Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle,
but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.
— Homer, The Iliad
EpisodeWhen the light is right, the sea around Crete is dark indeed, a rich cobalt verging on navy, like dark slate, covered with the whitest froth. The aptness of Homer’s epithet can be tested just by looking over the side of any ferry on a sunny day. It’s like looking into a deep cup filled with dark wine, in a dimly lit room.
Any ferry, because many places in the Greek islands own a slab of this slaty sea. To pass across it is to skim the surface of myth, deep and mysterious.
The sea also has its merrier moods, gleaming like copper sulphate, turquoise or lapis lazuli, even aquamarine and shades of green, sometimes all visible at once depending which way you face.
Right now the sea was like liquid silk, a pale turquoise tinged with pink by the approaching dawn. The hills of Rhodes were ranked in silhouette against the eastern sky, each peering over the shoulders of the rank in front. The hills were hazy and mysterious in the distance, dark and solid near at hand. As the ship moved on, their shapes changed like the shapes seen behind tightly closed eyelids. But my eyes were open.
I was on my way from Rhodes to Crete, riding the Greek ferry Vitsentos Kornaros, a 10-hour journey that had started in the dark before Rhodes’ dawn and would end in the glare of the Cretan afternoon.
I was in the second week of a seven-week trip. After frantic activity at Anzac weekend and enforced inactivity over the Orthodox Easter, I had finally settled into my normal travelling pace. I had spent two nights in Rhodes and could happily have spent another, but the urge to move had come on me so I had packed and gone. Through the silent streets of the sleeping city, out through an ancient gate, and down the docks, drawn like a moth to the bright lights and gaping door of the waiting ferry.
Once through the door I bore right, handing my ticket to the man by the inner hatch. He didn’t even look up, merely tore off the passage section and shoved the stub back into my hand.
I climbed the stairs and moved forward, looking for the luggage room. There wasn’t one. I sighed and hitched my pack into a more comfortable position. I would be shepherding it for the next ten hours.
By the time the ferry pulled away at 4:32 I was leaning on the stern rail, watching the lights of Rhodes Old Town draw together in the darkness and the lights of the New Town come up and slip back. My pack was safely hitched to a seat nearby, freeing me to participate in the experience.
The ferry took a long turn left, slowly orbiting the New Town that filled the north tip of the island, so it was quite a long time before all the city lights actually began to be behind us. But as the ship turned it was also moving out to sea to clear a shoulder of the island, so the lights slowly shrank and merged into the haze.
Looking up an hour into the trip, I saw a fingernail-clipping moon high above the dark bulk of the island. It actually rose about the time I was boarding the ferry, but I had been so engrossed in the lights on the island that I didn’t really notice the lights in the sky behind me.
The moon’s moment passed quickly as the eastern skyline brightened. The sky above Rhodes turned red, then salmon pink, and in a scene out of Homer, young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone over the serried ridges, blushing at what she saw. I stood enthralled, taking in this moment of legend and trying to fix it in my memory forever.
These are the moments that make up for the hassles of travel, the moments when you are where you need to be, when you need to be there, with nothing that needs doing — except enjoy it. If you’ve read my previous trip reports you’ll find such moments in them here and there. Coming out of the subway into New York (2000). Dolphins dancing in the sunset at Monkey Mia (2001). Exploring Thermopylae on my way to Delphi (2002). Sitting on the bank of the Seine on a magical evening (2003). Sitting in the window seat of a Roman house on a sunny afternoon (2004). And now.
When I started the job that pays for these holidays, it was fun and novel. Then fun. Then challenging. But for two years now it has been a hassle, something I stick at because the alternatives seem worse and because there’s always been the hope that what gets bad may get better. Because the problem is not the whole job, just parts of it.
In the end the holidays make the difference between going and staying, and these moments help make the holidays special.
One thing that is essential to my style of travel is mobility — the ability to walk or run from A to B. But during the writing of this report I suddenly lost that mobility: when walking, I would develop pain across my chest and down my arms that forced me to walk slowly and stop to rest every few metres. Then one night a few days later, I collapsed with a heart attack. It took the insertion of a sleeve into an artery to put me to rights.
It is hard to say which terrified me more: the loss of mobility or the nearness of death. Fortunately the two events were connected, and the treatment of my coronary artery gave me back my mobility — probably better than before, as I had been seedy for quite some time. However, the heart attack does close some doors. I suspect it would not be prudent to walk the Grand Canyon a third time, for example, although it may be premature to say that. But brisk aerobic walking to get around places will be fine — and good for me.
However! On this glorious morning in Greece, all that was still many months ahead. I felt good, and I was on the move through a landscape out of a dream. The ferry thrummed busily through the dawn, doing the hard work, leaving the esthetic appreciation to me. There was nothing else to desire.
Contents… a man’s life breath cannot come back again —
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.
— Homer, The Iliad
OutboundThursday, 21 April 2005
Summer came late to Melbourne in 2005, and the weather remained indifferent all the way through February, normally the best month of the year. Then, as if to apologise, the city turned on a vintage autumn. The days stayed warm and dry long past the point where the weather normally plunges into a dank murk. Only the short days and the growing chill in the mornings marked the approach of winter.
After a good lunch with my workmates, during which I went through several glasses of wine, I left work early and walked home in a merry mood. It was a warm, sunny afternoon with just a touch of briskness in the northerly breeze. I stopped while crossing the Yarra, traditional demarcation between “home” and “work”, to spend several minutes leaning on the balustrade of the bridge, just enjoying the moment and letting it sink in.
My life is bounded by two rivers, the Whanganui and the Yarra, the one surging through the city of my birth, the other winding through the city of my adoption, each muddy, each crossed by striding bridges that carry my life’s road on towards the horizon. I never cross either river lightly, though I have crossed the Yarra more than 400 times every year since 2000.
My flight didn’t leave till tomorrow afternoon, so I faced a leisurely start to my holiday. It was an odd sensation after seven intense months at work. The last four months had been especially tough, with a lot of pressure from deadlines and short-handedness, but now I was on the brink of more than seven weeks of freedom. Freedom to be my own boss, to go where I wanted, when I wanted. Freedom to say “no” to things I didn’t want to do, and make it stick. And this bridge marked the beginning of that freedom. It was a moment worth hanging onto.
Eventually I walked on. It was time to go home.
In past years, I was packed and ready days in advance, but this year I had dithered over what to take. In the end I had left it all for today. When I finished packing around 21:00, I discovered I’d packed my standard 14 kg load — 9.6 kg in the main pack and 4.4 kg in the day pack. The process had become that routine.
Once packed, I forced myself to sleep.
Friday, 22 April 2005
In the morning, I realised that I had no spare nonrechargeable battery for my new camera, just two “en-l5” rechargeables. Although two batteries should be enough, I decided to play safe and made a lightning visit to town.
I needed a “cp-l” battery, but such a thing was not to be found. In the end I bought a third en-l5 and went home.
By 11:33 there was nothing left to do. My flight had been moved from 16:00 to 15:50, so I called a taxi and at 11:45 took the first step of a journey of tens of thousands of miles.
The taxi was prompt. I like to take a “doorstep” photo when setting out. On this occasion, just as the shutter snapped the taxi pulled up. As in 2004, I decided to consider this to be a good omen.
Taxi driver Tian managed to hit every traffic light on Victoria Parade & Elizabeth St on the way out, but we still got to the airport around 12:35. The check-in counters for my flight weren’t open yet.
When the counters opened, I checked the pack through to İstanbul then went for a wander through the terminal looking for an adjustable elastic belt. No luck. Had a shepherd’s pie, veggies and a capucchino for lunch.
About 13:30 I went through to Customs. On the other side I changed my leftover money. AUD43 became SGD46 — the exchange rate was OK, but the $5 commission sort of killed it. Never mind, it was more than enough Singapore cash for my purposes.
I’m always amazed at the way airports simultaneously swallow time and expand it. The 55 minutes from arrival to customs were filled with things to do yet dragged by, the 140 minutes from then to the scheduled takeoff time were void of interest and alternately dragged and shot by. Somehow the waits in the boarding lounge and then aboard the plane waiting for takeoff always last longest. Every aircraft crew seems to believe they can cram 400 people aboard a Jumbo in 10 minutes and still take off on time. Experience shows they are optimists.
The flight made good time to Singapore. Once off the plane I made a beeline through the transit lounge for the hotel reception and booked a shower. Either they’d changed the layout or they had more than one set of showers, as I wound up in a different place to the last few times. No matter, the water was hot and the showers were clean.
Fresh and changed, I found I was short of time and had to hustle back through the airport to catch the flight to Dubai.
I had aisle seats on both flights, which made using the toilet convenient. On the Dubai leg I was next to a Turkish man and his wife. She spoke some English but he spoke none.
The flight was pretty bumpy. We no sooner left one patch of turbulence than we hit the next.
Crossed India on a line from somewhere about 50 km north of Chennai to 50 km south of Mumbai. Went back and peered out the window near the toilets but didn’t glimpse anything below: total cloud cover.
Dubai’s airport is big and glitzy. The gate area has palms with hundreds of small lights lining their trunks. Frozen fireworks of light surround the tops of support columns. Archways overlook the concourse. Armed soldiers march up and down.
We were herded off the plane, along endless corridors, and through a security checkpoint. After that we were left to make our own way to the departure lounge. There was no time to look for a shower: I barely had time to use the toilets. The “western” toilets were US-style, filled almost to the brim with water. But as well as toilet paper, each had a hose. I had an extremely hasty cat-bath and was headed for the departure lounge when I realised I was missing my jacket. Last seen disappearing into the x-ray scanner at security.
After some dismay I threw myself upon the mercy of a guard who had a little English. He escorted me back up to the security checkpoint, where the errant jacket reposed in isolation upon a table. Whew!
I made it to the departure lounge with barely five minutes to spare — but the boarding was delayed and, as it turned out, I had plenty of time in hand.
We veered to avoid Iraq, crossing Arabia, Jordan and Syria before hitting the Mediterranean around dawn.
İstanbulSaturday, 23 April 2005
By 07:42 I was waiting for my pack to appear on the luggage carousel. I’d made good time through the airport. Kiwis don’t need a visa to enter Turkey — as a bunch of Aussies who’d trailed me through the corridors (“he looks like he knows where to go”) to Passport Control discovered. They squawked indignantly when the officers stamped me through but ordered them off to buy visas.
I searched out an exchange booth and converted two USD50 notes into ₺134. But it was wasted effort, as I immediately stumbled upon an ATM and pulled another ₺500 from that. Turkey had sawn six zeroes off their currency since my last visit in 2002.
Baggage in hand, I headed out through the main doors, looking for the light rail terminal. Somewhat to my surprise, I found it quickly and it had plenty of room — İstanbul’s public transport is notoriously overcrowded. I claimed four seats and used them as a workspace to reshuffle stuff between the day pack and the main pack, trimming the load.
I lost my spacious nest when the light rail reached its first stop and dozens of locals poured aboard. Suddenly I was crammed into a single seat, pack on my knees, surrounded by men with big moustaches who spoke no English.
I was carrying a copy of the English-language Straits Times that I’d picked up at Changi and hadn’t thought to bin as yet. One of the newcomers was trying to read it upside down, so I grinned and gifted it to him. His gratitude cooled a little when he found he couldn’t read it, but he thumbed through it anyway.
Since the light rail doesn’t go where I wanted to go, I left the light rail at Zeytinburnu to transfer to the tram. The setup was a bit rough and ready but I stumbled across to the tramstop and bought a jeton. Unfortunately the tram was packed. I managed to squeeze aboard, but found myself ill at ease in the press of bodies. If I wore my pack on my back, there was no way to guard it from thieves, but if I carried it in front of me I was lurched clumsily around whenever the tram stopped and people pushed on and off. I could not reach a corner through the press of bodies, and since either door could open I could not even be sure of getting out of the way.
The second time the pressure forced me out onto the platform at a stop, I gave up. There was a taxi rank down on Divan Yolu, so I crossed a pedestrian walkway and picked the taxi that looked least villainous.
My booking was with Hotel Saba on Sehit Mehmet Pasa. I gave the address to the driver and pointed out the location on my map. I expected him to take me straight down Divan Yolu and via the Hippodrome but instead he swung off down towards the Marmara, then up through the maze of tiny streets below the Blue Mosque. We backed and filled a few times before eventually grinding to a halt. He was stumped: he couldn’t find the street. But he was sure it was nearby.
I paid him off and set off to find my elusive hotel.
Eventually I found Sehit Mehmet Pasa #8 — a two-storey residence. It was an unlikely-looking location for a hotel, but I knocked anyway.
A head poked out of an upper window. “Hotel Saba?” I asked it. The man shook his head: no English. But then a woman poked her head out, and in well-practiced English told me I was in the wrong Sehit Mehmet Pasa. I needed to go uphill and around a few corners. She gave precise directions, which I promptly forgot, but I thanked her and set off. I got the feeling I was not the first Hotel Saba seeker to come here.
I wound around a bit, heading generally uphill, until more or less accidentally I stumbled across the correct street. 50 metres along it I found my hotel, which looked nothing like a house but was altogether a more substantial-seeming establishment than I’d expected.
Half an hour later, freshly showered and wearing clean clothes, with my dirty laundry stuffed in my day pack, I sauntered out to look around. I wasn’t too sure where I was, but I headed further along the street to where there was some sort of park. And when I got to the corner I had to laugh: my obscurely-located hotel practically overlooked the Hippodrome! If I had only read my map better months ago when booking the hotel I could have saved myself a lot of hassle.
The Hippodrome, Constantinople’s one-time horse racing mecca, has always been busy. Once chariots crashed and bumped their way around here. Last time I saw it, it was choked with cars bumper to bumper. It was still bumper to bumper but now the vehicles were larger: tour buses. They ranged from gleaming fleet flagships to belching junkers fit only for the knackers. If it had wheels, an engine, and seats, it was there.
I was gobsmacked. I knew Anzac Day was going to be big, but this was off the scale! Surely all these weren’t here just for Anzac Day?
And they weren’t. Not the way I’d been thinking, anyway. The Anzacs are a minority even at Gallipoli these days. Most of these buses would be carrying Turks down the coast to celebrate their national day.
As I stood there, a cold wind sprang up and it began to spit with rain. I quickly pulled out my travel umbrella, but the wind defeated it, so I retreated into a doorway until the rain eased. Fortunately it was only a brief delay. I immediately put an industrial-strength umbrella on my mental shopping list. I was carrying a lightweight raincoat, but I prefer to stop raindrops before they hit my head.
