Follow My Finger: Discovering Southeastern Turkey

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“No Zena!” our driver, Joseph, commands as we gingerly shut the car door. The Australian girl, Anna, is the current subject of the reprimand. She gently closes the door, but Joseph merely grunts, opens his door, and makes a big show of walking around to Anna’s side to re-shut her door. “No Zena,” he dryly states.



With the door debacle behind us, I look around. Where are we, exactly? As if reading my mind, the other Australian girl thumbs her phone and says, “Hey, we are in Syria!” What? I thought we were in southeastern Turkey. “Well, at least Google thinks we are in Syria,” she adds as she shows me the blinking blue dot on the map. Yep, we are practically in Syria. This is the closest I have ever been to the middle east. Syria is literally on the other side of the decaying stone gate in front of which we stand.



“I turn around,” Joseph says before he peels away into a sea of white Renault cars. Pierce, me, and the two Australian girls, Anna and Maggie, stand at the gate to Syria. It’s not much to see, really. Just a heap of decrepit stones framing a dusty landscape. The heat is oppressive. The slightest wind is a welcome change--anything to cut the humidity for a brief second. “Alright,” Maggie says definitively as she starts to turn away from the gate. Now, where’s our driver? Not one of us had paid attention when he peeled away and we are lost in this dusty border post on the cusp of the middle east. We laugh nervously and begin peering into each white car within a few block radius. Is he here? No. How about this car? No.



A distant, but familiar, “hellooooo,” rings out across the space between us and the wall. On top of the wall, stands our driver. He is waving his hands, looking like a mad man. We sheepishly join him on the other side of the wall, joking that when he says “I turn around” he actually means that he will meet us in Syria. No passports needed. We must simply scale a wall to get to our ride. We apologize and he merely says, “Om” as he places his hands in front of him in the prayer pose. “What?” asks Anna. Joseph doesn’t miss a beat and replies, “for Buddha.” That clarifies things, thanks.



We pile back into the car and this begins our days with Joseph. He’s a character and his strange behaviors will pepper our time in southeastern Turkey with funny memories that will shape my impression of this corner of the world. Maybe it’s the kind of thing where you had to be there and maybe it’s not. I don’t want to extrapolate too much about Turkish culture--or, more specifically, about southeastern Turkey from our time with Joseph. He might have just been a wacky guy. Or perhaps fasting for one month per year for 70 years in extreme heat changes you. Either way, Joseph had many funny catch phrases that are my only clues to interpreting what we saw in southeastern Turkey.



We pull into yet-another unmarked site. Joseph cuts the engine and says, “I stay. You go,” as he motions to the gravely hillside. “Follow my finger,” he says as he points his index finger into the air--seemingly at nothing. “You see? You go.” And with that we are again in another southeastern Turkey spot. This time, though, we are in luck. Anna is doing her PhD dissertation on this particular site, Gobekli Tepe. We stumble around the recently-excavated spot. Gobekli Tepe is billed as the “world’s oldest temple” and dates back 12,000 years--predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years. This site, this dusty, hole in the ground is turning archeology on its head, says Anna. Archeologists have formerly held the assumption that we became civilized when cast off our hunter-gatherer ways and we took up agriculture, but Gobekli Tepe indicates that our hunter gather ancestors might have been much more sophisticated than we have ever imagined. There’s not really much to see, actually. Tourism hasn’t come to this part of Turkey--even if Gobekli Tepe is a really important find in the story of human history. The entrance is guarded by a ten-year-old boy in dirty sweat pants. He seems to play the part of ticket taker, guard, and tour guide. He follows us around, kicking a mangled plastic bottle, pointing at rock art, and saying, “fox.” It does look like a fox, I think. He’s got that much of the tour down. “Fox.” Fortunately, Anna is able to better explain what we are seeing. There’s still so much unknown about this space in human history. What were they doing here? Well, besides chiseling out pictures of a “fox.”



Back in the car, Joseph is at it again. We are racing down the highway in the setting sun. Even in the intense heat and humidity, he insists on rolling down all of our windows and never touches the functioning air conditioner. We also appear to have a perfectly functional radio, but Joseph prefers to sing. “Clap!” he commands and he sings. The chorus of the song involves him putting his finger into the air and we sing, “ohy, ohy, ohy, mama slappy.” There’s no way to tell what we might be saying. We might be damning someone or we might be singing a nursery rhyme.



Joseph is fasting and every day at 5pm he instructs Pierce, whom he calls “nephew,” to retrieve ice for him. Joseph then fashions this ice block into a sort of melting hat that he wears atop his head. At 8pm each day, he can break his fast and he guzzles water that “nephew” dutifully retrieves from the cooler. On our last day with Joseph, we stop at a roadside fruit stand. He buys half of a watermelon and distributes it between us, giving Maggie the biggest piece. “I’m not eating all of this!” Maggie protests, but we merely laugh at her and take a picture. Standing in the setting sun, we sweat--dripping and sticky. “It’s so hot,” Maggie says. This Joseph seems to understand. To our surprise, he grabs Maggie and in one quick--seemingly practiced--motion he stuffs the melting ice down the back of her shirt. She shrieks. “No afraid, no afraid” Joseph implores. He laughs devilishly. This just got strange. I am next and then Pierce. He ices my back, as I scream and wiggle away. “Come on, Anna,” we chant, suddenly energized by the strangeness of the situation. Join us. “I’m not taking part in this ritual!” Anna says, but it’s too late. Joseph is on her. She runs, but he grabs her hair and pushes the ice into her back.



Riding back in the car in the setting sun, singing, clapping on command, and feeling the hot air on my face, I smile to myself. This is anything but a typical tour and Joseph isn’t much of a tour guide. I can tell that his catch phrases will be part of our conversations for years to come--inside jokes. And what’s more, I know this kind of travel is fleeting. In a few short years, this part of Turkey will open up to tourists. Signs will be erected to describe the sites, air-conditioned vans will travel these roads, and a professional guide will explain everything in practiced English. Gone will be the hot car, the bumpy roads, the confusing sites, and people like Joseph. I feel so lucky to have visited this part of the world before it is on the tourist map. Gone will be the mayhem and trials of travel. It will be easy--and there’s something to be said for that too, but it will not be this place. To be uncomfortable, to be off the map, to find something undiscovered--that is why I travel--and people like Joseph are the best kind of characters in that story.

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Comments

[Sammie]

Beth/Nephew
How did you find out about this Syrian tourist trap?

[Beth's Mom]

True Traveler!!
I love that you embrace the people you meet and see the beauty in the non-tourist sites. You have the heart of a true traveler!!