NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/rec/travel/15536

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-16 | 74.8 KB

Xref: sparky rec.travel:15536 soc.culture.turkish:11611
Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!uknet!glasgow!jack
From: [e-mail] (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: rec.travel,soc.culture.turkish
Subject: TRAVEL DIARY: Turkey and Eastern Europe
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 16 Nov 92 18:55:25 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.turkish
Organization: Glasgow University Computing Science Dept.
Lines: 1251

[ Posted in one lump, as I suspect that the days when news transport
  software had 32K or 64K limits are long gone.  If anyone doesn't get the
  whole thing down to my signature at the end, let me know.  Followups
  default to soc.culture.turkish, as Turkey is what most of it's about.
  I'm not calling it a travelogue, as I've deliberately not edited and
  rewritten it in a literary style; I preferred to leave the original
  naiveties in place for immediacy. ]

Old loves, new hatreds - travel diary, Turkey & Eastern Europe, July 1992
=========================================================================

itinerary: Edinburgh >bus> London >bus> Praha >train> Vienna >train>
           Rijeka >bus> Budapest >bus> Istanbul >bus> Samsun >bus>
           Trabzon >bus> Artvin >bus> Yusufeli >walk> Tekkale >lift>
           Yusufeli >bus> Barhal >dolmus> Yusufeli >bus> Tekkale
           >bus> Yusufeli >bus> Artvin >bus> Trabzon >plane>
           Istanbul >train> Budapest >train> Praha >train> Kutna Hora
           >train> Praha >bus> London >bus> Glasgow.

/* Extra notes written as I type this in are put in comment brackets like
   this; everything else is as I wrote it at the time except for a few
   trivial corrections of spelling and grammar.  That includes the time
   sequence; it was sometimes a few days before I got round to writing
   something down, so events are very far from being in chronological
   order. */

Praha 7.7.92: Impressions in order of recall... let's map the way my memory
patterns these events rather than try to imitate a video recording...

Just back from finding the local pub serves beer at 6.70 Kcs/0.5 l, 12p a
pint.  We're in a posh suburb - several embassies down the street - but most
of the customers looked working class: could have been a pub in the East End
of Glasgow.  Marion met a Czech woman in the loo who was trying to assemble
a water-squirting plastic flower... between them they got it working
successfully... the Czech woman prattled on at us and never seemed to catch
on that we had no idea what she was saying.

Postcards.  Writing obligatory postcards is so boring that even writing
about it

Prague considered as Glasgow: somewhat bigger amd the main city of a country
not much bigger than Scotland.  Same sort of scruffy grime; nothing like
Glasgow's wastelands; much better public transport; far less pubs; similar
mass housing, but better built and landscaped.  The bus from Ostend left us
at the edge of the city after a trip through Prague's answer to Motherwell
and Coatbridge... big new coal-fired power station nearly completed.

/* We came with a charter group - the rest of the passengers were staying
   in Prague for their holidays.  The courier passed on two warnings to
   everyone staying in Prague: watch out for thieves and watch out for
   moneychangers.  The warning about thieves was in the usual racist terms
   you get all over Eastern Europe - those responsible are usually Gypsies
   and always from somewhere else.  He warned against both private money-
   changers - who will use conjuring tricks, Polish money, or colour xeroxed
   money to swindle the unwary - and the new rash of private cash exchange
   booths, "Chequepoint" and "Exact Change" that have sprung up recently.
   These places advertise a good rate but then charge 9% commission.  He
   suggested using conventional banks: we used a MasterCard ATM and CEDOK,
   the state tourist agency, with terms nearly as good and open longer. */

Mild attack of herpes.  Slight cold.  Grey cloud all over Europe from London
on Sunday night to here and now.  I am not in a mood to be thrilled.  Even
the Old City seems more like a stage set than something alive and exciting -
perhaps it might as well _be_ a stage set.  All the people selling earrings
and pop-up clowns in cones and peculiar brands of (mock?-) Western
cigarettes seem just like comic-opera characters acting in front of canvas
flats - it's nothing like Istanbul where every cranny in every crumbling
Ottoman ruin exposes termite-like activity in constant communication with
the street.  This is the Christian urban order: walled-in power with what
goes on beyond the walls a vast triviality of ice-cream vending.

/* Tour parties were everywhere, usually led by a guide holding up either
   an umbrella or a car aerial with a bundle of ribbons on the top for the
   entourage to follow like sheep.  Tourist tat had invaded everywhere;
   the Charles Bridge was completely lined on both sides by hawkers, and
   in one of the most surreal window displays I have ever seen, a bookshop
   near the Charles University was advertising Czech translations of
   Wittgenstein and stuffed toys on the same shelf. */

Saturday: bus Budapest-Istanbul.  Full of loud Hungarian chain-smokers and
playing Hungarian radio; mostly nondescript Western rock music.

Spent the day in Budapest: too hassled to see much and trying to save money.
Very hot and Marion frequently tired.  My toes blistered by the end of the
day.  We came across Gerbeaud's (Vorosmarty's) by accident and only later
realized we'd had coffee in the poshest joint in Budapest.  (Marion said the
ladies' loo was worth every penny).  Bought the bus tickets, then went over
to Buda, up the funicular, through the castle (amazing volumes of tourist
tat - Edinburgh High Street has nothing to teach this lot) then up the
cogwheel railway into the Buda hills.

Marion nearly got her daysac pocket rifled in the arches on Rakoczi
Boulevard - three guys following us rather unsubtly.  I caught a movement
out of the corner of my eye, Marion felt a bump, the guys dropped back and
we found the zip open.  They didn't get anything (she had her pocket
dictaphone in there).

Keleti Station - where we left our rucksacks - was crawling with fishy-
looking characters - I spotted one man who was loitering near the entrance
doing nothing in particular when we left the bags at 11am and was still
there when we got them at 6.30pm.  Several other blokes wholooked like they
were waiting to strike.  I've never had that feeling as strongly anywhere
else.  Turkey is going to be one hell of relief after all this paranoia.

More on Prague: had a pint in U Fleku - bloody expensive (60p for 0.5 l)
and horribly crowded at peak times - the only pub I've ever been in that
had a currency exchange office by the front door.  All the customers seemed
to be foreigners - on our first look in (far too crowded to go in) we
spotted the same Dutch computer scientist we'd met in U Koucoura the night
we arrived.  Flek is bloody nice beer, though.

The Hungarians have haggis!  We had that (along with a paprika sausage,
mustard, pickles, bread, chips and beer - 250 Ft for 2 people, about 1
pound 70) in the beer garden at the end of the cogwheel railway.

This coach feels exactly like the stereotype of a British tour party on its
way to Benidorm.  Nobody's stripped to their Hungarian flag underpants yet,
anyway.  If this is what Sampiyon Hersekli buses on this run are usually
like, AVOID THEM.  I think we'll try to find a bus to Bratislava or Prague
on the way back - anything to avoid being choked with smoke in a mob of
yammering loudmouths.  The one Turkish family on the bus are at the back,
totally silent, and not looking happy.  The Hungarians have enough spirits
with them to reduce them all to coma: let's hope it happens sooner rather
than later.

Two things I've forgotten on this trip: my earplugs and my damiana tablets.
God knows when I get to sleep.  Infected toe (started when walking round
Budapest).

Sunday: going through Bulgaria.  We got here through Serbia.  The border
check as we entered from Hungary consisted of a Serbian official getting
on the bus, shouting a three-word question "Hrvatski ??? ???" and leaving
after nobody spoke up.  So, back to before we got to Budapest, I wasn't
sure I wanted to have this bit in writing before now...

Wednesday night: train Praha-Wien-Rijeka.  I've been carrying an ex-Yugoslav
Army kitbag full of clothes and books that... let's call her Silvija... left
behind in my flat in Glasgow.  Also 200 pounds worth of high-quality
multivitamin/mineral tablets intended from the refugees from BiH, paid for
largely by donors from the net.

Couldn't sleep from Prague to Vienna.  Left at midnight, arrived early in
the morning.  Worried about being robbed on the train - some rather
unpleasant characters hanging around the central station in Prague and
thought them quite capable of an Italian-style train bagsnatching.

