Turkey!

Turkey and Turkmenistan are not the same country. I realize that they start with the same first syllable, but they are as different as Canada and Cancun. And yet small hints remain. In Istanbul there were chickens living in the highway median. In Ankara girls wore headscarves with jeans too small across the ass (a contradiction that isn’t seen in Turkmenistan yet, but would not be out of place). Our oh-so-Western and educated guide in Ankara said Mom got food poisoning because of the weather (I almost fell over laughing in the van). Our tour-guides were also generally more often of the Central Asian model than the Western: their purpose was not to give an insider insight and show us the places outside the tourist track, but rather to make sure that we stayed on the tourist track and only received the party line. It’s like we paid for our own KGB agent to show us around and tell us that the man being arrested in front of us was a perfectly safe individual who hadn’t done anything wrong, and yet the government was right to arrest him (true story). One of our fellow tourists (whose family is Turkish) told me that Turkmenistan is exactly like Turkey 30 years ago and I believe it. As Turkey is an immensely cool country which I wouldn’t mind living in when I grow up, I see this as a very optimistic prediction for Turkmenistan which I’m doing my part to bring to fruition.

I will spare you all a detailed blow-by-blow of our itinerary. My parents and I spent three days in Istanbul getting on and off a bus seeing the major attractions of the city and the Bosphorus. Then after a quick flight to Izmir we spent a day wandering through the immense Ephesus ruins. It was a rather impressively-preserved site, but our attention was distracted by trying to keep ahead of the Italian cruise-ship crowd advancing behind us like a solid horde of bronze-tan wildebeests in big sunglasses. The next day was Pamukkale (“Cotton Castle” because of the calcium deposits that make it look like a tiered sugar cake) and the ruins of Hierapolis, a Roman town built to take advantage of the Pamukkale thermal springs. I resisted the temptation to get covered in expensive mud. Then we saw Cappadocia for three days (see below). After Cappadocia we jumped back in a plane to see Ankara for two days, viewing the makings of Western civilization at the Hittite ruins of Hattusas and Phrygia Gordion, as well as the massive monuments where the modern Turks worship their republic’s founder, Ataturk; very cool guy apparently. As might be apparent, the word “vacation,” when traveling with my parents, is not synonymous with “resting.” It is in fact more synonymous with “journeying,” or -- do I dare? -- “working.” My parents got on their plane back to America 10 hours before I was scheduled to return to Turkmenistan so I used that time to “vacation”: sitting in various scenic locations reading “The Book of Air and Shadows” by Michael Gruber (really amazing book, far better than “The Da Vinci Code,” of the same genre), playing on the internet (everyone should see “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” at drhorrible.com), and watching movies in an honest-to-God movie theater (“Wanted” is okay, the Batman movie wasn’t out yet in Turkey).

I hesitate to gush about Cappadocia because I don’t want to give away the surprise. Call me an ignorant cretin, but I hadn’t heard of Cappadocia before this trip. While we were in Istanbul we’d run into other tourists and the first thing they’d ask us was “have you gotten to Cappadocia yet?” and we’d say, “no, but it’s on our list,” and they’d turn away with looks of secretive envy. Neil Gaiman in “American Gods” describes places of power, places in the world where sacred energy has gathered and human beings traditionally respond by building temples, monuments, and (in America) road-side attractions. I felt it in Delphi in Greece, in the slave pens in Zanzibar (for different reasons), and now in Cappadocia, that intangible something that leaves a mark on your soul. It isn’t just the physical wonder of the place, an ancient lava bed where erosion has eaten away at the rock and turned the landscape into walls of curling, sloping cliffs like the sides of a macaroon pastry and towers euphemistically called “fairy chimneys.” And it isn’t just the history, where ancient Hittites began carving out homes in the soft rock towers to hide from invaders and then early Christians built monasteries and chapels as well as entire under-ground cities linked by miles-long tunnels that go over 40 meters into the ground and served as places of storage and refuge. Functioning underground cities. Seriously. But there is a sense of wonder that goes beyond all that, a sense of sacredness that goes deep into the soil and is tangible even when flying hundreds of feet over it in a hot air balloon at dawn. Thank you, again, Dad for that trip.

And thank you, parents, for paying my way out of Turkmenistan, for being delightful and sensitive companions, and for giving me a wondrous vacation to remember as the days tick away at site. Now all I have to do is wait for next summer. Dublin, anyone?