The Government Was Right After All!!!

Day 56, May 30


The Government Was Right After All

I have a news flash for all of you, especially all you conspiracy (JFK, 9-11, UFOs, Area 51-- you know who you are) wackos who are stockpiling guns and food in caves in Montana---

Thinking you don’t (and shouldn’t) trust the government----

Well you are about to get rocked right down to your socks.

Stay tuned, and be ready.



A Stack of Storks

I headed south toward Afyon this AM, and not far from the town where I stayed last night a flock of about twenty storks flew across the road at about 30 feet, went into a big spiral and started riding the thermals above a field to about 500 feet or so when I left them to their tasks and continued down the road.

(Remember, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.)



And later, on the way to the big acropolis, I snagged a stork as close as I ever have—




Snipe Again: or The Greeks Were Here Before Me

When Susan and I were in the Balkans, we were pretty diligent about following all the brown archaeology site signs off the main road to wherever they led.

Only they never led anywhere, at least anywhere that we could find.

I’ve had much better luck in Turkey, generally, until today.

Three Km from the road, the sign said, and I hit this tiny village and the sign in the village pointed up the road and said 3 Km, and I went more than 5 and never saw a damn thing.

Here, Snipe! Here, Snipe!

But there were some poppies back on the main road to console me.









And here’s some more women working in the field along the road.






Back to Church

I hit a great old mosque that was being restored, and had some great stuff to shoot.

Here’s a sign I thought was pretty funny--- a FGCC (Failure to Grasp the Core Concept) example.



A beautiful ceiling in the medrassa (parish school)



And some great old doors.






Poplar Birches?

There are lots of pretty lovely trees here that look like slightly smaller versions of the poplars we have at home although, as you see, the bark looks like a birch tree, although the bark is a little greyer than our paper birches at home.



And it's not all that odd-- poplars, birches, and aspen are all in the same family.


The next article after this one is the one about the government—so be warned.


I bombed around some back roads looking for this fortress this afternoon, and it’s the last of the carved-stone fortresses I’ll see--- from here back west and north to Istanbul, they’re all standard stone-block construction rather than the scoop-out- the-soft-rock versions from Cappodacia and here.










And here’s the carved façade of the tomb where the local pasha was buried.

It’s maybe 75 feet tall.



Here’s a detail



And here’s the view from the top--- that’s cows down there, by the way.



Pot One Day; Heroin the Next

If you anti-government extremists are ready, here we go.

You are about to get the ride of your life. . . .

The government was right!!!

Remember when they said that first you get hooked on marijuana, and the next thing you know you are running heroin straight into your veins. . . .

Of course, we can also say that almost every alcoholic started out drinking milk, so you have to be careful about making inferences.


Well, think about it: yesterday I got pot, and today I’m in the middle of a field of the really good kind of poppies. . . .







The government here licenses certain farmers to grow the potent opium-producing poppies (they are almost all pure white with maybe 1% of them purple) and they sell the opium base to pharmaceutical companies to make opium-derivative drugs.

So you can put this in your underground newsletters and on your far-out web-sites and see what your fellow crazies have to say about it.

So, you want buy pot?

Day 55; May 29


Turkey Time Warp

Up and out early in the little town that the D-K Turkey Guide thought was a real prize, but it’s not a big market town (in spite of the name Baypazari--- “Pazar” is where our word “bazaar” comes from and usually means “market,“ but perhaps “Bay” is the Turkish word for mediocre).

It’s a nice town, and I enjoyed walking around in it, but there wasn’t much to shoot---

The usual collection of stuff spilling out of stores onto sidewalks,



but nothing terribly interesting.

except shovels.

Shovels

You may not have expected a report on shovels, but you would have been wrong about that.

I’ve been hoping to catch a picture of the shovels here as they have these very interesting (and much easier on feet or shoes) cross pieces for standing on to put more oomph into the digging.



And clearly, you can also buy just a replacement little platform, too.

Another way they are smarter than we are.

I did sneak a couple of street shots to show you a couple of cultural things.

Here’s a very typical older woman doing her early AM shopping. I wanted to share what most of the older local women wear. In the cities, rather than towns or villages, they are more apt to wear ankle-length long coats.



