by Rory Maclean
‘When I was growing up, I slept with my shoes under my pillow,’ says Abdullah. ‘Today, all my children drive cars. My daughter was the first village woman to go to university. Our prosperity started with the arrival of the hippies.’
It’s late when I hump the week’s supplies back to ‘Love’ Valley. The torchlight plays on stone walls so smooth, so eroded, that every sharp edge seems to have melted away in the day’s heat.
I’m not worried that Penny might have done herself an injury. Or abandoned the cave during my absence. I’m no longer wary of her intentions. She may remember Cappadocia as both a paradise and a good place to die but I don’t suspect suicide is part of her life plan.
I stand beneath the thick horseshoe arch. Above me, a single candle flickers in the darkness. I’m about to call out when I hear Penny’s voice. I listen for a moment. She’s moving around the cave, organizing her few possessions, singing as softly as the evening breeze. A Joan Baez lament. I don’t join in because I don’t want to break the spell. Her voice – as rusty as a temple bell – echoes off the darkening stones.
We eat a Flintstone pizza that evening, aubergines stuffed with lamb the next. We talk into the small hours. During the following days, I meet with Fred and the other men. I’m struck by the irony of the hippies’ rejection of acquisitive selfishness stimulating their hosts’ material prosperity. We also discuss the social cost of economic success. Fred remembers that, once, everyone in Cappadocia was family. ‘Every boy was my brother, every girl my sister’ is how he expressed it. ‘Now, neighbours own competing restaurants and cut each other’s throats.’ But when I voice a pang of regret for the lost communal life, he wags his index finger.
‘Turks don’t want to stay poor farmers in pretty villages, no matter how much some Westerners would wish our lives unchanged,’ he says. ‘We want schools and doctors. We want to buy toys for our grandchildren. We are a living part of this Flintstone world.’
Penny seems content to stay in the cave, watching the changing light. She leaves me to make my own decisions, to find my own road. She certainly has no wish to travel on with me.
‘There are a thousand paths to nirvana,’ she tells me. ‘Mine is not by way of Iran.’
On our last night together, I tell Penny that Fred will check in on her every couple of days to restock her food and water. I make sure she has enough money. I offer her my email address. She puts her hand to my lips and tells me to shut up.
Nightbirds and bats drop out of their shelters, flying by the edge of our vision. A bulbul warbles in the branches. An owl hoots at the twilight. As the valley slips into darkness, the candles warm the old cave with their intimate light. In their shadow Penny’s hair looks midnight-black not seal-grey. A full moon rises above the cones. The ancient horseshoe arch frames the stars.
I wake before dawn and, as she snores softly in her cocoon of borrowed bedding, I gather my bits and backpack and slip out of the cave. My bus is due to leave just after six.
In the valley, I pause to check for my passport. A thin, yellowed volume has been slipped between my notebooks. I pull out Penny’s copy of Siddhartha. The edge of a page has been turned down. As I step along the path, I read Hesse’s words on the shudder of awakening.
‘He began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.’
I turn the corner and walk away, leaving behind a lone voice singing to the morning.
8. Sympathy for the Devil
Beyond the fly-flecked windscreen spread gaunt plains, barren flat-top mountains and asphalt ribbons quivering in the hot sun. In every direction the prairie unrolls a hundred miles wide, broken only by tufts of white flowers marking family plots. Distant figures scythe with short, crescent sickles. Summer breezes push and pool wheat and barley, weaving waves of pattern across the steppe. Space stretches out, as well as time, dwarfing electricity pylons and a thread-like rail line, as if the earth itself is expanding in the heat.
I changed buses in Kayseri, my spirit lifting with the road ahead. A rose blooms beside a caged, blue-stone ossuary. On a blind corner we overtake an overloaded truck, its green chillies quivering free of their sacks like miniature elvers. I drop my pen.
‘Excuse me,’ I apologize to the passenger sitting beside me, taking off my earphones, ‘I don’t speak Turkish.’ Türkçe bilmiyorum. ‘Could you…?’ I gesture at the pen rolling under his feet.
‘No panic on the Titanic,’ says the stranger, brushing away my apology, offering me a delicate white hand. ‘You shouldn’t bother to learn Turkish; it’s an underdeveloped language.’
