We went up early to breakfast. Meals are served on the roof terrace. Then down to get our luggage. I guess it called “luggage” meaning “that which is lugged.” We went down to the desk to pay and there was nobody there. We rang the doorbell and still nobody came. I took off my pack and ran upstairs. I paid the owner. He asked where we were going next. I drew a blank. I could not think of the name of the next place. And he could tell I did not know it. “Konya,” I said. That wasn’t a lie. We will get to Konya eventually. “You have a ticket?” “Yes, we are all set.” Now he probably knew no bus was leaving for Konya, but he let it pass. I got halfway down the stairs and the name Pamukkale came back to me. I could turn around and tell him, but that would seem even more stupid. One of the great joys of living is the knowledge that most people in front of whom you have made a complete ass of yourself will never see you again and don’t even think about you. At least that was true until the Internet came along.

Well, I got downstairs got on my pack and we headed off for the bus station. We pass by a school. Instead of bells ringing they play Fur Elise when you go between classes. It sounds like a good idea gone bad. If they had different melodies that would be one thing. This way the kids will always associate Fur Elise with something painful.

There is a sculpture in front of the school showing a head split apart and held together by a blindfold over the eyes. It is about four feet from top to bottom. Evelyn’s interpretation is that it is a human rights message. Amazing how when we first see artwork that is abstract we assume it agrees with our own philosophy. To me what is keeping things together is restraints placed by others.

We got to the bus station early and sat and waited. The Farises showed up a little later, also going to Pamukkale. We talked to them. It turns out that we are taking a minibus. There are only a handful of people going to Pamukkale. I thin that Evelyn is not really happy about this. A minibus cannot offer either the comfort or the service of the big buses. I think we have grown used to the big buses, which are really the most popular means of travel in Turkey.

Maybe it is a sign of age but I am enjoying the travel days more than I used to. You actually do learn a fair amount looking from the window of a bus. They are not such strenuous days. The thought of climbing long distances uphill as we are doing so many days of this trip is just not appealing to me. Turkish buses are a really enticing way to spend a day. Travel days even give me a chance to get caught up on my log.

In the bus the discussion turns to what a theologian really does. (Peter was first a theologian, then a school administrator, and then a high school English teacher.) He studies history but also looks at systems of religious thought. We have a discussion with the guy sitting next to us in the minibus. He is on a four-month vacation. They went to places we had been on other trips. They had been to Kenya. They saw lions trying to take down an elephant, or so they claim. The elephants were in the brush. The lions were sitting and just waiting for the elephants to come out. One came out of the brush, sensed the lions and trumpeted. The elephants formed a circle facing out so the lions would have to attack right into those tusks. Ah, elephant is tough meat anyway.

After a while we stop for a beverage. I have a cherry nectar, my favorite drink in Turkey. Apple tea comes second. But neither is really Turkish. We talk with the Farises about opera. As we go the roads get a lot worse. We are getting into the interior, toward the real Turkey though we won’t see much of it firsthand on the tourist routes. We can see some of it from the bus windows. After a while we pull off the main road to a side road. We pass through some towns. I am a little surprised to see school children in jackets and ties in small villages, both because it is so formal and because it is so Western.

As we get to Pamukkale we see what looks like icy cliffs incongruously in the hot sun. It is actually a calcium precipitate. They are the big attraction in this area. As we pull in it is almost like being in Agra, India, again. Touts trying to get you to go to their hotel swarm the minibus. We and the Farises go to the Ozturk. They had it recommended by the owners of the last place. We have a bunch of people carry our luggage, unrequested. Shirley and I check out the rooms. It is pleasant enough and fairly Western in style. I tell Evelyn it is along the lines of a Ramadan Inn. She does not get it. It is going to be a long trip.

The staff of pension seem to be all on family. We get a very homey family feel. They have us choosing our dinner before we have even decided on a room. We pick fresh trout, Mother’s special kabap, yogurt, and tomato salad. We don’t even have a room number yet so they dub us the dark-hairs and the Farises as the gray-hairs.

We drop our stuff and get ready to go explore. Back on the street it feels like a dead New Mexico town. The sun is beating down, there is nobody on the streets but flies. We walk to the bus station. There is somebody resting out front. We go into the office. “Hello?” No response. We wait about 15 minutes and nobody shows up. Now what? We talk to the young man outside bus station, pulling Turkish phrases from the book. He looks at us but does not react. We ask next door at the little market (these little markets are not like 7-Elevens, they have about 16 square feet of floor space for the customer. They have just about enough space to get to the cooler. They tell us we can get bus reservations at the Koray. That is next door to our pension. As we are walking back we run into the Farises so go as a group. We go to the Koray to make arrangements. It is a little fancier than our pension. The man behind the desk makes arrangements. He also tells us that the Ozturk owners are lazy and do not run their pension very well. He gives them a list of hotels in other cities that are good, but he says do not show the list to the owners of the Ozturk. The capper was when he pulled out a half-inch thick stack of Koray business cards and asks the Farises to give them to their next hotel. I guess hotels are a cutthroat business.