/* The southbound Vienna station was about the most expensive hour I've
   spent anywhere - prices far higher than even Heathrow Airport.  Marion
   spotted a man cruising the gents' loo, this at 8 in the morning; I found
   this a lot more bizarre than she did. */

[continued Monday on a bus from Istanbul to Samsun]
Rijeka is a port city - container terminal, floating dry docks, dozens of
ships of all sizes in port.  The river that it gets its name from is a
trickle that goes the town centre where it's a marina for small boats -
Silvija showed us the one her father had built a few years ago.  There's
a paper mill inside Rijeka just upstream that changes the river's colour
depending on what dyes they're using at the time; people can still fish in
it, though.

Silvija has a child nearly 2 years old - call her Zora - and lives with her
half-Italian half-Serbian boyfriend (call him Milan) in a tiny flat
overlooking the container terminal.  I happen to like industrial landscapes
and this one was spectacular, with the Adriatic islands in the background.
/* very much as I remember the view from hill behind the railway station
in Auckland */ Silvija says there'll be a whole lot of UN military gear
coming in a few days, more or less directly under the window.  The flat was
confiscated from a fascist collaborator after the war; the rent is about
ten pounds a month.  Now the new regime wants to hand it back to the
collaborator's family and evict everyone in the building.

Silvija tells us, in general terms, all the horror stories about Bosnia I've
heard before: the Chetniks castrating prisoners, impaling them on stakes,
draining all their blood out...  I'm a bit skeptical about some of these
but the basic story seems plausible: that the Serbs are systematically
trying to drive all other peoples out of Bosnia, just as they have been
Serbianizing the Vojvodina for decades and have done something similar in
eastern Croatia; and that the UN is colluding in the process.  The UN
embargo is in effect one-sided: all the Yugoslav armaments factories were
in Serbia, so an arms embargo only affects the Croats and Muslims, and the
UN's "peacekeeping" forces simply rubber-stamp existing partitions; they
will do nothing to help the Muslim and Croat refugees to return.

/* Note: this was written in early July.  It was September before the
   Western media finally got round to noticing the existence of an "ethnic
   cleansing" policy.  And I doubt if Silvija had access to any very
   special sources of information they couldn't have found for themselves.
   As I write this the Tories are refusing to permit even a group of 200
   Muslim refugees to enter the UK.  Germany is accepting 230,000. */

Rijeka has tens of thousands of refugees, and we see almost none of them.
The nearby Adriatic resorts, like Opatija, have all been converted to
refugee accommodation.  Silvija says they - especially the children - are
bitter, contemptuous of the minimal help they've had, intensely hostile,
and she doesn't blame them one bit.

The party Silvija and Milan support - Silvija not all that enthusiastically,
in that she respects some of their people but has anarchist leanings that
would prevent her signing up for anything - is the HNS, Hrvatski Narodna
Stranka, or Croatian People's Party.  From the volume of flyposting around
Rijeka, it looks headed for a walkover in the August election: the other
parties are hardly bothering to campaign here.  Rijeka returned a Communist
majority in the election that put Tudjman into power.  The liberal party
(which Silvija regards as a tolerable alternative to Tudjman) launched its
campaign in the town centre just as we were leaving; Tudjman's party and
the renamed Communists (the SDP, Party of Democratic Changes) have only a
handful of posters, and the far right only a few bits of probably-ancient
graffiti, vastly outdone by graffiti for the "Fiume" football team.

For a country at war there's damn little sign of it.  Quite a few off-duty
soldiers - mostly Bosnian militia mobilized here in Croatia - but no
patrols, no covoys, no guardposts, no improvized depots or hastily converted
buildings.  Nothing compared with Turkey when I was there in September '81;
a year after the coup the whole country was militarized.  I expected the
same here, but it wasn't.  The only military vehicle I saw the whole day-
and-a-half we were here was a UN jeep.  (One sign that not everywhere in
Croatia may be like Rijeka: a mural in Karlovac we passed on the way out, in
a similar style to the Irish Republican ones, of a soldier holding a rifle.
Karlovac was bombarded by the Serbian army, if I remember right).

Silvija's daughter is bright as hell and needs about three adults
simultaneously to keep her occupied.  She's far more coordinated than most
babies her age and has a large vocabulary (most of which I don't understand,
but I know what "Zhiveli" means when she picks up her feeding bottle).
Silvija's pregnant again; what with Milan's salary being only 200 DM a month
and the rather limited help she gets with Zora from the family, she's in for
a hard time.

She puts us up in Milan's mother's house, high up above the town at the end
of a bus route.  International middle-class taste: change the language
edition of the women's magazines on the coffee table from Italian to English
and it could be a middle-aged Catholic woman's flat in Glasgow.

I tell Silvija we could try to organize aid for the Bosnians and ask what
would be appropriate.  She says "weapons"... the Bosnians don't see the
point of aid that just feeds them up to be killed by the Serbians.  She
rather grudgingly concedes that food and drugs would be better than nothing
when I point out that raising money for arms would be culturally impossible
in the UK (and quite possibly illegal, though I don't know this for sure).
But I'd have no difficulty persuading Muslim shopkeepers to keep a
collection tin by the cash desk for a cause like this.  I ask where it
should go at this end: she says the official Muslim relief agency is the
Merhamet, but that many Muslims don't seem happy with it.  I don't find out
the details.  She's taking the vitamins to a hospital for refugee children
near Rijeka; we'll get back in touch about where to send any aid money I can
raise later.

Silvija is contemptuous of the Western media for its obsession with
Sarajevo; she says the real problem is the systematic elimination of the
entire non-Serbian population of Bosnia, and Sarajevo is only a tiny part
of that. [I'm writing this in a hotel in Trabzon on Monday; on the bus out
from Istanbul the edition of "Turkiye" I read over someone's shoulder said
that 70,000 Muslim civilians were pinned down by Serbian artillery fire].
The TV news in Silvija's flat showed a town I'd never heard of being blown
to rubble by shellfire.  Silvija has become a newsoholic ever since the
Yugoslav civil war started, with both the radio and TV on all the time.

Croatian TV is censored: Silvija has about my attitude to Margaret Thatcher,
but says she did something very positive by saying in a speech televised
worldwide that 15,000 Croats had died in the war against Serbia - HTV had
never given a total, and for a world figure to mention it forced them to be
more open about what was happening.

Tudjman's government has also reintroduced the articles of the former
Yugoslav penal code that prohibited "defaming the state": in the mid-80s,
Silvija had been involved in some imaginative and dangerous protests against
these.  She doesn't think the Croatian state has the strength required to
enforce these the way Yugoslavia did: the new laws being just plain stupid
rather than a real danger, in that attempts to invoke them so far have all
failed.

We tried to work out how to get to Turkey from Rijeka.  There wasn't a boat
to Greece any more.  We thought there might be a cheap MALEV flight from
Budapest, so we booked a bus there (about 13 pounds each).  We didn't want
to go through Romania and Bulgaria because of the huge cost of the visas.
I had at the back of my mind that we might have to go through Serbia: and
that's what we ended up doing.  I'd asked the Croatian border guards on the
train not to stamp our passports, and explained why: they said travel
through Serbia would be impossible because of the embargo, but they went
along with me.  Rather pleasant as armed guards go: very obviously happy
with their job and the snazzy new uniforms provided by their new state.
Silvija says almost the whole Croatian police were Serbs before, and almost
all have since been replaced.

Silvija says there is very little anti-Serb animosity in Rijeka: certainly
there isn't any graffiti that even mentions Serbs or Chetniks.  She says
the local Orthodox church has not been touched, neither have the houses of
any Serbs left in Rijeka.  The incidents she describes are trivial: a
neighbour who persisted in leaving a "YU" sticker on his car got his tyres
let down every week, and the sticker with her name on it in Cyrillic that
I designed for her with a Mac drawing program had been taken off the door
by local children a year before.  /* The local monument to the Partisans
hasn't been touched, either - I saw that. */

Memory demands that I interpolate what happened to the Hungarian lager
louts: they bought their maximum allowance of cigarettes at each border
crossing, chain-smoking them for hours after, and stashed them in every
place on the the bus they could find.  They must have had nearly a thousand
packets between them.  Finally the Turkish customs officials found them -
I think with the driver's help, since he didn't want to get stuck for it -
and extracted the appropriate duty from them.  I didn't see exactly what
the duty or fine was, but a thick wad of Turkish banknotes was involved.  I
don't think I've ever felt quite so much like cheering for the cops
before...  NE MUTLU MACAR DEGILIM DIYENE, except that there were just as
many Hungarians at the front of the bus who spent the whole trip quietly
ignoring the zoo behind them.

