I woke up about 6 but breakfast was 7:30. When we go down the Farises are already eating. The owner brings out special fried bread. Homemade, of course. The owner brings out gifts including a bracelet and charm. Also there is a pack of postcards. Then we have to pay for the rooms, etc. The Farises used the services more than we did. They were not happy with the bill. While they were discussing it the owners said that they may have charged high and start cutting some of the prices. After breakfast we bid farewell to the Farises, certainly two of the more interesting travel companions we have had. We pay our bill. Maybe a bit high by Turkish standards, but still fairly reasonable.

It is still a bit early for the bus so we wait in the room. At the appointed time we leave and the owners of the Ozturk wish us goodbye. They give us business cards for us to give other travelers. We go to the Koray to get our ride to the bus. It is almost ridiculous. They take us to what would be a ten-minute walk away. We could have walked it easily. It is a small drink stand with a table. There we wait for the next bus. That will take us to the big bus terminal. The man running it asks us “Would you like something to drink?” Basically it he lets people sit at his table waiting for buses in the hopes of selling something. The town has three or four layers of bus terminals and bus sub-terminals.

We have to be careful with our money. It is not because things are expensive. The money machines just don’t want to give very much. Getting money is really difficult here. We don’t want to use up our money. We are sort of artificially poor.

We have taken a pay bus to Denezli and are waiting in the terminal for the bus. Next to us a family is sitting on the tiled floor and eating the lunch they seem to have brought. They have a loaf of bread and a metal dish with vegetables. I am trying to find something unique about this bus terminal but aside from the language and the Islamic head coverings of the women this looks a lot like a standard bus terminal. It is a little more open air and it is lined with a lot more stalls serving drinks. I pass a large vertical turning spit of lamb, what we call gyros. Our bus pulls in and we start to board. Someone stops us and asks to see our ticket. He pulls us into the bus terminal to the bus company desk. They rewrite our ticket. Probably because it was a hotel who wrote the ticket it has to be re-written. Earlier we were assigned seats 15 and 16, now it is 5 and 6. There are layers of middlemen. We get on the bus and a few minutes after the appointed 11am it pulls out.

The woman ahead of me is reading a newspaper called Asabi. The front page features a wordless news story. It just has the picture. Apparently it is important news when an attractive blond wearing only the bottom half of a bikini looks over her shoulder to smile at a news camera. No other major newspaper seems to be covering the story. The reader has her head covered in the conservative Turkish way, in accordance with the laws of Islam. Turkey is a land of contradiction. What land isn’t?

The buses are really the popular mode of travel in Turkey. What the trains are to India, the buses are to Turkey. And they make every effort to make bus travel pleasant. I don’t know why they pour cologne in your hands on the buses. I suppose the people are poor and some may not smell good. This way the buses always smell fresh. Next they come around with water. Perhaps this is a Middle Eastern welcome. It seems like it could be. Then they come around with Coca-Cola.

We drive past a large stratified stone mountain. Little scrubby trees growing out of it. You could film a Western here. Not as many nice rock formations as Utah, but we could be in the Western US.

At about 12:15 we stop for a rest stop, possibly lunch. It is sort of a gas station and a large covered outdoor restaurant. A shop sells touristy items. There are bead-covered bags, calendars, scarves, and instant “Turkish” apple tea. A “market” has candy, racks of the ever-present Doritos. They seem to have more varieties of Doritos than we have at home. Also Ruffles. It would be interesting to know how much of this is bought by Turks and how much by tourists. I am not sure which would be the bigger pity. Here comes another splash of cologne.

I make faces at the little boy in the seat ahead of me. He must be about three. I thought I was helping to entertain him but eventually he is swinging his arms and crawling on his parents. I figure he needs some benign neglect. We are now going through some gently hilly farmland. Another three ounces of Coca-Cola.

More driving, more writing. We stop in a town for ten minutes as we go into a somewhat deserted otogar. We do find a stand open to get some snacks. The man counts up the cost of our snacks, tells us the value and short changes us by 100,000TL. Evelyn caught it. He could have told us the sum of the good was more and we would not have known. But if the price was alti-yuz-something and you expect to get at least 300,000TL back. Two 100,000 bills and a coin won’t do it. Evelyn had to write the figures down and the man finally accepted that we could do Turkish arithmetic.

We got some cookies, some rod-like sesame crackers (really more breadsticks), and a bag of something mysterious. They were the size of peas, were brown with burn spots, and had very little flavor. Bite into them and they become a fine powder. Slightly peanut in taste. They turned out to be roasted chickpeas.

The steward comes around with the making of hot tea. I am not a big hot beverage person and on a bumpy bus even less so. The driver’s tray is full and a teabag (in cellophane) falls to the floor. He goes down to pick it up and his stack of cups falls over and more falls off his tray. I pick things up for him and he thanks me. He asks me if I want tea or coffee. No to both, but when he offers cola I say yes. He is not serving cola now but because I was helpful to him, he brings cups for Evelyn and me. A small thanks for a small favor, but it reminds me how nice most of the Turks really are.

Well we got into Konya and tried a recommendation we went to the Otel Petek. It is a tiny room though it does have both a double and a single bed for $16 a night. The place is something of a dump and second only to Salihli as the worst room we have stayed in. But that seems to be how things are in Konya, which seems like an older city. In fact local legend would have it that this the oldest city. When the great flood receded the first place that the waters left was Konya. Actually it is a city about 7000 years old, so it may well be the oldest city I ever visit.

This is the first city we have been in that does not have a lot of Western tourists and you really can feel a difference. There are no carpet salesmen haranguing you. In fact there are still some touts, but not very many. In general you get left alone. Carpets are not the big thing here and I would never have guessed what it is. Believe it or not the really big sales item is cigarette lighters. That is the item you see being hawked on the streets the most. Not only that, there are a bunch of stands set up to refill empty lighters. What kind of economy has that as the main consumer item?