I walked down the length of the spine of the Hippodrome, letting myself realise I was back in İstanbul. I was last here two years, seven months ago, nearing the end of a six-week marathon through Italy, Greece, Turkey and Egypt. It felt like I hadn’t been away.
Apart from the general shape of the park, the location of the Hippodrome is marked by surviving decorations from the spina, the raised hub of the track. At the west end is the “rough stone column”, once a monument sheathed in bronze. The bronze was stripped from it during one or another sack of Constantinople, but the stone core (possibly dating back 1700 years to Constantine’s time) was not worth stealing.
In the middle is the “twisted” or “serpentine” column, the most storied survivor. It was made from the melted-down weapons and armour of the Persians after the battle of Plateia in 479 BC. The Greeks made a monumental column of three intertwined snakes supporting a large cauldron, and set it up at Delphi. Constantine pinched the tripod for his new capital (there’s no record of what happened to the cauldron). 1400 years later, a drunken Polish diplomat chopped the heads off the snakes. Part of one head is now in the Archaological Museum. No doubt other fragments still lie buried in the Hippodrome. After 2500 years of rain and mutilation it’s still impressive.
At the east end is the oldest monument, an Egyptian obelisk (minus its bottom third), more than a thousand years older than Plateia. Once it stood before the Temple of Hatshepsut (Deir-el-Bahri) at Thebes (Luxor) and commemorated the crossing of the Euphrates during one of Thutmose III’s campaigns. The carved obelisk, though broken through mishandling, is still crisp and sharp after 3500 years. The Theodosian stonework that supports it, less than half its age, is rather less well preserved.
At a shop halfway along the Hippodrome, I stopped briefly. Warm gear lay on display outside: just the thing for tomorrow night’s vigil. I’d always planned to buy some throwaway warm things in İstanbul to save the bother of dragging my own gear from Australia. In the event they weren’t quite as cheap as I’d expected, only a little cheaper than similar gear in Australia, but my gloves, scarf and beanie still set me back only 20 lira and I hadn't had to carry them with me from Australia.
Booty safely tucked into day pack, I walked past Kaiser Wilhelm’s fountain and stood at the heart of Constantinople. Ahead and to my right was Haghia Sophia, once the spiritual heart of the Byzantines, its name softened by time and Turks into “Ayasofya”. Beside it was a square beyond which once stood the gates of the Great Palace of the Roman Emperors. To my left was the crumbled remnant of the Million, once a dramatic four-posted gazebo arch that marked the starting point of all roads in the eastern half of the Roman Empire.
Even after the coming of the Turks, this area kept its importance. The Sultan built his own palace on the hill beyond Ayasofya, and his architect built a mosque to challenge Aysofya on the opposite side of the square.
There have been many imperial capitals, but not even Rome can rival Constantinople’s unbroken run of nearly 1700 years. It was founded to rule an empire. Even after conquest by the Crusaders it was an imperial capital, although the Latin Empire it ruled was minute and short-lived. Four empires (Roman, Byzantine, Latin and Ottoman) were ruled from this spot, and three of them were the largest and most influential empires in the world during their time.
This spot gained new importance in the seventies, when a shop here became an essential stop on the hippie trail. Now the mediocre Lale Restaurant, it survives by cashing in on its past glory. It has four decks of signs above it, each shouting “Pudding Shop”. But the name is all that the hippies would recognise: the place has been extensively renovated.
I went in and ordered some soup, bread and coffee for lunch. The food was OK, if overpriced, but the aura of the hippie days had been extinguished, probably a long time ago. It was just another restaurant.
Refreshed, I set off for the port. I had my warm gear but I was also seeking a length of heavy plastic to use at Anzac as a groundsheet if the ground was damp, or a shelter if it rained. Given the weather — it was raining again — it might be needed. Several shops had the exact stuff I wanted protecting their wares from the rain. I’d asked a couple where they got the plastic. One finally directed me to try at the Spice Market.
Walking down past the Sublime Port in the rain, I was accosted by a man selling umbrellas. One was a sturdy golfing umbrella, and on impulse I bargained him down from the 25 lira asking price to a more reasonable 15 lira — still a little dear by local standards, but fair enough by mine.
I gave him the money and opened my prize — and the rain stopped. Instantly and permanently. It never rained on me again while I owned that umbrella!
I closed the brolly and secured it in the straps of my day pack and headed on down to the port.
The Spice Market, in the shadow of the Yeni Cami (“New” Mosque), was crowded and busy, but did not sell plastic sheeting. However, one shop directed me across the square to another shop that had exactly what I was after. Three square metres of tubed clear sheeting cost me 4.5 lira and wadded up into a manageable bundle. I could unroll it and sit on it, or slit one side of the tube and open it into a 3 x 2 metre makeshift tent. (In the event I used it as a cushion to stop a bolt from the foot of a light tower from digging into my back.)
I headed back towards the Hippodrome, with a brief stop at the original Turkish Delight shop to buy a couple of boxes of my favourite sweet.
This time I walked clockwise around Ayasofya, past a street filled with restored Ottoman houses. Most of these belonged to an expensive hotel, the Ayasofya Pansiyonlari. The street was charming, and the location, with Ayasofya dominating one side, was unbeatable. I decided that if I was under budget when I returned to İstanbul in June, I would stay here, and damn the budget.
Down the hill in Istiklal Caddesi, the centre of the backpacker ghetto, I found the Fez Bus office. I wasn’t able to get much sense out of them as to what to expect tomorrow morning, but I did buy a commemorative t-shirt to wear.
Istiklal Caddesi was teeming with backpackers. The paving had been torn up and the mass of busy feet had turned the drenched surface into a quagmire. But every shop was open and doing a roaring trade.
I dropped my washing off at the “Star” laundry I’d also used in 2002 — I would have preferred to do it myself, but Turkey still has not embraced the laundromat concept, just the label. Some places do have “Self Service” signs outside and coin operated machines inside, but the machines will still be operated by the attendant and you will have no choice but to leave your gear with them and pick it up later.
On my way back to the hotel, I paused at a souvenir stand by a corner of the Blue Mosque to buy a lucky glass eye. A small one. I bought one in a silver setting in 2002 but it fell out, so I needed a replacement.
On impulse I turned up Divan Yolu, where I found a bookshop (Galeri Kaiseri, 11 & 58 Divan Yolu) selling a range of guide books. I went in to look around, and the salesman asked me what I was after. In a spirit of mischief I told him the Blue Guide to İstanbul, expecting a blank look or a sad shake of his head. Instead he said “of course” and led me over to a rotary display groaning beneath the weight of its blue-jacketed cargo.
For the traveller who wants the lowdown on that ruin sticking out of the turf over there, the Blue Guide to İstanbul is the acme, the perfect reference to carry. I owned a copy back in 2002, but foolishly discarded it to save weight when leaving for Cairo. When I went to buy a replacement it was unavailable in Australian bookshops.
Even so, I debated putting off buying a copy now. It was heavy (340 grams) and I’d not use it today. I’d have to carry it in my luggage for many weeks. But in the end I decided to take what serendipity had handed to me.
There was some sort of free family entertainment going on in the Hippodrome. I don’t recall noticing it when I passsed through earlier. Perhaps it was not set up then, but more likely I just had my attention fixed on the shops and dodging the buses.
Back at the hotel I sorted out my booty, set my alarm clock and iPaq for 16:00, and lay down for a quickie siesta. I was feeling alarmingly tired. The adrenalin charge of being back in İstanbul was already wearing off.
When the alarms went off I toyed with rolling over and having a real snooze, but then self-discipline kicked in. I had only this afternoon in İstanbul to make arrangements: if I slept, I would be off-balance until Selçuk. Also, I wanted to shake off the jet lag as soon as possible. So I forced myself to get up and headed out again.
On Istiklal Caddesi my laundry was not ready yet, so I killed time by having dinner outside the “Metropolis” restaurant and taking in the buzz. The street was even more crowded now, if possible. The people were mostly young, mostly “Western”, and mostly wore the expensive casual gear that marks the backpacking ex-student who is having a gap year overseas. Sitting in my own scruffy travel gear I initially envied them for their casual elegance, but eavesdropping on their clueless conversations soon turned my attitude around. The anglophones were mostly Kiwi or Australian, but there were plenty of Brits and Americans, and a heavy leavening of European accents, particularly German.
Sitting at an unstable table in a muddy street of wooden buildings, it was hard to credit that I was in one of the oldest parts of a city older than any found Down Under, older than any in America, older than London or Berlin, and only a century younger, in fact, than ancient Rome itself.
Part of the explanation, of course, is that for much of that period Sultanahmet was the site of the Byzantine Great Palace. Roman Emperors may have dined on this very spot centuries ago, but it was only after the Turks captured Constantinople that ordinary people got to live here. Almost nothing recognisable remains of the Palace now, just some fragments built into the walls and a few mosaic floors, and yet much of the stone around me probably came from the Palace. Marble and large blocks were hauled away to build Turkish mosques and palaces, but nobody would have bothered lugging brick and concrete rubble far from the spots where they lay in such profusion. The ruins on the massive terraces overlooking the Marmara were dismantled and broken up and recycled into the foundations and walls of newer, humbler buildings.
As the sun headed down, I paid the tab and went down to pick up my laundry. All set! I now had clean clothes, warm clothes, munchies, information, and a reasonably clear idea of what to expect tomorrow morning. Time to go back to my room and crash — I faced an early start.
The Fez BusSunday, 24 April 2005
I was up early. My hotel receipt shows I checked out at 04:16, but I actually got up around 03:30 to have a thorough shower and double-check my baggage. Anything I wanted to use before tomorrow night needed to be in my day pack, as my main pack would be buried beneath a pile of other people’s baggage on the bus and mostly inaccessible for the next 36 hours.
The morning was dark and brisk as I walked into the Hippodrome, but the street already churned with buses, cars and people. Drivers rode their horns and every incipient traffic jam was punctuated by clusters of angry tour leaders waving their arms and shouting at each other. I ducked down side streets too narrow for buses and so avoided most of the bustle. Around me, other pedestrians did likewise.
Approaching Akbıyık Caddesi, I discovered that, as at the airport, I had acquired an entourage: some Aussies, lost, had decided that anyone striding along so purposely had to know where they were going. Fortunately for them, I did — and as they too were booked with Fez Tours, I was even leading them to the right place.
I thought Akbıyık Caddesi was busy yesterday, but this morning it was a seething river of flesh. People stood or sat everywhere. I edged my way through the crowd to a strategic location just by the Fez office, and when the opportunity came I did not hesitate to steal a vacated chair, “absent-mindedly” swinging my pack to block the way of a woman headed for the same seat.
A mob of Fez people, wearing red jackets, stood nearby. Somewhat to my surpise they were mostly speaking English — perhaps because many of them weren’t Turkish but had been recruited just for Anzac, and English was the nearest thing they had to a common language. I eavesdropped furiously, picking up snippets of what to expect from the day.
Finally they agreed it was time to get the show on the road. Forewarned, I was in the front of the wave that surged down towards the buses lining Ishak Pasa Caddesi.
Months ago I’d asked Fez in email which bus I was on. The response was “63”, so that was the bus I sought out, gloating over my preparedness. My pack was the first into the luggage bay beneath it, and then I hung around to watch the circus.
But the joke was on me. When I went to board, I discovered that my name was not on the list for Bus 63. From being an arrogant veteran, suddenly I was just another confused yokel, trying desperately to find my bus. And the buses were not parked in numerical order.
Fortunately mine was the third bus I came to, Bus 65. I retrieved my pack from beneath the now-massive stack of baggage on Bus 63 and saw it safely onto the top of the similar stack on Bus 65, then clambered aboard just three minutes before our 07:20 departure.
It turned out well, though. I looked down the aisle and saw no vacant seats except for the front row, normally reserved for the guide and steward and their guests. So I ended up with the best seat in the bus. I quickly chatted up the Aussies in the seat behind me — Harlie and Kate, from Melbourne.
I never learned the name of the driver, but our guide was called Metin and the steward was “Gary”. Gary had an impressive poker face but turned out to have a Puckish sense of humour.
Metin came from Cappadocia and claimed to be Turkish, though he looked more French than Turkish. He was a Turkish patriot with pronounced political views and no hesitation about expressing them. During the long run down the Marmara the bus received an education in the challenges facing modern Turkey. He was widely travelled — he’d seen NZ and Australia in the ’80s.
The bus paused for a “pit stop” 2.5 hours down the road at at Tekirdağ, and another 4.5 hours along at Gelibolu town, but otherwise we drove non-stop and arrived at Anzac Cove at about 1245, 5.5 hours out.
Metin had wanted us to be there in time for a 13:00 Turkish ceremony of some sort, but there was a hitch and the ceremony was delayed. Instead we got to spend a bit of time kicking around Anzac Cove, which was a lot more fun. I took the opportunity to repeat my 2002 walk along the beach, comparing “then” with “now”.
It was a sad comparison. Road-widening earthworks had dumped hundreds of tonnes of debris onto the beach, narrowing it and steepening the slope above it still more. Worse, the pointlessness of widening this stretch of road was obvious. Only Anzac Day can generate enough traffic to clog the road, but the bulk of the Anzac Day traffic comes from the north: during the evening of the 24th and on the 25th the area south of the Commemorative Site is reserved for official traffic. The old road had been more than capable of handling the load, although the departing pollies, their cars slowed to walking pace by the mass of plebes walking up to Lone Pine, might not agree.
Bit by bit the core of Anzac is being nibbled away by such “improvements”. The Turks don’t care: Anzac Cove means nothing to them. The politicians don’t care: the Anzac Commemorative Site is their stomping ground and they’re afraid of offending the Turks if they protest too strongly. And too many visitors don’t care: many never realise that the Commemorative Site is on North Beach and that the real Cove is that insignificant slip of sand they zipped past on the way to Ari Burnu. And so, year by year, Anzac Cove is being pushed into the sea, like the Anzacs long ago.
I dallied a little too long on my walk and got back to the bus just as it pulled out. But I was unrepentant. I could have spent a lot longer walking with the dead.
After the Cove we headed for Chunuk Bair (Conk Bayırı), but our bus got gridlocked at Lone Pine so we saw that first. The place had been turned into an arena by scaffolding and seats. But it was obvious that only the lucky and the early would get a seat tomorrow morning — the rest would wind up standing amid the gravestones.
At Chunuk Bair I wandered around trying to cover the area more systematically than I did in 2002. The reconstructed Turkish trenches here were actually useful to me, because they were built across the part of the hill that the Kiwis briefly captured in 1915. To stand in these trenches was to stand in Kiwi footprints, seeing the hilltop from the same angle they did. There were even plenty of Turks in sight, milling around Ataturk’s feet. Behind our lines.
