Karadeniz adventure

We've been out of touch for a few days driving around the Black Sea (Karadeniz) area of Turkey in a minibus. We wanted to go there to escape the heat down at sea level, and Begüm's brother suggested we go on an organized tour instead of trying to do it on our own. That's the way the Turks do it, and it costs maybe half of what an individual could manage. So that's what we did.

Thank heavens we had Begüm to help us out. These tours are not for tourists, they're for Turks (the idea that a Turk could be a tourist seems to have escaped them). When they found out we were Canadians they wanted to charge a lot more - why, we never figured out. But Begüm is tough and wouldn't let them get away with that. So our air fare to Samsun (on the middle of the south coast of the Karadeniz) and back from Trabzon (a little further east) four nights in hotels, breakfast, dinner, five days touring on a minibus with a guide and a courier, admission to museums and historic and cultural sites, and lunches (which we paid for separately) cost altogether about 1000 YTL (new Turkish lira, about on par with the Canadian dollar) each. Way less than we'd be charged as foreigners. (Just for fun Ron tried booking a hotel by telephone himself. He was quoted 120 Euros a night, if there was a room. Begüm called the same place a little later and was quoted 75YTL, and of course there were plenty of rooms available. I don't think Turkey wants tourists.)

The tour was called 'A Thousand and One Shades of Green' (Binbir Yeşıller). Turks from İstanbul and the west of the country generally find green a most unusual and appealing colour in the landscape. The west is so very dry and hot that you seldom see a green blade of grass come August. The Karadeniz is wet and cool(er), so it's full of green. It's also very mountainous. Our tour focussed mostly on the mountain uplands (yaylalar), a part of the country that the otherwise excellent Lonely Planet guide hardly mentions.

I won't do a day-by-day description of the trip. It would take forever and you'd be even more bored than you are now. I'm uploading pictures to our Yahoo photo album as I write, so you can see some of what we saw there. I just want to share a few reflections.

For the first time since we arrived we felt like we really were in a foreign country. Partly it was because we were the only people on the bus who weren't fluent in Turkish. An awful lot of the time we stood around saying ''Hunh? What's happening?'' But as soon as the rest of the passengers noticed our confusion they rushed in to help. Few of them had much English, but Tarzan is an international language. (A dentist from İstanbul was quite fluent and very helpful, and there was a couple who were retired French teachers, also very useful. The rest had to rely on what they remembered from high school, and the state of English teaching in the schools here is desperate.)
But most of the foreign feeling was because this part of the country is completely different. The west looks and feels like Europe. Many people speak French or German there if they don't know English, so my school foreign languages are getting a workout - but they do speak something besides Turkish. And they dress like Europeans and live like Europeans. But the Karadeniz is not like that. It's foreign - as foreign to the rest of the passengers as it was to us.

The Karadeniz is a lot like the East Kootenays. The scenery is much the same - mountains, swift flowing rivers, trees, rocks, that sort of thing. And it's poor. You don't see many men of working age in the villages. They've gone to the cities for work. The women and children run the farms.

And such women! According to legend this is the home of the Amazons. I'd believe it. You see slim, strong women everywhere in the fields, scything the hay, raking it, stacking it. The kids herd the cattle and sheep. Any men you see are in the coffee houses (men only) watching futbol on TV.

The farm work has to be done by hand because the fields are nearly vertical. No one in Canada would even consider farming such land. You couldn't get a tractor onto the farms, let alone try to make it run on such hillsides. But every spare piece of land there grows something: corn, beans & squash - usually together, as the Iroquois did it - or at least hay.

In the Kootenays we thought mountaintops where uninhabitable. Here that's where you live. Maybe that comes from the days (not so long ago, like 80 years or less) when war was what the men did in summer. It never seems to have occurred to the Turkish electric power gurus that you can't get electricity to people living in the mountains. Of course you can! One night we were driving up a mountainside when it was getting dark, and the number of lights around us, along the mountain ridges above us and in the valleys below us, nearly equalled the stars in the sky. At times like that you remember that Turkey has 70 million people squashed into really quite a small space.

The women of the yaylalar cover their heads like most traditional Muslim women here, but you don't get the feeling it's from any special piety. Anyone with half a brain who works outside wears something on their head. They wear their head scarves tied in a special way that keeps it tidy for work and provides some padding when they have to carry heavy things on their heads.

There's more obvious religious feeling here, though, than in the west. Most of the day you see men at the fountains outside the mosques (every village has one) washing in preparation for prayer. That's another one of the men's jobs. Women have no time for that.

The yaylalar provide an interesting contrast with the way Canada treats its indigenous peoples. Two non-Turkish ethnic groups live in these valleys. Both have their own language and look surprisingly northern European. They're generally blonde or brown-haired and blue-eyed with quite fair skins. And like our indigenous people, their cultures have been disrupted by education. At one time the children were taken from the mountaintop villages and sent away to residential schools. Now the whole family comes down when it's time for school to start, so the villages are populated only in the summer. Fortunately the Turkish government supports the teaching of at least the ethnic music and dancing, so not all is lost yet. At two of our hotels the dinner entertainment was a couple of the young male waiters doing amazing dances to wild pipe music - dances that came straight from Riverdance. It seems to me that these people are somehow Celtic, as the Galatians that Paul wrote to were (they lived in the south of Turkey).

The Black Sea coastline east of Trabzon is lovely. The sea and its wide sandy beaches come almost up to the highway. The trees between the beaches and highway are full of tents - families spend their summer holidays tenting there. The water is warm and clean-looking with enough surf to be fun. East of Trabzon there are no beaches. There used to be, but the government decided trade with the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union - Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the like - is more important. The seashore is being filled in with rocks cut from the surrounding mountains and with municipal waste, and the highway is being widened to 4 lanes to accommodate the heavy truck traffic.

Of course the earth will have its revenge. The week before we visited there were heavy rains in the mountains. One river turned into a raging torrent and wiped out a gravel pit with the people in it. The road is still difficult through there.
Public hearings and environmental assessment are foreign notions, luxuries maybe that Turkey can't afford. One of the world's great whitewater rivers, the Çorush, is being dammed for flood control and power. No one asked the locals what they thought. We were probably among the last people who could marvel at its wild beauty.
I wonder whether I'm going to be able to keep my mouth shut about such things. Probably not - I couldn't on this tour. But what right do I have to say anything?

Garbage. Why can't people here pick up after themselves?

We didn't see any wild animals and heard very few birds in the mountains.

It's an unimaginably beautiful part of the world.

Our pictures are gradually getting uploaded to our Yahoo album.