We did find some stands selling the worry beads also. You see a lot of people carrying them. Evelyn very cleverly suggested that they would make a good chachka item.

Well we went out to try to dinner, but first find a bank machine for money. Finding a bank machine has not been the problem. But this one would actually give us a decent amount of money. We are no longer poor. We are once again solvent. Our first thing to do is to find dinner. It was easy to find all sorts of shops including a few sweet shops but when you are looking for a place to eat dinner, that is not so easy. We found a kabap shop finally and tried to communicate. The place was dark and smoky. We ordered one thing off the menu and they were out. Two others they had out of maybe ten. Well, we picked the right thing. We translated some of the other things on menu and found they were things like trotters. We got a regular and a spicy meatball sandwich with coucous, grill tomato and pepper, and lettuce and onion salad. That a Pepsi and a tea came to $4.40 and they had to send out to get the beverages to two different places. But the meal was pretty good.

After that we went walking. We got some ideas for restaurants. This seems to be a very religious town. The vast majority of women cover their hair. Supposedly alcohol is very hard to find.

There seems to be a sort of Central Park. This is the Alaettin Tepesi. (A Tepe is a hill. This is the hill with the Alaettin Mosque.) We walked once around it looking at the shops across the street. Some seemed a little more upscale. Not like Manhattan, but not small and falling apart either.

I suggested we go find the other hotel that was recommended to us. It is a little further out. It takes us a while to find it but it is a pleasant clear night. We find it and while we are thinking of going in the owner practically pulls us in and insists we look at a room. I do and the room is just okay. It is nothing special. It is also three flights up (like our room) and costs $24 a night. We will probably stay where we are. We come down stairs and the owner has already made tea for us and is ready to give us a high pressure talk. Of course he is at a real disadvantage. He speaks only Turkish and French. And French is definitely not the Lingua Franca. We pull away and are out the door making a clean getaway.

Back at the room Evelyn starts a wash. We both drink water like fiends. We really need a lot of water in this climate. We have to buy a 1.5 liter bottle a day. The problem I run into is my throat and mouth are dry telling me I am thirsty, but my stomach is full. Maybe I should not eat such spicy food.

We went into the lounge. There were two men and a boy watching Turkish TV. The program almost seems like the old American idiot favorite “Queen for a Day.” It seems to be some sort of panel program where a woman in tears tells some sort of story to dramatic music playing in the background and the panel discuss what she is saying. I think there has been more than one woman on, all completely in tears. They say nothing without crying. I have not figured out what the program can possibly be about.

This is the first real Turkish TV I have seen. What do they have on? “Wheel of Fortune.” The Turkish edition, but easily recognizable. Another program comes on in Turkish but it is clearly Steve Gutenberg. I wonder if he knew he spoke Turkish. Another program is music video. Then they put on the news. That is quickly replaced by a situation comedy whose bad acting transcends the language barrier.

Back in the room I listened to Radio Moscow, now called Voice of Moscow. I hadn’t realized they changed the name. The toilet, once flushed, makes noise for 20 minutes if it doesn’t get stuck. If more than 20 minutes pass and it still sounds like a waterfall, then you go in and jiggle it. This room is somewhat overpriced for Turkey. Especially considering that this is one of the few places where breakfast is not included. The window is cracked. The bedclothes have stuff stuck to them like they have not been washed in the 1990s. In Goreme we will choose more carefully.

Most religions have their mystics. In Judaism there is the Baal-Shem-Tov who founded Hassidism. In Islam it is Rumi, poet and founder of the whirling dervishes. The history of Konya is entwined with that of the mystic Rumi, known to his followers as Mevlana. Rumi was among other things a poet who wound his idea into poetry. He was the founder of the whirling dervishes. He was the son of an Islamic scholar and mystic and himself became an even greater Islamic scholar and mystic with extremely loyal followers. Their very loyalty would cause serious problems.

He became the very close and intimate friend of another scholar and mystic, Shams of Tabriz. Rumi was loved but Shams was so devout that nobody could stand him. One day he asked Allah who could stand his company. A mystic voice asked, what will you give in return? Shams offered his head. The voice told him of Rumi. Shams and Rumi met and began an uninteruptable mystic conversation. It is said to have gone on for months without need for sleep or food or any human necessities. The followers of Rumi became jealous. Shams saw what was happening and disappeared without a trace. Rumi’s response was to return to his students but also to bury himself in his art but also to listen to music and sing spin for hours until his dizziness brought mystical visions.

Rumor came that Shams was in Damascus and Rumi sent for him. When they met again it is said that each threw himself at the other’s feet (which is a little hard to picture) and began worshiping the other. Again with the long conversations. Again the student jealousies. One day a conversation was interrupted with a message that Shams was wanted at the back door. Shams went to the back door and was never heard from or seen again. That was Saturday, December 5, 1248. Rumi was inconsolable, but life goes on. Rumi named the next book of his poems The Works of Shams of Tabriz but people knew better. Rumi continued to write poetry, mysticize, and teach until his death on Sunday, December 17, 1273. It was called his marriage day because he was united with Allah.

Rumi’s students picked up the spinning mania and are called the whirling dervishes. They wear distinctive robes with long skirts and fezes and spin as they meditate. These days they may just spin as a performance. The dervishes were to Islam much what the flagellants were to Christianity. They were an order with curious, colorful customs that wielded power. They were monarchist, archconservative, and xenophobic. Ataturk saw the dervishes as a force dangerous to progress and abolished them, having the monasteries turned into museums, as well as the shrine to Rumi/Mevlana.