‘What do you mean, underdeveloped?’
‘In French movies, a man need say only three words for a woman to kiss him. In Turkish, a man must talk to a woman all day just so she will touch the back of his hand.’
I laugh, offer my hand, introduce myself.
‘Call me Oscar,’ he says. ‘Everyone does.’
Oscar, whose real name is Özcan, would never stand out in a crowd. His clean-shaven face is as smooth and ageless as a sea pebble. I write him off as a salesman or a crooked, small-town accountant with fastidious hygiene habits. Until I look into his eyes. They are colourless.
‘Have you been travelling long?’ I ask him as he returns my pen. I hadn’t noticed him get on the bus.
‘About forty years,’ he replies. ‘Forget that guidebook’ – I’d been leafing through the Blue Guide – ‘it’s no good beyond Konya.’
‘You know all about it,’ I say, with an unexpected shiver. Yet I’m pleased to find an English speaker, so I tell him about myself.
‘A travel writer,’ he replies, lifting his interest but not his voice. ‘Then we’re comrades-in-arms.’ He hands me his business card. Tourism Consultant. ‘But I have little time for the sixties. The flower children were as simple as their critics are unpleasant.’
‘In Cappadocia they seem to have opened the door to prosperity,’ I tell him, mentioning the stories of Abdullah and Bayram.
‘The hash-and-hepatitis trail did spawn an industry that packaged the world,’ he admits, folding his hands in his lap. ‘I should know. I stand near the start of that trail.’
‘How so?’
‘It was me who put Butterfly Valley on the map.’
Butterfly Valley – Kelebek Vad1s1 – was once an isolated beach accessible only by sea; a divine holiday highlight for early, independent travellers.
‘I worked as a guide for tour-company scouts,’ he explains. ‘I turned them on to its tourist potential. I went on to invent the gulet package holiday,’ he gloats with a flash of conceit, ‘enticing Club Med to Foça and convincing Airtours to build the first hotel in Ölüdeniz.’
‘That’s…’ I search for the right word ‘… impressive.’
Each development marked a turning-point in the growth of Turkish tourism, transforming – in most cases – wild coastline into resort conurbations.
‘I’ve been a planning officer, a copywriter of brochures. I’ve advised Kuoni, Thomson, Abercrombie and Kent. As soon as the holiday-makers arrive, with their sun-cream and condoms, I leave the place to them. You’ve heard of the Arab traveller al-Muqaddasi? In the tenth century, he wrote that cities on the sea are hotbeds of fornication and sodomy. Nothing’s changed in a thousand years.’
‘Overdevelopment has changed Turkey.’
‘Tourism is the factory without a chimney,’ he insists, again in a unemotional tone. ‘It’s good for the economy, and thriving economy improves lives.’
‘So why are you travelling east?’ I ask him. As far as I know, the next mainstream tourist stop is Goa, 5,000 miles ahead in India.
‘Let me tell you a story,’ says Oscar, ‘about two brothers from Bingöl.’
I unfold my road map.
‘It’s a Kurdish town, poor of course, with red clay, lavender honey and so little work that men must look elsewhere for things to do. There are Koranic schools, soldiers on the street and wol
ves in the mountains. In truth, this is a story about wolves; about running from wolves, fighting with wolves, becoming a wolf.’
Bingöl lies to the south of the overland route in Turkey’s impoverished hard-baked south-east, where a vicious guerrilla war raged for sixteen years.
‘These two brothers were brought up alone by their mother for, I’m sorry to say, they had seen their father shot dead.’
‘Shot?’ I repeat, because there is no sorrow in his voice. He simply recounts the facts of a tragedy.
‘He was a songwriter and a prominent member of the PKK.’
Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the Kurds have aspired to nationhood. The outlawed PKK – or Kurdistan Workers’ Party – led the insurgency throughout the 1990s.
‘But these details aren’t important to the story. What is important is that the brothers – so good, so calm – grew up in a kind of isolation, because their mother kept them indoors, fearful that the Nationalists would come next for her boys.’
While western Turkey prospered, Oscar goes on to explain, with rapid economic growth and mass urbanization, the Kurds as a whole were cut adrift, forbidden to teach and broadcast in their own language, isolated because their aspirations threatened Turkish unity. Their guerrilla war unfolded far away from television cameras, claiming over 30,000 lives.
