I've been in Turkey now for three memorable and event filled weeks. Here is a little background and a few of the highlights.
Neither Felix (The DR650) nor I are going anywhere at present. Felix is in the hands of a mechanic in nearby Ortaca getting its 8,000 mile service. The guy’s workshop is in a local sanayi (pronounced San-eye-ee). In the UK it would be described as an industrial estate. Almost every Turkish town has one. But a sanayi's resemblance to a British industrial estate is superficial. The units are small. And their business is fixing things. If you want something fixed, there will be someone in the sanayi who can do the job. And if they can't, they will have a cousin in the next town who can. No problem!
Whether people have a dodgy modem or a thirty-year-old washing machine, they don't throw things away here; they take them to the sanayi and the sanayi fixes them, fabricating or modifying parts, as necessary. For the most part businesses here don't need to carry much stock, because there is usually someone in a nearby unit who can supply what is needed or can make it. The person you approach to do the work will take responsibility for it, but will contract out parts of the job to others as required. I'm told the system works very well, but as I discovered, it can take time if you need something unusual, and a DR650SE is pretty unusual in Turkey (in the UK, too, for that matter). Erhan, the mechanic who did the work for me, had never seen one before and appeared to be smitten. ('Lovely engine' he kept saying.) Before taking Felix to him, I had to give him three days to order an oil filter from Istanbul. And when he did start the service and found that the brake pads were badly worn and the front disc was slightly warped, I had to wait another five days (because of the week-end) while he got them, too. That's the way it works here, and I'm not complaining.
Like Felix, I've been getting about a little less than I would like because this part of Turkey is experiencing intermittent and unseasonal rainstorms. They don't last long, but they can be heavy. (And mucky too: after the last one everything was streaked with mud from the Saharan dust that sometimes blows over from Africa. I am, though, getting plenty of opportunity to relax and recharge my batteries which is what I need. I wasn't aware just how exhausted I had become. I'm eating a lot of wholesome Turkish food and seeing some of the immediate neighbourhood which is mountainous and spectacular.
Not far from the village where I'm staying is Dalayan, a tourist town with a beach where turtles come to lay their eggs. Until last year, the demands of commerce and conservation were held in a delicate balance by the municipal authorities. Coachloads of tourists came to the beach by day to sunbathe: female turtles came by night to lay their eggs. Night volunteers identified the nests and erected fences to keep the daytime tourists at bay. More recently, political shenanigans and local protests have resulted in the administration of the beach being taken out of the hands of the municipality and given to nearby Mugla university which (as is the nature of universities) doesn’t appear to know what to do with it. Service outlets and tourist numbers have declined and the fragile local economy has been affected. A drop in visitors to the beach is having a knock on effect for family restaurants, local taxi and minibus firms and their small-scale suppliers, while there have been few gains for the turtles. The babies can now incubate in a little more security, but adults are still being maimed by propellers and fishing nets. On the beach is a turtle rescue centre, which cares for sick and injured animals. It became famous recently when it successfully repaired an injury to one animal using a 3D-printed titanium jawbone.
I've been in Turkey for three weeks now. I arrived here on 11 May from northern Greece, full of dizzying excitement at the thought of exploring Istanbul. Constantinople-Byzantium-Istanbul - the threefold city. Can there be another like it? Is there anywhere on earth with such a spectacular location, or such a dazzling history? For decades, I have had an imaginative engagement with the city's exorbitant and catastrophic story.
My first night in Turkey, though, I camped just outside the city at the beach town of Silivri on the banks of the Sea of Marmara. The Sea of Marmara! I couldn't believe it; here it was, lapping placidly at my feet, the great waterway, a sea lane to Phoenician traders; Greek settlers; Roman legionaries; Persian armies; Ottoman sultans and slaves in their thousands. the Sea of Marmara has been a gateway for Russian sailors, Anatolian princes, Mongolian hordes, Byzantine patriarchs and Crusader knights. The whole of the ancient Western world tumbles together in this spot. That night I sat on the sandy beach for hour on hour watching the lights out at sea and letting my thoughts wander far and wide. Memories and feelings, hopes and dreams, facts and fantasies flowed through my thoughts. Traces of events from my past I had long since forgotten or buried surfaced here againagain. I didn't know it but I was on the point of exhaustion, and not just with all the travelling of the last two months. I was full of emotion. Tears and moments of elation came and went for reasons I could hardly explain. Watching the lights far out on the tideless waters brought back intimate memories of my grandfather and gathered his memory closer to me. Not far to the south lay the Dardanelles, where, as a Tommy in the British army he had fought, reluctantly in the first world war, a conscript in an imperial conflict he had no sympathy for. It was there he had received an 'enemy' bullet under his heart. He survived, but the wound proved to be inoperable under the conditions of the day, and he carried the bullet to the end of his life.
It may have been naïve of me to enter Istanbul, the monstrous and miraculous city, the second largest on earth, without a detailed map or a GPS, but... there it is. My plan had been to buy a map as soon as I hit the outskirts and use it to try to find my pre-booked hostel. Little did I understand at that time, that in Istanbul there are no maps, signage is incomprehensible to outsiders, traffic jams are a way of life, and homicidal driving is a permanent part of the experience. It took me eight hours, several litres of bodily fluids, and a year’s supply of adrenalin to find my way through the city's maze of streets. These are often cobbled and canted at impossible angles, with gradients never intended for motorised traffic.