The Dervishes have since become almost an act. I seem to remember seeing them on Ed Sullivan, though I could be wrong. They wear fezes, white jackets and long flowing robes. As they spin the robes fly out making them look almost bell-like. Most who see them do not realize the hat is really a symbol of a tombstone, the jacket a symbol of the coffin and the robes a symbol of the death shroud. They seem very much alive as they spin, however. It is interesting that while alive they have special headgear symbolic of death and Rumi’s tomb has a large turban on top, the headgear of the living.

Breakfast is extra in a hotel already a bit dirty and overpriced. We snacked a little on cookies in the room and I drank some cherry nectar. I found something nasty-looking sticking to the blanket from some previous tenant leading me to believe they let things go from the days that prompted the Lonely Planet to say the place was clean.

Our first stop was the Mevlana Museum, a combination tomb, shrine, and museum. Here we have the sarcophagus of Rumi and his son and the Sultan a the time. As you come in there are the turbaned sarcophagi of some of Rumi’s followers. The tops of each tomb are in the form of turbans. It is thought that April rains bring healing. April rains are collected and the ends of the turban on Rumi’s tomb is dipped in the water then daubed onto the ill.

You pass by the sarcophagi and see a tiny museum of Islamic artifacts including more of the beard of the prophet. There are antique copies of the Koran. Visitors should not miss the ceilings. There is a painting with dervishes. There are two giant rosaries, each with 99 beads each about an inch in diameter. As I was looking at the rosaries a visitor clapped me on the back and said “Salaam aleichum” which is Arabic for either “Welcome, friend.” Or, “move over I want to see also,” at least in this context.

Part of the same museum is a shop that is part museum with classic carpets, some amateur paintings of whirling dervishes, etc. We went to a separate kiosk and got some souvenirs including another woven rug sample. Some music on cassette.

I got as our chachka a set of worry beads. This fits all the rules, it is small, cheap, closely associated with the place visited, and something a local might be likely to buy for himself. We had already bought a small piece of cloth woven in a carpet pattern. This was one more item for the chachka shelf.

An old man seemed excited by our vests, but I was not sure if it was positive or negative. He would point at the vests and then on one hand bring his fingers together as if trying to pinch something using all five fingers. He would say what sounded like “good.” I had no idea what it was all about. It could be because they look vaguely military he thought they should not be in the mosque, but we were walking away from the mosque. Eventually it looked like we would not be able to communicate and we both gave up.

From there we walk the 3/4km walk to the Koyunoglu Museum. This whole museum is a private collection, in fact a large set of collections. None of the collection seems really large assuming we are seeing the whole collection, but there is a large amount on display. The admission is 100,000TL for locals and 250,000TL for tourists. It would be a little fairer if there was some in other languages, but the labeling is almost all Turkish. There is a collection of Neolithic tools, pottery, coins, fossils, rocks, stuffed birds, coins and bills. There is Islamic calligraphy including some long diagrams that could almost be kabalistic. There are historic photographs of Konya in the early parts of this century. There are collections of brass, a large one of carpets. After that there is a visit to a house from the late 19th century in Turkey. If the implication is that this was a typical house, one can only assume that the standard of living has dropped over the last century. I don’t know if it is typical, but the guard follows you through the entire museum making sure you do nothing wrong.

As we left and walked back to the main street we passed a boy of ten or so and unusual frankness said, “Hello, money money.”

As we were looking for a restaurant there was a sound like banging garbage cans and we could immediately see there was a collision of two cars. Both drivers immediately jump out and start arguing and gesticulating wildly. Like white blood cells people seem to come from nowhere to clog the damage site. We don’t stick around but continue on to find a restaurant for lunch. We did not see the accident and certainly don’t want to be witnesses.

We find a restaurant that sells a local specialty, firin kabap. It is basically mutton on bread. We also order half a roast chicken. While the food has been enjoyable for the time we have been here there is a certain monotony. We have had a lot of roast meat. We may not be getting the real Turkish cuisine. As in Scotland it may be difficult to find real local cuisine in restaurants.

When we are walking when people say hello to us it usually is a come-on for a sales pitch. We say “Merhaba” back, but not are really friendly. That is in part a mistake and we know it. When we stand in one place lots of people give us smiles and say hello and continue on their way. They are obviously just trying to be friendly. The Turks are a very friendly and fun-loving people. They are also aggressive sales people. And this creates a dilemma for the tourist who would like to be friendly with everyone and at the same time does not want to be pulled into a sales pitch. It is the identical problem we had in India, but there the percentages were a lot worse. Far fewer people tried to be friendly with no strings attached and I would guess there were four times as many aggressive tout contact per hour on the street. I think had we not been to India we would not appreciate Turkey and the Turks as much.

We went to the Great Karatay Seminary to see their collection of tiles but they were closed for lunch. We sat on a bench writing. A group of older schoolgirls in Islamic scarves sits down at the other bench and talk among themselves. I go off and get more water. We write a little longer. The school girls pick up and leave. One turns to us with a smile and says “good-bye.” We smile back. “Good-bye. Gule Gule.”

The Great Karatay Seminary was founded in 1251-1252. These days there is no seminary left, it is a museum of tilework. The first thing you should look at is the front door decorated with Koranic verses carved into the stonework. Very majestic. The museum is small, but it has a very impressive dome of geometrical designs. The first chapter of the Koran is written around the top. The museum has examples of all sorts of tile. It is interesting to see the sort of tessellation they use and how they hide it. (A tessellation is a covering of a flat plane always using one figure.) There are really only three kinds of tessellation. There is triangle, square, and hexagonal. You can recognize them by whether six, four, or three tiles come together at a corner. They have a tessellation alternating crosses and eight-pointed stars. That is really a variation on the square tessellation. Start with a checkerboard of red and black squares. Now for each red square, for each edge, add a little isosceles right triangle, its long side toward the edge. Do this all the way around and you have an 8-pointed star. But to do that you have had to cut a notch out of the neighboring black square. Each of the red squares neighboring the black square did that, so the black square becomes a cross. So you can perfectly tessellate with 8-pointed stars and crosses by deforming the checkerboard.