Tuesday, Trabzon: arrived yesterday completely knackered after three
consecutive nights on buses.  On the final leg from Samsun to here Marion
started going into heatstroke: got her out of it after half an hour of
dabbing with wet tissues, cologne, and water, and applying the drinking
water bags from the bus's chilly bin as cold packs.  WARNING to anyone
contemplating this trip: try to find a bus that makes minimal stops.  Ours
spent nearly as long stopped in tiny obscure villages (sometimes as long as
half an hour) as moving, while entirely bypassing towns the size of Giresun.
It could have done it in half the time: somebody *must* run an express
service.

We spent yesterday (what was left of it after the bus ride) washing, dozing,
and eating.  The fish here is brilliant.  Today we looked around the food
markets: Marion as usual dictating notes on food prices and availability
into her dictaphone.  I was keen to find where the Georgians did their
trading and we found the place easily by navigating to where the Mkhedruli
signs were densest: ending up at a long covered market beside the 4-lane
road east to Rize.  Apparently the market was owned and operated by
Trabzonspor (the football team): 2000 TL entrance fee. Somewhere between a
typical British car boot sale and Paddy's Market in Glasgow.  Weird range
of stuff on sale: we're tempted by Sekonda pocket watches for about 40000 TL
each.  I decide to think for a couple of days before buying a Kiev 60 TTL
medium-format SLR outfit for $110, and we come away with a set of 6 pottery
dishes, 2 boy-scout-type can-and-bottle openers (1000 TL for both) and a
4 oz jar of caviar for 20000 TL.  /* We ate this stuff beside the river as
a picnic lunch in Yusufeli a few days later, with bread and lemon; on
checking prices for the same brand in Valvona and Crolla's deli in Edinburgh
we found that our lunch would have fetched 150 quid at their prices. */
There is quite a bit of surgical equipment on sale - mostly dental
instruments /* sold at 50 times that price in the West as we found out
later */ - vast piles of utter tat, and cheap tools ranging from pliers to
pneumatic drills.  But for the people selling crap like dolls, badges or
fake-fur Red Army hats, it is really hard to imagine how the trip could be
worthwhile.  I asked about travel to Batumi in a travel agents beside the
Trabzonspor market, who was advertising Soviet visas for sale: it seems
there's a bus that only costs $3, but only Turks or Soviets can use it;
others have to go by boat or plane and pay $100 for a visa.  Forget it.
One of the people I talked to in the travel agents came up to me in the
market: he had emigrated from Turkey to Sydney and said he had to pay $45
for his visas when visiting the Soviet Caucasus.  While I was talking to
him someone comes up to us and says "ayrilsin!" /* "go away!" */ to one or
other of us... something funny is going on.  I've been watching my pockets
damn carefully all the time in this market - there is a faint tinge of
paranoia about the whole business.  I have no idea what that was about.
Was the Aussie Turk a known con artist?  Was I being warned away from an
area the other man thought was faintly shameful?

/* I still regret not being able to take that 15-foot-diameter inflatable
   ocean survival dinghy away... */

After eating (grilled trout, 43000 TL for two, really nice) we wander back
to the Georgian market area to see what the Georgians do with themselves
when not actively trading.  It's all rather grim and desperate: some are
huddled amid piles of clothes in the market itself, others sleeping in cars
beside it, others just sitting in the gutter staring into space.  An
8-year-old boy runs past Marion and hits her hard on the bum.  She's worried
enough to want OUT as fast as possible: at the far end we find there seems
to be no way up to the city itself, so we go to the other side of the 4-lane
road and walk back bypassing the Georgians.  Instead we get cruised by men
in cars who slow down, make various unpleasant noises or unintelligible
comments.  I'm wearing shorts (my long trousers are in the hotel laundry as
I last washed them in Prague) and Marion isn't wearing a headscarf: I assume
the (Turkish?) drivers think we're a prostitute and pimp (or male and female
prostitutes).  It would be surprising if some of the Georgian women didn't
boost their income from these trips that way.

We found a fruit I've never seen before in the central market: a cherry-like
thing I was told was a Trabzon specialty when the stallholder saw me looking
through my dictionary to find the label.  Not as much taste as a cherry but
a firmer texture.  I get through nearly a pound of them and save the pips to
see if I can germinate them in Scotland.

Took a roll of pictures in the Georgian market - mostly shooting from the
hip with a 19mm lens.  The only person who spotted what I was up to - hardly
anyone ever does - was a Muslim cleric about my age who came up to me, took
a look at the camera, and made a gesture I found completely
incomprehensible.  I suspect he knew what a 19mm lens could do in that
situation. /* This guy's air of extreme intelligence, total assurance, and
unknowable purpose made one hell of an impression - the most startling
30-second encounter I've had for a very long time. */

Might pass on the Kiev 60.  The one camera I had a close look at in the
market was a Fed-5: the shutter looked near to disintegration.  Maybe this
stuff is factory rejects?  Prague was a good place for second-hand cameras,
somewhat cheaper than the UK: the two things that looked interesting were a
5 x 7 monorail and a Russian medium-format stereo camera.  Might get
something there if we have any cash left when we get back.

Lots of rather tartily dressed women here with loose permed hair: some are
more stylish and would fit in any Western city, others look like store
mannequins.  I'm not sure if they're Turkish women making an in-your-face
protest against the Islamic code or if they're Soviet.

Yusufeli, Friday - came here after a night in Artvin.  Marion wanted out of
Artvin as fast as possible: we were followed up the stairs of the Karahan
Hotel by a man who acted like he was a hotel employee but stuck his hand up
her skirt just as we were going through the door - he'd obviously done that
regularly before.  The whole town seemed exclusively filled with men: we
haven't been anywhere where women were so invisible.  (Marion compared it to
a horrible time she'd spent in Durham the night before the Miners' Gala).
We stayed in the Sabah (the Karahan was full and much posher than we wanted
anyway).  OK but not easy for a woman to wash in - loo and shower separate,
handbasin in the hallway.  We got the midday bus out after looking at
another Georgian flea market: I got a Russian Swiss Army-type knife for 75p,
Marion got a Molniya pocket watch for 1 pound 50.

The bus from Trabzon to Artvin was by far the fastest we've been on.  The
driver overtook anything in sight, ignoring blind corners entirely.  We were
in the front seats: I thought the first few wheelies might have been for our
benefit but he carried on that way the whole distance.  The coast beyond
Rize lived up to its reputation: an overwhelming pall of gloomy cloud.  Hopa
wouldn't be exactly a cheery place even under desert sunshine - it's mostly
garages and tyre retread shops -  but in this weather it makes an average
Scottish village on a wet winter Sunday look enticing.  Everybody around the
bus terminal had almost manic grins, though.

/* The tea industry is everywhere here - every village has a tea processing
   plant, with a chimney - presumably fired by by tea twigs - pouring out
   dense black smoke.  The hillsides are covered with dark green tea bushes.
   If they advertise this area as a tourist destination it must be to people
   from the Mediterranean looking for a land of perpetual gloom.

   Since Samsun we've seen a lot of men swimming in the Black Sea, and a
   few women paddling in their skirts, but not one woman swimming.  Yet
   there are a few women's swimming costumes on sale here.  When do they
   ever get used? */

A violent thunderstorm has broken over Yusufeli as I'm writing this: a
wedding has just finished and a woman in a party dress just tried to run
across the plank bridge below the hotel.  Her heel stuck and she had to pull
it out - her husband was running with a baby on his head, not something I'd
have cared to do on a rickety wet bridge above a torrent like the Barhal.
/* I had the accident in B. Traven's "The Bridge in the Jungle" at the back
of my mind, though the image of the woman in her party dress in the storm
was pure Hollywood. */

The two of us have just had a meal of dolma with yogurt followed by fried
trout and salad, for 10000 TL each (75p).  The hotel (a new one, the Barhal)
has a room with shower, toilet and double bed for 60000 TL a night.
Everything seems cheaper than anywhere else we've been.

Rijeka had the same sort of goods as most Turkish towns - maybe more
fashionable clothing, being so close to Italy - but all at Western prices
(or, in the case of shoes at least, much higher).  When a typical salary is
200 DM a month this must be a nightmare.  Marion saw one old woman in a
supermarket whose jaw dropped in horror at the price of toilet paper.  The
one thing that is really cheap is alcohol, distilled spirits in particular.
I got 500 ml of some sort of aniseed-flavoured spirit to knock me out on
the bus to Budapest: it sort of worked, but the cap wouldn't close again
properly and I left half of it in a park for the local alcoholics to find.

