I have often wondered why dogs bark. In the wild, dogs never bark. It is only domesticated dogs that bark. I wonder if dogs are really imitating human language in about as well as they are able to coordinate. If wild dogs were domesticated by mutes, would they bark?

As I have noted before dogs are treated differently in Turkey than they are at home. I think they are put out at night and there are a lot more that are homeless and have to fend for themselves. People assume they are fierce, asocial creatures and so they become that way. The two or three dogs that I have shown some affection toward have turned immediately affectionate and responsive, though it could be the real toughs avoid people. The dog I encountered the first day apparently knew she (or he) was frightening the little girl, and was trying to avoid an incident. At least some of the dogs would be more domestic given a chance.

Well, that was something like 4:45. At 5am was the call to prayer. That is on a loudspeaker. You get that in any country with a large Islamic population, but in Egypt just about everything stops. This is a much more liberal country and I have seen no prayer times when lots of people unroll mats and pray.

After that Evelyn went into the bathroom and turned on the light but since the bathroom door has a glass window it sort of lit up the bed. It is now about 6:30. We are now about at the 3/7 point in the trip.

We have a fly in our room. I don’t know if this fly is representative of flies in Turkey in general but she is particularly aggressive. Shoo her away and she just returns or goes to bother Evelyn. Perhaps she is trying to tell us something. “Please come to my carpet store.” At home I have an insect net I would use to capture this beastie and put her outside. Here I have no such appliance.

I was a little surprised at how late I heard relatively young children playing yesterday. It must have been 10pm and they were still making noise and playing games. I am not sure what the school requirement is. You certainly see children out selling shoeshines on the street when their American counterparts are in school.

We are talking about what is Turkish to bring as gifts. Evelyn suggests Turkish Delight. French Fries are not really French, but Turkish Delight is really Turkish. In the late 18th century Ali Muhiddin wanted to make a candy that was easy to chew and swallow. The thing is that he had various sticky soft gums, but if you put two of them touching, they became hard to separate. He came up with the idea of using up all the stickiness holding powdered sugar. He coated the pieces and then it didn’t matter that they were sticky and gummy. The candy was popular in the Imperial Palace with the Sultan’s family. That was all it took to be popular throughout Turkey. Westerners discovered the candy in Turkey and dubbed it Turkish Delight.

The number of languages people seem to know here impresses me. I guess it is important if you are dealing with tourists, but the number is large even by European standards.

We had the same breakfast we have had pretty much every day. After breakfast I went down on the street for water and ran into the Sammons. I said goodbye to them once again. We seem to be forever wishing them a good trip. Evelyn stayed in the room.

Evelyn says this may be our cheapest foreign trip ever. At the current rate it is $3500 for everything including photography, room, plane, everything. That is 875,000,000TL.

Our goal today is three sites of ruins. Each was fairly important in history. Each for different reasons. A one-day trip will get them all.

We were waiting for the minibus pickup early, but it was there early also. We picked up Hari, our guide for the day and another Canadian couple, Peter and Shirley Faris. They are retired and do a lot of travel. He taught school and has an interest in the classics. He is interested in the Mycenian era. Peter said we made a real mistake seeing Turkey before Greece. Greece will be a lot more expensive and less rewarding. The people will not be as nice as the Turks. We suspected as much. Rounding out our group is Uki, a Japanese woman traveling on her own.

We drive through hilly country on the way to Priene. We go past a flood plain. I would not have known it was a flood plan but Peter Faris knows his stuff. We get to the site and it is a stiff climb to the site even after you leave the bus. Here we can see Greek structure because it was not later taken over by the Roman. Hence we are seeing the oldest ruins of the day. At 300 BC this was a meeting place of the League of Ionian Cities. In other words, it was a convention site. It has a theater for secular ceremonies and for plays.

We have sunny weather. The city was placed high on a hill with a rock ledge for support and serving as protection. The guide talked about the childish gods of the time saying it really was not much of a religion. I guess the gods represented little to respect besides power. The temples really became places of business, making loans and being places for merchants. The gold became a motive for the destruction of the temples. The Greek Gods really were a corruption of Babylonian gods and later were corrupted to become the Roman gods. The initial gods were female. To my mind this makes sense because the gods probably are recreations of parent figures we had as small children. Babies have parents who usually take care of them, and who are relatively powerful. That image is imprinted on us. When people grow up they recreate parent figures as gods. Anyway, that is what I think is for me a believable basis of religion.

The columns were fluted and I asked the guide how many ridges the Greeks used. He guessed it would be about 21. We counted and it was 24, the number I would have expected because of its divisors.