‘The brothers dreamed the dreams that boys do, of becoming pop stars or inter-city bus drivers. But when they grew into young men, the only work available to them, apart from bee-keeping, was heroin-smuggling from Iran. Of course, if you can feed neither yourself nor your sick mother, you feel ashamed, you get angry, you look for someone to blame. Then, in your feeble fury, the wolves come after you.’
Again I’m unsettled by Oscar’s cold calm, by his chilling talk of revenge without a trace of emotion.
‘Violence begets violence. No Kurd can sit on the fence. He must decide to run with the wolves or to run away from them.’
Bingöl was a divided town, he tells me, a stronghold of both the PKK and a shadowy Sunni group called Hizbullah; same name, same mentality, but separate from the Lebanese Hezbollah. Together, the PKK and Hizbullah shared a hatred of the Nationalists.
‘The first boy ran to the west, away from his beloved younger brother. He changed his family name. He sold himself, and Turkey. Every month he sent home money.’
‘And the other brother?’ I ask.
‘He fell in with the wolves, running east with them, along the same road as you are heading, as a matter of fact. Nothing was heard from him for years. Until last week. I received a call that he had come home.’
The persecution of the Kurds shames Turkey’s recent history. The restoration of minority rights has begun to redress the balance, but many of the country’s 12 million Kurds – like some of Istanbul’s inward-looking dağli – remain embittered by both their exclusion from progress and by the frightening speed of it.
Oscar polishes his fingernails. ‘In Kurdish, we say, “One hand clapping does not make a sound.” Kurds do all as family. When I say I love my brother, I mean I will do anything for him,’ he assures me in a flat tone. I notice that his pebble-smooth features are broken by the rough edges of three cracked teeth.
Five hundred miles east of Ankara, Erzincan cowers in a narrow corridor flanked by the rumpled bodies of fallen giants. Nut-brown fields reach over their long, wrinkled limbs as if to tether them to the earth. In 1939, these giants stirred and the entire city was razed by an earthquake. The sense of loss still pervades the evening air.
Oscar has a ride arranged to carry him across the mountains to Bingöl. He asks me to join him. ‘A favourable mention in your book will bring visitors and stimulate the local economy,’ he says.
I turn down his invitation, even though my bus is going no further tonight.
‘Another time then, my friend.’ He smiles but his eyes remain empty. Then he takes my hand and adds, ‘Remember, if you want to be sexy, you must drink Pepsi.’
In my concrete-and-cockroach hotel room I turn the lock and jam a chair under the door handle.
Along the hippie trail, beyond the ubiquitous crescent-and-star flags and assertions of ethnic integrity, Turkey unfolds as an elaborate, fluid mosaic; an Anatolian imbroglio of history and ideas over which great armies and ardent idealists have trampled and trespassed. In 334 BC, Alexander began his drive towards India from central Konya, the ancient city which the great Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah passed through on his haj to Mecca in 1331. St Paul was thirty-five years old when he walked this way. Crusaders and Islam’s horsemen galloped across this same lion-coloured plain, though heading in opposite directions. A thousand years later, the Intrepids were propelled east by their dream of a better world. In 1999, after the cessation of the insurgency, hundreds of radical Kurds chased in their footsteps, escaping over the border into Iran and northern Iraq.
The next morning, my bus follows them too, squeezing out of the canyon, over the giants’ outstretched limbs, beside the fast, frothy Euphrates. Boulders roll down gravel arms. Meltwater churns wild and white over outsized fingers. I’m dwarfed by the pathos of human endeavour and the precipitous, primeval mountains shot through with bone and iron. At Tercan, the driver spills hot tea on his lap and almost crashes into a gorge.
I spare only a day for grey, grim Erzurum. Women wash earthy wool in a public fountain, drawing veils across their faces as I pass. Policemen relax in the shade of the Citadel, singing soft songs to each other, gazing along the arrow-straight trading route as did Roman centurions, Danish freaks and all the travellers between them. In a broken backstreet a cracked old man seizes my hand and shakes it, crying out, ‘Sie sind zurückgekommen.’ You’ve come back. Since the Iranians closed the trail in 1979, few Westerners have had cause to visit the city. Istanbul feels a continent away.
