We are now approaching the end of our time in Turkey. Sitting here waiting for my poorly knee to heal before we can cross the border into Iran I'm not sure I've fully processed my Turkey experiences but if I don't do it now it will never happen and the chances are my memories would be adulterated by my Iranian experiences to be.
We have been travelling through Turkey now for about 2 months. Through lush valley's teaming with crops, bazaars with people hawking everything from antiques to leeches, endless landscapes of warm stubbled wheat fields, over so many hills and mountains some stunningly beautiful others seemingly just punishment. We have travelled along the black sea coast*, through Cappadocia's unreal landscapes of volcanic dust and caves, along empty roads through tiny villages, as well as crazed four lane carriageways into İstanbul** and by ferry across Lake Van. I have fallen in love with beautiful timbered Ottoman houses and the mosques in old towns. We have experienced Ramadan in a Muslim country as well as the sweet munching fest that follows, drank more cups of çay than I care to remember and eaten more baklava than my teeth care to remember.
*as a cyclist I would advise others against this, it is punishingly, unsatisfyingly hilly. We heard of one cyclist who became so disheartened he put his bike on the bus others just agreed it was a kak experience, Turkey has so much more to offer.
** I would advise people not to do this either, its terrifying.
Turkey has left me with mixed feelings from absolutely loving it to good grief what are they doing??? As an environmentalist I will never get over the way the Turks are literally trashing their land. From the moment we entered we saw rivers so polluted they ran brown with sewage and waste. There are huge monocultures of cereals stretching mile after mile over every possible piece of land which could be farmed. These and anything not planted are grazed relentlessly by goats, sheep and cows (including the islands which divide the lanes on the dual carriage ways). I will not deny that these are beautiful lands but with everything turned over to agriculture where does the wildlife go? I didn't see too much evidence (the roadkill was definitely of the domesticated animal variety with the occasional squashed frog or hedgehog).
Litter is discarded everywhere, on the approaches to almost every village and town people dump their rubbish. There are no bins in most towns so we ended up carrying our camp waste for miles to the nearest bin (probably to have someone dump it on the outskirts of the town for us). This is so disheartening considering how easily it could be prevented. Recycling? In İstanbul people do come and collect your cans and bottles as they can make money from it but that's it as far as I can see.
But there again I loved it, loved it, loved it. Despite the seemingly endless stream of plastic bottles, cans and disposable nappies at the sides of the roads I have also found Turkey breathtakingly beautiful. The landscape is warm, textured, rich in colours. So expansive with magnificent mountains of rock of the most unbelievable shades, layered over millennia. The landscapes through which we have ridden are so picturesque and vast at times I wanted to reach out and stroke the sumptuous curves of rolling hills or just roll around in it all (in reality this would have been quite a prickly experience).
The mountain area between Cappadocia and Malatya, ignored in the guidebooks, made for truly stunning cycling. It was certainly hilly and remote but the beauty of the scenery, the generally good and quiet road conditions as well as lovely (if bemused) people living here made it one of my favourite parts of the trip. Cappadocia as I have mentioned before is so unreal and beautiful. Combined with staying on a fantastic campsite (Kaya Camping if you ever fancy going) with lots of lovely people made for a great break with ample scrambling through caves (though I did endure the worst hangover of the trip here, I'm blaming the Germans).
People have been immensely hospitable here in a way which is virtually (and sadly) unheard of in Britain. Throughout the harvesting season people have been coming from the fields giving us more food at times than we could eat. At times when we have been about to pay for things in markets the vendor has refused our money. We have been invited to drink so much tea I would be needing rehabilitation if we had accepted and we have been invited to peoples homes to share food or simply shelter for the night during storms and just in passing. The generousity and offers of assistance have been amazing though at times as a woman I have been sidelined in favour of James e.g. asking men for directions and having them describe the route to James...Hey I'm the one with the map man! I might not know how to use it but he doesn't even have one!
As we have moved into the Kurdish area of Turkey we have taken to asking people to camp in their gardens for safety reasons (to explain the Turkish army have been bombing the PKK in Iraq, the PKK are retaliating by shooting the army in Turkey, the army told us not to rough camp or their patrols might shoot us! Just stop shooting each other man! Its also generally not too safe for women so knocking on peoples doors and camping outside family homes seemed like the best idea). Anyway every single one of these families has offered to take us in for the night, feeding us and generally caring for us the way you would a guest. At times we have offered money for food (refused) and so I have taken to being official family portrait photographer as a way of thanking them and posting them to families who have access to mail (not all do). The Kurds have been hugely hospitable and apart from some of the children who run down the road shouting 'money, money' at us and trying to pinch stuff off our bikes as a dangerous game of tag (this is why I am now laid up in Doğubeyazit with a bad knee) it has been a thoroughly rewarding ride.
