Southern Hospitality

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Continuing on our route south, we caught a bus to Söke, about an hour below Selçuk, on what we thought had been a tip from another traveler. Did Jenny misunderstand the name of the city? Was it a cruel joke? When we got to the bus station, it became obvious why Söke doesn't make the guide books. İt's a relatively small inland town, mostly concrete and red tile roofs, no real city center, and yet more dilapidated neighborhoods.

By the odd looks and blank stares, we guessed foreigners were a rare occurrence. A few people who spoke English asked "why are you here?" and "how did you find this place?" Despite their confusion as to why we would be there in the first place, everyone was very hospitable and eager to help us find whatever we were looking for. Usually we weren't looking for anything in particular, which only added to their bewilderment.

After a helpful local pointed us to a hole-in-the-wall hotel, we dropped our packs and took the opportunity to explore this rural Turkish town not infiltrated by tourism. Like everywhere else in Turkey, stray dogs and cats put aside their differences to beg together for scraps everywhere we ate. We felt a little strange eating during Ramadan when everyone else was fasting, but Turks continually waved off our concerns saying that "it's okay, everyone knows you're foreigners, it's no problem." We thought about trying to fast with the locals, but we soon recognized that we were both a lot happier--and a lot nicer--with a little food in our stomachs.

We spotted a mosque on a hill above the town and headed there to see if we could get a bird's eye view of the area. The dirt road zig-zagged through poor neighborhoods with chickens, goats, and children scattered about between unmended fences and open doorways. A bunch of kids playing soccer stopped their game to follow us up a ways, reciting the only English word they knew--"Hello! Hello!"

At the top of the hill we could see the whole city--schools, playgrounds, mosques, apartment buildings, fires burning in crop fields in the distance. A young girl played in the gravel beside us with her rag doll as we sat watching the sky slowly darken.

Later that night there was a series of three earthquakes in İsmir, a couple hours north of Söke. We felt the rumbling but weren't quite sure at the time whether it was Jenny's stomach or the amorous neighbors upstairs.

After an otherwise quiet night in Söke, we consulted our map and decided to head to the beach town of Bodrum. The bus to Bodrum was like a Turkish soccer mom van, except the driver was smoking cigarettes out the window, taking fares and giving change, talking on his cel phone, operating a stick shift, and dodging pedestrians--all at once. Any driver this talented was sure to get us there in once piece.

Bodrum is famous for its yachting and nightlife, and existed essentially only for tourists. After Söke it seemed like a good time to relax, drink wine at a beachfront cafe, and savor the view of the castle and the turquoise bay (ie, be good tourists). It soon became clear that this was all anyone ever did in Bodrum, and we were ready to move on to Antalya the next day.

We still had to feed ourselves in the meantime, so we managed to pry ourselves free of the tourist strip and found a tiny cafe on a side street that looked more like the front room of somebody's home. They didn't have a menu--you just looked at the trays of what they'd cooked and pointed to the things you wanted. The danger of this was that we wanted a little bit of everything, which they were more than happy to provide. We spent the rest of the evening recovering in the hostel.

After Bodrum, an overnight bus dropped us off on an empty street in the middle of the "old town" of Antalya at 6 in the morning. With no map of the city and no Lonely Planet to guide us, we asked the first person we saw--a street sweeper--for the nearest "pansiyone". He guided us a few blocks through narrow cobblestone streets to a small hostel with the most important amenity at that moment: an open door. The man at the reception didn't speak a word of English, but luckily (and bizarrely) spoke French; through Jenny's fumbling we were able to get a room with a hot shower were we were able to catch up on the sleep we couldn't get sitting upright on the bumpy bus.

İn Antalya we met up with Kim, the daughter of a friend of Randy's aunt, who had been living there with a family for about a month learning Turkish. Finally we had someone who could answer all the dumb questions we'd been waiting to ask, like: why are all the trees painted white on the bottom? İs it bad that we haven't been leaving tips? Why do so many men walk arm in arm? (A: maybe insects?, no, and why not?)

Kim was kind enough to invite us to dinner with her host family, and they were kind enough to accept our offerings of chicken and baklava. Their humble apartment was on the second floor of a building just off a main road where we shopped for bread, pilaf, and miscellaneous dinner items. The family (mother, father, one son and three daughters, plus Kim) shared three bedrooms, a living room, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom. Privacy is truly a luxury.

In the kitchen under the mother's instructions, we chopped vegetables and massaged spices into the chicken. The two older children busied themselves at the computer while the two youngest girls played rock-paper-scissors with us and vied for the mother's attention. Kim acted as linguistic and cultural translator as we learned more about their lives. The mother was eager to teach us a few words of Turkish that came in particularly handy while cooking--"smells good," "drinking glass," and "trashcan"--which of course we promptly forgot. Dinner was served on a tablecloth on the livingroom floor, and the nine of us sat around the edges and partook gratefully of this hearty homecooked meal. After dessert and tea, we said our goodbyes and thanked them for their hospitality.

The next day Kim took us to the beach, where Randy dove into the clear Mediterranean water, exposing his flawless snow white complexion. Jenny and Kim stayed on the shore, chatting and enjoying the view. That afternoon we also enjoyed some delicious Turkish treats like pudding and some strange sugary mixture of fruit, chickpeas, coconut, cinnamon, and various other odds and ends. We figure that all the walking we do with our heavy packs makes up for these sweet indulgences (optimistic? us? never).

That night we took our third and final overnight bus to İstanbul, where our flight left for Cairo. We were sad to be leaving Turkey so soon, but excited about the next leg of our trip. Here's where our itinerary becomes a wide open door, where anything and everything is possible.

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