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When we leave Cappadocia for eastern Turkey there's a definite feel that you have left tourist Turkey. The roads suddenly deteriorate and the villages start to become more rustic. We are still in the land of men sitting around drinking chay or playing OK which is sort of like gin rummy with dominoes. They don't seem particularly bothered when we roll up and join them for tea, in fact they go out of their way to bring extra chairs and include us in their circle. The mayor of one village explains that they are all farmers and once they have tended to their beasts in the morning and set them free to graze theirs nothing left to do until evening which is why they sit drinking tea.
There are several mountain ranges in eastern Turkey and we spend our days climbing up and over passes on back roads with sweeping bends. The scenery is quite varied sometimes there are alpine meadows, sometimes we are right up above the snow line with mounds of snow still piled up by the side of the road, sometimes we go straight through the mountains in deep rocky gorges. On the tops of some of
the passes the temperature gets down to -2C, pretty chilly.
We are mostly passing through small villages but occasionally we have to negotiate a big town. We manage to get lost in one but its actually quite fun the locals are enthusiastic about giving directions; first they have a con-flab amongst themselves to decide which is the right way then walk to the end of the road with you so they can point out precisely where yo have to go.
From Cappadocia we head over to Kangal driving right past Erciyes Dagi - the volcano which erupted all the ash that allowed Cappadocia and the fairy towers to be created. Kangal is where they breed the dogs that guard the sheep and there are kennels all over the town. But more importantly for us its where the flesh eating fish live in thermal pools. They are actually used medicinally for all sort of skin conditions but they do have a public pool which they hand over to us. Its a very strange experience; the small fish gather on your skin and gently browse, it feels like someone is tickling you, it's OK as long as you don't look
down and see the wriggling mass of black bodies on you. The bigger fish home in on you like torpedoes and head-butt you which is sometimes quite painful. .
Travelling from Kangal to Ispir we stop off at Divrigi to marvel at 3 amazing carved stone doorways in a nunnery/hospital. They really are impressive and enormous, the carving is incredibly deep so the finest details are still visible 800 years after they were sculpted. They are on the top of the hill above town but its tricky getting to them as its market day so all the cobbled streets are lined with market stalls - we end up driving straight though the market, nobody seemed to mind too much.
Then, really excitingly, we drive alongside the river Euphrates. Its another name from my childhood that conjures up all sorts of images; “the Tigris and the Euphrates, The Cradle of Civilisation” - they always seemed to be in such far off places and so ancient yet here I am picnicking beside the Euphrates in a wild flower meadow..
From Ispir to Yusufedi we get our first proper dirt road of the trip along a spectacular river valley. The
ride is made more challenging by the recent rain and all the road works - they are building a dam and are going to flood the valley. Rounding one bend we get diverted up a steep dirt hill and straight through the centre of a small village on a tiny single track road - fascinating we are almost in the houses we are so close to the villagers going about their everyday chores.
In the Georgian Valleys down to Kars the rock formations are amazing - great huge slabs of gnarled rock, the strata all twisted and sometimes even upright. They look hard and ancient, it must have taken some strong force of nature to twist these rocks into this shape. We are right on the eastern edge of Turkey near the border with Armenia and Georgia. It really feels different here, it doesn't feel like the same country that contains Istanbul. The houses are tiny stone buildings with turf roofs and smoke curling out of the chimneys, but they all have satellite dishes attached. And there are old churches and hilltop fortresses everywhere. This land used to be part of Armenia which was the first country to adopt
Christianity as the state religion hence the old churches.
We end our stay in Turkey on a cultural note with a visit to Ani, the ancient capital of Armenia. Inhabited for 3000 odd years and an important point on the Silk Road. To get there you pass through a tiny mud hut village and suddenly at the end there are enormous fortress walls enclosing a vast area. Inside most of the ancient city has disappeared and there are just a few enigmatic ruins dotting a wind-swept plateau. They are mostly the remains of churches and mosques, some have exquisite carvings of crosses tucked away inside, one still has every inch of its interior covered in frescos and the oldest, from 1BC, was once a Zoroastrian Fire Temple. At the edge of the plateau is a deep river valley and on the other side Armenia.
Now we are as far east as we can go in Turkey and tomorrow we head into Georgia.
PS - thanks for the comments - keep them coming its nice to hear back from you.
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Paul
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Fantastic blog...
... keep it up, it's almost like being there with you...