Eventually Metin called his brood together and took us down to the Museum at Kabatepe. I took one look at the queue and decided I’d rather look the area around instead. When that palled, I found a nice shady patch of ground and had a siesta. This was about 16:00.
I had an hour’s peace and quiet before we were gathered up again and lumped off to Eceabat for the BBQ dinner.
The BBQ was woefully poorly organised, although possibly the real problem was the scale of the catering required. We only got to eat late and the food was feeble. The toilets were filthy, overloaded and broken down. And nobody seemed to have a clear idea about the timetable for getting on down to Anzac. Metin talked vaguely about leaving around midnight. But the tourists were young and hyped, and the booze was plentiful, if expensive. They settled down to make some fun.
Once fed I took the opportunity to walk into Eceabat for a recce and to find a working toilet. The Western-style throne I found turned out also to be broken and clogged with shit, but I was able to figure out what was wrong with its mechanism and flush it clean for my use.
Relieved, I wandered back to kill time at the BBQ.
Eventually it became obvious that the smart people had already started back to Anzac and the passengers of Bus 65 began a determined search for its crew. We soon discovered why Metin was so laid back about when we were leaving: our bus was totally blocked in by later arrivals. We had to wait until a gap cleared that we could scrape through.
The roads were as clogged as that Eceabat toilet. Our driver was stubborn and kept finding ways just where the traffic seemed most impenetrable, but around 23:30 the bus could go no further. We clambered out and started walking the remaining distance to the Site.
The Dawn ServiceWe filed along the road, skirting the dusty steel flanks of the behemoths that had brought us here. Job done, they rested, croaking like giant frogs as their engines cooled in the midnight air.
A lot of the walkers wore flags tossed over their shoulders like capes: mostly Australian, some New Zealand, quite a few Turkish. Many had torches, many more did not. Spots of light jumped up and down on the shoulders of those in front, or swept around their ankles, picking out the tar-sealed road and its crumbled dirt edges.
I stepped out of the line, switched off my lamp, and stared ahead. Torchlight and the silhouettes of walkers stretched ahead in a great curve. There was a brighter light far down there: blue searchlights clawed at the sky, choreographed with a booming male voice. My memory dredged up the banks of huge spotlights lining the north edge of Ari Burnu that I’d seen this morning. So the Commemorative Site must be closer than those lights, and to their left. But I could see nothing except scattered fireflies that might be the torches of people sitting on top of the scaffold seating that hedged the Site itself.
I looked behind me. I was already a good twenty minutes from my bus, and the lines of people behind me seemed as endless as those in front. The northern horizon blazed and flashed with bus headlights, a display rivalling the searchlights to the south.
It seemed impossible that the Site could absorb us all. I’d seen it this afternoon, from Ari Burnu, a horse-shoe of rickety scaffolds surrounding the main platform and its three white poles, the whole spindly ensemble dwarfed by the looming hills and the jaunty spike of the Sphinx.
30,000 people were expected, said a rumour. No, 50,000 said another. Tonight I could believe any figure. It felt obscene that there might be more people here tonight than died on the allied side during the entire campaign. I settled on a guess of 30,000, double the largest previous attendance that I knew of (2002) but safely short of the death toll. (In fact I hear the crowd topped out at a modest 20,000 — a new record, but disappointing after the anticipation built up by the rumours.)
There is a fundamental selfishness in the Australian view of Gallipoli, a reluctance to allow others to have suffered more. For example, Australian journalist Tony Wright says in his book Turn Left at İstanbul:
The Kiwi ceremony was smaller and less formal than Australia’s, but the statistics of what it commemorated were proportionally even more dreadful. Of the 8,566 New Zealanders who fought in the Gallipoli campaign, 2,515 were killed in action, another 206 died of disease or other causes, and 4,752 were wounded. In short, 87 per cent of New Zealanders who went to Gallipoli were killed or wounded. “Almost every family in New Zealand was affected by this tragedy,” [NZ Conservation Minister Sandra Lee] pointed out. This is only slightly greater than the percentage of Australian casualties at Gallipoli, though the raw Australian numbers are much higher. In all, Australia suffered 26,111 casualties — 8,709 fatalities, and 17,402 wounded — according to the figures generally accepted by the Australian War Memorial. And it is true that in Australia, just as in New Zealand, virtually every family was affected by the tragedy of World War I.
His paragraph sets out to explain how awful the NZ casualties were, but he loses his thread. By halfway through it he is playing NZ’s losses down, telling us that in fact proportionally they were “only slightly greater than” Australia’s, and that Australia’s raw figures were higher. The intellectual dishonesty is breathtaking.
His Australians injured figure is suspect, but let’s work with his figures a bit. He gives us the NZ figures but omits the total number of Australians who fought on Gallipoli. This figure was between 50,000 and 60,000. To proportionally favour Australia, the following calculations are based on the lower (50,000) total:
| Killed | Wounded | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| NZ | 31.8% | 55.5% | 87.3% |
| Aus | 17.4% | 34.8% | 52.2% |
| Ratio | 1.8 | 1.6 | 1.7 |
A proportional ratio of 1.7 times as many Kiwis injured or killed to Australians injured or killed is not a “slight” difference! If I was getting paid 70% more than you for doing the same work, you’d probably feel hard done by.
Yes, in raw figures more Australians died than Kiwis — with nearly 6 times as many Australians there, you’d expect that. But France lost 10,000 men, the British 21,255, and the Turks acknowledge losing 86,692. Still want to use raw numbers to assess who got hurt worst? The Turks “win” that one hands down.
I’m not belittling Australia’s losses, just this queer blindness in Australian literature on the subject. No matter how you count the casualties, Australia was not the worst-off participant. NZ was proportionally worse off, the British and Turks numerically worse off.
I rejoined the throng, walking briskly to get warm, passing hundreds of people. But now up ahead the files of lights were merging into a milling clot. I squeezed my way through the crowd and found myself in the eerily lit queue for a security checkpoint. Ahead of me, an armed guard turned back one man wearing a backpack and then rummaged through the day pack of the next in line. Beer cans glinted as they were confiscated.
Then it was my turn. He gestured to me to open my day pack. I fumbled to obey. But I had secured the pockets with combination padlocks to deter thieves, and I could not read the numbers on the dials in the crazy flickering light, especially with the queue bumping me from behind as I bent over the wretched things. He watched me go through this futile exercise for a minute, then waved an arm: move on, move on. He must have decided I was too clumsy to be a terrorist. That, and the fact that the pressure of thousands of oncoming pilgrims was forcing us both away from his post.
Not that it mattered — I wasn’t smuggling anything in. Many of the people around me carried water bottles, outwardly identical to the ones in my pack. But mine were actually filled with water: theirs often contained clear liquids of considerably greater authority: gin, vodka, ouzo, raki. Other bottles claiming to be Ice Tea held beer and whisky. Once past the guards, many smokers put away their cigarette packets and lit up strongly scented roll-your-owns instead. How did they get that past the guards?
The way was now clogged with bodies, lying in sleeping bags to left and right, standing upright and surging around in front and behind me. But fewer people were entering the site from the south than the north and so by osmosis, the randomly eddying crowd moved slowly from the jam-packed north to the less pressured south, carrying me along, until at a pocket of clear ground by the base of the southern light tower it squeezed me out like a seed from a pod. There I took root.
There was a step down beside a big black box. I sat on the step, shoving my day pack into a small niche behind me as I shuffled my bottom left and out of the way of the people moving past. I swapped an amiable “G’day” with my neighbours, whose responses showed them to be mainly Aussies.
Now that I wasn’t moving, it was bloody cold. I hauled out my sleeping bag and slipped my lower half into it. My upper body wore two t-shirts, a jacket, and a lighweight nylon raincoat. A woollen scarf circled my neck and was wedged immovably into the neck of the jacket to halt drafts. Woollen gloves covered my hands and their wrists were tucked beneath the wrists of the jacket. On my head was a woollen beanie. I felt decidedly picturesque — but no more so than the people around me. Everyone was dressed for warmth, not fashion, and a lot of the warm clobber had obviously been purchased from the same local hawkers of mass-produced warmwear who sold me mine.
Everyone wore apple cheeks and red noses. Everyone was gazing around them, trying to take it all in. New arrivals staked out territory and tried to expand it so that they could lie down, but the pressure thwarted them. Gradually even those who’d got here early were being forced to concede ground and sit up. The man with the microphone was cheerfully no-bones about it: we’d all be standing up by dawn, so get up, move over, move forward, make room, still plenty of room down the front.
The sound system boomed into a video clip: by craning my neck I could see the northern video display. I paid no attention to the music — it was pop of some type, and I don’t even remember now who the artists were. Later on they played a Bee Gees video.
We were going to have a concert by John Farnham, until NZ Prime Minister Helen Clarke put her foot down, whereupon John Howard chorused “me too” and the concert was replaced by trashy music videos and a live navy band. Woohoo. He may be Australian, but at least Farnham knows how to warm up a large, young crowd on a cold night. The substitute programming was an eye-glazing, dismal failure.
Monday, 25 April 2005
Out to sea, a ship hung with lights was sailing up and down. HMAS Anzac or some such. When I wasn’t people-watching, I watched its lights go hypnotically back and forth. Left, turn, right, turn, left … It worked: my head nodded and my watch skipped ahead half an hour.
With a loud bang and an impressive spray of sparks, something blew out in the left front leg of the light tower. The people sitting around it leaped a mile, squawking. A clear space appeared, but as the sparks died down the people drifted back, talking loudly. Above us, the lights on the tower were all out.
A few minutes later a crew of officials appeared and started moving people on. A woman bent down and, exhausting her English, told me, “you cannot be sitting here”. I stared at her: I was nowhere near the short! But it turned out they needed to get into the big black box to close down the power so they could repair the smoking wires. Grumbling, I abandoned what I’d hoped would be a ringside seat for the repairs, and moved forward and to the right.
Just past the forward-right leg of the light-tower I found a temporarily untenanted section of wall beside a walkway. I wedged myself onto it sideways, leaning back against the leg of the tower. A bolt wanted to dig into my back so I packed my plastic groundsheet around it. The wad made a good pillow and the bolt secured it from slipping. Now I was almost comfortable!
People kept filing in. The remaining space on the wall was taken up by an older couple. He was wearing a chestful of medals. With plenty of time to kill, we started chatting. The medals were his grandfather’s, who’d been here and come back.
After we’d chatted a while I realised that the BBQ and alcohol I’d consumed earlier were kicking up a ruckus inside me, so I decided to take the opportunity to lighten the load while I had neighbours willing and able to hold my space.
There are no permanent toilets at Anzac, but several dozen had been trucked in for the Dawn Service. The queues were long, but I struck a quiet patch and only had to wait about 15 minutes. I was also lucky in getting a loo that was not yet clogged by toilet paper. In fact, its paper had been either used up or pinched to resupply another booth. But I was carrying my own supply, so that didn’t matter.
Relieved, I went back to my seat and resumed my conversation with the old couple. We were interrupted by a group of officials, who told him there were unfilled places in the section of scaffold seating reserved for veterans. He objected that he was happy where he was, but they were insistent. Eventually he and his wife shrugged and went with them.
The space was quickly filled by several young Turks, drunk and prone to talking loudly among themselves in Turkish. They were the seed around which a large group of Turks gradually accreted.
Each time the people in front got up to see something happening on the stage, pressure from behind moved the whole crowd forward another step, and another row of latecomers would surge up onto the wall to maintain the pressure. Blocked in by the bracing for the light tower’s foot, I was one of the few people who managed to stay almost still, but eventually I lost my wall perch (and my groundsheet) and was encapsulated on three sides by bodies. From then on I stood. There was no room to sit, unless I backed up and pushed a Turk off the wall.
The video clips gave way to live entertainment — a millitary band off the ships. A lot of marches and other gung-ho pieces, but some more contemplative stuff, and they tried to keep it sprightly.
04:30. Since the landings started at 04:30 in 1915, some people think that the Dawn Service should start then now. But there was no daylight saving in 1915, so 05:30 is the appropriate time. The organisers solved the quandary by staging a repeat of the “Prelude” that had been playing when I arrived last night.
If the entertainment was uninspired, the more politically-correct material offered in the “Prelude” was generally not a good choice either. Listening to a didgeridoo being played on a Turkish hillside was surreal, especially since in 1915 Australian aborigines were being turned away by the army’s recruiters on the grounds of race!
The “Prelude” ended with the searchlight-and-voiceover show that I had heard booming along the beach last night. It told the story of the landings, with the searchlights standing in for the lights of the convoying battleships and the flash of the guns and the shells. I ignored the voiceover and plunged myself into the past. When the lights began to swing along the cliffs, picking out the Sphinx and the clots of spectators around and below it, I actually felt a chill up my spine: the watchers had became soldiers struggling up the slopes, and the voices of today’s Turks at my elbow became the shouts of the defenders on the ridgeline.
The light show died and the Dawn Service began immediately, without the expected period of darkness. Disappointing.
I’m not normally moved by the speeches of generals and politicians and priests, and this time was no exception. John Howard was particularly soporific. I ignored the blah and concentrated on remembering the futile events of 1915. Then came the Recessional, and to my surprise, I found myself joining in, and listening carefully through the following Beatitudes, tears in my eyes. They almost lost me after that in a mumbo-jumbo of religion, but I did join in the Lord’s Prayer, even if the words weren’t quite those beaten into me as a child. With the reading of the Ode of Remembrance, I could feel the tears running my cheeks. In this place, on this day, the words took new life.
The Turks around me had talked through the whole service, but even they fell silent for the Last Post. It was a shame it was played so badly. Perhaps the cold got to the bugler or his instrument.
And then it was over.
There are two great jars that stand on the floor of Zeus’s halls and hold his gifts, our miseries one, the other blessings. When Zeus who loves the lightning mixes gifts for a man, now he meets with misfortune, now good times in turn.
— Home, The Iliad
The man at the microphone told everyone to stay put and let the official party through, but most people ignored him. By turning around and peering over Turkish shoulders I was able to see a string of balding heads and military headgear rush along the path a few metres away while police held back the waves, but as soon as the last bobbing cap went by the crowd surged into the vacuum.
The newly widened road south of the Site was clogged with people. The road would need to be four times wider to make any difference to the mob that surges along it at 07:00 on Anzac Day. Here and there I could see official cars caught in the tide and moving barely faster than walking pace.