The valley below is the Menderes River Valley, but it was at one time the Meander River Valley, giving us a new word. I asked about not the foods in the diet-olives, grapes, and figs, some lamb-but how did they eat them. Given the ingredients of a cake would one necessarily figure out what a cake is like? Too often what we are told is the ingredients of a diet and not really the food that is eaten. He suggested there was little preparation. Simple grilling and frying. I am less than convinced. Otherwise he thinks of these as being highly creative people. Evelyn says that in the Iliad it says people throw meat on the fire and don’t even eat vegetables. But I think we know that is unlikely because that is a very bad diet. I think that is the Homeric poet buying into “Real men don’t eat quiche.” It makes them sound more primal to say they ate that way. These are people who had dairy products and meat. I think we have just lost to history what it was that the ancients really ate. They also had short lifespans, of course. Dying at 50 was living a long time. The guide tried to get us wondering about how the ancients built these buildings. Slaves were not good for labor because you spent too much effort taking care of the slaves. (Of course if you don’t care about your slaves dying on you it can be much more efficient to use slave labor, as the Germans discovered in the 1940s.) But the guide sort of hinted that there might have been mystical methods behind the construction. We saw the theater. We were told some of the basic aspects. This theater as not used for animal fights since the front seats were not raised enough to prevent animals from getting at the audience. You know how embarrassing that can be if the lion on the stage jumps out and starts tearing up the paying customers.

Leaving the site we have a stop for apple tea and to talk. I am not sure this is the best use of our time. We talk about languages and alphabets. Especially the trouble when Turkey changed to the Roman alphabet and the older works that can now be read only by experts. We talked about food. Shirley has a disease that is a problem with eating gluten. We talked about substitutes and eating rice.

Back when I was in the 7th grade I had to do a report on an assigned subject. I got Miletus. I was excited because I was hoping he was a classic scientist. I was always fascinated with the people who made advances in apparently primitive times. It turned out it was a city, but at least it had scientists. Our next stop was to see in the flesh the city I wrote about. Thales, philosopher and scientist from the beginning of the 6th century BC, lived here and made it a colony of philosophers known as the Milesians. He predicted the solar eclipse of 585 BC a year in advance of the event and it took place. Thales said that everything in the world is made of water. He also was a practical man, the first good businessman recorded in Greek history. He bought up olive presses when they were not in use, then when the olive crop was harvested he made himself rich.

Hippodamus of Miletus invented the grid system for city layout and Priene actually used it. A heating system for Roman baths was invented in Miletus. The Greeks who lived here grew tired of Persian dominance and revolted in 499 BC. Persia utterly destroyed the city five years later as well as the temple it controlled at Didyma.

Like Priene, Miletus was once a port city. These days it is a good distance from the water, something like nine miles, proving Mark Twain was wrong when he said they don’t make real estate any more. Miletus has a theater and baths. Our guide threw into the discussion that Islam has a natural form of birth control that one must wash oneself after sex from head to foot and that is difficult to do in places like Saudi Arabia where there is so little water. Also we saw the remains of Pompey’s house. It celebrated Pompey’s defeat of the sea pirates. Pompey however became something of a pirate himself. (I think that story was repeated often later. It seems to me that it was one of the great pirates who was initially sent by the English government to fight pirates and instead became one. People who saw the film Cleopatra may remember what happened to Pompey from the beginning of that film. When he became enough of a threat, Julius Caesar was sent to kill him. Pompey fled to Egypt and was given friendly sanctuary by the feuding Ptolemys-Cleopatra and her brother. When Julius Caesar arrived to try to capture him, Cleopatra’s brother wanted Caesar to side with him. He was presented Caesar with Pompey’s head in a jar of oil. Rather than winning Caesar’s favor he won only Caesar’s disgust and anger. No Roman citizen, no matter how bad could be treated this way by a non-Roman. Pompey was a Roman first and a criminal second to Caesar. In the conflicts between Cleopatra and her brother, Caesar immediately started favoring Cleopatra. And the rest is cinema. Actually the film Cleopatra is overblown and at times dull but the history is really quite accurate.

Our guide takes us to an onyx stand but Evelyn and I are not interested. Shirley buys an onyx bowl for $8. Back on the bus. It is nice to talk and look at the scenery. I am expecting another big site like Miletus. Instead our site is almost like the town square, but it is the magnificent remains of a temple. Then Peter looks at the columns and says “nice Doric columns.” I claim that the columns with the scrollwork at the top are Ionic. Peter, who seems to know what he is talking about insists they are Doric. A little while later I quietly ask the Hari what is the difference and why are these Doric? He says that Ionic columns taper. Since when? Peter, if you ever read this the tall columns had scrollwork like on page 333 of the Lonely Planet, not flat pads like on page 155. For those who are interested Corinthian are illustrated on page 498.

Before we see it, it is time for lunch and there is a buffet across the street. There is not much meat on the buffet, but this is a good way to try several different dishes. The best is the Haydari and the fried eggplant. I get a Cappy cherry nectar to drink. Over lunch we discuss travel and Turkish baths.

