Farewell tour

I know something you don't know

The end is getting near. In a few days we'll be boarding a bus for Istanbul, visiting our dear friends, the Şamlı family, and finally jumping on a plane for Canada. Part of me is really longing for familiar food, familiar language and familiar friends, but there's a big part of me that's going to miss this place terribly.

There's still a lot of Turkey we haven't seen. Last week and a bit of the week before we tried to make up for that failure and show our Turkish daughter Begüm some things she hadn't seen yet. We did a lightning tour of south-central Turkey.

We started off in Cappadocia, which we'd seen briefly at the end of March in preparation for the solar eclipse - but Begüm had never been there. We repeated much of the tour we'd done before, walking through familiar moonscapes that astonished her. We stayed in an even nicer place than before, the Gamirasu Cave Hotel. If you needed a reason to visit Turkey you have one now. This is my lifetime favourite hotel. Nice people, great food, amazing scenery, and rooms - not all in caves, but some - that are clean and appropriately decorated. At dinner our first night a local man was playing an oud or some similar instrument, and eventually a Turkish woman at another table got up and began dancing with the host. (Turks are the world's best dancers, IMNSHO).

The last morning we got up in time to be picked up at 4:05 a.m. for our balloon ride. Oh my goodness! We had a long wait while they dealt with some tourists getting a short trip as their package tour, but finally we headed off in a minibus for the launch site. The 15 or so of us who had paid for a longer trip were to fly in balloons piloted by the owners, a Swedish man and a New Zealander woman who have been handling balloons for more than 20 years each. The wind was coming from an unusual direction, so we took off from a small parking lot to the east of the main wonders of Cappadocia. We drifted over valleys and ruins we'd toured on foot the days before, seeing things from an entirely different point of view. We travelled above the highway and the main street of Göreme, waving at women hanging out laundry and men enjoying their morning coffee. Finally we came down in an unused field, being caught and held by the company's contingent of strong men who then became exterior decorators, covering our basket with flowers and preparing a morning cocktail of cherry juice and champagne.

It was a great experience. Don't miss it.

We drove - or I drove - to Konya after that, with a side trip to try to find Tuz Gölü, Turkey's second-biggest lake, which is so salty that crystals precipitate out of the water. We drove and drove along a road that the map said would lead us to the lake. Finally we came to a fence and a gate and a young man making welcoming gestures. Turns out that the lake has been sold to a private company, a salt manufacturer. Tuz Gölü has always supplied a large proportion of the salt Turkey uses; now it's privately manufactured. The young man was a tour guide hired by the company for the summer. He got into our car and drove with us to a place where we could get a good look at the lake.

We wanted to go to Konya for two reasons: Çatal Höyük and Mevlana's shrine. We got to both of them. I'd first read about Çatal Höyük in Scientific American in the early 60s, when they were discovering the earliest (at that time) traces of agriculture and city life there. We saw many artifacts and wall paintings from Çatal Höyük at the Ankara museum and were really looking forward to it.

There's not much there now but a couple of grassy hills and a building or two covering excavations in progress. Really it's just another hill like millions that dot the Turkish landscape; it must have been pure luck that led the first archaeologist to dig there. Perhaps if someone else digs someplace else they'll find someplace even older. But it still thrills me to look at walls put in place 9000 years ago, and see (in the Ankara museum) carbonized knitting preserved by a fire. One of the buildings had a painting on its wall that looks like a map of the city, and in the distance there's an erupting volcano. You can see exactly the same mountain today, but it's covered with snow at this time of year. That place was one of the highlights.

Mevlana's shrine was another. Mevlana (Rumi) was a great Muslim mystic and poet, the founder of the Sufi order. His shrine is a place of prayer and peace, and it felt holy. He was a great man whose faith transcended labels, and I felt deeply moved to be in his presence.

I think we all liked Konya, which surprised us, since it's supposed to be one of the most conservative and narrow-minded cities in Turkey. Not that we could see.

From there we drove to Antalya on the Mediterranean via Isparta, hoping to see the fields of roses that are said to be harvested at this time of year to make perfumes and things. Alas, they told us the season was late, and I saw only one field full of single-petalled roses, the oldest and most perfumed sort.

So we got to Antalya, me driving and Ron navigating - the reverse of the usual situation, although I'm not sure it would have been any easier if I had been navigating, given the quality of Lonely Planet's maps. We circled the downtown for what seemed like hours trying to find the entrance to the ancient castle, where we were supposed to be staying. We finally had to enlist the help of a taxi driver. So we got to a pleasant pension with a pair of doves nesting behind the shutter of our bathroom window, and we spent a couple of days experiencing the tourist hub of Turkey's south coast. Very ancient and very pretty.

And then we moved on to Olympos, west and south along the coast, where we stayed at the Turkmen Tree Houses. This was our chance to kick back and do nothing, really have a holiday. We must have been among the oldest people there, but it didn't matter. The beer was good and the beach was great. We went to see the Chimaera our first night. This is a fire that emerges from the rocks of a nearby mountain in several dozen places. The ancients thought it was a monster encased in rock; modern science says it's methane gas that spontaneously ignites. Whatever, it was worth the hour-long climb in the dark and the equally harrowing descent.
The next day Begüm tried out sea kayaking for the first time while Ron and I did absolutely nothing - wonderful!
And the next morning we drove to the airport and came home.

Now we're sorting through stuff deciding what we need to take home and what we can leave here for when we come back next spring. It's hot and sunny in Izmir, no rain any more, and the spring flowers are beginning to realize life's tough after all. I'm beginning to enjoy our klima for its cooling properties - what a wonderful invention that thing is. Probably the next time I write we'll be back in Canada!