As the cars crept past, each with its bow-wave of reluctantly parted pedestrians, I could see the worried faces of the passengers. Like people in a lift staring at the indicator above the door, each dignitary stared fixedly through the windscreen into the middle distance. Helpless to affect their fate, they avoided eye contact with the common muck outside. When a particularly obnoxious vehicle pushed me aside I barely resisted the urge to do a blowfish on the glass.
Most of the mob barely cast a sideways glance as they passed above Anzac Cove. Looking down, I could see a very few people down on the sand. Damn, I missed a trick there! To walk on the sand of Anzac Cove on Anzac Day would be a memory worth having.
The walking warmed me up. At a convenient rubbish bin I discarded my cheap gloves, scarf and beanie. I wouldn’t need them again. There was no point lugging them around with me all day.
The mob eventually curled off the road and began to climb a dirt track. I took it easy, letting more energetic climbers pass me while I pretended to stop and admire the view. In fact I was exhausted and in pain. Barely six months later, I was to wake one bitter morning with a tremendous pain in my chest. I did not know it in April, but the pain in my arms, shoulders and chest presaged an October heart attack.
Whenever the pain eased I moved on uphill. At Shell Green I turned off to have a look around the notorious cricket ground. The cemetery is built on a slope behind it, leaving the flat ground in its natural state. The unimproved areas looked remarkably like a scene out of Anzacs.
Nearing the top, the mob had to squeeze its way through stalls selling food, drink and tacky souvenirs. To one side stood rows of toilets, which were already attracting many of the older walkers. But now I was on flat ground the pain in my arms had eased and I picked up my pace to get to Lone Pine ahead of the mass.
Lone Pine was still half empty, but it was filling fast. I clambered up the stands on the near side and claimed a seat. Munching food from my Fez-provided lunchbag, I took stock of my emotions. How Australian was I? I had an excellent seat but was it worth waiting hours for the Australian ceremony then struggling uphill to the NZ ceremony in the midday crush?
John Howard’s jingoistic little speech earlier this morning turned the trick. When I finished my meal I headed uphill.
The toilets tempted me, but they were now all out of service, completely blocked up. People were already sneaking off into the trees around about, returning relieved but shamefaced a few minutes later. By noon the roadside would be an open sewer.
The morning was still cool. Walking uphill was pleasant. Every so often I passed a landmark last seen in 2002, when I walked down from Chunuk Bair, but in 2002 I had the hill to myself. Today I ran into several hordes of Turks walking down, and I was accompanied by hundreds of Kiwis and Aussies walking up. There was no chance of quiet contemplation amidst such mobs, but then, this was no place for silent contemplation in 1915, either.
At Chunuk Bair I was exhausted, and the crowds made it awkward to poke around. Besides, I saw it yesterday and in 2002. I soon gave up and picked out a nice spot of turf beneath the shade of some trees. I lay down and dozed off.
I woke up when a pack of Turkish kids ran across my chest. My watch said I’d had almost two hours of sleep. I certainly felt a lot better, so I got up and took a walk down to the road to see if I could get a good view of the hill from across the valley.
The road was lined with buses. I’d been impressed by the size of the Chunuk Bair parking area, but in fact its capacity was negligible compared to the massive schools of buses that beach themselves here on Anzac Day. I discovered later that a continuous line of parked buses ran down to the crossroads, four or five kilometres away.
The nearby Turkish memorial (five concrete fans arranged like the fingers of a hand), which was under repair in 2002, was choked with Turks. Just as yesterday, they stood in small respectful groups.
I went back to Chunuk Bair to try to find a good spot to watch the events, but I had missed the moment. All the good spots were taken.
The crowd had sorted itself out. The Kiwis and Aussies had formed ranks around the memorial, spreading out to fill the ground between the memorial and the VIP seating. Around them marched battalions of young Turks, waving flags and chanting.
I eventually found a spot behind the scaffolding that supported the stands. I had a glimpse of Prince Charles in profile when he arrived, but a limited view of anything else.
At one point several Aussies squeezed beneath the scaffolding to get a closer look, blocking the view of the rest of us lined up along the ropes, but a couple of military uniforms noticed them and shooed them off.
Still, I eventually abandoned the spot and roamed around hoping to find a neglected vantage. In due course I found a spot beneath a tree where uneven ground beneath a low branch had discouraged exploitation. Being short, there was plenty of room for me to stand there, and the uneven ground that discouraged bums was OK for feet. Here I had a good view of the stage.
And then it was over. The dignitaries melted away and the crowd began to disperse. But now I had a problem: where was the bus?
The problem was soon solved. Somehow Metin had talked his way onto the media stand. I caught his attention and he directed me to one side, where he had already accumulated several members of his flock.
When he came down to us I asked where the bus was. He said it was several kilometres along the road. We should gather and walk down to it together, or wait here until it came to us. Impatient, I decided to walk down and find it on my own.
It was a long walk, nearer three kilometres than two. I lost track of time and wasn’t sure how far I’d come or whether I might have passed the bus. The line of buses stretched interminably along the roadside, most attended by little clusters of pilgrims who huddled in whatever shade they could find. Every now and then a bus would grumble into life and pull out of the queue, headed up towards Chunuk Bair.
Bus 65 finally loomed ahead, with familiar faces lounging beside it. As I came up they burst into laughter: Gary, the porter, who had seemed as stolid as a golem, had just played a practical joke on them. He walked around the front of the bus wearing a wide grin.
The baggage compartment was open, so I took the opportunity to dump some heavy things from my day pack into my main pack and to fetch a pair of clean socks and a change of underwear. I climbed aboard the bus and used my sleeping bag as a changing room.
Time passed. More and more pilgrims turned up. We lay around in the diminishing shade beside the bus, pestered by flies and at risk of being run over as more and more buses pulled out and headed up the hill. But finally Metin appeared, accompanied by the remainder of his flock. When the driver started the engine, we all filed aboard the bus, eager to escape the afternoon heat.
Sweating, dust-streaked faces watched our bus enviously as it pulled out of line and headed uphill. Luxuriating in newfound air-conditioned idleness we looked down on them in disdain as if we had not, just minutes before, been just like them.
We were still missing two people, so we pulled in at Chunuk Bair to look for them. They weren’t there, so we drove on down to Lone Pine, where we finally caught up with them.
Driving down past the crossroads, we also acquired a stray from another Fez bus, whose coach had gone without him. I wasn’t pleased by this because apart from Metin I was the only person with a vacant seat beside me. But there was nothing to be done about it, so I put on a pleasant face to this person less fortunate than me.
The road was clogged with buses. We made slow progress until the turnoff near Eceabat, where most of the traffic turned north. But after looping around the edges of the town we were soon halted again when we joined the long queue of buses waiting for the overworked ferries. The driver turned the engine off, and the bus quickly became stifling, so most of us got off to pass the time in more comfort along the waterfront.
I used my knowledge of the town gained during last night’s venture to buy a few small things and to use the toilet. I wanted to clean up but the facilities were repulsive, so I decided to wait until we reached our hotel.
The queue gradually advanced until it became obvious that our bus would be on the next ferry. Miraculously, all the Bus 65 people re-materialised from the gloom and boarded. The extra man from the other bus had found his own bus, so once again I reposed in solitary grandeur. It was short-lived. We drove aboard the ferry, and everyone immediately climbed down again.
Watching the loading of vehicles aboard a Bosphorus ferry is endlessly interesting. There is no obvious planning to it, but by the time the ferry pulls out every metre of available space has been used to best advantage and the ramp is cranked up beneath the very bumpers of the last few boarders.
A flock of vehicles labelled “jamdarma” had pre-empted pride of place in the queue and their cargo now loitered around the upper deck. The grim faces that had confronted straying pilgrims overnight were now relaxed and split by friendly grins, and they mingled with us almost apologetically. Somewhere in Turkey there’s a photo of me surrounded by several hulking policemen, all of us smiling into the camera lens. But the Turkish passengers gave them a wide berth.
We rumbled off the ferry and up the main street of Çanakkale, then promptly ground to a halt outside a restaurant. I’m not sure why. Metin and Gary got off and some of the pilgrims also climbed down for a hasty smoke, then we were moving again.
Our overnight stop was far down the coast, at Küçükkuyu. We got there around 23:00 and mobbed the registration, clamouring for keys, but we still all wound up in the dining room for supper before we were allowed to go up to our rooms.
Room-mates had been assigned more or less at random. I lucked out. My roomie wanted to stay downstairs and party, I wanted to go upstairs, shower, and sleep. I took the keys and agreed to leave the door ajar a little.
It was something like 40 hours since my last shower, in the dimness of an İstanbul dawn. The water in the shower was hot and abundant. Washing away the grime of Anzac and the stress of the bus journey in brown runnels was a glorious rite. I stayed under the torrent until I felt clean enough to face the crisp, clean, horizontal bed.
My roomie came in quietly some time during the early hours. My traveller’s reflexes were in good shape: I woke up long enough to establish that the intruder was not a thief, then drifted back to sleep.
BergamaTuesday, 26 April 2005
I bounced out of bed, refreshed and ready for the new day. Showered and dressed, I left my room-mate to wake up at his own pace while I went downstairs for breakfast.
The buffet breakfast was surprisingly well patronised by early-rising tourists. The miracle of youth. Half the diners wore panda eyes that suggested that they’d spent the night partying. If I’d tried that stunt I’d still be asleep. Instead I had energy to burn.
Fed, I sauntered forth to explore the nearer parts of Küçükkuyu.
On the map the town was a fly-speck, notable only because here the highway finally met the sea after its long short-cut overland from Çanakkale. I’d expected the hotel to be a concrete monolith on the outskirts of some sleepy little village, but in fact the “village” was quite substantial — though it was indeed, at this time of the morning, sleepy. The hotel was surrounded by a sea of multi-storey blocks of flats, and although it wasn’t in the centre of town, it wasn’t in the outskirts either.
I wandered around more or less at random for a while, getting my bearings, then made my way down to the seashore. The long beach was almost deserted, but showed signs that last night or yesterday it had been well patronised. The lighter rubbish had mostly blown away, but the footprints remained, and some of the heavier detritus. Used fireworks were littered here and there, explaining some bangs I’d half-heard during my conscious moments last night.
In fact, the next two weeks were to be punctuated by fireworks celebrating the various Turkish, Greek and Orthodox holidays that cluster around the beginning of the northern summer. The explosions brought back memories of my youth, before random lighting of fireworks was banned in New Zealand. Indeed, having left pain and winter behind at Anzac, I was immersed in a time warp, moving through a land where everything was new to me and the sun always shone and my energy never faltered. After the perpetual autumn of my previous trips, it was a revelation and a renewal, and I decided that in future I would seek to travel in the spring, not the autumn.
Perhaps in compensation for the harsher winter, late spring in the northern hemisphere seems to be brighter, lusher and more joyous than in Australia or New Zealand. New Zealand is always greener, but has fewer bright flowers, while spring in Australia unfolds slowly and then verges into the long, dry summer. The northern spring explodes, although the effect may have been enhanced because I was moving south into it instead of staying still and watching it come to me.
I swapped a “merhaba” with a man who came by walking his dog. He had loosed it from its leash and it was dashing around at breakneck speed, rushing up to investigate everything it saw. It shoved a friendly nose up my bum and then dashed away to chase a seagull. A patch of seweed made it sneeze, and it spent a hectic minute chasing a fly in circles. Just watching it was an aerobic exercise.
With the clock heading towards 08:00 I headed back towards the hotel. The town was starting to stir now, but what I mostly noticed were the cats. They were everywhere. I tried to befriend several, but they just stared at me and slunk away. They were sleek and well fed by and large, and did not look or behave like feral cats, they were simply uninterested in wasting their time on scruffy strangers.
I bought some chocolate bars and orange juice at a corner shop that had just opened, munchies for the road, and arrived back at the hotel just as the driver was warming up the bus and the first tourists were bringing their packs out. I shot up to my room and fetched my own pack, checked out, then joined the mob lounging around the tables on the patio to watch while the porter stowed our luggage.
Boarding was by now a well-practiced routine, and within minutes of Metin’s appearance we were aboard and on our way.
The trip from Küçükkuyu to Bergama has left no impresson on my memory. I dozed, watching the coast and the hills go by. But I woke up when we reached Bergama, because our first stop was the Red Basilica, Kızıl Avlu, which I had half-feared we might bypass.
The Red Basilica (or perhaps the Great Altar of Zeus up on the Acropolis), appears in the Bible as one of the Seven Churches of the Revelation, but it started its career as a temple of Serapis somewhere between 100-200 AD. Later a church was put up inside it, and then a mosque. Even ruined, it is still an impressive structure and it made for a dramatic introduction to Pergamon.
We did not stop at the Archaeological Museum, instead heading up to the Acropolis.
Pergamon’s main modern claim to fame is its industrial production of animal parchment, which word is a blending of Latin pergamina (“writing material from Pergamum”) and Parthica pellis (“Parthian skin”). During the Hellenic period it was the capital of a sizeable kingdom, two of whose kings, Eumenes II and Attalus II built stoas in the Agora at Athens. Attalus II also founded Antalya (Attaleia) as a trading city on the Mediterranean. His successor, Attalus III, bequeathed the kimgdom to the Romans.
The entrance was by way of a large carpark below the Monumental Gate, already well populated down one side by buses. Down the other side ran a wall of souvenir stalls. As we climbed down from the bus, one enterprising vendor cried out “Aussie Aussie Aussie”. A couple of the dopier tourists started a reflexive “Oi Oi Oi”, but it died halfway through the first syllable as they realised the source.
We climbed up past the Heröon and went through the Gate, turning at the top to walk through a string of small palaces. The largest is maybe 40 metres square, the rest much smaller. The Pergamene kings seem to have been relatively modest in the size of their households, though the tendency to build a new palace every generation or so would have been expensive.
We gathered around the exposed cistern of one palace. It had a central pillar that once supported the vanished roof. The top of the pillar glittered in the sun where tourists had thrown small coins, apparently treating the cistern as a wishing-well. About 30 coins lay on the pillar. Several people in our group (including me: 10 Kuruş) tried to add to the collection, but all our coins bounced off and joined the much larger hoard in the bottom of the cistern. I made my wish, anyway — to someday come back and try again.
The dominant feature of the area today was the Trajaneum, the Temple of Trajan and Hadrian. Although it was probably once brutally monumental, it was now a graceful ruin surrounded by flowering trees. I liked it very much, and allowed myself to be photographed hugging a pillar at a spot where there had once been a balustrade.