/* Even fruit and vegetables were at the same prices as in Scotland; the
   market had a pretty good range, and the cheese and meat market was
   probably better than anything you'd find except in the largest British
   cities, but also at West European prices.  Milan was in shorts when we
   arrived: his one pair of trousers had been stolen from the washing line.
   Replacing them was going to cost him more than a week's wages. */

Croatia seemed extraordinarily well signposted: the Rijeka-Zagreb road had
kilometre markers and every imaginable kind of warning sign.  Turkish roads
have far less: only one "falling rocks" sign that I noticed between Trabzon
and Yusufeli, despite a massive landslip that obliterated the road for a
few hundred metres just before Hopa - they'd bulldozed a diversion out into
the Black Sea from the fallen rubble.  Maybe there isn't an international
standard sign for "The Entire Hillside Might Drop On Your Head At Any
Moment".

The wedding video has got to Yusufeli: the first thing that drew our
attention to the one last night was a video light at the front of the hall.

Yusufeli, Sunday - we've been wandering up and down the valley with Marion
doing her usual food-spotting and me taking photographs.  I'm finally
getting up to my usual speed of picture taking: all through Eastern Europe
I didn't see much that I wanted to make a picture of.  Local agricultural
practices are more my style, together with the strange landscape - there's
a thin ribbon of cultivation beside the Coruh and Barhal rivers, and the
hills are spaghetti Western country - a wild tangle of buttes and scree that
the Ministry of Forests is trying to cover with trees.  The trees only seem
to get to a reasonable size quite high up.  (All around here there are
official notices from the MoF saying "Please Love Trees" in dozens of
different ways).

We walked up the Barhal River towards the nearest Georgian castle
yesterday - Marion slipped and got badly bruised so we didn't go all that
far.  The castle is parked on an insane crag: getting to it looks like a
fairly difficult rock climb.  The garden plots round here grow an incredible
range of things: paddy rice, maize, wheat, hay, beans, olives, apricots,
apples, pears, peaches, pomegranates, mulberries, brassicas, onions,
tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, melons, almonds, walnuts, sunflowers,
grapes, clover (for honey?), plums, aubergines - is there anywhere else in
the world where such a variety of crops is possible?  A few cows and
chickens, some donkeys and horses as pack animals, but the only sheep we've
seen was a pet.

Monday, Barhal - two-hour ride up here from Yusufeli in the rain in a packed
dolmus /* minibus */.  One elderly man spent the whole trip sitting on a
donkey saddle; he got out partway to collect a bear trap from a blacksmith's
and left shortly before Barhal in the middle of nowhere with his bear trap,
a scythe and two huge bags of lentils.  The donkey saddle went back to
Yusufeli; maybe it's a permanent fixture on the dolmus.  I forgot my tripod
at the Yusufeli stop; the driver was totally unhelpful and the phone here is
out of order so I can only hope it's somewhere around Yusufeli when we get
back.

We are getting a bit miffed at the tone and inaccuracy of the Rough Guide
for here.  It both overstates the badness of the road here - I've driven
over worse in New Zealand - and ignores the fact that building any sort of
road to a place as remote as this is a significant engineering achievement.
And keeping it open despite heavy rain and falling rock won't be easy,
either.  And their comments about the road to the Georgian church at
Dortkilise are just unintelligible - the road works are a mile away and
there is no bridge under construction.

Dortkilise is where we went yesterday, almost accidentally.  We just
intended to walk down the river in that direction but not actually to it;
after wandering past the rice paddies in the heat we got a lift to Tekkale
and met the muhtar /* elected village headman */ in his teahouse.  He took
us up to Dortkilise - we'd never have found it on our own - with a taxi
taking us most of the way and a government van of some sort taking us back.
He invited us back to his place later in the week for a village festival in
the Tekkale yaylas /* a yayla is a high-altitude chalet only occupied in
summer */; his wife has a kind of rheumatism Marion thinks might respond to
dietary treatment, so we'll see what we can do when we're back from Barhal.

We went to Sumela monastery near Trabzon when we were there: better in the
postcards than in the actuality, though the situation is spectacular.  Most
of it was closed off and full of scaffolding for restoration work.  This
looked rather dubious: lots of men hacking away with pickaxes but no
archaeologist in charge - it seems they just want it to look nice for the
tourists and to hell with historical accuracy.  The frescoes are only in
reasonable condition on the ceiling - the walls are almost obliterated by
graffiti, almost all Turkish names (unlike Aya Sofya in Istanbul, where
nearly all the graffiti is Western).  Also some Western names written
slightly wrong and a few Greek ones dated 1875 or thereabouts but obviously
more recent - is this some strange dating system, someone trying a bizarre
fake, or what?

Cemil Ozyurt's hotel/restaurant in Barhal is built almost over the river -
while writing this the water has changed from clear to diarrhoea-brown,
presumably from the rain.  The change took only a few minutes; a few hours
later it's still brown.  The smaller stream that joins it is still clear.
Landslip?

/* Cemil Ozyurt's place is a hotel/bakery/teahouse/restaurant in one, a
   haphazard construction in an architectural style that reminded me of
   nothing so much as Ancient Hippie Californian.  Cemil is about 50 and
   Marion says he's a terrible flirt.  It only cost us 30000 TL a night
   for a small room with a double bed. */

The way things are built right at the edge of the water looks hazardous by
Scottish standards - in the Highlands a flash flood would demolish anything
built that way in a few decades - but many of these river-edge
constructions, and the masonry used for channelling in places, seem quite
old.  The river must be more predictable than it looks.  Otherwise half the
hotels in Yusufeli would be piles of wreckage with the light bits washed up
around Artvin by now.

[ Names and addresses of several men who posed for their picture beside a
  truck of the road to Hevek... ]

Barhal, Tuesday - The river's clear again.  We both woke up very depressed
and flopped till mid-morning: Marion's theory is that eating eggs after a
long break from them can do that, mine is that this is high enough for a
slight lowering of oxygen level to be detectable.  Anyway we got over it.

Walked up the valley towards Hevek.  The cultivated strip is much narrower
and more discontinuous here than down at Yusufeli, with a narrower range of
things being grown.  The whole valley was milling with butterflies: we must
have have seen dozens of species and tens of thousands of individuals.
Presumably because pesticides haven't got here.  But very few birds; there
must be more further up, as we came here with two Germans who were walking
over the mountains to look at vultures.  There are adverts in the hotel for
hunting trips - wild boar are free; ibex, bear and lynx cost real money.
One of the guys round the hotel is a professional hunter with a company
that runs shoots here and in Bulgaria.

We were given a free lunch by some farmworkers when we'd walked halfway
towards Hevek - boiled runner beans in a gravy with traces of tomato in it,
salad, bread, and trout from the stream, fried, with noodles, both being
sprinkled with sugar.  I had my doubts but it tasted wonderful.  Got a lift
about halfway back with some electricity workers.  The standard technique
for working with HT here (the lines looked like 3300 V) seems to be
manipulating live wires with immensely thick rubber gloves.  Rather them
than me.

The other side of the valley being full of butterflies is that it was also
full of moths.  Our window had a hole in it so they came in whenever the
light was on.  We must have had ten different species blundering around us,
several of which seemed determined to get into bed with us.  And I squashed
a wriggly thing two inches long like a giant pink earwig.

We had an immense feed of fried trout caught by the local shopkeeper - the
only trout I've had that could compare was from a restaurant in in Lisbon,
much more elaborate.  I suspect we won't even be asked to pay for that meal.

We both got ill in the night.  I had a couple of bursts of mild diarrhoea
and threw up violently, Marion had mild diarrhoea and just felt rotten until
mid-afternoon.  Not too bad as Turkish bugs go.

Marion seems to have cracked her coccyx in the fall near Yusufeli; it still
hurts and there's no bruise.

The Valley of Lost Galoshes: we went up to look at the Georgian church
above Barhal - similar to Dortkilise but in much better shape and with no
outbuildings.  Locked, the muhtar is the only person with a key, he's down
in Yusufeli till this evening, and we're going at dawn tomorrow.  The path
and stream were strewn with old shoes, mainly torn galoshes; unless the
fact that the village school is up there has something to do with this, I
can't imagine why.  The local shop has an immense stock of them.