On to the temple at Didyma. This is a spectacular temple with an oracle who, like the oracle at Delphi, was expert at giving enigmatic and useless answers to questions. Once again the scale is spectacular. Five adults cannot reach around it. Hari again tells us that we have no idea how they could have built this temple. I comment to Evelyn that if we knew how they did it would spoil the trick. We see a holy well the drinking from which gave the oracle his power to answer questions or the chutzpah to sidestep them.

As we walked around Hari, our guide, told us that the people who built this temple may have had entirely different ways of thinking. He says that the goal of all religions is to make people Supermen. And it was the religion of the ancients that allowed them to build these temples. He said that they may have known about the vibrations in all matter and might have been able to use vibrations to control matter. The tight vibrations might actually make people invisible. They might be able to lift stone. Now what is interesting is that we had heard almost the same suggestion from our guide in Mexico. At Tula he told us that the ancient peoples had a horn and by striking a tuning fork and amplifying the sound with the horn, they could levitate solid stone. Yes, it sounded like this guide, like our Mexican guide, had been to the Tourist Guide School for Technical Hokum. Yes, these people attacked problems differently than we do. We don’t know their techniques. But where do people get all these mystical ideas about vibration? People have the darnedest ideas that all things vibrate at different frequencies. Individual molecules may have motion. But it is not cyclical in the way that a wave is cyclical. You can force some objects to vibrate, but you get nothing mystical out of them. Ancient peoples did some wonderful engineering marvels, yes with minds very different from ours. But there is no reason to think that the means they devised for doing work was anything we would not understand today. There is a big difference between unknown and incomprehensible. I don’t know how a Turkish woman makes fried bread. I cannot comprehend what goes on in her mind. But if I saw how she made breakfast, I would understand it. I don’t assume she has mystical powers.

Supposedly we were going to stop at a jeans factory. That is dropped from the tour and it may be as a mark of respect. Most places tour guides get a kickback for taking tourists to someplace they can be sold to. Hari may have realized from the questions he got that these tourists were above that. Just a guess.

As we drive I notice how many olive trees there are in this region. I learned today to recognize olive trees. They really are olive drab. They have leaves a sort of gray-green. They almost look like they are in a different light.

I am half-tempted to take a picture of a soldier with a machine gun, but I probably won’t. It would be fairly easy to snap a picture from the window of the bus. It is very unlikely they would notice me and even more that they would chase a bus for the image of one of their soldiers. You see these guys on the street all the time. But it would be breaking Turkish security. It isn’t a crime to wanna; only to actually do it.

By the end of the day my canteen is fairly empty. We can get water in .5 and 1.5 liter bottles. We use the big bottles as stock bottles and the .5 litter bottles as canteens. Water is a gourmet item here like wine. You have experts who can taste a brand and know what spring it came from. I don’t know the flavors, but really cold water is really good stuff. Between the meat meals and the exercise in the sun, cold water tastes really, really good to me these days. And it is healthy. The only problem is that it is heavy and filling. You don’t want to carry too much at once. If you drink too much you are really uncomfortable and even more so if your mouth goes dry.

Well we got back to Selcuk. We let off Yuki at her hotel but she was almost immediately rounded up as were the four of us were dragged into a tourist office for a sales pitch on upgrading our $6 bus trip to Pamukkale to a $50 guided tour. It was never clear what the advantages were. Eventually Shirley was asking questions in a civil but animated way and our salesman thought he’d try another tack. “Madam, don’t talk to me like that!” This was the last straw and Shirley responded “Don’t you talk to me like that!” We all stormed out. I don’t think this guy was a very good salesman.

We got back in our minibus and were taken back to our hotel. Evelyn wanted to call her mother so we went to the post office and with a little effort she figured how to phone. They did not have a phone booth but they had the phone behind the safety deposit boxes. I was a little surprised to see that the back door to the safety deposit boxes was locked with a bicycle lock. We decided to sit outside the post office and watch the passing parade. We talked to a couple from Colorado who were also making a phone call. Then we walked around the center of town, warding off restaurant hawkers.

We did do some talking to a carpet salesmen about Bill Gates and America. When it was clear we would not buy a carpet we became his evening’s entertainment. He gave us what he called plums, but they are more like apples. It seems to be a popular local fruit. We talked to another salesman on the way back. I suggested to him that with five carpet shops in a row there is too much competition. He really should go into another business. He said it was the culture, but I assume he really knows what he is doing. A carpet can cost $1800. You don’t have to sell many at that price in Turkey.

Back at the hotel we went up to the roof terrace, but found it mostly dark. So back to the room. There was a lot of noise in street, to me it sounded like a motorcycle rally. I preferred the dogs.

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.