In conclusion Turkey has been a land of highs, lows and vivid contradictions but overwhelmingly I will leave it with a hearty GÜZEL!*
x
*which roughly translates as just about every fantasticly, superb positive word you can think of.
Tuesday 14 October 2008
Saturday 11 October 2008
Where have all the little girls gone?
One of the things I have found most interesting/bizarre/unnerving whilst we have been in Turkey is the female presence (or at times the lack of) on the street.
To start with on entering Turkey I found myself a lot more bothered by the covering up of women than I thought I would. Perhaps its because I felt little prepared coming from Bulgaria where, as you approach the border, its difficult to imagine the skirts could get any shorter, especially as we arrived in Edirne (rather than Marmaris) where the thought of wearing any skirt approaching knee level (from the ground up), even with tights, felt deeply inappropriate. But I think its more than that. Before arriving I thought I would feel fine about it all, treat it as a cultural experience, cover up, observe, learn and move on. I did in the end but initially it was a total culture shock. I felt seriously unsettled possibly feeling nervous about offending someone and not fully understanding the cause of any offence but also in partial rebellion. Anyway suffice to say I was more affected than I expected and had a days battle with myself which saw me refusing to visit any mosques etc as I would need to cover up and just couldn't bring myself to despite having stern words with myself about missing out.
Anyway back to the title. In large cities, many towns and touristy areas women are to be seen out and about and apart from being modestly dressed with an obvious increase in headscarves than elsewhere in Europe the female presence doesn't seem much different. But as we travelled through rural areas, small villages and towns (or generally heading east through conservative Kurdish areas) it was a different story and I frequently found myself thinking 'Where have all the little girls gone?' More often than not we would ride into town and I would be the only visible female, no local women, no little girls playing. This is particularly strange as its not like the streets are empty. They are teeming with men, men drinking tea, men baking bread, men behind cash registers in shops, men driving cars, boys carrying school books or playing but NO WOMEN OR GIRLS AT ALL (actually I once saw a little girl chopping wood in a garden with an axe almost as big as her so I'm exaggerating a little).
I've been reading lost heart of Asia and a quote from that says that 'women need only leave the home twice in their lives once to get married the other to get buried.' Hmmmmm. This total separation of the sexes leads to a very bizarre feeling in towns as the public areas are totally male dominated, so where are all the girls...
As you would imagine apart from the ones which are chopping wood or working in the fields sowing, growing and harvesting, they are generally to be found at home, caring for the family and raising children if all has gone well.
Literacy rates in Turkey are apparently pretty good. We've had the good fortune to stay in a couple of peoples homes and speaking to a group of Kurdish young women it turns out that they go to school for only one month of the year. So they can read and write but beyond that describe themselves as uneducated (which they clearly would like to be but accept that this is the way). Its not that they don't have the opportunity, education is freely available, its just that their father's won't permit it. The rest of the time they are at home looking after the family, growing food for the table (they put my old allotment to shame) or helping bring in much needed money, which in the case of Suna and her friends will include picking walnuts during the season (the men cut, the women pick them from the ground if you look closely you can see their hands are stained with tannin). I have also spoken to a university student who plans to become a teacher and he reckoned it was quite common for children of rural families (particularly girls) not to complete school though the shepherds, always male, are often pretty darned young too. I'm not syaing that hthere is anything wrong at all about being at home and raising or caring for your family, it is one of the finest things you can do and everyone of the homes we were invited into were clearly very loving respectful places. But if that's not the road you want to go down, or actually even have the opprotunity to go down if you don't get married, and you've no education then opportunities for improving your lot seem fairly limited.
To start with on entering Turkey I found myself a lot more bothered by the covering up of women than I thought I would. Perhaps its because I felt little prepared coming from Bulgaria where, as you approach the border, its difficult to imagine the skirts could get any shorter, especially as we arrived in Edirne (rather than Marmaris) where the thought of wearing any skirt approaching knee level (from the ground up), even with tights, felt deeply inappropriate. But I think its more than that. Before arriving I thought I would feel fine about it all, treat it as a cultural experience, cover up, observe, learn and move on. I did in the end but initially it was a total culture shock. I felt seriously unsettled possibly feeling nervous about offending someone and not fully understanding the cause of any offence but also in partial rebellion. Anyway suffice to say I was more affected than I expected and had a days battle with myself which saw me refusing to visit any mosques etc as I would need to cover up and just couldn't bring myself to despite having stern words with myself about missing out.