We've been asking people about the employment and demographic situation in
the villages around here: all are losing population, almost everyone goes
to work in one of the big cities of western Turkey as soon as they leave
school.  Practically nobody from Barhal goes on to high school.  About all
we saw being exported from Yusufeli was a truckload of apples; presumably
other fruit is, but nowhere near enough to keep a town of 4,000 in work.
The TEK workers said they expected to retire at 40, and said it as if it
was an accomplishment that Turks could do that while we had to wait till
we were 65.  So the result is that the village has almost no young adults:
everyone between 13 and 40 is away working in Istanbul, Izmir, Germany,
Belgium,...

The mosque here doesn't seem to do the ezan /* Muslim call to prayer */ very
often.  The only one we've heard was at midday.  Or maybe they get Dial-A-
Call-To-Prayer and the phone's only just been fixed? - the Georgian church
used to be the mosque until recently, and its tannoy is hooked up to a phone
line.  I thought that was cheating.

Blisters.  Trainers are the best footwear for this kind of holiday but the
heel join inside isn't well engineered.  I spent the night with bits of
Marion's embroidery thread through each blister, a trick I learned from
Beate who learnt it from her mother from the Sudetenland - it drains them
very effectively but I've never heard of anyone else doing it.  It looks
rather weird.  /* The offending shoes were Hi-Tec Silver Shadows, but a
slightly cheaper model than the XA4's I used on our last trip here. */

/* Veysel, the proprietor of one of the village shops, obviously fancied
   Marion a lot.  She bought some fabric and other stuff from him and each
   time she went in he gave her a pile of henna as well for free. */

Barhal seems to be too small to have a statue of Ataturk.  There isn't even
one by the school.  Amazing.

[ Name and address of two agricultural workers whose photo I took, posing
  with their pesticide spray.  I don't know what the stuff was yet, but
  they weren't using any protective clothing at all with it. ]

[ More names and addresses, transferred from a bit of paper, of people I
  took pictures of in Trabzon. ]

Tekkale, Tuesday - Several times we've seen enormous donkey turds on the
road, packed with cherry stones.  It must have taken a good bucketful of
cherries to produce each splat.  I have never been anywhere where such
a variety of fruit and vegetable are grown all together: Marion's been
noting it all on her pocket recorder, but pretty near everything imaginable
seems to grow here.  And one thing we'd never imagined: fresh sesame,
"tut".  /* That's what Marion and I thought they were at the time because
of their seed structure; they were really mulberries.  "Dut" according to
the dictionary, but that's not how people here say it. */  These look like
small grubs, and are white to purplish when ripe; they have a blackberry-
like structure with each blob containing a seed.  They're very sweet with
a nutty aftertaste.  There's no way you'd ever get to taste them outside an
area that grows them.

We left Barhal early this morning; on the same dolmus there was a boy just
leaving primary school to go to Istanbul.  He had a very emotional send-off
from his grandmother and several middle-aged women.  There were two older
boys in the dolmus who seemed to be part of the same family, but none of
the emotion seemed to centre on them; I'd guess they had already left and
were going back to Istanbul after a visit.  They looked dull and leaden
beside their brother, who was in and out of the dolmus as we waited for it
to leave, in tears one minute and playiong with the dog the next.  One more
to the ten-million-odd population of Istanbul.  Hope he makes it.

And nobody here seems angry about all this.  It seems like the whole
province is dying with a kindly, beatific smile on its face.  The logical
endpoint of this for all these gardens and rice paddies and villages to
end up like the Scottish Highlands, razed flat to a desolation of sheep
and game with armed guards controlling who goes in.  Which might be a
nightmare but so is the capitalist world system.

Turkish bus-driver etiquette: always stop for at least ten minutes longer
than the passengers expect but then roar off with a few seconds' warning.
If you don't get at least one traveller leaping through the door after it's
started moving you haven't done it right.

Last night Marion left her embroidery needle at the teahouse table and two
boys followed her across the street to return it.  My tripod turned up in
Yusufeli: a shopkeeper at the bus stop had kept it for 4 days.  When we
went for an all-day walk at Barhal I left the key in the door of our hotel
room, with all our passports and tickets inside: of course it was all there
when we got back, I never expected anything else.  After the hassle of
Prague and Budapest, where everyone seems terminally paranoid about thieves
all the time and with good reason, this culture comes as a huge relief.

We're staying at Cemil Albayrak's guest house for his festival.  "His"
festival because he's the muhtar and seems to be doing most of the
organizing: when we arrived he was running around like a flea in a fit.  He
unwound enough after his wife came back that we all went to look round his
garden - a bit bigger than an average British allotment but with a far
greater variety of stuff growing.  Marion slipped and landed on her bum
again but thought the visit was more than worth it.  Three things growing
that I couldn't find in the dictionary: reyhan, pirpir, serali.  I'll try
the big dictionaries at home when I get back. /* No luck, I still don't
know what they were; the first two are pot-herbs and the last a kind of
bean. */

Neriman Albayrak /* name written in a child's handwriting */ is Cemil's
terminally cute daughter who is, together with her mother, giving Marion
a lesson in how to embroider borders on headscarves.  She's 8.  She
collected some fresh sesame /* mulberries */ for us out of the tree beside
the restaurant this evening: scrambling over wobbly branches above a 20-
foot drop in galoshes.

There seems to be a local belief that eating yogurt with fish can poison
you.  Is this universal in Turkey?

Milan's mother had the idea that the way we should go from Rijeka to
Turkey was by boat to Dubrovnik and then to Greece.  The direct boat to
Greece didn't run any more but there was a regular service to Dubrovnik,
mainly bringing relief supplies.  Dubrovnik was still being shelled and
didn't have any electricity.  If I was on my own I'd have tried it: there
must be relief boats coming the other way from Greece.

Bulgaria got left out of this diary so far.  No contest for Least Friendly
Border Crossing.  Transit visas cost only 20 marks - Marion had been told
20 pounds by the London embassy staff.  Border post in a rocky gorge with
(Marion said) the smelliest toilet she's used in the whole trip by way of
welcome.  Duty-free shop with a minimal range of spirits and cigarettes,
which the Hungarians snapped up regardless.

The Dutch man staying here says that the Genya, the first hotel we asked
at in Artvin, is "full of Russian hookers".

[ name and address of someone I took a photo of ]

The Dutch couple have been totally obnoxious.  The man made a big show of
walking out on Cemil's saz playing (he was pretty good, too): when offered
honey with their yogurt they said "no, we have sugar with it at home" and
got Cemil to send his son Engin home (about a mile away) to get powdered
sugar.  This morning I found a Gregor-Samsa-sized cockroach in the bath:
I seriously considered going outside to their tent and leaving it in their
shoes.  /* Marion assumed they were American, but then Marion tends to
assume all obnoxious tourists are American... */

Two more Dutch people turned up in the teahouse today - butterfly
collectors.  One was a psychologist, the other a marine biologist.  We'd
seen them going back and forth between Barhal and Yusufeli several times.
They've been coming to Turkey every year for 15 years: they say they
probably have the biggest collection of Turkish butterflies in the world.
They're writing it up: they don't think anybody in Turkey is doing anything
comparable.  They didn't think that with the level of information available
to Turkish scientists and their limited means, that anyone outside Europe
would be able to do comparable work.  They know of one entomologist in a
provincial Turkish university who was doing good work on butterflies, but
his knowledge of research outside Turkey was so limited he didn't even know
of their own work.

The made one remark I found really depressing: that hydro scemes were meant
to cover almost every river in Turkey.  Even if that's a huge exaggeration,
it made me think of all the communities like this one - gardens, rice
paddies, vineyards, orchards, houses... that are going to be drowned.  No
more old men pottering about with hoes, no more trees for little girls to
climb in galoshes, just bare hillsides and dead water.

The frogs here are LOUD.  Marion found them quite disturbing: I rather
enjoyed them.  We've come across lots of them hopping in and out of
irrigation ditches, and a few flat ones on the road.  This place hasn't
yet joined in the world-wide frog extinction, it seems.

Walked down to the garden again today with Serife, Marion and Neriman.
Serife worked the irrigation: an hour a week is all it takes.  It's a
brilliant piece of work: the large channels at the roadside feed into a
network of smaller channels, gated by an assortment of rocks, planks,
buckets, and plastic bags.  A few seconds' work moving things at three
points, and the garden's watered.  The slopes are precisely arranged so
that each plot gets an equal amount.  She sprinkled a small amount of
fertilizer (some white powder) round some of the plants.  None of the
grunt the average British allotment holder puts into it.