And here’s a cultural change picture—not a great shot at all, but it shows three young women--- two dressed in a pretty standard western culture outfit, the third a little more traditional and the older generation wearing traditional clothing.



You just kind of wonder how many of the current cohort of twenty-something young women will wind up dressing like the older women dress now.


When I hit the main square about 6:30, it was full of the little local busses (dolmus) and they were just about exclusively full of traditionally dressed women (some with huge loads of stuff in plastic gunny sacks almost the size of a traditional bale of hay) and there were about 35 guys clumped by age, generally, standing around on the sidewalks.

And I watched for a while, and the busses pulled out for all over the region, and the guys just hung around smoking and visiting for over an hour, until after I went in to eat breakfast and pack up to go.

I was talking, E-T/T-E dictionary out and being used on both sides, with the young (modern dress) woman at the hotel reception desk about the social situation.

She got to the word on the T-E side that meant “rural.” Then the Turkish word that means “traditional.”

So I wrote

“Istanbul/Ankara 2009

Baypazari 1750”

on a piece of paper and she agreed.

There used to be a joke that ran like this:

“We are about to land at London’s Heathrow Airport.
Please re-set your watches to 1973.”

but this is a lot more than that.


Put ‘Er There, Pardner

I headed out across country, mostly south then west, through some pretty Wyoming landscape—some green fields, some rocky hills





but I’m pretty sure I never saw a marble quarry in Wyoming.



And I got caught in another traffic jam.



So, you want buy pot?

And I’m bombing along, going through a little town called Sorken, and here’s all these people tending some pretty odd fires—and it’s about 80 to start with.

There were about three different fires with different groups of people tending them, and were about 800 square feet each— 20 by 40 and so I went back.

Well, of course, it was the women tending the fires and the guys supervising








and they were firing terra-cotta pots.





And so I’m schmoozing with them in my 80 words of Turkish and the Tourist Pantomime and I learned they fire them like this for about five hours and then the pots have to sit for about a week, and then get sold at the little stand down by the road.

And yes, I bought (a) pot.

Pretty cool.

When I got the pot, the kid who spoke the most English said,

“Thanks, very thanks,”

which is probably way ahead of where my Turkish is even after almost two months.


At a larger town, where I ate lunch, there was a really old mosque, and I was the only one in there, and it’s got wooden posts rather than the standard masonry columns.






More Authentic Stuff

And on my way into town I drove past something in the road that looked like a scrap of a rug, but I did a double-take, turned around and drove back to check it out as it seemed a little more than a scrap.

And there was a guy standing there by the side of the road, and I figure he’d lost it off his truck, and he’d gone back to get it.

But when I went back, circling past it again, he hadn’t moved and he’d had every chance — no traffic except me orbiting the thing, other than the big truck that drove over it on its way past, so I pulled another U-turn and stopped and scooped it up.

And this is it.



It’s about 1 by 3 feet, and is made from old rug scraps, and each end is double with an opening in the edge facing into the center, so it’s a kind of donkey saddlebags, except the ends are pretty flat, so there’s not a lot of room for a lot of stuff.

Here’s one end,



and here’s the other.




And here’s about what you get for $25 in Eskisehir, Turkey. There’s a nice three-star bathroom, too, and wi-fi in the room.




Homage to Susan

As I was bombing along in the hills today, I went past a very old Muslim cemetery that was full of irises, and I remembered the drizzly, rainy Saturday last year when Susan and I were coming back from Mostar, in Bosnia, and had just finished shooting some kids and a huge wisteria in this town along the road, and we're just hitting the road again when she starts sliding the car to the side of the road, hitting the turn signals, down-shifting, and braking all at the same time.

"What?" I said.

"Muslim cemetery," she said. "Full of irises."

So were out in the damp weeds and wet grass shooting irises for almost an hour.

It was great.



And finally, a couple of what I’d call “workshop images” to round out the day.

A Road Day (But What a Road!)

Day 54; May 28


It’s a couple hundred kilometers from Ankara to Beypazari, where I am now, which is a little market town in the hills, so most of the time today was either trying to determine the way out of Ankara, see King Midas’s tomb (!!!) and make my way via some great back roads up here, where I’ll be hitting the big outdoor market in the morning. . . .