We spent a while wandering around the Trajaneum and the adjacent Library (rather an insignificant structure for the 200,000 books Pergamon supposedly once held, but my Blue Guide assures me that only about 17,000 of them were kept in this building) and Temple of Athena, then descended into the Theatre.
Built to seat 10,000, the Theatre had a gorgeous view out over the land. The Pergamenes obviously appreciated it, because there was no permanent scena. A temporary wooden structure was erected for performances. Between times, it probably provided a marvellous spot for the locals to meet and picnic. The breeze blowing up the hill was cooling, countering the blast of the sun.
A group of German tourists had assembled an impromptu choir here and were singing hymns. It was somewhat anachronistic, but did provide a test of the acoustics. Despite the breeze and although they were standing in the seats rather than on the stage, the sound reached every corner of the theatre.
We walked along the terrace below the Theatre, then ended our tour at the Great Altar of Zeus and Athena and the Upper Agora. Little remains of the Altar: it was dismantled and stones from it were used to build a wall. Then the Germans dismantled the wall and took the stones to Berlin, where they reconstructed the Altar. It’s a shame they didn’t reconstruct it on the original site. Instead we’re left to try to build it in our minds on the grass-grown stepped base that remains.
Our tour of the Acropolis took less than two hours and covered only the very top of the hill. We never got down to the lower buildings of the Acropolis. If I’d been on my own I could easily have spent half the day wandering the Acropolis and the rest of the day walking down to and exploring the sites in the valley — the Asklepeion, the Ampitheatre and the aqueduct. Nor did Metin’s commentaries provide much insight that wasn’t available from my guidebooks and the signs scattered around the site. I’ll need to go back someday to have a proper look.
As we returned to the carpark, everyone stepped over a glittering jewel that was crossing the path just inside the entrance. An exquisite scarab beetle, black with lapis lazuli highlights, like an animated opal.
Enchanted by the scarab, I allowed myself to browse the souvenir stalls for a memento. I found a small silver box for 3 lira. It has a “925” hallmark but may only be plated. No matter: it’s lovely anyway.
Back in Bergama we were hustled into an anonymous tourist restaurant for lunch. The food was paid for by the tour but the drinks cost extra — quite a bit extra. In the end my lunch cost me almost as much in drinks as I would normally have paid for a complete meal.
After lunch we milled around the shops a little bit, getting in the way of the locals, lining the pockets of the shoeshines and generally doing the obnoxious tourist thing. It took Metin a while to gather us back aboard the bus: some people had strayed quite a long way.
Once again memory blurs the bus ride into nothing. I had passed through here in 2002, headed north, and it gained no new interest when seen from the opposite angle. My camera shows I was awake at about 15:30 when we passed through Izmir (Smyrna) but my mind was on auto until we pulled into Selçuk about 1700.
Most of the tour had agreed to fork over a bit extra for a quick guided tour of Ephesus (Metin’s preferred site; Pergamon was not his major topic) but I was going to take myself there tomorrow, so I elected to be dropped off outside the Tourist Information office in Selçuk instead.
I had a booking for the “ANZ Guesthouse” in 1064 Sokak. I wasn’t sure where it was, but the map in my Lonely Planet showed it had to be near the “Australia & New Zealand Pension” in Profesör Mitler Sokak. Unfortunately the map was not a good mirror of the actual layout of the streets and I could find neither establishment. I got lost, until a cheerful-faced woman took pity on me and asked where I was going. When I told her she smiled and said that she worked at the ANZ Guesthouse — just follow her. I did, around two corners I’d already passed once, and there it was. It had taken real talent for me to miss it.
Turned out that the two somewhat similarly-named but differently-located pensions were one and the same. It occupied a corner of the two streets, with a frontage on each, but only the 1064 Sokak entrance was in use.
The entrance opened into a courtyard, a buzzing cauldron of excited backpackers planning their evening. My guide led me to the office and signed me in, then pointed out my room, which was on the first floor overlooking the courtyard.
The room was delightful, with a double bed, washbasin and en-suite shower and bath. At USD18 per night it was a bargain. My March 2003-vintage Lonely Planet said to expect USD15, so the price in USD had gone up 20% in just over two years, but with annual inflation running at over 10% in Turkey this wasn’t too bad. The lira had slipped more than 15% against the AUD since 2002, but the USD had slipped even more. In the past, price rises in Turkey were offset by the relative rise in the value of the USD, but where in 2002 the USD was 1.61 to the lira, in 2005 it was only 1.37. In the same period the AUD went from 0.87 to 1.05 lira. Many apparently “excessive” price hikes in Turkey since 2002 could be written off against the twin phenomena of the internal Turkish inflation rate and the external loss of value by the USD. For me, the rise of the AUD offset both effects. USD15 in 2002/2003 was about AUD24, and USD18 in 2005 was about AUD23.
Only the price rises of some archaological sites and tourist facilities were really obscene.
I didn’t stay in my room long. My itinerary expected me to get to Selçuk much earlier, so my planned sightseeing was out, but Selçuk is a good place to waste time in. Rather than lurk in my room, I headed down the hill to find a nice place to write up my budget and my journal.
After a quick wander through central Selçuk, I found it: a little café outside the “Thales” bookshop. There I spent a happy hour drinking tea, chatting to the waitress, and admiring the local cats. I did my budget and some reading, but there is no entry in my journal for this day: it seems that somehow I never got around to writing any of it down at the time. I had plenty of time for writing, so I have no excuse. (I’ve had to reconstruct it entirely from memory, photos, and receipts.)
Eventually I felt the urge to move on, and I headed back towards Selçuk looking for a place to have dinner.
Approaching a ruined mosque, I was enchanted to see that storks had built a nest atop the broken minaret. One stork was in residence, and obliged me by striking a set of photogenic poses against the skyline. I was so engrossed by the sight that I was almost run down crossing a road.
None of the eateries cried out to me, so I ended up on the rooftop terrace back at the ANZ for the free “BBQ”.
The BBQ went on my room bill, but the bottle of wine I had with it cost me 25 lira. I didn’t care. There was a gorgeous sunset and a splendid view towards Ephesus and the Temple of Artemis. I’d had a great day and I was finished with the tour scene. I stayed on the terrace chatting with a British family until my self-appointed bedtime, then toddled off to my comfy bed in my cheap private room and drifted into uninterrupted sleep.
EphesusWednesday, 27 April 2005
I was up bright and early and out the door before 07:00. In 2002 I got to Ephesus the merest trifle late and, working up from the main gate, had met the wave of tour groups coming down from the Magnesian Gate. My impressions of the upper town were spoilt by the mob scene that soon engulfed every point of interest. I was determined to be there when the gate opened this time, and I also wanted to start at the Magnesian Gate so that I could fill out the sections of my last visit that were abbreviated due to mob interference.
My Blue Guide map showed a road linking Selçuk with the Magnesian Gate, and implied that if I got onto this road I could save myself a long dogleg around the back of the hill from the main road. The catch was that it wasn’t very clear how to get onto this road. (For the record, it comes off Atatürk Caddesi and doesn’t save much distance — but I figured this out far too late.)
Munching on a bagel and a flaky roll bought at the kiosk on the corner of the main road, I spent some time poking up likely-looking side streets but they all petered out into cart-tracks or dead ends. Defeated, I headed back to the main road. At least I knew where that was.
I turned left off the main road at the same place as 2002, but at a fork instead of turning right to go to the main gate I took the left fork that led around the hill, reversing 2002’s footsteps.
The gypsy teahouse where I bought a map in 2002 was still there, and was deserted at this early hour. But further on I discovered that the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, closed in 2002 and festooned with toilet paper, was now open.
This was serendipity. Expecting the Cave to be closed, my plan had been to walk directly to the Magnesian Gate from Selçuk, then to walk directly back to Selçuk from the main gate. Only my inability to find the direct road to the Magnesian Gate led me past the Cave this year.
It proved to be more interesting than I expected. The closed gate had stopped me from seeing much last time, and I came away with the impression that it was a quite small cul-de-sac. In fact it was an extensive complex of halls and grottos. The Cave itself had been cut and shaped into a huge, apsed, barrel-vaulted hall, inset with niches for sarcophagi. The floor was brick, now collapsing to reveal the native rock in the cavities beneath it.
All the ledges were empty. So were the few sarcophagi that still stood in niches and grottos elsewhere. Clearly those who had sought eternity here had not found it (perhaps they woke too soon). This is the lesson of the pyramids: if your grave is a landmark, don’t expect to stay in it forever. Only those buried in unmarked places can hope to sleep undisturbed.
Me? I want to be cremated and to have my ashes scattered from a bridge across the Whanganui River, perhaps at Taumaranui, but any bridge would be fine. Then let the river take me where it will.
I returned to the road. It was past 08:00 and Ephesus opened at 08:30. Time was running short.
A dog loped out of the bushes and followed me. I was a little worried at first, but eventually it became obvious he was just out for a walk and had decided to tag along with me for the sake of the company. So we strolled along together companionably and I discussed the day with him and asked his opinion on the weather. He rolled an eye, sneezed, wagged his tail, and laughed at me. Obviously he spoke no English.
Eventually when I turned off the road to take a shortcut to the Gate, he watched me go then turned away to follow his own path.
At the Gate, I was dismayed to see a line of tour buses already there, even though the time was only 08:35. Perhaps the tour operators had wised up.
No matter. I paid up and squeezed through the turnstile.
Inside, I was relieved to see that there were too few tours to cover all the sights at once. I would be able to sneak between them, for a while at least.
I made the most of my time, exploring the Odeon, the Prytaneion, the Temple of Domitian and the Nymphaeum of Caius Laecanius Bessus in quick succession. By 09:00 I was at the Fountain of Trajan, finishing off the itinerary skimped in 2002. By now the tide of tours was rising fast, pushing a wave of people towards me down the Street of Curetes, so I headed off into the ruins to explore the Baths of Scholisticia and the Brothel.
All too soon I ended up back on the Street of Curetes beside the Temple of Hadrian. There was a guard standing just across the way, and I went over to ask him how to get into the Terrace Houses. He smiled and asked me for 15 lira. I paid him, and he unlocked the door behind him, ushering me in and locking it behind us. As easy as that, I got away from the crowds and also got to see the best sight in Ephesus, which I’d missed in 2002.
The Terrace Houses are a block of upmarket Roman-era town houses that are remarkably well preserved considering that there was no convenient volcanic explosion to bury them. A 7th-century mudslide accounts for the survival of the beautifully frescoed walls and mosaic floors, which have been excavated with loving care, covered by a weatherproof roof, and are slowly being put to rights.
The walls themselves provide an illustration of advanced building techniques, with their air gaps and drainage and clever weight-relief. But it’s what’s on the walls and floors that catches the eye. Exquisite pictures, mosaic floors and even homely furniture: marble desks, wellheads, and statue bases. The wooden items perished, but by and large the houses were not despoiled of the goods that were in them when the earth moved. Nothing precious: it must have happened late, when the city was being abandoned and these houses already stood vacant. But nobody bothered taking the bulky, low-value stuff.
Some walls have grafitti on them, particularly those of a toilet. Some of the grafitti appear to be in Greek and may actually be ancient. But this is in a private house. Who scrawls on the wall of their own bathroom? Perhaps the houses sheltered squatters after the owners departed and before the hillside came down.
It was overpriced and was all over in less than 20 minutes. But it was worth it.
The fascinating thing about these houses is that although they date from hundreds of years later, someone from Pompeii would have recognised them and been at home. The decorations are “Fourth Style”, which was scarce and apparently new-fangled in the first century Pompeii, but they clearly belong to the same matrix. We would still need to be living in Tudor houses to match this slow pace of stylistic change.
I walked on down to the Library of Celcus and poked around the area, exploring a few places I missed in 2002, including the public toilets, but the tour groups kept flooding in and eventually I surrendered and headed on.
At the Theatre I took a moment to have a good look out towards the harbour. The street was still blocked off partway down, but I could see people poking around some buildings off to one side. Could I sneak around and reach the harbour that way?
I made my way to the “Double church”. While looking through the ruins of the Church, I spotted a trail leading off through the grass in the direction of the harbour. I followed it and found a dirt road.
The road led me around in a long circle that didn’t apparently meet the harbour, but gave me good perspectives of the town. I may actually have crossed the harbour, as at one point in a big brown patch there were some long structures crossing the road that might have been the wharves. But I couldn’t find a way through to the structures around the Harbour Way to confirm the connection. There was a wire fence in the way, and although I could play the dumb tourist this far, there was no excuse for breaking and entering.
Finally I lost my bearings and was reduced to following the road as it bent back east. Eventually it petered out in the Commercial Agora. I ducked under the “no entry” rope that had prevented me exiting this way, and found myself back at the Library — which by now was totally clogged with tourists.
I gave up and headed back towards Selçuk, thinking I might stop off for a second look at the Temple of Artemis on the way. But just then a local stopped and offered me a “free” lift. My intuition detected an agenda — probably a carpet pitch — but I figured that the Museum would be closed for lunch by the time I got back, and since I saw the Temple of Artemis last time, I might as well have my “carpet experience”.
Sure enough, we pulled up at his carpet shop and I was invited in for a tea. So there we sat for the next 45 minutes, during which I sipped an apple tea and two orange teas. I shared the remains of one of my packets of Turkish Delight, and he fetched a nice square of rosé from a nearby shop. But eventually he conceded that I just wasn’t in the market for a carpet and I was allowed to escape. Oh, we tourists take such dreadful advantage of innocent natives!
Still, I was actually very tempted. He had a huge camel-hair carpet hung on one wall, which he mentioned was priced at USD1200. Even though I made it clear I wasn’t haggling and never mentioned a price myself, by the time I left the price had fallen to 600 Euros, which I could afford and was willing to pay, and was certainly a fair price for such a superb piece. Only the fact that I was still at the start of my holiday and not willing to deal with the hassle of shipping the thing home saved me from buying it. Sometimes I regret the decision, but never for long: it was simply too big at any price, and there would also be the customs duty to pay …
I walked back into town through the scorching streets. When I reached the Museum, it was open. Last time I had time only for a hurried 15-minute glimpse of this place before it closed for the day. This time, with the whole afternoon available, I still only took 25 minutes to see everything I was interested in. It’s simply not a very big museum, although the quality of its contents make it a “must-see” for any itinerary.
I was particularly interested in the frieze from the Temple of Hadrian (replaced in Ephesus by a plaster copy). Some of the figures on the frieze are in such high-relief they’re practically in the round.
