January 26th, 2009 
Turkiye
I woke up at 3am with digestive problems. Apparently something at the restaurant last night did not quite agree with me. No muscle aches or anything of the sort that usually accompanies this sort of thing.
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.
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