Got that?

I would say these museums we were seeing were tiny, but there are things to see. The Seminary of the Slim Minaret was built in 1264 to be more impressive than the other seminary. The doorway is as impressive, but the dome is not so ornate. The slim minaret is not so impressive or so slim looking since lightning in 1901 knocked off the top two-thirds. The door is impressive, and inside is examples of decorative stonework. In Islam it is forbidden to show creatures with souls, but mythical creatures presumably do not have souls, or at least that seems to be what was assumed here. There are a lot of designs, Koranic quotes and a few stone images of fanciful creatures. Some of the Koran carvings look almost Celtic.

We spent about forty minutes looking for the Archeology Museum but concluded only that you cannot really trust maps in the Lonely Planet. This is not as useful a Lonely Planet Guide as the one for India. Tired, we walked back to the Alaettin park. There is a fancy tea garden and Evelyn suggested we stop for a drink. Somehow I always think these places are for other sorts of people. I had a Pepsi for 150,000TL and Evelyn had coffee 100,000TL. We sat for a while. The park is on a hill overlooking the street so it was a pleasant place to watch the passing parade. Eventually it was time to move on. We were continuing around the hill when three girl students stopped us to talk so they could practice their English. We talked to them about five minutes telling them that we liked Turkey and telling them what we did (and did not like). We continued on to the Alaettin Mosque on the hill. It was first finished 1221. It is in the process of being renovated. They are putting metal braces on the columns and the roofing. Inside it has lost a lot of the feel of the old mosques. You cannot really see the dome from the inside because a lowered ceiling has been put in. Now it just looks modern inside.

After that we headed back to our room. On the way we made a purchase. We decided to give the beads we bought this morning as a gift to a friend who requested we bring him back something from Turkey. We passed by a man selling Islamic beads and I after some discussion bought some beads that the seller claimed. I got his best beads and paid 600,000TL, about $2.40. He claimed they were carnelian, but I thought that carnelian was opaque and these are translucent. In any case they looked like they were decent quality.

The mystery of the man this morning is a little deeper. It made no sense that he was saying “good” talking about my vest. I had more or less ruled that out. But walking back to the room I passed a man selling the same hot pepper we see as a table spice in restaurants. Basically it is pepper flakes. I point it out to Evelyn and the man selling it says “good” and makes the same hand gesture putting all five fingers together as if trying to use all five fingers to hold a single poppy seed. So the old man was excitedly saying something about our vests and saying something about good.

We got back to the room to find the room had been made up, but there were no towels. It may well be that they think that there is no point in us getting towels since there is no water either so there is nothing to dry off. I start down the two flights to the desk to complain that we have no water and no towels. The unsold rooms have their doors open. I look into one and of course it has towels. Oops, no, my mistake. It is my room that has towels and this unsold room that doesn’t.

At about 5:15 they turn on the cold water.

I started the short-wave listening to local stations on FM until the English language broadcasts came on. The BBC had a science program that talked about the recent detection observation of the largest space explosion ever detected. It was as if all the bright objects in the universe were compacted into a single location in space. I want to know more.

That ended at 7pm and we went out looking for a place to eat dinner. We found a place that specialized in chicken and had chicken on a spit like doner kabap. There is some sort of sports team eating there also. The waiter asks on of the girls to ask us whether we want the chicken as a sandwich or on a plate. She is wearing a Walkman. It is the same model Aiwa I have at home. Of mostly Islamic countries this one is one of the most liberal, and the standard of living, at least for some, is just about the highest. In most countries the military is the force of conservatism. Here it is the force keeping the country liberal and forward-looking. The non-poor do not want to see this become another Iran. The religious are free to be as religious as they want. The government does not want to let them force it on the unwilling. At least that is how I interpret things.

We each had a doner chicken submarine sandwich, effectively. Not a lot of chicken, but probably healthier.

Our hotel is just on the edge of a bazaar. Basically it is a lot of small shops in a small area. It is more convenient than what we would have since all the shoe shops are right together making it easier to compare. Elsewhere all the cloth shops are together.

It is now 8:55 and all the mosques seem to be competing with each other to chant. I am surprised anyone can make out the chanting from their own mosque.

Apparently a Swiss bank is being forced to turn over to Cambodia government funds deposited with the Swiss bank before the Marxist takeover, but the records of which have been lost. After the international grousing about Holocaust gold apparently Switzerland is getting very irritated at having to return deposits to both Jews and Cambodians and will ask the World Court for a clearer criteria. Just whose funds deposited in Swiss banks can the bank consider their own?

Voice of America is interviewing Basil Polidouris. The interviewer is just gushing over him as a great film composer. I probably agree, but Basil, what have you done for us lately? Independently of the quality of the film, if I had to choose the best single film score I ever heard I would have to choose Conan the Barbarian. For my taste it has the greatest spectrum of orchestral color. I can think of no score since Prokofiev that stands so well on its own. But you have not shown that degree of creativity in a good long time.

Well we were awake at 7 and the bus leaves at 9. If there are problems getting to the bus terminal, which I doubt, best to get them out of the way early. We put on full packs and head down to the desk. Nobody was at the desk. We knocked on the desk, but nobody came. I left 8,000,000TL on the desk with the key.

A mini-bus comes a way down the street and we run for it and ask “Otogar?” The driver shakes his head yes. Evelyn sits down in back. The driver gestures to me to take off my bags then to sit next to him in the front seat. This is sort of a place of honor. Drivers will frequently have a friend in this seat to talk to. Often the person in this seat will make change. He ask the usual questions. What language I speak. Where I am from. That sort of thing. Mostly we just drive and I see the streets and we listen to Turkish music. He has the money he has collected on a tray next to me. He moves it to the dashboard. Friendship is one thing, responsibility is another. When we get to the Otogar I thank him using the longer form. “Chok teshekul ederim.” I get a big friendly handshake. These are the most friendly people in a country we have visited since China.

