my neighbor at my cabin
trail up through the ravine to the waterfalls
the view from my cabin, down the valley to the beach
Well lets see. I spent 4 days in Cappadocia. I’m not going to bother trying to describe it because it would be a foolhardy attempt to capture something not to be captures. Suffice to say that the days were filled with long sweaty hikes through valleys, up and down dusty ravines, looking out over landscapes like nothing I have ever see. I’ve heard Cappadocia compared to the “needles” national park in Utah, which I have admittedly never seen. But its hard for me to imagine anything else on earth looking remotely like this land in the heart of Turkey. There are these huge conical formations of sandstone, called (in translation from Turkish), “fairy chimneys” and I don’t have a better name for them. Hundreds and indeed thousands of years ago (or at least one thousand) humans began digging into the bodies of them like woodpeckers into tree-trunks, hollowing out small living spaces and many of them went on occupied by man up until very recently. I saw one whole village swiss-cheesed out of a huge hillside, interconnected caves, which looked down over the present village at the base of this hill. While I was sitting in a café on the street, sipping on Turkish tea with the proprietor, looking up at this abandoned village, the owner told me that it had been occupied up until the 1950s, at which time the government made people move out. He said that his mother had lived there, up on the hill until she married his father and moved down into the lower village.
One day I climbed out of the midday-heat, off the trail and up a ravine into one of the more inviting-looking caves, climbed up to the second storey of the dwelling and took a nap on the cave floor. It was cool. Maybe 65 degrees and with a nice breeze, while out in the sun, down the hill, it felt closer to 100.
It was hard to leave Cappadocia. There is something fearful and greedy about the difficulty leaving, knowing that you may never see this magical place again. I wanted my eyes to feast for a day or two longer. But my general plan included many more sights and I decided to move on. From Cappadocia I took a bus to Konya, Turkey, which is the epicenter for Sufism in Turkey and the whirling dervishes of Mevlana. Rumi was a spiritual write, a philosopher and poet who lived in what is now Turkey, back in the 1200s. The order of Sufis came from his teachings after he died and led to the whirling dance that tourists can see in Istanbul. In Konya, there is a mausoleum/ museum for Rumi which documents how Mevlana life was in the middle ages. There is a huge sarcophagus/ tomb in the building, where Rumi lies to this day and it is one of the great pilgrimages for Muslims in this region and has the feeling of a holy site (as much as any I have ever seen). They have handwritten Korans, 800 years old, relics from the time and a snippet from the beard of the Prophet Mohammed, kept behind glass in a mother-of-pearl chest. I saw many of the devout sniffing deeply at the edge of the glass case, apparently trying to take in some scent or essence of the Prophet. I was curious but didn’t dare, for fear of trivializing their religious experience as an infidel.
Konya itself was a very religious city. No alcohol to be found anywhere (except for the high-end hotels that cater to the few-and-far between infidel Westerners that come there. It was good to go from tourist-haven Cappadocia to such a singularly Turkish city and feel the culture of the country I was in again instead of the culture of the tourist industry.
From Konya I took a bus to Antalya, 8 hours to the Mediterranean coast. I spent 2 nights in the old city, a fortified mideval city, now abandoned by the Greeks that once largely inhabited it. Many of these old Ottoman-style houses have been converted to pensions (somewhere in-between a hostel and a hotel), shops and café- restaurants. Stayed in a cute little pension called Camel Pension for about $20 a night, breakfast included. My second day in Antalya I went to the Antalya Achaeology Museum, reputed to be the best in Turkey. Over those hours I was completely overwhelmed by the volumes of history…the oldest inhabited human community yet proven was in Turkey (9000 years ago) and there were clay pots, bone tools, arrows, spear tips and stone axes among everything else. From there it went on to pottery from Greek and Roman occupation of this part of the Mediterranean, styles that I have seen in other places, the Louvre and Smithsonian, etc. But its different to see these relics in their country of origin. They seem more organic and real, not some abstract representation of a culture on the other side of the world. Its more a statement of “This is what WE were doing here 2 or 3,000 years ago” and it felt heavier.
From there, on into the next room with huge marble statues of emperors and Gods, Artemis, Zeus, Apollo, Nemesis (badass!) and many others. Again, I’ve seen similar things in other countries, but it felt different so see them in their country of origin and more immediate. I can’t explain it. Upstairs there was the coin collection. One exhibit was a literal treasure that some goat herder or farmer discovered back in the 1970s. 178 solid gold coins from the Byzantine era. Priceless. But it was strange to see them use the word “treasure” and realize that it was just that. To think that somewhere else in this country, right now, there is likely another clay pot laying in the ground, full of gold or silver coins that were minted around the time that Christ was born, if not before. Let alone the thousands of points of land around this country that hold a few feet underground just one coin, sitting there, sleeping, waiting to be found. Maybe they are better left in the earth. I don’t know. But I’d sure like to find one someday.
I left Antalya 2 days ago, took a 4 hour bus to Fethiye on the other side of the “Turquoise Coast” and took another mini-bus to a small village tucked in the mountains called Kabak, where I will stay for 4 days at a place called Full Moon Camp. Another place difficult to describe. For pop culture references I would compare it to the island of Lost. To slow development, there are building ordinances in the area forbidding the use of concrete so many of the places to stay are called “treehouses”, which are wooden cabins build onto the hillside, almost all with a view of the beach below. It’s a 20 minute hike down the hillside to the beach with whitish sand and clear water deserving of the name of the Turquoise Coast. Life is very slow here and its kind of nice to be away from all of the historical sites, ruins and other tourists. I’m perfectly alright with a few days of nothing to do but lay in a hammock and read, hike down to the beach, swim in the Mediterranean waters, hike back up to camp, nap, swim in the pool fed by a freshwater mountain spring, eat and drink cold beer. No problem with that at all. In fact, its going to be hard to leave here, too. It is also $20 a night here, but this included breakfast and a nightly sumptuous feast of vegetarian food. Eggplant, greenbeans, peas, rice, homemade-bread, mint soup, homemade cheese, peppers and tomato. Almost everything is grown in the valley and all is fresh. The growing season basically runs all year and the hike down to the water is peppered with small plots of garden. Best of all, the small beach, accessible only by boat or hiking down the mountain, at maybe 1/8 or a mile along, is all-but deserted, ringed by mountains. I could maybe make a tradition of coming out here for a week every or every other year for as long as I cam make the trek down to the water. God-willing it will not get developed beyond this. Out camp has a covered kind of veranda, roofed with grapevines and a large tree and rimmed with mats and pillows to lay out and lounge. Its hard to want to do more.