Back to Bulgaria: we only went through it along the main road, but still
it looked quite different from any other place we've been.  Cultivation
seems a weird mixture of monoculture and chaos: huge fields of grain with
haphazard plots between and around them, with these plots themselves all
mixed up - crops obviously left to reseed year after year, so last year's
and this year's crop end up in the same plot in randomly varying
proportions.  It probably works but it certainly doesn't look pretty.  All
the buildings look scruffy in the same way as some of the Czech ones, but
to a far greater extent.  While Turkish buildings tend to look half-
finished for years, these hadn't been painted or even had their windows
cleaned for decades: whole factories left to rust.  The contrast was
greatest at the Turkish border, where you suddenly get sunflower fields
with militarily sharp edges, brand-new apartment blocks painted blinding
white - Marion made a remark about communism having collapsed while fascism
hadn't, which was way over the top but I can see why someone might get that
idea.

I came back to the teahouse after leaving Marion with Serife, Neriman and
another girl of about 12.  They seem to have gone off home to eat (I left
deliberately so Marion could get a chance to see more of women's life
here).  I came back to a political argument over the radio news: Erbakan
threatening to bomb Iraq for supporting a Kurdish group, I think.  Cemil
was talking with three friends: he's a Social Democrat, one was a Demirel
supporter /* conservative */, another backed Ecevit /* social democrat */,
and the other Turkes /* fascist */.  All very amicable.

/* I got my camera busted through an excess of generosity at Tekkale.  We
   couldn't walk anywhere in the area without being given fruit - stuff
   with real taste that made EC-regulation fruit look like plastic.  We
   were walking around the terraced gardens high on the hillside when a
   man in the terrace above called down and offered us some apples and
   apricots.  He handed me down a huge armful, far more than I could hold;
   an apple dropped straight into my Minolta Autocord TLR and bent the
   magnifier. */

[ Several names and addresses of people whose pictures I took at the
  Tekkale festival on Saturday, and of a small girl with a pet rabbit
  who I also took of by the roadside later in the day... ]

On the bus, Sunday - just went through Ardesen.  There was a local office
of the Refah Partisi.  Comfort Party???  Another one in Pazar.  /* This is
usually translated "Welfare Party"; it's the Islamic party - it's
surprising they have such prominent representation given how secular the
Laz tend to be. */

More Georgian market shopping: got a bottle of Georgian champagne for 1
pound (15000 TL) at the tiny market in Yusufeli on Thursday - drank it on
the beach where the Barhal and Coruh rivers meet.  Today, in Trabzon,
acquired: 4 meters of striped cotton for cushion covers, 12000 TL; another
Soviet pocket watch with a railway motif, 55000 TL; a pocket-watch-sized
circular slide rule, 50000 TL; 3 Swiss army knives (Victorinox lookalikes
with 13 whizzbangs), 25000 TL each; another big multipurpose knife like
the one I got in Artvin, 10000 TL; and 75 cl of a 1980-vintage fizzy red
wine from Azerbaijan, 20000 TL.  This stuff is really superb, far better
than any of the fizzy Italian reds I've tried.

The Dutch birdwatchers said the top floor of the Karahan in Artvin was also
taken over by ex-Soviet prostitutes.  That goes a long way towards
explaining what happened to Marion and why the main street for blocks around
was totally devoid of women.  And maybe it explains what the ultra-cheap
bus fares for Turks to visit Georgia are for: intra-Third-World sex tourism.
It turns out that there were even Georgian prostitutes in the Aydin Hotel
that occupies the floor above the Hotel Barhal in Yusufeli, which explains
two things - the stares we got through our window, which looks into a
teahouse across the street that seems to be patronized by most of the haji-
capped old men of the village, and the three who waved to me going up the
stairs when I was in the lobby once.  They turned on an intense flash of
sexual magnetism.  At the time I just thought they were French or Italian
rafters coming in after a night out drinking, and that I was being a dirty
old man.  Seemingly not.

/* Explanation of where rafting comes in: the Coruh river from Ispir to
   Artvin is apparently one of the best in the world for white-water
   rafting.  Cemil Albayrak made part of his income guiding parties at
   this (he has some sort of certificate in it).  Yusufeli is the obvious
   place to break the trip, and we met one party (Belgians and French
   Canadians, I think) who were doing just that. */

This trade must be having a terribly destructive effect on male-female
relationships all across north-east Turkey.  I find myself trying to
classify unheadscarfed women in the street as either Soviet prostitutes,
Western tourists or Westernized Turkish women: and I don't find it easy
until they open their mouths - even then I can't identify Georgian very
well from small snippets.  I don't suppose Turkish men find it much easier.
Marion's been wearing a headscarf a lot of the time, though deliberately
not in the traditional Turkish way - a headscarf is an obvious first line
of defence here for any Turkish woman; being mistaken for a Georgian must
be horrible.

God, is that whole country reduced to flea markets and whoring?

Snakes.  When we went to the Albayraks' garden on Friday we came across a
lizard and a snake a few seconds apart.  Serife immediately started heaving
huge rocks at the snake.  It was a harmless-looking brown thing less than
two feet long.  She didn't say it was poisonous: just "Yilan!" was enough.
I hope she missed.

We got a bat flying round the teahouse.  I was in the inner room translating
at the time, so I didn't see it, but I don't think it was molested.  Seems
bats are OK.

We're both covered with mosquito bites from the stay at Cemil's.  Most of
mine don't itch much (prior exposure?) but Marion's been really suffering.
We've just about run out of the ferociously powerful anaesthetic ointment I
bought in Samsun in 1981.  Pharmacies are closed today so I can't buy any
more. /* I bought another few years' supply later; good stuff and totally
unavailable in the UK - why not, given the existence of Scottish midges, I
can't imagine. */

The bus ride from Yusufeli down to Artvin is along the side of a steep gorge
all the way, with a torrential river below, below, unstable rock above,
huge oncoming trucks, the bus overtaking everything in sight and at one
point 33KV lines sagging to about 20 feet above the road.  We're at the
front of the bus where we can read all the cheery Muslim stickers /* above
the windscreen */ (the 10 x 2 cm ones printed on a diffraction-grating
background) which say things like "The Last Stop Is The Black Earth" ("Son
Durak Kara Toprak").  Just what you want to read in that situation.  Are
they for real or are the drivers deeply into graveyard humour?  Or both?

Serife gave Marion a bag of dried mulberries.  They'd make a superb
sweetish snack food: crunchy with a nutty aftertaste.  We've been thinking
about how they might be marketed in the UK so as best to help the local
economy.  The Artvinlis would get far more for them if they were marketed
that way than they do for the mulberry jam they export now.  Snack food
packaging is well within local technological capabilities.

I don't believe the Georgian "castle" that gives Tekkale its name is really
a castle at all.  Sloping roof?  No arrowslits?  It looks far more like a
church: there was no way to launch defensive weaponry from it.

Anadolu Hotel, off Yerebatan Caddesi, Istanbul, Tuesday - this place was
great two years ago: now it's a shitheap.  They demand (aggressively) money
in advance.  There are no towels in the rooms.  Only one sheet per bed and
the pillow covers obviously dirty.  No slippers for the Turkish toilet and
no toilet paper for the Western one.  Sheets ripped in places.  Awful
Western-style music in the hotel bar, which charges more for beer than
anywhere else we've been in Turkey.  Western toilet blocked.  Bedding feels
damp.  All the guests but us seem to be in their teens or early 20s -
presumably they don't know that Turkish hotels can and should provide a lot
more for the money.  The place is in the Rough Guide and presumably other
guidebooks so they've stopped trying.

We moved to the Aya Sofya (Yerebatan Caddesi).  Same price, much cleaner,
quieter and friendlier, our own shower.

We bought some more things we'd been intending to get in Turkey for a long
time: tea glasses and a heavy-duty orange squeezer of the sort they use in
the street stalls around Istanbul - these are better than anything you can
get in the UK.  I got a Turkish-made G clarinet: rather crudely made but
sounds OK and the price was right (500000 TL, about 35 pounds).