Also of interest was the broken statue of Domitian. The nose has been broken off and his pudgy face looks twisted as though in pain from the blow. He also appears to be balding, with a comb-over. This is not a flattering likeness of an unpleasant emperor.
The waitress at “Thales” had urged me not to miss the gladiatorial exhibit, so I made a point of seeing that. I was amused by one relief where a gladiator appears to be wearing a g-atring — or else has a painful wedgie!
I walked over to the Otogar, where I took the plunge and booked a tour to Priene, Miletus and Didyma. I’d dithered over the decision, preferring independence, but in the end I decided that getting to all three locations in a day by public transport was going to be more trouble than it was worth. The dolmuş network was not designed for it, and it was too far to cycle. The tour cost £50. My pre-trip budget suggested a tour should cost USD17, but the prices had ballooned.
My cash was running low, so I decided that even though I was going to Greece in a couple of days I might as well top up the lira supply. I would use it up when I came back to Turkey in June. I decided that to conserve my ATM funds I would use travellers cheques.
After finding a bank that would cash traveller’s cheques, I discovered that they wanted £17.50 commission per cheque. With a USD100 cheque being worth about ₺137, that represented 12.8% commission! Exorbitant. No possible combination of risk or expense could justify it. I gathered my things together and stalked off to find an ATM instead — and not one of theirs, either.
On the way back downtown I stopped in at a travel agent and exchanged USD30 for a booking on the ferry to Samos the day after tomorrow.
Back at the ANZ, I settled in for a lengthy siesta. In late afternoon I went downtown and found a wonky-tabled restaurant that took my fancy. Finally I went back to the ANZ and watched the sunset from my room. Despite the siesta, I was completely buggered. I fell asleep early.
Miletus, Priene and DidymaThursday, 28 April 2005
By 08:18 I was on the roof of the ANZ, drinking coffee and waiting for breakfast — fried eggs, tomato and sausages. Just after 9:00 we were off on a whirlwind tour of three ancient sites, with a well-regarded local guide known as “Harry”.
We zipped past Magnesia on the Meander without stopping, and shortly before 11:00, Harry had us clustered around a plan of Priene attached to the city walls while he explained what we were about to see. The site was steep, climbing the hillside. I was surprised they hadn’t built it atop Mt Mykale, but I guess there was no water up there. Also, the hillside was a good defensive position convenient to the lush valley floor below.
Although the walk was steep and had lots of steps, it took us only about 5 minutes to walk up from the plan to the Temple of Zeus Olympios. The floor of the temple was in good shape, but it looked like a bomb had exploded and knocked al the walls and columns outwards. Stones were strewn across the ground in all directions, scarcely one left on top of another.
After a few minute,s we were on our way again, spending 15 minutes walking through the Boulueterion and the Agora, including the Fish and Meat Market. We then walked over to the Temple of Athena. Later we spent a while in the theatre and the tidy ruins of a Byzantine basilica. There were significant remains of the city’s extensive water distribution system including a magnificent cistern-come-settling-tank.
Afterward we stopped in the site’s caféteria for a brief snack. It was just after noon, so the whole visit had taken us less than an hour and a half. The caféteria had an attractive water feature built around old walls and building.
We zoomed on, catching our first sight of Miletus’ Theatre in the distance at 12:45. The road follows the approximate course of the ancient coastline, so it was almost like approaching the city by boat — an illusion assisted by the extensive wetlands on either side of us. We drew up in the Theatre parking lot a few minutes later and spent just 20 minutes looking over the Theatre before gradually moving down to look over the Agora and the Baths of Faustina. Harry showed us some ancient olive trees, and just after 13:30 we were back on the bus.
I was a little disappointed; I had hoped to be able to spend more time just walking across the site and trying to understand it. But I was in a tour group; we were trying to see three big sights in one day; we couldn’t spend as much time as I’d prefer at any one of them. Perhaps on a future trip …
About 14:00 we stopped for an hour for lunch at an eatery near Didyma, with a nice view across to the Temple of Apollo. The two temples at Didyma — of Apollo and Artemis — are magnificent. We went down into the cella of the Temple of Apollo. The actual cult building was a toppled ruin, but the walls of the cell were mostly still standing. The steps of the temple were covered in graffiti left by idle hands. Pictures, game boards, and assorted inscriptions — some possibly crude.
We were followed around by local boys trying to sell us stuff. One boy had a tortoise he wanted us to buy. We didn’t, for the obvious reason that he would just capture it again to sell to the next group. The tortoise had taken a beating; its shell was already punctured near its back legs and its remaining lifetime was likely to be short.
We didn’t get to the Artemisium.
By about 16:00 we were on our way back to Selçuk. At Söke, we dropped off two guys working in Afghanistan who wanted to get to Bodrum. Their plan: rent a boat and spend a few days fishing, the idea being that it was about as far from what they had been doing as they could get.
I later summarised my day thus: Priene was OK, Miletus was disappointing, but Didyma was better than expected — enough was left not only to give a sense of what it once was but also a real glimpse into how the Temple of Apollo must have been.
It was a good way to end my time in mainland Ionia; my next stop would be the Ionian islands, offshore.
Out in the wine-dark sea there is a rich and lovely island called Crete,
washed by the waves on every side, densely populated with ninety cities …
— Homer, The Odyssey, 19.169–174
SamosFriday, 29 April 2005
I got up in plenty of time and had finished showering, packing, etc by 6:15, but must have zoned out lying on the bed, as the next time I looked at my watch it was 7:30! I finished dressing, opened the windows and leaned out, and one of the ANZ guys waved up at me from the gate. My minibus was waiting. By 08:45 I was on the ferry, waiting for departure; by 10:45 I was on Samos, in Vathy; by 11:30 I was in Pythagorio.
I’d bought a phone card and my ticket to Kos in Vathy, but now decided to skip the Archaological Museum in Pythagorio, instead just grabbing a taxi to the Ireon from the rank.
The Ireon (Hereion — sacred to Hera) was another very large temple, around which a sacred compound developed. It was never fully completed and, as usual, it was used as a quarry in later years. What is left is essentially its outline in the rougher slaty stone that was used for foundations. There was still quite a lot of rock lying around the site, including some headles statues of Hera, but I was unable to conjur the ghost.
I walked back from the Ireon down a pleasant road, starting at about 13:40. I was back in Pythagorio by 15:40, sitting at Polykrates Restaurant on the harbour, waiting for my salad and retsina. It was either a very late lunch or a substantial afternoon tea. The guy upgraded my retsina from 375 ml to 500 ml for the same price — I guess business was slow and they preferred a happy body to an empty table. Half an hour later, I was feeling very mellow and I ordered ice cream and capucchino to extend the moment.
The local pets were making their rounds — a cat who didn’t respond to cajolings but just stared with huge eyes, and a young dog with a nodding head who took a while to realise he was plumbing a dry well.
Gusts of wind howled through the rigging of the moored yachts. One catamaran tied up in front of the restaurant had to turn out all hands to avoid being rammed into the dock. One woman was soon permanently stationed with a bumper at the point of danger. Some young boys took it into their heads to pee off the side of the catamaran, into the wind; they quickly regretted that.
Later I came back to Polycrates for a swordfish dinner. I had decided to try to see the candle-lit procession on Odos Metamorfosis Sotiros, depending on how long dinner took and what time the procession happened. If Easter was going to stuff up my plans, I might as well try to salvage something from the ruin.
By 21:30 I was standing in Odos Metamorfosis near the steps down from the Church. The procession was forming up, and started about 21:45. A guy carrying a cross led the way, followed closely by pair of bannermen flanked by standard-bearers and people waving censors. Behind them came a priest accompanied by a guy with an unfortunate resemblance to John Howard, then the float, carried by a bunch of guys in blue shirts who were probably soldiers or cops. I followed it a short way, but around 22:00 I felt my body calling time on my participation the evening.
The real question in my mind was whether the Asclepieion on Kos would be open tomorrow. Apparently all sites on Samos, at least, would be closed. Not a good omen.
KosSaturday, 30 April 2005
The ticket woman in Vathy had sold me a ticket for the 08:00 Samos Flying Dolphin 1 — a service that wasn’t running today. But they let me aboard! I sat aboard it, serene and confident, until 07:55, when they finally realised the problem and sent me down the row to Flying Dolphin 12. There I discovered my ticket was no good, so I had to walk back up to #1 and get a refund from the agent (less 10¢ because he didn’t have the right coins and I couldn’t be bothered stuffing round over 10¢), then back down to the ticket office to buy a slightly cheaper 08:15 ticket for #12. I lost 15 minutes and my serenity, and saved 50¢. Woohoo!
On the bright side, #12 had cleaner windows, which meant a better view. There was no real exterior passenger deck on a hydrofoil, it was all bus seats and largish windows, except for a very small area aft.
By 09:20 we were near Patmos, half an hour later we whistle-stopped Arki, half an hour after that, Leros (“the island of Artemis”), and by 11:00 we were nearing Kalymnos. I also learned that tomorrow’s service from Kos would be at 09:50, not 08:30. We finally docked at Kos around 11:45.
I checked in to my hotel then, splurged on a taxi to the Asklepieion, which was in fact open — and free — today. Incredibly restful and serene, despite the loud German family roosting in the propylea of the 2nd C BC Temple of Asclepius. I finally headed up into the trees backing the site to escape the to escape “the unceasing cackle-gargle”.
This led to serendipity, as I found an ancient staircase right at the edge of my map. Stairs usually go somewhere. After a brief walk up through the trees, I found the Temple of Athena, which otherwise I would have missed. It was utterly ruined but quiet and atmospheric.
Pushing my luck, I followed a rough path on uphill from the Temple, finding traces of unexcavated ancient stonework. At the top of the hill, a wire fence marked the border of the site and blocked further exploration, unless I retreated to find a way round — possibly onto private land. The intriguing building I could see across the field must go uninvestigated.
Eventually I arrived back to the now almost-deserted Asklepeion. The Germans had departed, and the Temple drowsed in the sun, exuding a mist of ancient visions. Below the platform, the seven white faerie columns of the Corinthian Temple stood in contrast to the massive brown stone brickwork of the Roman Baths beyond. An exedra below me suddenly revealed three statue bases I'd not noticed earlier, one still displaying the oval footprints of whoever had once stood upon it, left foot advanced. A headless, handless statue demonstrated how to wear a peplos.
Investigating the Baths, I found a mysterious yet quite attractive modern structure with whitewashed walls and pale wooden doors and shutters, its many-arched patio an unfinished mess of concrete and piled earth. A couple of 2015 images accessible via Streetview show that it's a Museum.
About 14:00 I started walking back to town. A trio of local cats resting in the shade beside the road watched me go by, but made it clear that if I tried to approach them, they would be outa there. Further on, I found the biggest dandelion seed-head I'd ever seen. It was the diameter of my open hand. I soon saw plenty more the same size, but at the time it blew my mind. Any local street sign with a vestige of a resemblance to a target was well-peppered with BB-shot. Note to future criminal self: the shooters aimed well. Near the end, I passed an open-air shop specialising in pe-made roadside shrines.
Back in town, I walked downtown, with a stop for coffee, and spent an hour or so looking through the other ruins around the town. In the Western Park, apart from the big tickets such as the Odeion (with the inevitable population of would-be opera singers) and the House of Europa, I found some well preserved wall frescoes and mosaic floors in what appeared to have been Roman-era houses.
I checked the ferries. There were in fact none tomorrow, just a catamaran at 18:50. Decided I might as well move my planned Rhodes slack day forward and hang out on Kos an extra night, thus preserving my slow ferry ride and daytime approach to Rhodes. So I booked on the 08:20 on Monday.
I had dinner at “Amaryllis”, near the Agora, a sweet little open-air restaurant embraced in a nest of artfully-culivated shade trees and amaryllis flowers. It's still there, but seems to have gone sadly downhill.
Sunday, 1 May 2005
I did not sleep well, waking up covered in mosquito bites. But their losses were also considerable. Between about 03:00 and 06:00 I killed eight. With the help of daylight, I found and murdered two more.
My rest day went well. I got my laundry done, sorted through my photos and deleted some of the less effective ones to save space. Watched a cat sleeping on the roof opposite. The high point of the day was taking an 08:30 walk through the deserted town in the morning cool. I paid my respects to Hippocrates at his eponymous plane tree, a tree so old the main trunk has rotted away, leaving the still-vigorous branches attached to hollow fragments that need a sturdy metal framework to hold them up.
For the rest, well — yes, the rest. It was restful lying in my room with the warm breeze blowing the curtain about as it wafted in from the balcony. But I wasn’t sure it made up for the mozzies.
I determined that my next flat back in Australia must have a balcony — a resolution that I failed to keep. It did have mosquito screens.
In the evening I ventured forth to have dinner and capture the sunset. The sunset, seen from a grassy spot near the plane tree, was excellent. I probably went back to “Amaryllis” for dinner, but the only record I have is the price: €12.50, or ⅔ of what I paid the night before.
RhodesMonday, 2 May 2005
My day started charmingly, watching an old man laying out kibble for the local cats along a park fence. I stood off and enjoyed the commotion as latecomers tried to find morsels not being jealously guarded by incumbents. Then I went down to the port and watched my ferry, the Rodanthe, come in. She seemed to take forever, but just 20 minutes after dragging myself away from the eating cats, I was aboard.
The massive flank of Kos fell behind, gradually wrapping itself in haze, as Rodanthe carried me away. The sun shone, the sky was blue, the sea was cobalt, and the big ship vibrated eagerly as it carried me onward. Once again I was where I needed to be, when I needed to be there, and all was right with my world. For the next three hours I had nothing to do except enjoy the experience — and I was feeling supremely happy. I could have reached Rhodes faster by catamaran, but arriving in Rhodes on the open deck of a ferry seemed better — more memorable and closer to the traditional Island-hopping experience, both ancient and modern.
We passed between Knidos on the coast and the island of Nissiros. The next island was Tilos, already a misty hump in the sea ahead to starboard. Then would be a sea passage followed by a pass between Simi and the Turkish coast, and so to Rhodes.
The toilets aboard were mostly unspeakable. The seats of most had been peed on. Some were blocked because people had tried to flush paper. I found one with the lid up that was clean and dry, except for a couple of spots that were easily fixed. I put the lid up again when I finished, in case I might want to use it again. With luck the next Mr. Macho wouldn’t overshoot and nobody would put the seat down, but that was probably asking too much.
Using my rest day in Samos forced me to rework my Rhodes itinerary. Most touristy things were closed on Mondays, including Lindos. I could walk the walls and such, but anything I needed to get into had to be done tomorrow — or else I’d have to let my schedule slip a day.
