Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for October, 2009
Phil’s Travel Blog: A Farewell to the Middle East
23 October 2009
It’s a funny thing about my dreams. They tend to incorporate the real world, like if a bird is chirping loudly outside my bedroom window, suddenly a dream about flying to the moon involves sparrows on the wings of my spaceship. This morning my dream included a train, a very loud train, about to smash into the nightclub where I was singing alongside Elvis. I woke to find the train was real, just outside the window. The Istanbul to Ankara Express. So at 6.30 I was awake. Which is just as well. Jac wanted to get in every sight of Istanbul in the following 12 hours. Which we did. Mosques, palaces, sheesha bars, rug stores, the Grand Bazaar. Ah, the Grand Bazaar. Now that is something. Pre-Ottoman and a heavy slice of Turkish history, it was once the centre of trade and commerce in the Middle East, before it was called the Middle East. In truth it is no longer a centre of anything except 13th century architecture. The fascinating traders of those days have been replaced by junk jewellery and watch sellers who stand in wait outside their stalls prepared to use any legal connivance to get you into their stores. Chinese-made toys and trinkets, fake big brand shoes, this was the world’s biggest two dollar shop housed in one of the world’s most magnificent labyrinths. Glad I went though, and equally glad I didn’t buy anything. A Turkish spinach pancake in a street cafe around the corner and one of those fabulous apple teas, and we were ready to go to see the famous Whirling Dancers. Home and our last sleep in Turkey. Tomorrow we catch our planes. Jac goes to the U.K. to visit family, and I head home to Australia, and we’ll both be sorry to go, which is unusual. On most trips I am happy to get home, but this journey has been so intense that we have had no chance to get home-sick. As we walk home hand-in-hand we remember the last 5 weeks and all the things we’ve seen. Pyramids, Petra, Goreme and most importantly, the local people we have met, the laughs we shared, our tripmates, the illumination of our understanding of the muslim world. Everywhere we went was an affirmation of life, and what more can you want from a sojourn.
Phil’s Travel Blog: Istanbul
22 October 2009
So we arrive at our last stop. Pouring out of the train in the early hours, we must’ve made a sight for the locals. Thirteen bleary-eyed tourists in various brightly coloured jackets and tracksuits, rumbling their cases over the ancient cobbles, past the coffee drinkers and cheap watch sellers. It always amazes me how traffic behaves differently in each city. Our Mother Duck, tour group leader Chris urges us on across the city’s busiest intersections, in front of cars that he knows will stop. This is not the sort of thing you dare do in Cairo or Damacus. Somehow he knows that the Istanbul drivers will stop. They do. Jac is doing it tough today. The little rucksack she wears is too heavy and her knee is sore, the end result being that I carry my backpack, all 20 kilos of it, my camera bag on on shoulder, Jac’s ruc on the other, and somehow pulling the wheelie, all the while assuring the luggage-less Jac of my sympathy for her plight. After half an hour we are at our last meeting point, a small hotel where we can have a shower before saying goodbye to the other members of the group. Most of us have booked some days in Istanbul and have hotels to go to, so after breakfast we make fond farewells to people we have spent a month with, remembering what we have been through together, especially the good times at the sand dunes, the homes of the Bedouins, floating eerily in he Dead Sea, splashing in the Nile, bartering with Damascus hawkers, even dealing with officious border officials. We’d been through a lot in those four weeks, and although we’ll never see many of each other again, some will be in our hearts forever. We are all anxious to start our own Istanbul sojourn, so we head off in different directions. Jac and I are booked into a Wooden House close to the Blue Mosque. The house is magnificent, the room on the ground floor beautifully furnished, its windows opening onto.. a train line. The 9.53 charges past our window with a cacophony that only a close train can bring. Don’t worry, the receptionist says. The trains stop at midnight. It says something for our state of relaxation that we shrug our shoulders, throw our luggage on the bed and start to unpack, making sure of course that we don’t put our heads too far out the window. We’re about to go off to the Blue Mosque, which I have been told will be the biggest mosque I will ever see. Then the Palace and the Aglia Sophi. Istanbul is a treasure of places. One good thing about the Orient Express going past your window is that you don’t really want to spend all day chillng out in your room. So it’s time to go mosqueing.