Anyway back to the title. In large cities, many towns and touristy areas women are to be seen out and about and apart from being modestly dressed with an obvious increase in headscarves than elsewhere in Europe the female presence doesn't seem much different. But as we travelled through rural areas, small villages and towns (or generally heading east through conservative Kurdish areas) it was a different story and I frequently found myself thinking 'Where have all the little girls gone?' More often than not we would ride into town and I would be the only visible female, no local women, no little girls playing. This is particularly strange as its not like the streets are empty. They are teeming with men, men drinking tea, men baking bread, men behind cash registers in shops, men driving cars, boys carrying school books or playing but NO WOMEN OR GIRLS AT ALL (actually I once saw a little girl chopping wood in a garden with an axe almost as big as her so I'm exaggerating a little).
I've been reading lost heart of Asia and a quote from that says that 'women need only leave the home twice in their lives once to get married the other to get buried.' Hmmmmm. This total separation of the sexes leads to a very bizarre feeling in towns as the public areas are totally male dominated, so where are all the girls...
As you would imagine apart from the ones which are chopping wood or working in the fields sowing, growing and harvesting, they are generally to be found at home, caring for the family and raising children if all has gone well.
Literacy rates in Turkey are apparently pretty good. We've had the good fortune to stay in a couple of peoples homes and speaking to a group of Kurdish young women it turns out that they go to school for only one month of the year. So they can read and write but beyond that describe themselves as uneducated (which they clearly would like to be but accept that this is the way). Its not that they don't have the opportunity, education is freely available, its just that their father's won't permit it. The rest of the time they are at home looking after the family, growing food for the table (they put my old allotment to shame) or helping bring in much needed money, which in the case of Suna and her friends will include picking walnuts during the season (the men cut, the women pick them from the ground if you look closely you can see their hands are stained with tannin). I have also spoken to a university student who plans to become a teacher and he reckoned it was quite common for children of rural families (particularly girls) not to complete school though the shepherds, always male, are often pretty darned young too. I'm not syaing that hthere is anything wrong at all about being at home and raising or caring for your family, it is one of the finest things you can do and everyone of the homes we were invited into were clearly very loving respectful places. But if that's not the road you want to go down, or actually even have the opprotunity to go down if you don't get married, and you've no education then opportunities for improving your lot seem fairly limited.
Tuesday 7 October 2008
Entering Turkey - belated post
Ok so we're about to leave Turkey but thought I'd write this up as a lesson learned and a warning to others...Entering Turkey was a bloomin' trauma. I find entering any new country a bit of a trauma anyway. I always feel a bit nervous about the unkown for example: will there be anything I can eat? (top priority) or potentially being rejected at the border for some spurious reason I have no control over. So my general approach is to roll up looking as innocent as possible (which is pretty easy when all you have on you is 3 pairs of padded pants and a bag of haribo bears) and hope they think we are too foolish with our pimped rides to turn away (just wait til I get to India, Trusty'll have tassels and bells on).
Anyway entering Turkey proved to be a special nightmare because we didn't have the euros necessary to buy visas (just the correct amount in apparently worhtless Bulgarian lira). This left us stuck in no mans land between Bulgarian and Turkish borders, no going forwards (no visas) no going back (well, you wouldn't). We tried to reason with the visa sales man, no movement there. I tried to speak to the Turkish police, not much doing there either. Just as I had psyched myself up to tout my worthless cash up and down the huge line of cars queueing to go to Bulgaria, planning to throw myself upon the mercy of anyone unlucky enough to have uk plates and beg for their emergency sterling, the guard who had turned us away to get our vısa's came to find out why we hadn't produced them at the gate.
Finally he found someone who would take all I had of any value, every lira and a random 5 pound note I had somehow missed spending on cups of tea at dover to give me just enough Euros to buy 2 visas. All of this lasted about half an hour leaving me highly strung. When they finally did give us the visas I burst out crying with relief at which point all the Turkish border police mercilessly took the piss out of me as only police can. Smooth.
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