It was 2:00 a.m. and we hadn’t slept for almost 35 hours. We had been waiting for a car to pick us up from the airport in Istanbul, and I couldn’t reach our hotel on my phone. Then I realized that the man standing near me had been holding up a sign since we arrived. It slowly dawned on me that the sign that read “WIZARD” was…….me, with a “Z” flipped from an “N.” (My name is Winard, but I’m thinking of changing it; I like Wizard better.)
Travel trials
We had flown from New York City to Istanbul via Amsterdam, where we spent the day barely awake, on a boat touring the canals. I had come up with Turkey as a college graduation trip for my daughter, but it was obvious that I had ulterior motives. My usual travel antennae had found photographs of the fairy chimneys in Cappadocia, and that lured ME to Asia Minor.
Seeking my travel mojo
Some background: my daughter is the best travel companion. She is happy to let me do all the planning and happy to visit wherever I drag her. That said, travel is my sweet spot and is what I do best, although it had been a while since I had planned and taken a trip either alone or just with her. I feared that I had lost my travel mojo, and in retrospect I spent a lot of time acting as if everything was under control on our journey, even when things were going horribly wrong.
That happened almost immediately in Istanbul. We arrived at our hotel in dark, and I had to track down someone to give us a key to our room. A young man was sleeping near the front desk, I woke him up and gave him my name. He told me that all of the rooms were taken, but that there was a room nearby he could offer us. Exhausted, I told him that I had confirmed the room numerous times from New York. He smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and led us into the shadowy streets.
Welcomed by feral cats
We dragged our luggage for blocks in the Old City near Topkapi Palace, down chipped stairways, across garbage-strewn alleys. Finally, in a remote area, we stood in front of a building with no sign on it, and he smiled and said, “Here is very good room.” The key didn’t work and another man appeared to try to help him open the door. Nothing. Finally, he broke the glass of the front door, scaring all of the cats in the garbage cans around us. He put his hand in and turned the knob. We seemed to be the only ones in the “hotel,” but we were so exhausted that we just filed in. I asked him if our room in the hotel we booked would be available the next day, and he said, “Of course!” We quickly locked the door behind us.
Glories of Istanbul
After a day of walking around Topkapi, the opulent palace built in the 15th century by the Sultan Mehmet II and the center of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries. The grounds look out at the Golden Horn to the north, the Sea of Marmara to the south, and the Bosphorus strait to the northeast. We also visited Hagia Sofia, the breathtaking building that began as a church and was converted to a mosque in 1453, when Mehmet II conquered the city. Christian mosaic icons had covered the walls but were whitewashed when the Ottomans came. In 1934 they were restored when the government deemed the building to be secular. We also visited the Blue Mosque, across from Hagia Sofia, which remains a mosque and is the burial site for Ahmed I, who ruled in the 17th century.
No room at the inn, but we find a better one
We returned to our hotel, and, once again, no rooms were available. “That’s it,” I said, and we took off to find another place to stay, marching down the street with our bags. Our friend at the front desk was not happy, since I am sure that he could never find any other tourists who would stay at our house of horrors with the smashed front door.
We found an old hotel with rooms available. It was wondrous—a large living room, a kitchen, and a small patio overlooking the point at which the Golden Horn meets the Sea of Marmara. Everything was fine. Our trip could really begin. We spent the next day touring the city, visiting the Grand Bazaar, having drinks high on a hill at the Pierre Loti café, and then taking a cruise between the European and Asian sides of Turkey.
My daughter fell ill that night. We had to be at Sabiha Gokcen Airport on the Asian side of Istanbul at 6:00 a.m. to fly to central Turkey, so I was understandably worried. The reason for her illness became clear.
Top photo: Hagia Sofia: the glorious meeting of Christian and Islamic art and architecture.
What we do for Love
Thankfully, miserable experiences can make one appreciate anything that comes afterwards. I might not have appreciated finding a pharmacy that sold tampons so much if I hadn’t had to act out what they were in front of several elderly non-English speaking-Turkish men at a hotel desk at 5:00 a.m.
But before I found an open pharmacy at the airport, I had entertained the few locals and tourists in the old city when, because I was a mother, I had stopped people on the street to ask them if they had any tampons. My daughter waited half a block away because I think she found the scene absolutely humiliating, which it was, but I managed to cadge two of them from a lovely young Australian backpacker, who acted as if everyone asked her for tampons on the street early in the morning.
Fairies take wing
We flew to Kayseri and then hired a driver to take us to Goreme in Cappadocia. When we entered the grounds of our hotel, our journey really took wing. We stayed in a small cave with a window overlooking the fairy chimneys and with Turkish music wafting through the valley. The chimneys themselves are millions of years old. Ash from volcanoes hardened into a porous rock covered by a layer of basalt, and then erosion formed pillars. People discovered that the soft material inside the rock could be fashioned into caves. During the Roman period Christians hid in the caves, eventually building homes and cave churches, with beautiful religious color paintings within. Several of these survive, and we visited them. So Cappadocia: the food was lovely, the people who worked at the hotel were lovely, even the tourists were lovely.
Blocked antennae
But soon we were transported back to the real world. I wrote in a previous blog that I could feel the violence building between the Chinese soldiers and the Tibetans in Lhasa when I visited in 1987. Perhaps that radar fades with age, because I was 65 years old in 2013 and I had no idea that things would explode in modern Taksim Park in Istanbul soon after we returned from Cappadocia.
We booked a room in a modern small hotel a block from Taksim Square, the center of the New City in Istanbul. We strolled and rode the streetcar up and down steep Istiklal Street, a long block lined with shopping malls, restaurants, and street carts. The city here seemed completely different from the other side of the Bosphorus, with its ancient buildings and ruins.
We ate simit, the large Turkish bagels covered in sesame seeds; dondurma, a kind of chewy ice cream; flaky sweet baklava; and terrific Turkish salads. We passed stores whose goods were aimed at the tourists and fashionable Turkish women and men window-shopping on the wide avenue. It was the last day of our journey.
Violence erupts
We left Turkey at about noon on Friday, May 31, 2013. A few hours later, a peaceful group gathered in Taksim Square, part of a growing number of people protesting the economic policies of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and accusing his government of trying to impose conservative Islamic values on a secular state. Some said that Erdogan’s economic plans relied on expensive new housing, shopping plazas, and constant construction to the exclusion of the arts, public programs, and homes for people who needed them. Suddenly, police officers in riot gear and gas masks attacked the crowd with water hoses and tear gas. It was a debacle.
We continue to travel in countries with histories of violence and protest. We live in places that also have bomb threats, marches, and shootings. There are countries that I would not visit because their politics and policies are anathema to me, but I still want to see the world and hopefully to learn about people and their culture; in the end, that’s one of the few hopeful ways in which violence will diminish.
Endnote
Shortly after we returned, I posted a review of our original hotel in Istanbul. I described the disappearance of our reservation, our trek through the deserted streets, the smashed door, and the smiling man who lied to us. A while later I received a message from the smiling man, saying that he had been fired and expressing his displeasure with my review. So travel—and the Internet—can make the global become personal. I wasn’t sure if he would turn up on my doorstep, so I double locked my door for some time—but I still think that it’s all worth it.