Phil’s Travel Blog Part 28
21 October 2009
One of my favourite James Bond films is From Russia With Love, the one where Sean Connery’s Bond takes a train across Turkey as he tries to get a Russan decoder (and a Russian girl of course) out of the country. So it was with some excitement that we joined a Turkish train, on the same tracks used by the famed Orient Express (and James Bond). It wasn’t quite as exciting as Connery’s journey. We didn’t get hijacked, get into a fight with Robert Shaw or use a lethal briefcase to gas anyone. But it was still great fun. Four of us were crammed into a sleeping car: Jac, me, with Jess and Amanda, two twenty-somethings who we had had as playmates for most of the trip. In scenes reminiscent of another film, Some Like It Hot we spent part of the evening in another car, seven of us, feet dangling from the top bunks, chatting, possibly for the last time on this trip. Then it was beddy-bye time. We were awoken before dawn by some porters who thought nothing of opening our compartment door, throwing back our curtain and yelling that we were only fifteen minutes from Istanbul. Groans from Jess and Mandy among the early morning clatter of the tracks. Tracksuit pants were donned and they disappeared to try to get to the toilet before everyone else, leaving me to the hard part: waking Jac, who simply refused to take her eyeshades off. Somehow I got her up, complaining and meowing, and managed to get the beds folded back in time to see the beautiful Bosphorus River and a first vista of the majestic Blue Mosque through the window. Istanbul is going to be magnificent. That is, if we can get the luggage, which seems to bulge more and more each morning, out the tiny corridor.
Phil’s Travel Blog Part 27
20 October 2009
Four hours in a bus probably doesn’t sound like much, but if the bus has a capacity of twelve, and you have fourteen people in it and luggage, it does tend to get a little cramped. No matter, this is an adventure holiday and if T.E. Lawrence can ride a dying camel through the toughest desert on earth, then I can manage a few hours with my knees in my mouth. Especially if we are going to Goreme. You may not have heard of Goreme. It is a valley in central Turkey where volcanic activity has caused the formation of little kast hills that look like fifty foot pixie hats, or, as in the case of some celebrated ones in the Valley of Love, giant penises. There are thousands of these ancient formations, and the interiors of many of them were chiselled out by locals to make homes and churches in the old days. People still live in some of them, but most are empty now and you can go inside, especially into the churches, which despite graffiti and desecrations of succeeding religions, still have frescos and carvings made by the holy men of a millenium ago. Some of the group have taken a balloon ride up through the Valley this morning, but Jac and I demurred, being too fond of a sleep in, and too unwilling to part with the funds that would pay off half our mortgage. Instead we went for a walk off the tourist track and found our own abandoned church. Pristine, beautiful and about as holy as a church could get. We had to climb up a rickety old wood ladder, to come into a circular room with an ante room with an old grave in it. Occasionally you will find these graves, they are of an old priests from centuries long past. Most have been emptied of the remains, but sometimes a few bones stay. It is not at all gruesome, but that old feeling comes back, the unease about whether it was right to open a grave, whether these priests and even King Tut should have been allowed to rest forever undiscovered. I am sure he would have wanted it that way. I know I would. We move on from the church through a field, and meet a family pressing grapes. They press their grapes on us, then a bowl of the syrup that they reduce the juice down to. To my mouth it is almost exactly like maple syrup, but what would I know? I am neither Turkish nor Canadian. A fond farewell and my love of Turks is again strengthened. As the trip draws nears its end I find myself touched almost every day by humanity’s good nature, and that alone has made this a trip worth taking.
Phil Travel Blog – Part 26
19 October 2009
I have found a new love. For ten years I have had only one true love, but this trip has done what no-one else anywhere in the world has been able to do. I have been corrupted, and I am exhilarated about it. I have fallen, and am in love with.. Turkish people. All of them. From the moment Jac and I went out on a romantic evening on our first bed stop close to the Turkish border yesterday, I saw nothing but generosity of spirit and goodwill towards us. Nobody wanted our cash and nobody eyed us suspiciously as foreigners or tourists. They were genuinely pleased to have us in their country, giving us their fruit in markets or a laugh and a coffee. In many ways they are similar to the Syrians we met, but the flirting is much more subdued here, in fact it could almost be called non-sexual flirting, like children wanting to get to know each other well. So I have a new love, but who was the one true love of ten years’ standing? The Vietnamese people. When I worked in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi for UNICEF I found an unusually loving and spiritual people. I still love the people of Vietnam, but the Truks have offered something else again, and perhaps it has to do with the fact that they are so close to my own forebears, the Greeks. All my life I have heard about the tension between the Turks and the Greeks. This was highlighted by an incident that happened when I was working in Athens. The Greek Deputy Foreign minister, in a most undiplomatic moment, told me that he considered the Turks ‘animals’. He was obviously tainted by the stories of the Turkish occupation of Greece generations ago. Greek people suffered during that time, but to belittle a whole race for the sins of occupiers long dead is not statesman-like, and, from the people I have met, plainly wrong. I sometimes wonder whether the problems of the world are creations of the world, or of the people we elected to administer it.
