Sleeper Bus, Angry Bum, Cappadocia

BM and I had sort of ran our wheels over those parts of Istanbul we wanted to see and subsequently had stagnated into a period of watching youtube videos in the hotel room. Lamas with hats amused us.

We had checked our money and consulted the map. We’d hummed over Amsterdam, huhhed over Israel.

We opted for Cappadocia, a 10-hour bus ride from Istanbul (no toilets), but still in Turkey.  Also a 10 hour bus-ride back (no toilets). The set-up was not ideal for miserable bums needing to do miserable things often (I still don't know...parasites or bacteria??), but it gave me an opportunity to strengthen my anal sphincter.

 

I discovered that the difference between a "sleeper bus" and just a plain old bus is that a sleeper bus is driven at night, and you're sort of expected to sleep, whereas in a regular bus you merely can sleep.  OK then. Great.   

Cappadocia, in west-central Turkey, isn’t really a place.  Historically, it was a place (one that gets mention in the bible), but these days the word is kept alive for tourism purposes, but roughly coincides with the Nevshir province of Turkey. The word "Cappadocia" roughly means “the part of Turkey that sort of looks like this”:

 or this

 and has structures carved out of ancient volcanic ash, like this:

Stunning landscapes. 

Volcanoes made the place this way.  

Coming from Jeju (in S.Korea), I thought I was familiar with volcanic landscapes, and as usual, I was wrong.  Unlike Jeju, where volcanic rocks were formed by cooled magma, Cappadocia's volcanoes covered the land in ash rather than lava. By comparison, the rocks formed from ash are softer in color and composition, which is why the area has so many structures carved into them.

Also carved into the rocks are actual friggin' cities, as in underground labyrinths that go several stories downward, complete with (remnants of) churches, wineries, farms, and all you'd want in a city except for the sun.  They're old (think Byzantium times/Bronze Age) and, from what I understand, not used for daily life unless needed for protection. They were a safe place to go when the neighbors were in rape & pillage, warring mode.  

Going down (and down and down), the air gets different and your sense of claustrophobia starts to act up a little.  If you're a nervous, overly-imaginative human, you get the sense that the earth is just going to collapse itself and fill in its holes any second.

Many of the passage-ways were carved to be deliberately small so that invading armies would be slowed and ideally killed one by one in single file, leaving corpses to further hinder the invaders. 

My claustrophobia and angry bowels were fighting for attention after about an hour in there; I was happy to leave.  Here's BM's bum, climbing stairs to eventually surface above ground again. 

Last Days in Istanbul. . .

Two buddies, glad to be out of Korea, happy to be exploring Turkey.  Oh wholesome joy! Let's frolic with the joyful Muslims!

Travel buddies YEAH!

I forgave him when he puked on my socks, and I presume that he forgave me when I spent days puking out my ass (I got an intestinal infection) and generally making the bathroom a horrible place for noses.

Forgiveness!!!!!   : )  Not just for Christ!

We like cameras and took lots of pictures of pleasant things in the city.

Two buddies and one small hotel room.

A small bed. I slept on the floor.

No women. Just two straight buddies with no privacy.

We went to Galata Tower.  Joy! It cost 20 Lira and we weren't allowed to take in our tripods.  :)

 I spent most of my time in the bathroom having an ass-plosion.
The view from up top was boring!

Then, we got separated because I spent so much time in the bathroom while my ass did an awful thing. He waited for me at the top of the tower, and I waited for him at the bottom.  It was really cold.  We waited for almost an hour! Then when we found each other, we had a fight! 

To travel is to have an enriching experience; it is a wonderful investment of one's funds towards both self-discovery and good ol' fashion recreation.
 

Hagia Sophia

I was a bit whiny when I first arrived in Turkey.  Accustomed to spending $16/day for food, entertainment and accommodation in India, paying 20 Turkish Lira to enter the Hagia Sophia pissed me off enough that it tainted my enjoyment of the place once I'd entered. I further took the situation personally insulting when they didn't allow me to take my tripod. 

Oy. We all do this sort of thing. It's the brain's talent for soiling it's own fun.

I don't know what's up with the Santa looking dude to the left.  He stood there for the better part of a day with giant prayer beads in his hand. If my friend hadn't commented on him, I might have concluded that he was an autonomous aspect of my own fragmented mind projected upon consensus reality. Turkish Santa is standing in front of the Hagia Sophia (direct attention to dome and spikes in the background).

Let's get a little closer...

Yup.  That's closer.

This is actually less close, but we're looking at it from a roof at sunset. Which is cool.  And there's a seagull looking at it too. 

Like a lot of the things to see in Istanbul, the Hagia Sophia is insanely old. It's been around since the year 360, functioning as a (Constantinople's) cathedral until 1453--a big year in Turkey--the year the Ottoman Turks took over. It was the world's largest cathedral for almost 1000 years. It's called one of the greatest surviving examples of Byzantine architecture.

When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople (1453), the Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque and the Christian images inside were plastered over with Islamic stuff.

In 1935, the building was opened as a museum.

Restoration process are on-going, or seem to be.  If you pay 20 Turkish Lira, you can go in this very impressive structure and see old, weird Christian iconography, a lot of which is ruined with time.  Some examples:

 

Grumpy angel. All sorts of weird.  

After it's conversion into a museum, restorers have been faced with an issue: uncovering the Christian iconography means destroying the Islamic art plastered over top. This is debated most heatedly for the domed roof, seen in the two pictures below, where Islamic calligraphy may be covering a Christian mosaic of "Christ as Master of the World".  I'm serious about that, too.  Google it if you don't believe me. 

In through stained glass windows, streams of light glare into the huge, stadium-like hollows of the building.  ... ... .. And...whatever other poetic phrases that can be used to describe these photos.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Blue Mosque)

HDR photo (taken with a Nikon D90 using the kit lens) of the Blue Mosque at night.