We got our ticket and sat down to wait. Our next challenge was getting breakfast. There were three stands in the bus station. All had almost exactly the same selection of baked goods. I went to the one near where Evelyn was sitting. I asked for a corn muffin and a pizza, 100,000TL and 200,000TL respectively. The boy behind the counter was surprised I wanted pizza at this hour. I nodded. Crazy American, I guess. I was told to pay the cashier first. You pay first and bring a receipt. I did. They grilled the pizza. Actually it was like a roll a foot long topped with meat, cheese and onion, though not much of the latter. Hot? Yes. So he folded it in half and grilled it on something like a waffle iron. It was pretty good. I wrote for a little while.

We get on the bus. There is a lot of arguing about something as the bus starts to leave. I suspect they have oversold the bus. They sell seats, not rides. A family of four can ride for the price of two if they keep the kids on the parents’ laps.

We pass by a field where the army is training. The drill instructor sees the bus and waves at it.

Apparently if you total your car in an accident the state gets it and then leaves it at the side of the road as a ghoulish reminder to drive carefully. Usually you see this along rural roads but Konya had one in the center of town with a mannequin impaled on the broken windshield and basted with plenty of fake blood.

The radio playing on the bus has a time tone but time tones vary by as much as two seconds here depending on where you hear them,

The countryside is not really very interesting. These are the Steppes of Turkey. It is pretty flat. You see herds of sheep tended by shepherds.

There was a dead sheep by the road. I figure the shepherd leaves it there as a ghoulish warning to the other sheep to stay out of the road.

We stop at an otogar and the man ahead of me tells me that we will be here for ten minutes. I pass the word back to the English-speaking couple behind me. I bought a “bagel” at the stop and we talked to the people from behind us on the bus, a New Zealand couple who had not been to Anzac Day. They are also going to Goreme. We discussed the food and other pleasantries. They had been to LA, New York, and Israel. We discussed how friendly the Turks were compared to the Israelis. I wrote and napped a little.

At about 12:25 I saw an interesting rock formation in the distance and thought it would be good to get a picture. It looked like a big termite mound. The road took us closer and closer until we were in amongst what looked like a whole colony of termite mounds. The bus steward tapped me on the shoulder saying this was where I get off. Sure enough this was Goreme. By the time we were off the bus our luggage was on the ground. The strange squalling sound I had been hearing turned out to be a chicken who did not want to go into a small box in the luggage section. Frankly I am on the chicken’s side. It would have to be a contortionist to fit in the box and certainly would not want to travel that way. I was rooting for the chicken.

Now I wanted to see where the heck I was. Goreme is a bunch of homes and hotels dug into strange Utah-like rock formations. Yup, this is where we are staying for the next few days. There is a tour and accomodation center. We heard about a place to stay, the Melek. Okay, we set out for it with full pack. It is a climb up a hill to get to it.

There is a local place called the Flintstones Hotel. Except that the rock formations are more pointed and conical and that the place is more hilly than Bedrock that is a pretty good description. You are either living in a cave or a rock building built into a hill.

We climb, having some problem finding the Melek in part because an arrow fell off one of their direction signs. Evelyn finds a souvenir along the way, the part of jawbone of a sheep complete with three or four molars.

We ask to see the room and find it a big climb up, even from the lobby. There is a common area like a porch for four rooms that looks like a piece of a grape orchard. The shade is provided by vines hanging over crossbars.

The rooms are the tiniest yet but the look and feel is amazing. If I wanted to put myself someplace exotic, this is it. Descrbing this place is just not sufficient. This is the kind of place I never expected to get any closer to than pictures. Evelyn says that this is our cheapest international trip yet. If you don’t count airfare India was cheaper, but this was the cheapest all inclusive trip on a per-day basis. And as I look from our patio I cannot believe what it bought us.

Goreme is part of the region of Cappadocia. The Cappadocian Fathers who were the followers of St. Basil came to this region and here carved churches into what were really volcanic chimneys. There are hundreds of volcanic chimneys that are easy to hollow out to create buildings. These days the area has been discovered and there are efforts underway to protect the beauty. Part of the reason we chose the Melek is the owner is supposedly a leader in that preservation.

We probably should have run out right away to get some pictures but Evelyn wanted to wash her hair and I really wanted to get my log entirely up to date. I also want to take it all in. I feel like I have fallen into an issue of the National Geographic.

So we are sitting on our porch looking across at a cliff-dwelling family who seem to raise chickens. Every once in a while one of the chickens or people comes out of the home for one thing or another.

Well we had to make arrangements so we climbed down the hill and walked into town. That takes all of about 10 minutes. Evelyn stopped and talked to a New Zealand couple. They recommended Flintstone Travel to book a tour of the area so we did. That seems to be the most common nationality here. Actually the travel agencies all seem to off the same three tours and seem to designate them exactly the same way. There is the red tour, the yellow, and the blue. I bet they all charge the same for them. So it makes comparison between travel agancies very easy. And pointless.

The woman at Flintstone Travel was also from New Zealand. She was on her first day and we got into about an hour conversation about travel, local food, politics, and a number of other topics. I asked what was happening to New Zealand’s currency. It seems it has been very unstable and headed very much downward.

After that it appeared to be ready to rain hard so we figured that we ought to get out of it. 5pm was early for dinner but we’d had little real food. We went to a restaurant called the Sedef. I had Ayran and a dish that turned out to be chicken, cheese, and tomatoes in a clay pot. Evelyn had chicken and couscous and Raki, an anise flavored liquor. While we ate the sky opened up for our benefit with lightning and thunder, though not enough of either to be exciting. For desert I had Fresh Fruit with Honey and Yogurt. That was fairly good.