Go In and Out the Capitol

As you might remember from a deliberate reading of these reports, I don’t mind getting lost—after all, Robert’s Rule Number Two of Travel is just that: Get Lost!

And out in the country, that’s a pretty good plan. But not in big cities. The worst couple of hours of the trip last year was trying to navigate Plovdiv and Bucharest, although we weren’t lost in Bucharest, we certainly were in Plovdiv.

And today, it took almost an hour longer than it should have to get out of Ankara. Ah, well, I’d rather be lost in Ankara than know where I was in Auburn. . . .

I’m pretty good at travelling by the seat of my pants, and bombing around, but I’m the least effective getting in and out of major cities. For the Central Europe trip in 2011, a friend is loaning me his GPS, so I’ll have it on for getting into and out of the big cities (Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Kiev, Krakow, etc.).

Once I got to Ankara on Sunday PM I just parked the car and never used it until this AM when I headed out— I walked, took the bus, took a dolmus, rode the Metro, etc. That’s how I normally handle big cities— drive in, park, use mass transit, drive out again.

So I think the GPS will be a big help— I looked into it this year for this trip, but apparently there are only about a dozen GPS locations in the systems I could get at home for the whole of Turkey.

Here’s the old castle at the top of the hill from the roadway---





I’d normally keep the bus and the road out of the picture, but I wanted you to have the scale. That's one of he dolmuses, by the way.


And here’s a house I saw where the colors caught my eye



The people who lived here were washing their rugs--- garden hoses running, young women on hands and knees scrubbing them with brushes---

And the boss watching them




Bon Appetite!

Yesterday PM, as I headed to the train museum, I grabbed a Doner Kabob, a Turkish Hoagy, essentially, and was walking toward the Metro stop and eating and this guy running a pretzel stand said “Bon Appetite!” to me, so we started talking in English, French, German, and some Turkish.

I stopped to visit because I always try to lead with Turkish, and often, as I’m trying to remember the phrase as I walk into a store, for example, the clerk just beats me to it and says, “Hello.”

How can they tell?

This is him and his pal.








Didn’t Look All That Golden to Me

The country around Ankara (220 miles ESE of Istanbul, 135 miles due south of the Black Sea) is where the Phrygians lived and there are two myths connected to them.

The first is all the King Midas and the golden touch business--- and the second is the Gordian Knot legend surrounding Alexander the Great.

(A significant ox-cart involved in choosing a king had been tied to a post with an intricate knot which remained for decades (whatever) in the palace of the kings, and was apparently too intricate to untie.

In 333 BC, while wintering here, Alexander the Great attempted to untie the knot, but could not. So he sliced it in half with a stroke of his sword, the so-called "Alexandrian solution".)

Well there’s no tangles of string or cords or whatever on the ground here, but there is a tomb (actually scores and scores of them in the area, mostly unexcavated) under an artificially created mound about 75 feet high and 250 feet across, and someone was buried under there in about 1750 BCE with some pretty good loot, most of which is in the big museum I visited on Monday, and almost all the kings in the area were named Midas, so . . . . .

The local museum was really good, but got invaded by a phalanx or three of high-school noise-makers.


Time Warp—The Cold War in Turkey

And on the way out of there (on the back roads to here) was a really big Army post. With many watchtowers about 25 feet high, lots of guards on duty with lots of firepower, tall fences around the whole thing, and kids’ playgrounds inside the fence.

And tour busses.

And at the gates, there wasn’t just some kid with a machine gun, the kids with the guns had flak vests on and body armour and were inside little blast-proof structures (think of a 5 foot tall circular snow fort with a narrow entrance only in the back) and for obvious reasons I don’t have any pictures to show you, but it looked like Checkpoint Charlie about 30 years after the fact.



A Great Back Road

Or

"Don't Throw Me in the Briar Patch, Bre’r Fox"

I chose to take a back road out of the Midas area to got up to where I am, and it was about 50 miles or more of great countryside (looking much like standard American West high plateaus--- some green, some brown, some irrigation, gently contoured land with some rocky outcrops---




and poppies.