It was a tedious and terrifying time (if you have ever been caught in a blitz of Turkish drivers you will understand), but once I had located the general area, I was able, by a gradual process of elimination, to use dubious or near-incomprehensible directions from a string of passers-by, to home in on my destination. I should perhaps here acknowledge a particular debt to Olaf who recognised the ‘Horizons Unlimited’ sticker on Felix and bounded up to me with great good humour to offer his help; his wife who persuaded the clerk of their hotel to provide me with detailed directions; and to Onur and Meltem, two Turkish students who early on in my quest took me under their wing and came up with a brilliant - if life-threatening - plan to get me to the right quarter of the city (It sounds easy enough, but Odysseus never had a wilder or more hair-raising time of it): follow the 86C bus.
The hostels I had booked and where I was to stay for the next four days were close to Taksim Square and the adjacent Gezi Park which, in that short space of time, I got to know extremely well. Both square and park are of huge political and emotional significance to Turks as symbols of their fight for national independence and, more recently, for their personal and collective freedom. Only two years ago the square became the focus of huge political protests that spread rapidly across the country, gathering a great deal of international media coverage as it went. Because of those events, many of the buildings surrounding the square and park, now have iconic status.
Eventually, I tore myself away from Istanbul, crossed the Bosporus bridge, and rode into Asia. That trek out of the city was one of the most miserable of my life. To avoid getting sucked back, once again, into the monstrous labyrinth, I stuck to the motorways. But motorway traffic in Istanbul crawls along at the speed of a tortoise, while motorway drivers exhibit all the manners and temperament of wild boar. Water and fruit vendors festooned with their wares made their sweaty way down between the rows of honking and jabbing cars. Pedestrians climbed over the dusty barriers and made their way listlessly across the road to god knows where, faces set, their eyes fixed and impassive. In the intolerable heat, my motorcycle gear rapidly became a personal sauna. Sweat ran down my body and dried. On either side of the carriageway, for mile after mile, tall cranes in bright, primary colours were busy raising what must be the most insolent and soulless modern high-rise development that I have ever seen. Built, it seems, for androids and not for human beings, this nightmare cityscape was a place for people to go mad in.
And beyond the city itself, there was no relief. The ugly urban sprawl continued. Clinging to the long northern shores of the Sea of Marmara, a huge industrial development scattered across the landscape all the filth and detritus of modern commercial life: dirt, dust, chunks of concrete, rusting metalwork, broken crates, half-finished and abandoned buildings, scattered panelling, patches of wasteland covered in dusty weeds and rotting brickwork: it just went on and on. Hours later, as I began to think it would never end, the world turned green and orderly once again, and the relief I experienced was like a long-wished-for release from physical pain.
Izmir, where I arrived two days later, proved to be a much kinder and comprehensible community, gentler in every way than Istanbul, its crazy, exuberant and unsleeping sister-city to the north. Navigating through it was relatively straightforward. A cheap hotel turned out to be hard to find on my first night, though, and when I did find one, proved to be little unexpected. The first indication that it was a love hotel came with the sight of the massive 'emperor'-sized bed with its tiger-skin rug. The second indication was the mirror strategically placed on the wall beside it. The clincher though was the toilet roll which was not located in the bathroom but over the bedside cabinet. I slept that night in my sleeping bag. It did the job, and for the remaining four days of my stay I found a super-friendly hostel inhabited by a lovely and fascinating group of international travellers, each with an extraordinary tale to tell. I spent my time there exploring the harbour and bazaar and taking a trip to Selcuk and the evocative remains of the Greek/Roman/Byzantine city of Ephesus.
After Izmir, I travelled slowly down the coast to Ortaca where I was to stay for a few days with friends. There were a number of possible ways to get there. I had initially chosen the fastest. A friendly and enthusiastic waiter in Izmir, though, had insisted that I should abandon this plan and take the tiny coast road that runs through Oren. I orginally determined to ignore this advice, when I got the same tip from a guy I met chilling out to rock music in a lay-by near Kusadasi. (While still talking to me, he rang his girlfriend, and with a great deal of shouting and gesticulating, told her that he had just met a madman who was planning to ride a motorcycle to Kazakhstan). Two unforced and enthusiastic recommendations cannot be ignored, so I went with the advice.,/p>
Minor roads, though, can be hard to find and as a result, this part of the trip turned out to be somewhat adventuresome. (Having no detailed map and no GPS are always good preconditions for an adventure.) Before finding the right road, I turned down several wrong ones, the last of which gradually broke up till it became a non-road, and then hardly more than a pile of rubble. And it was there on a hairpin bend that I took my second tumble on Felix. Neither the bike nor I were injured, so the only damage was to my ego. Once on the right road, though, the advice I received proved to be excellent. I think it would be hard to find a more beautiful and spectacular mountain road anywhere on earth than the wild little single-track road from Oren to Mugla, or one that was so much fun to ride on a motorcycle.
And once I had reached the road's end and turned onto major roads near Mugla the surprises continued. This stretch of the D500 must rank as one of the world's most dramatic motorway experiences as it careers down the almost sheer face of the mountainside in tight sweeping arcs giving dizzying views of the coast and coastal peninsulas below.
It was after dark that I arrived at the home of friends near Ortaca, in a state of manic excitement over everything that I had seen and had happened that day and in the days preceding it. I babbled on late into the night. Now, though, I’m now appreciating the opportunity to recover from what has been a sometimes traumatic but always exhilarating couple of weeks.