I'm writing this on the train through Serbia between Nis and Beograd.
Uneventful trip so far: the staff at Sirkeci station in Istanbul were
being their usually cluelessly unhelpful selves, but (after asking some
Western tourists for their European rail timetable, which the Sirkeci staff
don't have) it seems we arrive in Budapest just before midnight, too late
to connect to the Prague train.  Bugger.  This carriage is going to Warsaw
and is mostly empty now - a lot of people got off in Sofia, including the
three young Dutch men who shared our couchette and were also heading to
Prague, but via Romania because they'd promised their mothers they wouldn't
go through Yugoslavia... good grief.  /* Marion thought they had nice legs,
anyway. */

There's a little square off Istiklal Caddesi just above the Tunel that has
a small Turkish-and-foreign-language second-hand bookshop and an immense
population of cats.  Marion fell for a little white kitten last time so we
thought we'd look it up: there was a young white cat there that was
probably the same one but it didn't want to talk to us.  Most of the others
just lay in the sun and asked to have their tummies tickled.  There was a
huge pile of kittens sleeping in a drain grille at the bottom of a tree.
Marion counted 23 cats in the square (maybe 20 metres on a side).  We also
made friends with a fluffy grey kitten in Yusufeli, the Albayraks' family
of a female and 3 kittens, and a kitten in Eminonu that seemed to spend its
time a couple of catlengths from the new tramline.  It's always nice to have
so many cats around in Turkey.  What noise do Turkish cats make, anyway?
My dictionary doesn't list either "purr" or "meow". /* "to purr" is the
same word as "to mutter" or "to grumble": "mirildamak".  Can't find "meow" -
just use "bagirmak" ("to cry out") perhaps? */

The new tramline is amazing.  Each of the 4 carriages holds 48 sitting, 288
standing.  There are 5 trams on the line by Marion's count and the trip from
Sirkeci to Aksaray takes about 15 minutes.  That's one hell of an efficient
way of moving bodies around the city centre.  And it's free.

A piece of graffiti by the railway line: VOLIM SARAJEVO RDE ZLA @  /* The
@ being the international anarchy symbol. */  We've passed a couple of
tanks.

On the other hand, the tram is a lot less interesting a way of getting up
that hill than the old mix of insanely packed articulated buses and
dolmuses with drivers yelling their heads off at each stop.  And the same
goes for a lot of other things about the city: there seem to have been more
changes in the last 2 years than in the previous ten, mostly in the
direction of making it more like a European megalopolis on the model of
Haussmann's Paris.  It's got a long way to go but already there seems to be
quite an unnecessary degree of orderliness creeping in.

The most dramatic change is on the fringes of the city: this must be the
fastest house-building programme in the world.  Whole cities of tower
blocks are going up: you could drop Glasgow's Easterhouse among them and
not notice it.  Most built from prefabricated concrete panels: where are
these made?  One encouraging development is that they are starting to take
on interesting shapes and layouts, closer to Newcastle's Byker or Safdie's
Habitat than the Standard International Oblong.  But no mosques.  Who are
they building these for?  Surely most of the immigrants will be immigrants
from the countryside for whom religion is still important?  There's hardly
even any open space left to build them.  And transport links?  There aren't
any rail links out there, so the city's bus service is going to need
enormous expansion to cope.  And travel times are going to be of the same
order as London.

We spent an extra day in Trabzon on our way back - Istanbul Airlines
switched our flight time from 13.30 to 20.00 without warning, and we
didn't want to travel that late and miss seeing Turkey from the air and
arrive in Istanbul when most hotels would be full.  So we had a chance to
look at the Aya Sofya Museum in Trabzon.   The fresco paintings here are
astonishing - the faces are all individual, some of the earliest examples
of humanistic art in the European tradition, while the narthex has a
symbolic cross-vault painting of the Four Evangelists that looks somewhere
in between Blake's illustrations of Dante and the op-art cubism of
Vasarely.  The postcards don't get anywhere near doing it justice.  It far
outclasses anything in the Aya Sofya or Kariye in Istanbul. /* Something
else we found in Trabzon was "sira", a very-slightly-fermented grape juice
drink which is made by the same firms that make "boza" in winter.  Great
stuff: we took 2 litres of it on the train to Budapest.  I hadn't tried it
before; it isn't very widely sold and, if Coke and Pepsi have any say in
the matter, will shortly cease to exist.  Coke and Pepsi advertising is
*everywhere* in Turkey.  I don't suppose it will be long before Turkey has
babies dying of malnutrition from being fed on cola as in the UK. */

There was a display of gravestones in the garden around the church.  Mostly
Ottoman, some Roman and Byzantine.  And one labelled as Byzantine but
covered with Armenian script.  I took a picture of it, complete with label.

Another VOLIM TE SARAJEVO inscription in a shunting yard.

A field of haystacks that have subsided unevenly so they look like lactating
nipples.

We wanted to look inside the Georgian church at Barhal - it's the same
desing as the one at Dortkilise but in much better condition - but the
only person with a key was the muhtar and he was in Yusufeli while were
in Barhal so we never got in.  The Dutch butterfly collectors said we
should have tried bribing the local imam but nobody at Barhal even hinted
that he might have a key.  This seems a remarkably coy attitude for a small
village with a major monument on its hands.

We have just been through a very long tunnel, and on this train there are
no lights during the day.  What you need for these situations is a Bonker's
and Groper's Guide to the Railway Tunnels of Europe, so you'd know in
advance how much time you had.

I tried climbing one of the hills near Tekkale to get up to what I thought
was another Georgian ruin.  I was only wearing trainers: I gave up after a
couple of hundred feet of scree.  The stuff was coated with dried salt and
full of sharp fragments of calcite.  I got covered in stinging scratches
and descending was even more difficult.  Next time I'll bring hiking boots
and a pair of gardening gloves.

More graffiti, still in Serbia near the Hungarian border: BBB (the Zagreb
football team), "Born to Kill" (in English), several occurrences of the
symbol  > | c
        -----
        > | c
(the ">" symbols are actually backwards C's, so the thing is symmetrical).
Somewhere south of Beograd: SRBA CAR, MRDA CAR.  Lots of @ signs.

Welcome to Bulgaria: the border guards charged us 50% more than we paid
going by bus the other way and then tried to fiddle my change.  They didn't
understand any English and seemed to resent being spoken to in Turkish.
/* The chief guard was a loud-voiced woman who woke us at 3am with a torch
demanding deutschmarks.  Another movie stereotype. */ I went looking for the
restaurant car and was rudely stopped from walking down the train by a
monumentally offensive passport control geek who just ignored "restaurant?
restoran?  lokanta?...".

I miss that Turkish restaurant car - we only had it while on Turkish
territory.  Good food, cheap, comfortable and friendly, far better than
any other I've seen (next best being the Lisbon-Porto express).

The toilet in the Turkish compartment was the best of a bad lot until
someone (presumably one of the Poles) nicked all the toilet paper and
someone else splattered diarrhoea all over it.  The Hungarian one has a
seat lid that falls down on your back and a crap-stained seat and the
Bulgarian one smells utterly disgusting - its flush is about a teaspoonful.

One problem with that restaurant car: the only beer it had was Tuborg,
albeit the bottled version which isn't quite as awful as the keg or can
forms.  The other main Turkish beer, Efes, at least attains mediocrity.
The Turks haven't really got beer right yet.  Surely some of the German
returnees know what it's all about?

I am reminded of one of them we saw at the festival in Tekkale on Saturday -
a Turk in goldrimmed spectacles and Panama hat who had picked, of all
possible German archetypes, the comic-book Bavarian as a model to emulate.
I suppose there is something vaguely Tyrolean about the yaylas of Artvin,
but you half expected this guy to pull an inflatable euphonium out of his
pocket. /* Like a lot of Turks who've been to Germany, he couldn't believe
we knew hardly any German and persisted with it despite our total
incomprehension.  But then a lot of Germans get a bit miffed when I find it
easier to get by in Turkish in Germany, too. */

The festival was quite simple: we all got up there (about 7km up the valley
from Tekkale) by 9am.  Just after we arrived a group of the men said the
ritual prayers over a calf and killed it: very quick and painless, much
like the technique used by the New Zealand slaughtermen in the the abattoir
I worked in.  What followed was a display of the most incompetent butchering
imaginable.  They started skinning it but tried to take the legs off as they
went.  One of them slipped and stabbed the animal in the bowel: this meant
a dash to the stream to wash the leg and some bizarre attempts to ligature
the cut piece of intestine.  /* This bit was almost like a Monty Python
send-up of a surgical operation. */  After much fumbling the limbs and
torso halves were passed to the cooks, who chopped them into random bite-
sized chunks.  Marion said she could have done a better job, but this was
obviously men's work.  The chopped-up calf was sprinkled with salt and pot
roasted in four large metal buckets.  The result didn't taste bad but was
hardly the most exciting meal we've had in Turkey.