After we eat we go to a grocery and get a package of Turkish Delight just to try it.

From there it was back to the room. We were sitting inside our small room when we heard people on the patio talking English with a North American accent. “Ah, someone to talk to,” I think. I take a look outsiede the window and see someone who looks familiar. “Hey! I know him!” “Who is it?” asks Evelyn. I have to think for a moment. “Sammon. Pat Sammon.” Yup, the people we met going from Istanbul to Canakkale, in Canakkale, in Sardis and again in Selcuk. They had gone their own way and had ended up at the same hotel in Goreme. I just caught a flash of him receding around a corner. I go to the manager’s office. There is Pat registering. We are in room 20, he in 21.

We get caught up with them on what had happened since. They had gone to some more restful sites. I think Pat and I have both had digestive problems. They are not sure which tour to take. We suggest they join our tour. They agree it is a possibility and ask how to find our tour office. I suggest we walk them. So we head back into town and take them to Flintstone Travel. The woman is surprised to see us again. Not as surprised as we are to be here. One of the chimneys supposedly contains a pre-Christian church. We go to see it and it is in a restaurant. We look at the doorway in and it looks like a storage room for cleaning materials. The owner of the restaurant says that we should walk in. So we do only to discover he is decorating the inside like one would a van. It will be a music club. At least until the loud music damages the chimney.

After that the plan is to try to find a high place that we can see over the entire town. We do some climbing but do not manage to find any place easy to go. We are at 1000 meters or about 3300 feet. That makes breathing something of an effort. Though it is one effort we are anxious to make, at least considering the alternatives.

We find a relatively high place that gives a view. As we are admiring it a woman comes out of a house just to be friendly and talk to the foreign strangers who have come up her road.

We do a little more exploring and then go back to the hotel. We sit in the lounge, drink apple tea, and talk to the small, soft-spoken Nico Leyssen, the owner. He is Dutch with a close-cropped moustache and beard. He always seems have sunglasses and to wear jeans, a cream-colored turtleneck and a black vest. He is trying very hard to save this region from developers who would do things like put music clubs in the chimneys and who want to put of concrete buildings all over. He has political enemies and has been thrown out of Turkey twice and has had to sneak back in. Part of the reason he can get back in is that the “y” in his last name is a “j” in his own country and there is no “j” in Turkish. That causes confusion when he is looked up in the database. He has to leave but we continue to talk. I say the the big developers really should be stopped, but there are local people who are just trying to make a living here and they will be a problem. You really hate to tell them they have to lose their jobs to protect the feel of the area.

The conversation drifted and then settled on the Y2K problem. We told the Sammons some reasonable precautions to take.

Back at the room we opened a package of Turkish Delight and I had my first sample.

There is a classical radio station that we can just barely get. I listen to that until they switch over to jazz. Why do classical station have this tendency to play jazz, even here? Jazz stations don’t feel compelled to play classical music. A lot of jazz seems to me formless and unmelodic. I wake up at 11pm and realize I had fallen asleep writing. I turn off the light and go to sleep in earnest. This involves going over to the door since that is the only switch that controls the light over the bed. That gets dust on my feet since like desert areas the dust seems to just blow in and cover things. By the time I am in bed I am fully awakened and it takes a good half hour to fall asleep. But I don’t wan to turn the light back on and awake Evelyn.

Once I opened the window it got nicely chilly. The night averaged out to a comfortable temperature. Well, it is easier to sleep when it is too cold than too hot.

At 6am or so someone walks the corridor ringing a bell as a wakeup call. Outside we see the Sea of Marmara. There is a low mist on the sea the same color as the sky giving the impression that the hills in the distance are floating on air. We pass a modern rural area, one looking very Mediterranean, and every once in a while you see a pair of minarets towering over it like a pair of candlesticks. I wonder why Americans are not here in larger numbers. This is a terrific place to visit.

The sink has a little metal label that shows a faucet over a full water glass and an “X” over the water glass. Wash with water but don’t drink it. Breakfast was the cookies we had since the trip to Konya and mineral water. The toilet on the train is sit, not squat.

We are once again dogged by cloudy weather. Some of these views would be a lot nicer in the sunshine. Still I guess there is nothing to be done for it but live with the bad weather. Well, this is the last day.

We pull into Istanbul station at about 8am. Istanbul station is a marvelous old building with stained glass windows. It has a feel of classic Middle Eastern architecture even if it is not a mosque. There is just a feeling of romance about the building.

We buy our ticket for the ferry, a cost of 125,000TL. We get on the boat. I have been told from my reading that this ferry across the Bosphorus is supposed to be something magical. I am looking forward to it.

Most people are unexcited by the trip across the Bosphorus. A few of us stand in the open area. We pass docks with boats loading and exotic buildings in the distance. Once again here and there you see minarets. A student sees that I am a tourist and wants to know about me. Another man joins in the conversation. We are making a short stop to let some passengers off and others on.

Now we are out on the water. Looking at Istanbul is indeed beautiful with its giant mosques. In the early morning there are sleepy fishing boats in the water and faster boats. This is certainly a nicer way to get into Istanbul than to come in by airplane on a gray and foggy day. Unfortunately the ferry ride lasts only a few minutes. We get out and they are selling fresh fish on the docks. The smaller fish glint in silver, and there are some very large fish heads.

Hmmm! This really is not going well. Maybe it is the fish heads. It really was a very exciting scene, but fish heads just aren’t going to convince any one. You are probably reacting the way I would reading about how exciting it is to see a bin full of liver. Well, take it from me. It is a “ya have to have been there.” From there we got a taxi to what was basically the same area where we had been three weeks before.

