American Life In The Summertime #21 - Turkey Take 2

I was supposed to be long gone from Turkey by now, jumping off my tour after ANZAC Day and steaming my way by ferry from the Aegean coast of Turkey into Greece. However a combination of ferries being completely booked with hoards of Australians & New Zealanders all doing the same thing, bad timing requiring me to get up at 5am to catch them (not happening), and the absolute mess that is the Greek ferry system, found me continually staying on my tour a couple of extra days until the next ferry port, until eventually it became easier to just stay on the tour the entire way back to Istanbul & start again from there. So as it turned out I got to enjoy Turkey for more than an extra 2 weeks, including the skills of our bus driver, Dogan.

Dogan attempted a "shortcut" to wherever we were going approximately once per day, which typically ended up involving much reversing, swearing, sweating and general unhappiness on his part at the direction the shortcut had taken since he conceived it. On Day One he attempted a shortcut to ANZAC Cove, beginning barely a kilometre out of the town in which we started. There is, it is worth pointing out, only one road into and out of ANZAC Cove. Within 400 yards the bus was wedged up a narrow country lane so overhanging with trees and other shrubbery that extracting ourselves involved reversing the entire length back down the lane until a 15-point-turn became possible, past a bemused collection of locals who had only moments before seen the unusual sight of a large bus cruising first confidently and then with increasing uncertainty past their farmhouses and up their goat track. Not to be deterred, the Dogster continued his quest for a faster route for the entire duration of our 17 day tour, with results that never seemed to completely justify the effort taken. On another occasion he was attempting to find a restaurant for the lunch stop, and discovered his chosen route unpassable due to a large hole that had for some reason been dug in the middle of the road just that morning, contents piled high by the kerb and Turkish road crew standing around smoking and generally looking pleased with their hole digging abilities. Chuffed at the opportunity to find yet another shortcut, the Doganator immediately set about finding an alternative path, which took us through an increasingly dodgy collection of backstreets and, on occasion, front yards, with Dogan becoming more and more stressed the longer it took, until he finally delivered us to the restaurant and we piled out. After lunch, we went to leave by this same route, to find that the dodgy road out was somehow now also blocked by another freshly dug hole directly behind the bus, which had incredibly appeared in the less than an hour we were in the restaurant, only this time with no Turkish road crew in sight to explain its mysterious appearance. Dogan's face as we then had to find an even sketchier path back to civilisation still amuses me greatly, and he never really tried another shortcut after that.

Turkey actually reminded me quite a bit of Africa, especially Kenya, once you get out of the major cities. The highways coming in and out of every town and city are littered with half-built and unfinished apartment blocks, left abandoned when the money ran out with no windows, doors, driveways, landscaping etc - just empty concrete shells on empty dirt blocks. However every one of them has a forest of satellite dishes already attached, as these are apparently provided free by the government here, the better to receive quality western porn, which was also provided free in virtually every hotel room we encountered. The main difference from Kenya is that Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country, and therefore they also love a mosque. Many, many mosques, scattered around each town so that you are never 5 minutes at a quick shuffle in your burkha from being able to praise Allah. This predominance of mosques is in fact completely unnecessary, because attached to the tall spires of each mosque are loudspeakers which pump the call to prayer at full volume out across the town, so that prayer becomes part of your day whether you want it or not. No other religion is so fervent in publicly displaying their devotion to their god. I suppose the same could be said of ringing church bells, but at least that is only once a week, not five times every day, and certainly not starting at 5.30am. Of course, this means that for 23 hours and 35 minutes of every day, the loudspeakers are silent, and if you have the infrastructure already in place, you may as well use it. As a result the loudspeakers have also developed, particularly in smaller towns, into a kind of general-purpose blanket communication device for the community. Being small towns, the news requiring communicating is not always, shall we say, of great importance to the rest of the world, or even the town, so you are always hearing the crackle of loudspeakers followed by "AKHMED - WHERE IS THE FUCKING REMOTE CONTROL?????" or something similar.

All in all, I loved Turkey. I loved eating the included "breakfast" of plain bread and sliced cucumber in a hotel dining room in which a mirrored disco ball was already revolving to greet us as we came down the stairs. I loved the restaurants in which 75% of the menu is unavailable and it would have been quicker to advise from the start which of the 3 menu items were actually on offer (hint - it's the 3 with some version of the word "kebab" in their name). I loved the genuine shock and disappointment that greeted our refusal to enter a proprietor's restaurant when we had clearly just walked out of the one next door having just finished a meal. I loved the shops selling very specific but random collections of good such as televisions and motorcycles - and nothing else. In one town I happened upon a shop selling nothing but calendars with pictures of different cows for each month. Now obviously I was reluctant to conclude that I had chanced upon the local purveyor of cow porn, but as I said the satellite channels were quite liberal, so if I ever find myself in urgent need of some top quality bovine erotica, I know which shop I'll be going to. That's all I'm saying.

But most of all, I loved the attempts of Turkish men to pick up western girls. While as enthusiastic as anything I saw in Zambia, the poor old Turks are clearly cursed by the easy abundance of adult movies they have available from their free satellite hookups, and so they liberally employ the use of what they obviously believe are excellent pick up lines, but which truly belong only in the sort of movie where the dude from the Turkish bath has come to clean the pool and finds a cow calendar on the wall, and for some reason everyone then proceeds to mimic the actions they find within it. The best of these that I heard was this attempt on one of the girls on our tour:


"Your father must have been a garbage man."
"Why?"

"Because you have one hell of a dumper."

I can assure you this was delivered with dead seriousness. And so, as I finally prepare to make it to Greece, it is time to once again channel the great Jerry Springer and remind you 'till next time: take care of yourselves.....and each other.