A Return of Sorts

After a year and a half away from Turkey, I was finally able to return!

While it wasn’t the usual type of trip that I would normally write about on this blog, it’s the closest thing I’ve gotten in a long time! In place of exploring new places, and meeting new people, it was nearly two weeks full of familiar places and time spent with old friends. If anything, the fact that two weeks wasn’t enough to even see everyone revealed how much of my and my family’s life is still there.

Arriving in Istanbul was a strange sensation. Apart from navigating the newly built metro routes and the astronomically high prices (where did all those zeros come from!?), so much was exactly the same and overwhelmingly familiar. The names of train and bus stops at places that I had lived, the massive glowing sign of the hospital where my son was born, the familiar sounds of cards being scanned to board busses; all were striking in their familiarity.

The incredible energy of this vast metropolis immediately stood out in comparison to the sleepy little Canadian town that I’ve been in for the past year and a half. Commuters flowed by in a ceaseless stream onto the platform and packed onto busses, only for the platform to refill in less than a minute. I had to wonder how many minutes it would take to see the equivalent of my hometown population flow by at rush hour. As that bus route alone sees well over 1,000,000 passengers daily, I doubt I would have had to wait that long.

The few days I had in Istanbul were spent with old friends in the same restaurants and cafes, walking familiar streets, and taking in the things I missed most. Rather than the usual tourist attractions, it was the simple things like having a cup of sahlep on a ferry, people-watching on a busy street, or getting a haircut at midnight that I wanted to do.

The strangest part about being back in Turkey was just how normal it felt. It had been just over five years since I had moved from Istanbul to Antalya and a year and a half since I had left Turkey for Canada and yet everything about it felt as if I had never left. I even regularly mentioned going back to Antalya instead of Canada, subconsciously forgetting about the last year and a half of life as I seamlessly slipped back into life in Turkey.

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Perhaps the most obvious sign that I had been out of Turkey for some time was how rusty I felt speaking Turkish. For the first couple of days it felt like real work to make my mouth produce what my brain wanted, and my accent often made me cringe. Thankfully, this too came back quickly, and I could enjoy catching up with people without too much trouble.

Catching up with old friends quickly took me beyond Istanbul and into Turkey’s Aegean region, with Fred once again joining me for the ride. Turkey’s Aegean region is an area that I have never really blogged about (though technically Afyon is an Aegean province and I’ve written tons about time spent there); it’s one of the country’s most touristic and accessible areas and hardly fits the description of “lesser-known sites” that we try to focus on. Rather than dimly lit teahouses or workshops with traditional craftsmen at work, there are whole streets dedicated to dental implants, lip injections, and hair transplants for the masses of Brits that come every year (Russians prefer Antalya and Germans Alanya).

While hardly as exciting a region as far-flung provinces like Hakkari or Erzurum, we tried to take the scenic route whenever possible and visit historical sites along the way. The reality that I wasn’t expecting in this area was that, with the greater degree of economic development and work opportunities comes a lot of ugliness. The hills around Denizli for example have all been torn up to quarry the marble and travertine that make up the backbone of the local economy. All sorts of factories, including the ones processing olives in Aydin and Muğla, belch out a smog that fills the wide valleys with a haze that glowed in the low winter sun.

Towards the end of our tour in the area, we had a bit of time to explore the absolutely stunning Bafa Lake area. The lake, together with the ancient Mount Latmos (now Beşparmak in Turkish) is one of Turkey’s most archaeologically rich and naturally beautiful areas. Full of monastaries tucked away on islands and caves, neolithic rock art, and ancient cities, there is plenty here to explore and almost none of it on the beaten path.

Arriving in the evening we set out to look for one of the cave monasteries that had eluded me on previous visits and was supposed to be hidden in a cave in the midst of the old Carian ruins of Latmos. Latmos was a city that was abandoned around 2300 years ago in favour of the newer and much grander city of Heracleia, built only a couple hundred yards away. Thankfully I decided to ask a couple of locals for directions and managed to get the young son to take us directly to the cave itself. It was a good thing we had a guide as the landscape here is a confused jumble of massive boulders where any hollow or gap could hold some secret.

The only problem was, this wasn’t the church I was actually looking for. The frescoes on the ceiling of the church we were in were in poor condition and in a different layout from the Pantocrator depiction I had seen in my guidebook. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my guidebook with me and so I assumed that the Pantocrator cave was one of the monasteries further up the mountain. And so, because I hadn’t done any proper pre-trip research, we went on our way not realizing that the much more imressive monastery site was somewhere nearby.

With the sun getting low, we set out for another of the area’s many sites: the “Twin Island” castle and monastery. Years ago I had tried to hike to the “island” which is usually connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of sand but had to give up thanks to the steep cliffs and swamp that made the shoreline impassible. Looking to avoid the swamp we took to the difficult hills but were forced further and further inland by the deep boulder choked gullies. After nearly an hour of hiking we reached a high outcrop from which we could see our goal, the Twin Islands, far below us.

While we had covered a decent amount of ground, there was still a long distance to go and the terrain only looked more difficult near the lake shore. The real issue however was that the sun was now getting quite low and, without any proper trail to follow this difficult landscape would be treacherous in the dark. Deciding to head back and try again in the morning, we attempted to retrace our steps only to wander on and off again from our original route. The return took almost twice as long as it had going out and it was getting dark by the time we arrived.

Failed attempts to reach island monasteries and rushed hikes before sunset was feeling awfully reminiscent of our last two trips to Van and a far cry from the nearby tourist cities that centered on alcohol sales and dentistry.

Setting out before sunrise the next day we made a second attempt at reaching the island, only this time we decided to try the coastal route and see if the water level would be low enough to be passable. Other than a couple hundred feet of boggy trails right at the begining, the route was easily passable and easy to follow. In fact, “trail” is hardly the right word. The trail was actually a paved road and a part of a large network of ancient roads built around 2400 years ago to connect the cities of Caria.

We made much better time on this path than we had scrambling among the boulders further up the slope. We stopped to watch olive harvesters arrive by boat to begin their days work, flamingos wander the coast in the hazy sunrise, and a lone fisherman make his way across the still lake to check his nets. We reached the final stretch of gravelly beach just as the sun peaked above the hills at the far end of the lake.

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Climbing up the steep slippery cliffs and into the fort at the top (we went in the wrong way and so had to scale the wall instead of simply walking through the gate), we had a great view of the second of the “Twin Islands” with the ruins of its Byzantine monastary showing clearly. In the distance beyond it I could just make out Menet Island low in the mist, the largest of Bafa’s islands and also home to a large monastic complex.

With my time in Turkey coming to a close and no way to reach these other sites I began to think of a plan for my next visit to Turkey: buy an inflatable boat and row to the islands of Bafa lake, then fly to Van and attempt to row to a couple more island monasteries that I failed to reach last time.

While it’s not as easy as it once was for us to visit and explore new places in Turkey, it’s still something I hope to continue doing as often as I can.