Drivers are really casual here. As we were driving one motions to our driver to pull up beside and the two start a conversation. He probably wanted directions. I already commented on how close they will drive to people. If a driver in the United States has to drive within two inches of where a person is standing he will stop and wait for the person to move or honk. Here the attitude is, “What’s the problem?”

We leave our luggage at the Alp and take a cab out of the city to the dock were we hope to get a ferry up the Golden Horn, the port of the city. Naturally our cab nearly hits someone getting there. We get to the dock and looking for how to get a ferry we are pretty nearly flooded with touts trying to sell us rides up the horn in their boat. What we find out, which seems to be true, is that the water is low and there are no ferries up the horn. We still have to fight these guys off with sticks, but make our getaway across a busy road. That frightens them off, but nearly does the same to me.

We get bus tickets and while we are waiting for the bus I buy from a vendor a roll of egg bread. The cost is 20 cents and it is fresh and quite good. The Turks do like bread. I am eating the last as we find our bus.

Our first site is the Eyup Sultan Mosque. Eyup Ensari was a friend to Muhammed and one of the founders of Islam who died fighting for the new faith. His tomb was revered by the Byzantine as a mark of respect. When Mehmet the Conqueror took the city for Islam, he was obliged to treat the tomb with more respect than the Christians had. This mosque is considered a very holy day. We see at least two families with little boys dressed in white satin suits with red sashes, cylindrical hats, and capes. They look like they are ready to lead a circus parade. In fact this is one of the special days in their lives. Jewish boys are only a few days old when they are circumcised and at 13 they have the bar mitzvah for which there is a lot of study and commotion. Then on the day there is lot of cheek-pinching by sadistic aunts under the guise of affection. Moslem boys don’t have to study for the event, but they are circumcised between eight and ten. And they do lead a parade of friends and family. I am not sure which is worse. Maybe it is better to get it over all at once the way they do here. The boys I saw did not seem to be very happy, but both had older sisters who were enjoying it immensely.

The tomb has not a lot to see. A tomb that you can see a little of behind an iron grating. There was an ornate chandelier and the room was decorated in blue tile. Women are expected to cover their heads and wear long skirts. Evelyn did not, but had the respect not to enter. I did enter, and I gave her a description. We walked around the area and there are other tombs and other graveyards. Some of the gravestones are pillars with Koranic verses.

Well, once again we were accosted by a group of schoolgirls wanting to test their English. It was all the usual stuff. “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” “What work do you do?” We asked about them. They asked about us. One of them made what I assume was a rude comment in Turkish and the others giggled and hit her.

Our next stop was to be the Kariye Church. Evelyn found it on the map and judged it to be one kilometer, certainly less than a mile. We set off to find it. This was one of those cases where we just walked and walked through non-tourist areas. Really non-tourist. After better than 45 minutes with no sense of getting any nearer, I insisted we hire a taxi. We did and the guy seemed to drive and drive and drive. Eventually we got there and the cost was about $2.

Kariye Museum (Church of St. Savior in Chora) known in the Lonely Planet as the Chora Church was originally called the Church of the Holy Savior Outside the Walls. When first built in 413 it was an outside place, outside the walls of the city. It was garishly over-decorated with mosaics. As the city grew it was surrounded by the city. Under the Ottomans it was defaced for the greater glory of Allah. What the Ottomans did not get to is still more than enough for a church several times as big. I will let Evelyn cover the actual art.

The next order of business was to find lunch. After our little disagreement over the whether walking or taking a cab was a better idea Evelyn suggested I take the lead in finding a restaurant. We walked a couple blocks to find a busy street. We walked a little further and found a nice-looking kabap restaurant. For me lunch was doner kabap and Pepsi. Evelyn had the Iskander Kebap. That is the same meat in a spicy tomato sauce with yogurt on the side.

After lunch we find the bus that would take us to the next site but as we go to get on the bus we see everybody else has a ticket. So we buy a ticket and wait for the next bus of the same type. We get on and they say it is the wrong kind of ticket. They sell us another one. Well, that’s about half a dollar wasted.

I had heard that in Islamic countries that a woman would not sit on a bus next to an unrelated man. The bus filled with so many people I could not see Evelyn across the aisle. I later suggested that we should have used our walkie-talkies. I did get occasional views of Evelyn’s hand, which reassured me that she was still there. Then the bus got so full I could not see that.

We had planned to tour the Dolmabahce Palace. This was the palace of the Sultan, but only late in history when it was no longer really time to have Sultans. This was the time that Turkey was called “the sick man of Europe.” While the state of Turkey was going into a bucket, the Sultan was having this ornate palace built for him to impress the monarchs of Europe. The entrance cost was something like $14 per person. We decided to give it a miss. We could see much of the exterior from the gate and got the idea that it would be of the ornate French “lather on a little more gold” school of decoration.

In front of the gates are guards who are supposed to stand at attention and not react, no matter what. They stand like mannequins. To me it is not clear what this has to do with winning wars. We continued up the street to the Maritime Museum.

At one time Ottoman Turkey was the supreme sea power through the Eastern Mediterranean. Under Suleyman the Magnificent from 1520 to 1566, Turkey commanded the waves. The Christians could not allow that power to continue and destroyed the fleet in 1571 at the battle of Lepanto. The Sultan built another fleet, though never as successfully. Turkey failed to keep its fleet up to date and eventually lost its place as a sea power.

What we at first thought was the Maritime Museum was a small exhibition of art, all on themes dealing with the ocean. One piece seems to have a sailboat on cloth so that a background seems to move in Moire patterns. Pieces were done in a style of 1950s science fiction art. Some were done in bright cartoon colors. One nice piece was an abstract shark.