I push on across divided, diverse eastern Turkey, numbed by distance and busted springs, each bus slower, older and hotter than its predecessor. The Meteor Turizm coach has broken instruments and a cracked windscreen. The Doğubeyazit Express, a fiery metal coffin on wheels, rides low on its tail and stops every hundred metres whether passengers are waiting or not. An aged farmer hobbles down the aisle, hands reaching out to steady him. A baby is passed from passenger to passenger, held and kissed by strangers. The driver and conductor count and recount their takings, whispering in hushed tones, debating – as the bus isn’t full – whether to make the journey at all. Every hundred kilometres, armed traffic jandarma shoulder Kalashnikovs to check my identification. The burnt-out hulk of a Kars Comet smoulders among the birches far below at the foot of a rocky valley.
Horasan is a mud-brick hamlet of motor grease and black sheep equidistant from the borders of Georgia, Armenia and Iran. Travellers waiting by its bus stop carry sacks rather than suitcases. I see no women in its tin-roof cafés, on the dirt street, at the plough-maker’s shop. Along its alleyways, discs of animal dung dry for cooking fuel. At its market, a barefoot boy offers me home-made pide, a thin gloss of tomato on bread. When I buy him a piece instead, he wolfs it down as if he hasn’t eaten all day. Beyond him, in a razor-wire BTC oil camp, men work on the world’s newest export pipeline, pumping Caspian crude a thousand miles west alongside the ancient road.
In Doğubeyazit – called Doggy Biscuit by sixties overlanders – the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy avoided rape at the hand of a six-foot, scantily clad Kurd by firing her .25 automatic at the bedroom ceiling. A decade later, and 2,305 years after Alexander, the unarmed founders of Lonely Planet guides, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, drove their Austin Minivan through this cheerless border town. Marco Polo paused here to look for Noah’s Ark in the summer of 1270. He didn’t find it but became instead the first European to witness a practical use for petroleum. Near here, he wrote, ‘there is a fountain of oil which discharges so great a quantity as to load a thousand camels. It is not used for food but as fuel for lamps.’
Doğubeyazit is a place of transition, within the borders of secul
ar Turkey yet infused with Islamic fervour. On its cramped main street, waiters, with coins jingling in their pockets, carry meal platters to the bustling medrese school. Outside the mosque, a cripple with brush-thick eyebrows sells paper cups of seed, sustaining the practice of feeding the pigeons which fed Solomon. At the otogar, I watch a public parting. A young man and woman stand an arm’s length apart, shaking hands. Unexpectedly, their fingers knit together. She squeezes his thumb, then releases it. He draws his flat palm slowly, firmly, across her open hand. She places her hand on his waist, dips her head and he kisses her forehead. At that moment, a tall, white-robed imam emerges from the terminal, steps up to the couple and wrenches them apart. I’ll not see a man and woman touch again for the next four thousand miles.
At dawn, the swallows rise up, circling the empty streets, connecting in their sweeping flights the mundane and mystical, the contiguous and the transient, the intolerant and the liberal. I walk alone beneath the flanks of soaring, wide-mouthed Mount Ararat. A dolmuş carries me across a flat, parched land like a desiccated estuary: desolate, biblical, lodged deep in the souls of men yet of no practical value. My last, treeless stretch of Turkish road is the same that carried Oscar’s brother back to the west, to Erzincan and then Istanbul, where he would drive the ‘car of death’ into the British Consulate. He, like two other of Turkey’s first four suicide bombers, came from angry, hopeless, nihilistic Bingöl.
At the Iranian border, all but on the threshold of Arabia, I cross the first great frontier of the trail, between the Turkish and Persian worlds. In the blue distance, the mountains rise up like hands clasped in prayer.
Iran
9. Look What They Done to My Song, Ma
‘I hate my feelings,’ says Laleh, looking past me at the mirror. ‘I hate my weakness.’ She tilts her head, easing on the black hood of her chador. ‘Most of all, I hate my nose.’
Babak turns up ‘Like a Virgin’. Around him, young women flaunt spangly frocks and Lancôme eyes. The men sport designer jeans and long, swept-back hair. Two out of three Iranians are under thirty and at least half of them seem to be in this room.