I booked in to Olympos Pension for “two days, maybe three”, and paid for two, and then serendipity intervened: it turned out that the Archaeological Museum, normally closed Monday, was open today due to Easter! Looked like I would be able to stay on my timetable.
I decided to let tomorrow bury its own dead. If I was still in love with the place tomorrow night, I could extend my stay. If not, the ferry awaited me in the early hours — I hoped. I still needed to check on that.
The Museum was good, and included statues in good condition of Hygeia, goddess of health, and the deified Asclepius. Many other statues lacked heads. There was a head of Helios, still with the marks and holes from his rays, that probably reflected the face of the lost Colossus of Rhodes. And there was the famous Marine Venus, eternally crouching and drying her hair. I tried to get a good photo, but the glass case defeated my camera — or maybe it was Aphrodite punishing me for that unasked grope back in Ostia.
After the Museum, I walked down the Street of Knights, stopping to admire the stone cannonballs in an armory in the 15th C Villagut Building, which had become an Ottoman mansion in the 18th C.
About 15:30 I had a late lunch at the “Rustica” traditional restaurant, accompanied by a hard-boiled easter egg. I was looking for the LP-listed Diafani, but finally gave up. (In fact it had closed down.)
Afterward, I walked the walls to settle my meal, and climbed up to the acropolis to see the cave sanctuaries, the Temple of Apollo, the Theatre and the 2C BC Stadion. The Staion was in good shape, probably repaired by the Romans. I had assumed the runners would start at the flat end, but I found the foundations of some sort of mechanism there that may have been starting gates. I tried out some nearby VIP seating, and found it quite comfortable. I found a statue base that had obviously been recycled at least once: One of the sides had a second pair of footholds. Later I found another statue base that still had its ancones (stone handling knobs) on the sides.
I re-entered the city via the Amboise Gate, took a couple of photos of wall decorations at my hotel, went to my room, and recall nothing more from that day. I faced an early start tomorrow.
Tuesday, 3 May 2005
I got up at 06:00, skipped my shower and walked down to the east coast bus terminal. There was one bus there, labelled “Rodos”. Its driver was standing nearby, peering anxiously at the timetables as though unsure when he was due to go. As he came back to the bus I caught his eye and said “Lindos?”. He went back and looked at the timetables, then acknowledged that yes, his was the Lindos bus.
At Lindos there was a profusion of signs but, oddly, not one sign pointing the way to the Acropolis. I wandered back and forth through the village in vain, then gave up and asked a local. Turned out I was on the right street but needed to take the (unmarked) left turn up ahead.
The Acropolis was interesting, although the raw newness of some of the restorations jarred — as did the crane squatting in the middle of the main temple. I entered the gate about 8:30. At the top, I spent a while enjoying the view while sorting out my finances, then walked across the east side and down the steps in the middle, poking into any likely-looking corners. It looked like they were completely rebuilding the Temple of Athena Lindia, but a look today shows the work was near completion. I’d had a brief glimpse back in time to when the Temple was under construction. I even go to watch a column drum being hoiseted up a sheer cliff.
By 9:30, the tour bus surge had started. It was time to go. In places where I’d ambled freely, I now had to squeeze through mobs of mostly German tourists. I turned aside and went down to the almost deserted beach to enjoythe bay’s turquoise waters, and eventually caught the 10:30 bus back to Rhodes. So much for the day’s planned itinerary.
I showered, changed, and dropped my laundry in to a nearby “laundromat”. Like the Turks, the island Greeks never really grasped the notion of self-service. Their system worked fine if you were not used to fingering your own smalls and you weren’t in a hurry, but it irritated me. Still, this lot promised “two hours”.
I had a long late lunch; chatted with two English people at the next table. He had been a guest lecturer at Massey University, years ago — but long after my time.
I had reached a decision: to move on tomorrow and stay on my nominal schedule. I would have dearly loved to spend another day in Rhodes, but if I did it would be mere lotus-eating. There was nothing wrong with that, since I originally planned three days here, but if I took a day off now it would need to come out of either Santorini or Pylos. A day on Santorini was a higher priority than one on Rhodes, and Pylos was still more than two weeks ahead.
The Wine-Dark SeaWednesday, 4 May 2005
By 04:00 I was on the ferry Vincentzos Kornaros. Half an hour later the ramp was raised, and we were on our way to Crete.
I enjoyed a homeric rosy-fingered dawn from 5:30 until we docked at Halki. At Diafani, an old lady boarded with her two goats. After leaving Piadia (Karpathos) we were briefly delayed by having to return to the dock to pick up latecomers. By noon we were at Kassos, a place that was to become hateful to me two years later. But not on this trip.
After dithering over Lunch — eat now and fill in some of that gap, or wait for the cheaper, better food at Sitia — I slowly indulged in three toasted ham and cheese sandwishes and a cup of coffee. With the two cups of coffee I’d already had, I later spent a fair amount of time checking out the ship’s plumbing. (Grimy, clogged — in short, Greek Ferry normal.)
Things were quiet after Kassos, barring passing a few small islands, until the dull brown coast of Crete slowly emerged from the haze like a dozing bull. The water alongside was dark slate, like the darkest wine. We docked at Sitia at about 14:45.
Scorning the bus service, I walked into town and checked into the Itanos Hotel for two nights, then went to the Bus Station to check the timetables. The first bus left for Zakros at 06:00, same as in 2002. Buses returned from Kato Zakros at 12:45 and 15:30. After a brief internet session, I went back to my room for a siesta, only emerging in the evening to relive 2002 with a huge dinner by the harbour. Tomorrow was going to be a big day; breakfast would be coffee in my room and biscuits en route.
Sitia and ZakrosThursday, 5 May 2005
The pre-dawn 06:00 Zakros bus, now-predictably, was signed “Sitia”. The sun rose as we ran south.
The bus dropped me in Ano Zakros at 06:54. My next task was to find my way down into Zakros Gorge — the so-called “Valley of the Dead”. I had some trouble finding the route in 2002, and this year I saw why — the signs were beyond the best turnoff! This year, I was on the right path by 07:00, and I reached the gate by 7:30. After that I was rarely at a loss, did not find myself climbing over boulders, and by 7:54 I had reached a tree with a circular stone seat built around the base, where in 2002 a friendly Ocker reckoned I looked done in. Which I had been, having gotten badly lost and ending up climbing over rocks instead of walking the trail. This year I was in much better shape. That was the half-way point.
I continued down, passing dead water taps and identifying one token crypt in the gorge walls. There are more, but this year I was focused on not getting lost. I kept my eyes on the track. By 08:50 I was through the exit gate at the end of the valley, and five minutes later I encountered an official sign pointing the way to Kato Zakros.
I walked up to the gate to the Minoan site right on 09:00. I could see the site spilling down the hillside across the flat. Shortly after that I was getting reacquainted with the terrapins at an old cistern. The water level was higher this year, but the locals still hung out beside the pool.
This year I focused on the Minoan town more than the palace. It was a thrill to walk down a street of polygonal paving that had been laid down more than 3500 years ago, conjuring up in my imagination the overhanging two-storey façades of the ancient townhouses that once lined it. In one house, a ghostly stair wound up to a vanished second floor. Here and there were low benches built into the walls. The ash-buried town of Akrotiri on Santorini gave me a handy mental model to work from. When I was here in 2002, I had not yet been to Santorini and had no idea how the town may have looked. Now I could see some of the logic and conjur the ghost.
Here, the Kitchen, with a service corridor linking it to the storage rooms. I spent a while trying to grasp the arrangement of the workshops. They meshed somehow with the lustral basins and trasuries, but even with my new toolchest I couldn’t quite join all the dots.
And yet, despite my mulling, I spent just over an hour on the site. By 10:15, I was sitting in the Taverna Akrogiali, which was not only the best place to rest and eat in Kato Zakros, but was built on the line of the ancient road from the Minoan town to the beach. It seemed likely to me that there had been popular eateries on this spot, on and off, since Minoan times.
After lunch, I tried to walk out to some nearby caves. Fog rolled across the road ahead as I walked. On the cliffs further along, I looked down on crystal clear water and hoped the rock overhang would hold me. Sheep clyustered on the cliffs that reaered to the other side of me. I came across a tempting side gully, but I was on my own — if I twisted an ankle up there it was a long way back! I kept on across the flat, until I saw some rocks like standing stones ahead. They looked like a good place to stop, but turned out to be closer than I expected. I finally stopped in the middle of a bleak, foggy landscape just beyond a signpost, a yellow arrow on a red field. I had walked for 35 minutes, and estimated that it continued for at least another 10 minutes from where I stopped. I gave up.
When I got back to the beach, I waded into the sea, sandals and all. Then I took off my sandals and scrubbed them out. The pebbles and the cold, frothing water felt incredibly good on my feet for the first couple of minutes, and soothing for several minutes after that. I came out just when it started to get painful. It was exactly the tonic my poor grubby peds needed.
Back to Akrogiali for orange juice and a rest while waiting for the 12:45 bus back to Sitia. The bus pulled out five minutes early, there being nobody else waiting to catch it — a warning for future reference elsewhere in Greece!
In Sitia, I made my way across the road to the Archaeological Museum, which was a bog-standard museum with wood-and-glass cases filled with marvels recovered from the ruins. Pots, cups, jars and containers. A clay bull. A bathtub. Minoan tablets in both hieroglyphs and Linear A. Seals. Loom weights. Double-axe heads. Bracelets. Wine and olive presses. A Horns of Consecration. Clay structures built like one-legged bar stools. Rhytons. The Palaikastro kouros: a crystal and hippopotamus ivory Minoan figurine. A sarcophagus, complete with occupant.
There were also Greek and Roman artifacts — Roman votive statueuettes, Hellenistic glass jars, etc. I paid less attention to those.
That night, I decided to eat at the Itanos’ attached restaurant. Ordered rosé, got white wine. Ordered two separate courses (garlic bread and chips, followed by moussaka) and it all arrived together. The chips were soggy. My free dessert and appertif card disappeared without comment, but I did get my freebies. It took a long time for the bill to arrive. Not impressed!
IraklioFriday, 6 May 2005
I caught the 08:45 Iraklio bus after a last minute executive decision to skip Gournia/Malia this year and shoot direct for Iraklio. The bus was half empty, and I nabbed the front seat behind the driver. As the bus pulled out, a doofus with no deodorant and a heavy smoker’s cough came forward and crammed himself into the seat beside me. Bro, there’s an empty side with a better view across the aisle! I was tempted to move to the back.
We pulled into Iraklio Bus Station A just after noon. I checked into the Hotel Kronos, then kicked my way up to the Iraklio Archaeological Museum. There was nothing new to see there, but I got to take a new set of photos, clearer and at higher resolution than my 2002 camera could manage (I took exactly two photos in 2002, one of the Phaestos Disk and one of the Snake Goddess, then gave up), and got re-acquainted with the Phaestos Disk, the various Snake Goddesses, the bull's-head and leopard-head rhytons, the boar's-tusk helmet, the Harvester Vase, the Bull-leaper, the Parisienne, and the like. I spent a while looking at various sealstones, admiring their impressionistic style. Some of this was due to the hard material andcrude tools available. Like coin dies, many details were achieved by drilling a series of shallow holes or abading tiny grooves. The heads of oxen ended uplooking like owl faces. A lion on a stag resembled a mosquito.
I did spend a while looking over a large wooden model of Knossos, settling the shape and mass of it into my head. It would come in handy when attempting to conjure the ghost at the site tomorrow.
Saturday, 7 May 2005
I missed the 07:30 bus by minutes, but caught the 08:00 bus, and found that I had beaten the tours. Every point of interest was free of vermin, and I spent a happy hour wandering the high spots before the first groups appeared. At each cardinal point I tried to bring my memory of the model from the Museum to bear on the ruins, with some success. The lower floors of the Palace became darker in my mind, some open, sunlit ground-level terraces being blocked off and shadowed by vanished protective walls. Now that I knew they had been there, I could see their marks in the foundations. Some areas that were roped off in 2002 were now open, including some rooms with reproductions of frescoes. I was also now adept at spotting(sometimes incorrectly, no doubt) the little corners with column sockets that were once light-wells, many with lustral basins at their bottoms. Above the Throne Room I took an angled shot by holding my camera at arms length down the light-well that caught the cereminal bowl, wall benches and the seat of the throne. I wished I had brought some string: I could have lowered the camera far down the well and used the timer to get some eye-level shots. Alas, the Grand Starircase was still closed and will probably never re-open for hoi-polloi like me.
I probed the evocative mysteries of the Royal Road (access still barred); I walked it from the rope to where it split, the left branch going to the Theatre and the right to the Pillar Hall. At the Pillar Hall it enters the Palace proper via a three-lane doorway. I looked down on a 4,000-year-old house that predated the Palace. My guidebook claimed there were still traces of red paint on walls and floor.
By 10:15 the tour group population was reaching critical mass, but I had completed a generally clockwise circuit and I started phase two of my itinerary: the systematic exploration of minor sites beyond the palace, finishing with a panoramic view from the opposite hillside.
It was superb! I started by skulking around the fences that barred access to Evans’ house and the Little Palace. I managd some long-range glimpses of the various buildings, just enough to shet my appetite.
Then I walked around to the south, where there is a Minoan villa. I missed the “House of the High Priest”. The “River” Kairatos was a miserable trickle. I made the acquaintance of a couple of local cats. They were friendly, but they were also sleepy and would have preferred I go away, which eventually I did. The “Royal Temple-Tomb” was disappointing, but intriguing passages behind suggested there was more to see there. Entry to those was blocked off.
I turned off where a sign pointed the way to the lookout, by way of the little St George church. Soon I was high enough to look back and down on Knossos. In the words of C3-PO, “the damage doesn’t look as bad from out here.”
I took my photos, then just stood there, letting the location sink in. I hope I never lose the memory of standing in the cool breeze blowing across that sunny hillside, watching Knossos seething like a maggot-ridden corpse below me, with Iraklio spilling over the nearer hilltops, the port itself visible at the end of the valley, and all overlooked by Mount Juktas. It had been a hot and tiring climb to get here, but every step was worth it.
From this height I could see into the back of the “Royal Tomb”, where there was indeed quite a lot more than was visible from the roadside. Off to one side of me was a deep gash in the landscape that was probably the quarry for the gypsum used in the Palace.
The sun was hot, and I was hungry. It was time to descend. I went down, pausing to admire the small “Villa Anastasia” — would live there! I also finally found the “House of the High Priest”, basically a shrine in the hillside with a stool or altar in the back and a couple of Minoan pillars holding up the porch. Disappointing.