There was supposed to be a second building of the museum, but it turned out we hadn’t been to either building. The first real building was mostly taken up with historical boats of the Sultans and their harems. From there you went through a garden that featured bronze busts of maritime governors and admirals of the fleet. It has cannons and mines from more recent history. The second building had more recent objects including Ataturk naval mementos, a captured Ottoman standard from the Battle of Lepanto. They had a collection of boat models, medals, coins with maritime pictures, figureheads, water lights, diving suits and pumps, etc. It was a much nicer museum than it first appeared.

We thought it might be a good idea to take cheap ferry twice across the Golden Horn. I would have liked Evelyn to see a view like I had seen that morning, but the ferries were not running. So from there we wanted to get back to the room. Since our room was in walking distance of the Topkapi Palace and the bus claimed to go to Topkapi, we figured we were all set. We asked how to get the bus. A man sold us a ticket and told us we had to cross the street. It was a busy street and we had to cross a “flyover” to do it. It was about a fifteen-minute wait for the bus, and when it arrived the ticket-taker claimed we had the wrong kind of ticket. Evelyn was getting frustrated and started to complain. Another passenger took our two tickets and left the price. It was a small thing, but typically Turkish.

We took the bus to Topkapi only to find ourselves at a bazaar that was nowhere near the Topkapi Palace. We had to take a taxi anyway. The driver was a disagreeable sort who kept making obscene hand gestures at other cars. He also shortchanged us and drove off before we could stop him.

We went back to the room a little tired and a little down. Actually we had not seen the room at the Alp yet. We rested and realized we had to change money for dinner. None of the cash machines would accept our card. We passed one cash machine that had rejected it before. Someone inside the booth waved at us. It was one of the Kiwis we met on the Goreme tour. We went to see if she was having any luck. She said the machine had just been repaired. It still rejected one of our cards. We tried the other and Voila. Magic. We could have a decent dinner our last night instead of pizza.

We tried the Altin Kupa for dinner. The service was just awful. First they served a group that came in after us first, then apparently were taking dishes to the restaurant next door before serving us. After about 40 minutes we finally got our food. I had mixed grill; Evelyn had lamb cutlets. I was irritated and had planned to get dessert, but did not.

Over dinner we discussed what were the highpoints of the trip for each of us. For me it was the collection of artifacts of ancient religions at Ankara. This may be one of the great collections in the world of religions whose country I always wanted to visit, but assumed it was impossible to get to it behind a political curtain as impenetrable as the Iron Curtain. It was a real discovery that there was a country that still had the originals.

Evelyn’s choice was Goreme and there is something to be said for that. Certainly it is the most visually spectacular place we visited. There were two problems for me there. One is that I still have wounds on my head from cracking it so many times. A few times is funny and I should have learned to be more careful. But in the end I began to grow weary of the traps for the unwary. But I have another and deeper problem with Goreme. What happened geologically at Goreme is unique, wonderful, and beautiful. And I can even accept that some historic people might have hollowed out some of the volcanic chimneys for homes. But then the Christians had to deface it for what I consider selfish reasons. And then the Moslems had to come in and deface the Christian art, scratching out eyes of the images, putting theirs in its place. How would you feel looking at Yosemite if it had been totally defaced in a South Bronx style gang war and there was graffiti over everything? At heart I suspect a lot of what is done in the name of religion is trying to curry favor with what people consider to be the powers that be. People willfully confuse the concept of “done in the name of religion” with “good.” That is at the heart of perhaps most of the evil in the world. I see evil done for this motive, evil done for greed (e.g. theft), and evil done for racial intolerance. They are basically a) greed for the next world, b) greed in this world, and c) instinct to preserve ones own genes (a la Dawkins’s Selfish Gene). a and b are the same if you assume life after death. b and c are the same if you take a more biological viewpoint.

As we are leaving the restaurant a carpet salesman sees us and rushes to try to get us to his shop. The Sammons absolutely hated talking to carpet salesmen. The Farises convinced us that it was enjoyable and often did not involve buying a carpet at all. They just want to talk and find out about the world. This one wanted to know what we do. I said that I work with computers. He said this was like Bill Gates. Yes, computers but not Bill Gates. Gates is now the richest man in the world. He is the second carpet salesman we have met who is fascinated with Gates’s wealth, at least after we said we were in computers. Both knew, however, that Gates was in trouble with the government.

Our salesman wanted to know what we made a month in salary. I told him. He was astounded. He said he could live very, very comfortably on that much money. I told him that was meaningless. You cannot earn like in the United States and live in Turkey. Really all he is seeing is that there is a high exchange rate. We do not live all that much more comfortably than he does. It is more comfortable, but our prices are a lot higher. He knew that was true saying that bread is very cheap in Turkey and very expensive in the US. He wanted to know if we each had a car. Yes, but that has been true only for a short time. Over the last three or four months for the first time we have had two cars. Before that we had one car 15 years old. And we own our house? Well, yes, but have a mortgage. He did not know about or understand mortgages.

He also wanted to know about violence in the United States. Five-year-old children had guns, he had heard. I told him it was very rare. Did we have a gun? No, but I know several people who do. Guns are very hard to find in Turkey. I told him it was a good thing. He agreed. I had hoped to buy some candy for my group at the corner store that had offered us credit the first day.

The carpet salesman said we could get I right there, but the woman had been nice to us and I wanted to be nice back. Now it was after 9pm and I was probably too late. Eventually we pulled away. The corner store was on he way. We passed it at 9:20 and it was open. The woman remembered us and treated us like friends. We bought candy for home and some peach candy for me (which turned out to be really good). We had about a million lira left. It occurred to me to make her a gift of what was left. Evelyn thought we might need it at the airport. We didn’t. But we did say good-bye.

We returned to the room to pack. Evelyn went to sleep. I tried not to sleep, but did sleep maybe an hour.