We continue our exploration walking toward the white cliffs. It is a little problem figuring how to get in, but I suggest we go the way the tour buses are letting people off. We pay to get in. There is a long path up the cliff right through the white area. We climb part of the way up and have to get our shoes wet crossing one white pool. The water washes over the side of the cliff leaving calcium residue. A man with a whistle tells us we have to take our shoes off and climb the path barefoot. Peter is well-used to walking barefoot. He did it as a child jumping from rocks to rocks and running through fields. Evelyn had done some barefoot walking delivering mail. Shirley and I are complete tenderfeet. I have it worse than she does because I weigh more than she does by a fair amount and both she and I have dainty little feet. We step on something sharp and it hurts. A lot. And the way up has smooth patches moderately painful to walk on and gravelly parts which hurt like the dickens. It was about a 45-minute climb and it was painful. Great, I am spending my vacation ripping up the bottoms of my feet to climb a slime cliff. Evelyn tells me it is not a slime cliff. Sure enough the Lonely Planet corrects me. The water is scummy, not slimey. The European visitors must do more barefoot walking than I do. I was really happy to reach the top. Shoes are such a convenience. The pools are an interesting shape. They have walls around them from evaporation from the outer edge.

It was a real pleasure stopping for a drink of Coke. The topic of discussion was Shakespeare interpretations. Also movies. We continued on to the Hieropolis, and some very well preserved ruins. These had been Roman baths and a cure center. There is a Byzantine church, there is another latrina. There was some good photography here.

The time came to go down and we were not sure we could find the other route. Also we could not find how far it was. Eventually we decided on a cab. I sat in front with the driver while the others piled in the back. The driver gave us freshening cologne like on the buses. The driver put rock music on the radio. I asked for Turkish. First he put on a radio station, then he popped in a cassette. It had a really good beat. He snapped the fingers on one hand to the beat. I started snapping my fingers to the same beat. I did it with both hands. On the straightaway he took his hands off the wheel and either snapped with both fingers or clapped. I did a sort of modified Zorba the Greek dance only sitting down. The two of us were having a high old time. Evelyn asked how he was steering. I told her I would give her a hint.

When he clapped, that was not the sound of one hand clapping.

The driver left us off in town. He was still snapping his fingers as he drove away. Back at the Ozturk a shower felt very good.

Evelyn came out from the shower dressed for swimming. She thought it would feel good. Usually I am the one lobbying for us to swim. I was honor-bound to join her. Down at the pool it was another matter. The local water is full of calcium and is cloudy. There was no way to tell how deep he water was. I would have gone in up to my waist, but I did not want to dive in where I did not know how deep it was. And that went double for Evelyn. We t by the side of the pool and talked. The Farises went out to try to get money at the bank, but failed. We talked to them for a while and then went in to get dressed for dinner.

During and after dinner we had a discussion a long discussion with the Farises. We were there from 7 until 10. We talked about religion and books and deconstructionism.

I showed Peter my way of diagramming the plot of a story. It seems I went to see Richard II in London, April 1989, and had no idea what the story was. I tend to get confused about who is who in a Shakespeare play. The program had the plot, but on first reading I said I would never keep it straight. On the spot I invented plot diagramming. Each character is represented by a bubble in a diagram. The character’s name is written in a bubble. Actions and relations are represented as arrows between bubbles also with labels. By thus making the plot visible on paper every character somehow was clearly delineated in my mind. I find this technique extremely useful reading novels, watching films, keeping straight the plot of stories I am about to see, etc. (I would love to hear from readers who try this technique and find it useful and/or have comments on it.) I thought this method seemed mathematical so I asked Peter what he thought our training was because we were discussing Shakespeare and literature so much I assumed we might have fooled him into thinking that was our field. Without hesitation he said, “You’re mathematicians.” “Had I told you already?” “No, but mathematics is very visual.” I thought that was extremely insightful.

Peter had wanted to find books to complete his collection of G. A. Henty books. We told him about bibliofind on the web. We discussed science fiction and fantasy and Toyotas and the Y2K computer problem.

After a while Evelyn said it was time to pack it in. We headed up to our room. Evelyn went to bed fairly quickly; I worked on my log and went to sleep at 10:30 or so.

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.