I’d been in the air and on the road long enough that I smelled when I landed in Turkey.  Unshaved, unwashed, I trekked the cobblestone roads of Istanbul alongside the fancy-pants cafes wondering if I stood out as bad as I imagined. My travel buddy didn’t notice, or was classy enough to not mention it.  The locals all dressed like models.

India, where I'd just arrived from, is an unusual place that makes people unusual.  Istanbul was something else. I never did figure out exactly what.

Our priorities that day weren't complicated: drink Turkish coffee, smoke sheesha, see sights. 

Turkish coffee, if you've never had it, comes to you in a cup not much bigger than a thimble--but scoff not. You only drink the top of it; the caffeine-ladden sludge at the bottom can presumably be eaten, but I'd suggest leaving it alone. The soapy-coffee flavor isn't unpleasant, but it liquefied my bowels real good. 

Caffeine highs carried us to the Blue Mosque.

History buffs can really get lost in the temporal play of Turkey. Structures stand here erected by hands centuries dead now. Construction of the Blue Mosque began around 1609.  Renovations have kept it pretty fresh looking.

In the picture above, you're looking at the mosque from the court.  People wash their feet in the smaller structure in the center of the court because Allah really likes Himself some cleanliness. 

In this shot, you're looking at the same court but the picture is taken from the opposite side, in the corner with the mosque along the left. 

The tiles lining the interior walls are predominantly bluish, hence the title 'Blue Mosque'.  Interestingly, during the construction of the mosque, there was quite a bit of inflation (an historical constant, apparently), yet the price paid for each tile had been negotiated ahead of time, and didn't change. Consequently, the quality of the tiles decrease the higher they are in the mosque, and the blues have turned to green.  Still, the interior is truly amazing.

Abeautiful girl who wanted me to take her picture inside the mosque and E-mail it to her. I'm not sure that I got her E-mail right. If you know her, send her to my blog so she can collect her picture.

Istanbul, Turkey

Blue Mosque, Istanbul

A list of Turkey’s many incredible and breath-taking structures would not include its airport.  Boxy and moderately functional, one of the first problems you’re likely to run into is getting a visa (or more accurately, the $60 stamp these people force you to buy when you arrive). You must buy it before passing customs, and the only ATM on this side of customs is permanently broken. Arriving without the proper money in hand, you’re in for an irritating welcome. One of the staff laughed, calling this ‘one of the many adventures I’ll have in Turkey’.  I didn’t laugh, and didn’t express my thought that his idea of adventure made me feel very sad. To get around this problem, you’ll have to find somebody with a decent command of English and have this person find somebody else to escort you upstairs to the “arrivals” section, where there are ATMs that actually work.

My friend had booked a hotel in an excellent place in the city; we stayed in the district of Fatih of Istanbul, south of the ‘Golden Horn’, a short walk from the Blue Mosque, the Basilica Cistern, the Bosporus, and Hagia Sophia. This is where you want to stay.

Driving in from the airport, a sense of the city’s historical presence is unmistakable despite Istanbul being a modern city. Along the shores of the Bosporus, sections of the Wall of Constantinople still stand after roughly 2000 years. Pieces of castle and other tattered remnants, time-beaten and ancient, are embedded into the city here and there beside cafés situated along cobble-stone streets.  

The Turks are, compared to other countries I’ve been to, better at selling. They stand outside their cafes and offer small talk and their menus. They're a touch imposing by Western standards, but they do it in such a way that declining their invites feels rude. Once they've engaged you in conversation, they’ll tell you just about anything you want to hear. But what they lack in sincerity is made for, generally, in charisma and energy.

On our first night, a fast talking ego-maniac sold us tickets to a whirling dervish show.

As a promoted show with fairly expensive tickets, I have doubts regarding how authentic the dance was. Nevertheless, it was interesting to watch.

Afterward, the maniac who sold us the tickets put on his own show, showcasing unusual parlor tricks such as standing on wine glasses. 

How the wine glasses didn't break, I don't know. I suspect they were reinforced by the strength of the man's self-regard.

Next, the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern, Galata Tower, and the Bosporus. . . 

April Fool's Joke Conspiracy Foiled by Facebook

 

It’s not often you can credit Facebook for keeping you on track, but it happened to me.

Countless afternoons of being carried on the wings of whims, hungers and a search for the cheapest place to get a decent coffee had extinguished my reliance on a wrist watch, let alone a calendar. I’d been keeping a lazy eye on the date via my computer but somehow I’d managed to not notice that it had been April 1^st for about 4 days straight.  It was a tasteful April Fool’s joke, I suspect, caused by a power surge that fried my laptop battery.

Then a status update by a friend who I was supposed to meet on the 5^th of April in Istanbul read: “In a few hours I’ll never have to listen to Korean pop ever again”.  

A few hours? A few days maybe….

A stranger, huffing a giant hash joint at the table next to me, confirmed the date.  It was April 4^th already. I had about 14 hours to get to Delhi to make my plane.  Oops.

Naked, covered in ash from human cremation, carrying a human skull, and impossibly surreal, an Aghori walked in my direction as I hastily exited the coffee shop.  This was, I assume, an extension to the April Fool’s joke being played on me by the cosmic forces.  I’d been searching for these guys since I arrived in India. In my final, rushed hours, they passed me by. India is a playful place and jokes at your expense are frequent.

Minutes later, all that I own has been collected from my hotel room and stuffed into a bag on my back. I’m on a bus before I can even turn around to say good-bye to Rishikesh…this place that I really loved.

Run to the bus, then an auto-rickshaw to the airport, the 10 hour journey is complete.  4 hours to spare. Thanks for everything India.  Really.