Tekkale has a zurna player but not a drummer (the usual accompaniment
everywhere else in Turkey).  While the butchery was going on some of the
men did a brief line dance with a handkerchief: we'd seen the same zurna
player performing for what seemed to be a stag night just before in
Yusufeli (that dancing might have been a bit less accurate but was a lot
wilder).  Then we got a series of wrestling matches, from very young boys
up to adult men.  (Nobody much over 20, though, unlike the oil wrestling
in the west of Turkey).  Then a brief speech introducing the new imam and
an appeal for funds for the new mosque.  This was done in an effectively
public way: men came up to hand notes to the fundraiser, who shouted out
the donor's name and how much they'd given: applause followed.  Out of two
to three hundred men they got 3 1/2 million TL.  I gave them 50,000 and one
of the few other tourists there (Steve the Australian) did the same.  We
got a good round of applause for it.

We'd been eating bread and cheese by the stream with Cemil at the start,
and he took us to his mother's yayla during the midday prayer meeting for
lunch.  A wonderful spread of pide (home-cooked flat bread), salads, honey,
white cheese, kaymak (clotted cream) and fruit, all locally produced.  The
reason the butchery was so fumbled is quite understandable: most of the time
the local diet is vegetarian, with the occasional small trout (these are
ridiculously easy to catch with a thin stick, a few feet of fixed line and
a spinning lure).  /* Even sheep are rare here: the only one we've seen was
being kept as a pet in Yusufeli. */ Sitting on cushions on the balcony of
the yayla looking down the valley on to something like a Swiss picture
postcard, this was a meal I'll remember for years.

After that we went back to the main gathering where the meat was being
served.  A small taste was enough for me, and the German and Dutch women
stuck by their vegetarian principles and wouldn't even taste it (this
struck me as boorish).  The a couple of exhilarating rides in the back of
a truck down the valley to Tekkale.  For the second ride we had the calf's
skin with us.

From that to the worst meal we've ever had in Turkey: the in-flight lunch
on the Istanbul Airlines flight from Trabzon to Istanbul.  This is cheap at
45000 TL (30 pounds) but better bring your own food - it's an international-
style plastic tray with a few slices of tomato, a roll, a piece of white
cheese (the only good thing on it) and some slices of processed meat, one
of which tasted very much like pork to me - at least I couldn't imagine
anything else that could taste like that.  Alcohol is one thing, but pork
on an airline menu in a Muslim country?  The following day I was belching
sulphurously and Marion threw up: we suspected lahmacun we got late at night
(not a good time) from a street stall, but the airline meal seems a more
likely culprit in retrospect.

Back at the roadside eatery just inside Germany (1 km from the Czech
border).  Just remembered what we saw here on the way in: a busload of
Polish tourists from Wroclaw.  Something about them immediately suggested
religiosity: on cue, a priest at the front of the bus pulled out a book
and led them in a prayer session.  /* By German standards this place was
a pretty good deal, with nice goulash soup; it was mostly used by Turkish
and Hungarian truck drivers in enormous rigs covered with pinups and other
trucker kitsch.  It has a supermaket-cum-dime-store attached to it selling
all kinds of stuff, including lots of consumer electronics ranging up to
laser printers, presumably aimed at people going home eastwards with money
still to burn. */

We arrived at Keleti Station, Budapest, in the middle of the night.  The
train was mobbed by touts for yough hostels, all wearing vests advertising
them and shoving leaflets into our hands.  They were selling accommodation
much the same way the touts at Istanbul bust station sell long-distance
rides.  We paid a fortune for a taxi ride to Nyugati station for the train
to Prague, but got there in time with no trouble (there's less than an hour
for the connection).  The train was filthy: considering that Czech local
trains are pretty clean and the Prague metro is immaculate, it looks like
the Budapest cleaners just assumed that the mostly young Inter-Railers who
made up most of the passengers weren't worth the bother.  /* Four more
gorgeous legs in our compartment, belonging to two young Dutch women this
time. */

/* Almost all of the other tourists we met in Eastern Europe were Western
   Europeans, and the only non-western-European tourists we met in Turkey
   were Australian.  It looks like this whole area of the planet has become
   an American-free zone except for a few bunches of them huddled together
   en masse for protection in the centre of Prague.  The State Department's
   scare tactics seem to be working.  What I found rather more surprising
   was how few Eastern Europeans were using the trains. */

Graffiti on a motorway bridge in Belgium: MOSLEMS BUITEN.  Posters stuck on
the next bridge: VLAAMS BLOK - are they the local fascists?  /* Yes. */

Two rather uneventful days in Prague.   The flat we're in (same area -
Stresovice) is rather better - the owners were away for the weekend and
their father let us in.  Prague is an insanely difficult place to get food
in - all restaurants close at 9pm, nothing opens before 10 or 11am, and it
even gets difficult after 7pm.  We had to resort to expensive bar food at
a tourist joint (U Pinkasu) on Saturday night and missed out entirely on
Sunday night.  I'd have been happy with the basic Czech restaurant meal of
pig and stodge but even that was hard to find (finally got it from the
rather good stand-up eatery on Narodni truda).  /* We did find ice cream,
though.  Lots of it.  Prague must do the best ice cream on earth. */

/* In these last three days, we also wanted to visit U Kalicha, touristy
   as it might be - the pub featured in "The Good Soldier Svejk".  It was
   closed for renovations.  Just round the corner was a herbal medicine shop
   with a window display entirely devoted to a product called "WANK" - if
   they'd been open I'd have bought a sample just for the box.  I went up
   the Petrin Tower - one of Eiffel's designs, much like a scaled-down
   Eiffel Tower - and we went round the odd mirror maze nearby.  We did some
   shopping, mainly for musical instruments -  a C clarinet, two cello bows
   and a Strohfidel - and a big clay Golem as a souvenir of the Jewish
   quarter.  The cemetery of the Jewish quarter was a tiny space with
   tumbling gravestones piled in heaps everywhere; lots of candles left by
   visitors, with little notes attached, mostly trite wishes for peace.
   Rabbi Loew got hundreds of these.  The museum beside the cemetery had an
   exhibition of children's drawings from the Holocaust, which Marion liked
   but which I thought was mostly unilluminating and predictable.  Jewish
   Prague being marketed as a big tourist asset: the only other feature of
   the city that gets exposure comparable to ghettoes and golems on T-shirts
   and postcards is Mozart.

   And we made an afternoon trip to Kutna Hora.

   This was a deeply strange place.  We walked far longer than we expected
   to get to it - the Rough Guide doesn't make it clear that there are TWO
   railway stations, a main-line one out of town and a spur-line one in the
   centre.  So we got off a Brno train at the main-line station and spent an
   hour wondering why things didn't look like the map.  In the old centre
   everything was flaking stone, cracking unpainted wood, rusting iron, and
   overwhelming silence.  I now know exactly what to imagine for the setting
   of Kafka's "The Castle".  The silence extended far out beyond that into
   the modern blocks at the edge of town: even children played politely with
   hardly a sound.  (According to a Czech Jew Marion met at a bar-mitzvah
   back in Edinburgh, this is normal for Czech children; they have always
   been disciplined to be seen and not heard).  I wish I'd found this town
   at the start of the holiday, as its atmosphere was utterly unlike
   anything else I've experienced and I'd have liked more time to look round
   it and photograph it systematically.  The supposed main attraction, St
   Barbara's Cathedral, didn't impress us very much, though we couldn't get
   inside; built on the we'll-have-one-each-of-everything principle of
   architectural ornament.

   We couldn't get a meal there, either, because the only bar/restaurant we
   found was being run by one woman single-handed doing what would have
   taken six people in Scotland and naturally taking so much longer that
   we'd have missed our train back to Prague (which turned out to be free as
   nobody came to check tickets).

   Kutna Hora does have a sex shop.  I imagine that mummification must be a
   big seller and the vibrators have silencers. */
--
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RZ, Scotland   TEL: [phone] x6854 (work)
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