, who I'd seen in Göreme. He'd seen me walking down from the ridge over the Red Valley and asked me if there were hiking paths over that way (lots of paths, but not much marked, and lots of areas that look like people's houses). Here he was wondering how to get to the Castle, which I knew was on the hill beyond the Basilica.

The train from Selçuk to the Izmir Airport (which is actually only halfway to Izmir) was easy. My flight was delayed a bit, and the hotel I was planning to stay in didn't get my email requesting an airport pickup (my mailserver says that their email provider is graylisting), so I didn't actually get checked in until almost 10pm (getting there from the airport by public transit involves a subway, a tram, and a funicular). This time I'm staying near Taksim Square, rather than in the historical/tourist area, so there were plenty of fast food places open at 10.

After breakfast, I walked over to Ephesus. It's huge. There's an interesting section where you can see restoration work in progress. It's been likened to the world's hardest jigsaw puzzle. Not only are they trying to put together thousands of bits of shattered buildings, but those buildings were used (and remodeled) over periods of hundreds of years. So styles and construction methods aren't consistent. Was there marble put over that brick two hundred years after the building was built? Which are you trying to restore? Neat stuff.

I still think I like Afrodesias better. Part of it was definitely related to the lack of crowds, but I also feel that Afrodesias is just more evocative of what was going on there.

I also visited the remains of one of the Seven Wonders of the (Ancient) World, the Temple of Artemis. It was a temple bigger than the Parthenon, but all that's left of it are fragments of stone. There's one tall column standing on the site, but it was reconstructed from whatever pieces were handy. There was a flock of geese grazing there today.

I think I walked over 15 miles today. I wish the GPS unit I've been carrying with me didn't flake out as much as it does.

I had a relaxed morning (the woman running the guesthouse said "You must have slept well, I think!"), because I abandoned the plan to get up early and visit the hot spring before jumping on a bus. My alarm went off, and then I remembered that I don't actually like hot springs, and didn't feel like paying 45TL ($30) to do something that I wasn't really psyched about. So I rolled over and went back to sleep.

When I mentioned that I was going to Selçuk, she looked dismayed and said I'd missed the direct bus. I didn't know that there was a bus that left from Pamukkale at all, much less a direct bus. Too bad, because it would have saved me some annoyance later. She told me that there was a direct bus from Denizli at noon, but that I shouldn't take an Izmir-bound bus.

I caught a minibus to the Denizli bus station and asked around at the various bus company counters for a direct bus. Most of them told me that they didn't have direct buses, and that I should change at Aydın, but I found a company that said they had a direct bus. I was very clear about it, specifically asking if there was a change of bus. They said no.

But when the bus arrived, its sign said "Izmir". So, of course, when we arrived in Aydın, the conductor took the three people bound for Selçuk off of the bus and transferred us to a minibus. I was quite annoyed, not just because of the extra hour this added to the trip, but also that I gave my money to the company that lied to me, rather than one of the ones who'd told me the truth.

I arrived in Selçuk around sunset, so there wasn't much point in trying to visit any of the sights, but I did have a really good meat and cheese pide. It was so good that I had a second.

When I checked in at my hotel, I discovered that Jordan guy I ran into again in Meteora staying in the same place. What are the odds?

Afrodesias is the best set of classical ruins I've seen on this trip so far. Impressively large, well-preserved, remote, almost empty. There were long periods where I was walking around the amphitheater or the stadium where there was nobody else in sight.

The sites in Athens definitely have these buildings beat for individual size and historical importance, and Delphi may be in a prettier location, but Afrodesias has a town's worth of monuments all together, with no nearby town or traffic visible, and no throngs of tourists. And the on-site museum has a surprisingly large collection of intact and nearly-intact sculptures that decorated the various buildings.

One of the people in my minibus tour was a Spanish woman. I think she'd been away from home a long time, and hadn't run into many Spanish speakers, because when I said that I spoke some Spanish, she spent the rest of the ride back (1.5 hours) talking to me almost without stopping for breath. I don't know how the Spanish sustain that rate of speech. They speak much faster than anybody I've heard from the Americas.

It's kind of exhausting, mentally, to listen to a partly-known language for a long time. When I've been speaking Spanish for a few weeks, I can get to the point where I don't have to translate everything into English before I understand it, but I'm nowhere near that right now.

She had just gotten an electric blanket (apparently she's been staying in guesthouses where the heat doesn't work too well), and asked for clarification of a few things in the English version of the manual (there's no Spanish translation). I tried my best to explain what a "quilt" is and that "between when" is probably missing at least one word.

It turns out that she went to Morocco a couple years ago, so we talked a bit about visiting places where people were outwardly friendly, but really just wanted to sell you things. She gave me some tips about where to go in the western part of Turkey.

I got up before dawn again to catch a bus to Denizli at 7. I'd made a note of two taxi ranks very near my hotel, and assumed that there'd be a taxi at at least one of them at 6am. Nope. Had to go back to my hotel and ask them to call one for me. At the bus station, I was told the wrong gate number for my bus, but I got suspicious when there was still no bus there 15 minutes before it was scheduled to leave, and discovered that the but labeled "Izmir" several gates over was the bus I needed.

It was a long bus ride. I think it ended up being 7.5 hours. I finished reading a novel and started another. I messed around a bit on the Internet (in bus wifi!). I napped.

In Denizli, I discovered that bus companies don't want to sell me direct tickets to my next destination (Selçuk), but to route me through another city, and that the handy train route there is closed for track work. Ah, well.

I caught a dolmuş to Pamukkale, and started looking for a hotel. This town seems desperate. Guys lean out of cars and minibuses to offer you places to stay. Hoteliers start dropping the price as soon as they show you the room. The hotels are visibly empty.

I was looking for a hotel mentioned in the guidebook, and when a guy in a car offered to take me to that particular hotel, I thought "where's the harm?". As soon as I was inside and the car was moving, he said "That hotel is closed, but there's another one." Classic scam, right? Well... he actually drove me (the three blocks) to the hotel, and they were closed for repairs. But the setup bothered me. I'm not going to stay at a hotel that someone takes me to under false pretenses. Anyway, I found another place where the people were friendlier, and there's in-room wifi.

It's funny how that's become the deciding factor in so many of my hotel decisions on this trip. Private room > Attached bathroom > In Room Wifi > Breakfast > Price > Decor.

It was getting late, so I hustled up to the local site, the ruins of Hierapolis and the hot springs and travertines of Pamukkale ("Cotton Castle"). The springs here have dissolved minerals in them that precipitate out as the water flows down the hill, leaving terraces of white stone. I arrived too late to visit the museum or the hot spring pool, but I did get to dip my feet into the warm water and walk along the terraces.

I missed the early bus (8am) to Konya, opting to have breakfast instead. However, it seems that the 9:30 bus that I thought I could catch wasn't running, so I caught a 10:30 one instead. That meant I got to Konya rather later than I expected. Luckily, I didn't find a whole lot in Konya that I wanted to do.

I was looking forward to the Mevlana Museum, which is the shrine to Rumi, and once the lodge of the whirling dervishes. There are some very beautiful decorative elements in the museum, and some fascinating old books (like the original manuscripts of Rumi's poetry, over 700 years old), but the collection is a lot smaller than I'd expected.

I also visited the museum of stone and wood carving, which also had some good pieces, but was very small in comparison to the museums in Istanbul.