For lunch, I stopped at the most appealing of the eateries across from the entry to Knossos. “Most appealing”, I’m afraid, was determined mainly by the round bum of the hostess, fetchingly displayed by her skin-tight white jeans as she leant over to point out the salient points of the menu to a pair of prospective diners. But the coffee was good and so was the moussaka, once I added some salt to it, so the choice was good even if my criteria were dodgy.
On the bus back to town, I noted to myself that this time There’s no doubt that I gave the area a good looking over. Still moe to see there however.
The rest of the afternoon I spent slacking in my hotel room, waiting for my laundry. This would have been great except that with the window open, the constant street noise and plane noise was driving me nuts. Eventually I closed the window.
Iraklio is totally unsuited to cars, yet everyone drives from A to B. I’ll be walking down some obscure side street but will have to duck as some grim-faced driver roars through, clogging up the passage in a search for a way that is not already clogged with the vehicles of his grim-faced fellows. Several spots that in other cities would be converted into café-lined plateias with scenic views are here used as car parks. It’s a nightmare, redeemed only by the places in the countryside around for which it is the logical base or jumping-off point.
I redrew my plans a little. The Dikteon Cave must await a later visit: I decided to see Archanes tomorrow and Phaestos and the south on Monday, then take Fastcat 4 to Santorini on Tuesday morning. There was no ferry on Wednesday, so if I spent an extra day here to do the Dikteon but still picked up Archanes, I was actually opting for two more days. That was too many — Iraklio would drive me nuts by then. The 20:00 ferry on Tuesday I discounted — although I didn’t much like the idea of arriving in the closed cabin of a catamaran, I really disliked the thought of a midnight arrival in Santorini.
Santorini would be a much nicer place to kill time. Going early on Tuesday gave a better spread of activities, since I could do the Museums on Tuesday afternoon, then Akritiri and Thira on Wednesday morning, chill out Wednesday afternoon (post some CARE packages home, particularly the heavy, bulky Phaesto Disk), and take a caldera tour on Thursday. My itinerary said I should move on from there come Friday morning, but I was tempted to take my Paros slack day on Santorini, and to do nothing that day but slack off. I’d been driving to my predetermined schedule so far, and I felt like it was time for a do-nothing break. The Kos Easter Sunday had been lovely, though on the wrong island. I could use another one of those, on the right island.
I needed to pick my accommodation carefully. I decided that a room with caldera view and preferably terrace was worth trying for, even if the price was higher. Hopefully I could find something suitable. An awful lot of people had gone to Santorini already — hopefully most had moved on!
That night I had dinner at To Koutouki tou Thoma. Their ice cream dessert was to die for.
Sunday, 8 May 2005
At 09:53 I was at Phourni, sitting in the carpark by the locked gate. The sign said open Tuesday-Sunday 08:30-15:00, but clearly the sign lied. The Blue Guide said 10-15, which is why I was sitting here — in case, magically, a man drove up and opened the gate at 10:00. But I didn’t really expect that.
Since I got off the bus in Kato Arkhanes just before 9, I’d so far wasted an hour for zilch. I’d climbed a long, steep hill and crossed broken ground while circumnavigating the enclosure in case another gate was open, and my reward for my pains was nada. If this day went on as it started, it would be effectively a dead loss. I traded the Dikteon Cave for this?
At 10:01 there was still no sign of a magician, so I headed off to Arkhanes. At the tiny Museum there, I asked one of the four staff about Amenospilia and Phourni. Both closed. “Maybe next month,” they said. Vathypetro, apparently, was open. Meh. At least the Museum was good, with finds from Amenospilia well displayed.
Vathypetro turned out to be well worth the scenic walkto get there. I arrived just as a tour group was leaving, and mostly had the site to myself. It was quite accessible, basically a small settlement or villa supporting the local oil and grape industries, with oil and grape presses, storerooms, and shrines. I crisscrossed the site and made notes, but lost them all the next day.
I’d walked all the way to Vathypetro, so I started to walk back — and then someone offered me a lift. It took me over an hour to walk out there, just 8 minutes to get back in the car. However, since they only picked me up at 13:00, I missed the 13:00 Iraklio bus anyway — the next one was due 16:00. Nothing else for it, it was clearly time for lunch!
Archanes was an obvious target for a future trip. It was located in an immense bowl, with Amenospilia, Phourni, Vathypetro, a Minoan hill Peak Sanctuary, and modern wineries all within a radius of two to three kilometres (albeit the Peak Sanctuary was a 2-hour anticlockwise walk with no easy direct route), it would be a good base for several days away from the turmoil that is Iraklio.
Back in Iraklio I used the internet, then realised I needed to make a pit stop. I bought an orange drink and a coffee I didn’t need to get a pretext to use a restaurant loo.
Monday, 9 May 2005
Monday was Phaestos, a long-delayed desire from 2002 and earlier. I got there by 09:00 and by 10:30 I was having brunch on the terrace outside. Now I had seen all four major palaces.
The modern entrance is from the top of the hill at the north side, through what was an upper court, the Northwest Court; but, based on Knossos, it looks to me like ordinary Minoans came in by walking along the hill into the Theatre Court and thence to the Central Court at the bottom of the Grand Staircase via a passageway. The Grand Staircase down from the Propylon was probably used by the upper crust coming down to greet visitors, but could have been used ceremonially to conduct high-ranked guests away from the workday areas. I came down the narrow northern stairs, arriving in the Western Court at the base of the Grand Staircase. To my right were the seats of the theatre. Ahead of me the Royal Road crossed the West Court on its way to the Central Court. At hand was either a tumbledown shrine or restrooms
I walked through into a set of storage rooms opening off the Central Court. One room opened into the passageway followed by the Royal Road but had no connection to the other rooms, and would likely have been a guard room.
The Central Court was large, and was probably in the heart of the Palace. However the slow erosion of the hillside had swallowed any structures in that direction, including one corner of the courtyard itself. There were some ruins still standing down by the foot of the hill to the south, so it was likely the south-east side of the Palace in general ran down the slope rather than being built out on a collapsed cliff edge. I was unable to climb down the steep hillside to investigate more closely: steps leading that way were blocked at a locked gate. I could get there on a later trip, perhaps, by walking round via a concrete road visible on the satellite but not accesible in Street View, if the road is not private, if the spot is not fenced off, which it probably is due to the ruins there. There's a drone shot that shows the area.
There has been more reconstruction here than the archaologists seem willing to fess up to. It’s not on the scale of or as contentious as the partial rebuilding of Knossos, but they have paid a lot of attention to, for example, door posts.
A friendly cat was lying nearby, demonstrating disdain for the world. On impulse, I offered him some ham from my roll — he did a beautiful double-take and teleported over to accept it, and even condescended to appreciate a scratch behind the ears. Then he went back to sleep at my feet, clearly exhausted by the ordeal.
Nourished in stomach and soul, I headed off via the shortest, 4km, route to Agia Triada. The sign at Phaestos said it was closed Monday, but everything else I had to check with said it was open. Trust the sign! I started by walking west to the nearby Church of St George, then continuing and taking the right fork a hundred metres on, where a sign pointed the way. The road was very scenic and little frequented. I passed the church at 10:53 and was standing at the — locked — site entrance by 11:39.
Aya Triada was indeed closed on Mondays! I salvaged something by walking the perimeter. Most places there was a good line of sight into the heart of it, and in many places the outer structures come close to the fence. There were points where I could have easily clambered over the fence, but I resisted, despite the thin reward for my virtue. The architecture was very similar to Phaestos, with square colonnades and doorways. I had a picnic beside, if not actually amidst, the ruins. Warm Iced Tea and a ham and lettuce roll for main, cream crackers, water and a Mars Bar for dessert. Yum.
Got back to Phaestos about 13:55 and an Agia Galini bus, allegedly bound for Matala, was the first bus to come along. Looked like the next Iraklio bus was over an hour away and I decided I’d rather kill time this way than by lying around outside Phaestos. I’d see more, and know where the next bus is ... I thought. Dumb, dumber, bloody stupid. By 15:2 I was outside Gortyn, sitting by the Odeon.
My bus took me to Agia Galini, and wasn’t coming back till 16:30. So I made a deal with a taxi, €30 to Gortyn. Thought I had got away with it till I reached for my red portfolio at Gortyn and discovered I’d left it somewhere. Last seen when I used it in Agia Galina to show the taxi driver where I wanted to go.
I think I left it at the kiosk where I stopped to buy water before getting into the taxi. So my chance of seeing it again is slim. My only chances are if someone realises it came on the bus AND hands it in to the driver AND I catch that bus, or it winds up back at Iraklio AND I can pick it up from Lost Property before the boat sails tomorrow. Chance: zero to Buckley’s.
Damage assessment:
Overall, a pain in the arse but no major injury. My ferry ticket was in my belt, I still had my LP, and all the unused DIY guides were in my pack. I could wrap them in the red plastic jacket I was using as an overflow to stash my Gallipoli stuff.
And yet, I felt bereft. The red portfolio was my security blanket. Apart from my paper itinerary it carried ephemeral notes and thoughts and things picked up during the day, and was something to read during dead time. Losing it tore a big hole in my self-confidence.
Half an hour later I was sitting at the bus stop outside Gortyn. Gortyn was a dud. I missed a 16:00 bus by standing in the wrong place, so this time I was making sure. Without the bus timetable I had no idea when the next bus was due.
The day kept getting “better”. An Iraklio-bound bus came along around 17:30, but five minutes down the road it stopped with motor trouble. And I was developing a need to pee.
They tried several things, including a nifty little fuel truck, but the bus remained immobile. I tried thumbing a ride, but then a German woman said a new bus was coming from Mires so I gave up and helped the traffic get past the obstruction (with an occasional flash of thumb on the off chance). The new bus arrived about 18:20.
After this my next diary note was 21:06, during a sulky dinner across the road from my hotel — I didn’t feel up to hunting for anyplace special tonight. I had arrived back in Iraklio around 19:20. My feet, legs, back and head were aching. Fortunately I had some easier days in front of me now. I did need to find some throwaway local plasters to put on my cracking soles to ease the drain on my limited supply of Australian Extra-Wide plasters, which I doubted I could replenish here.
SantoriniTuesday, 10 May 2005
My seat on the catamaran was nowhere near a window, but at least it was on an aisle. The cabin was fitted with large plasma TV screens emitting guttural chatter from some incomprehensible Greek version of weekday morning TV.
By the time we sailed at about 09:20, the guttural male suits on TV had been replaced by a show hosted by a genial middle-aged gent: the show was called, eerily, “Good Morning Greece” (Kalamera Ellada).
At Santorini I followed my 2002 playbook. I wandered down looking for my chosen rooms, but wound up outside Loizos, my 2002 haunt. The manager there latched onto me and made an offer too good to refuse. A three-room apartment at “Noni’s”, with caldera view, for €50 per night. If was as good a deal as it seemed, I could feel a 4th night coming on. I could steal it from Naxos or Pylos. After Iraklio, Santorini was car-noise-free heaven, with a view.
Sunset, sitting on the edge of a drowned volcano, watching the light change. Sublime. I had neighbours now — the other apartments were occupied by families. There was also a cruise ship anchored in the new port — not a monster. Little bigger than a ferry, really. I cranked my camera up to its max to get a telescopic view of the ship. Its name appeared to be Emerald.
I went shopping earlier and stocked up on munchies. With the caldera at my doorstep I didn’t have much of an urge to go to Oia for the sunset. Not tonight, anyway.
Also bought a few goodies for my poor tortured feet. I could afford to use the new plasters liberally — unlike the stuff I bought from Oz, I could replenish the supply as required. A high-tech seal on each crack at night, then a strip of plaster in the morning for durability should fix the worst cracks in a few days.
The shoe dropped — the other manager dropped by while I was sunsetting and we chatted. He asked if I wanted to move next door — seems it’s a 2-person apartment and I’m using up a 4-person apartment. Was tempted to tell him I am happy where I am, but I temporised.
Made a note never to eat at Selene’s again. Sky high prices, mediocre food, slow cooking and indifferent service.
Wednesday, 11 May 2005
The next day, there was a ferry strike. I didn’t care — for once on this trip I was in the right place when it happened — as long as it didn’t drag on. Besides, I was sharing my breakfast on the terrace with a local cat.
My visit to Akrotiri was largely a bust. They were replacing the shelter. The site was only open 10:00 to 15:00. The buses seemed to have “adjusted” for this — the 08:45 bus went via Perissa and took an hour to get to Akrotiri. Inside, the place looked like a construction site, with scaffolding and rubble everywhere. The project was expected to take another two years to complete. Waste of a morning. So I set up in a shady spot on the hotel terrace, eating an early lunch — local bread, cheese, salami, bickies, chocolate, sugared peaches, chocolate milk and Ice Tea. An inexpensive combination of simple fare, but with that million-dollar view to back it up, it was both delicious and priceless.
Later, the caldera drowsed in a golden afternoon haze. The neighbour's cat, encouraged by the breakfast morsels cadged from me, came by every so often on mysterious errands. Monica and Kevin, two Aussies who took the two-person room, still appeared to be asleep. But the island was starting to stir from its siesta. One of the café terraces up the hill was playing classical tenors. Small boats were buzzing around the mammoth liner that now dominated the gap between Thera and Nea Kameni.
Later still I had dinner on a rooftop in Fira. There was a cold breeze today — it was delicious during the sunlight but by night it made it uncomfortable to sit on the edge of the caldera. My Swordfish was cooked just fine (for frozen) but was full of bone fragments. They must have used a chain saw to cut it up!
Thursday, 12 May 2005
Thursday, or Thirst-day, was Kamari day. I walked across from Perissa. It was the wrong way! If I’d remembered there was a minibus service up from Kamari, I could have saved myself much effort by walking down insted of up. On the other hand, consider all the healthy aerobic exercise I would have missed.
Ancient Thera was your bog standard set of ruins, bilingually labelled in Greek and German. Most of it was roped off as an archaological dig was going on.
Back in my room, my clip-on sunglasses, which I left on the table on the terrace last night, were missing this morning. Of such little things are decisions made. Swearing maledictions on whoever stole them, I bought replacements and decided to leave tomorrow. I bought my ferry ticket on the way home. And when I walked into my room, there were my clip-ons, sitting on the table in the lounge. Monica had noticed them lying outside last night and had taken them in charge, and had put them on the table the next morning while my room was being cleaned. Well, I couldn't waste the ferry ticket. Or could I?
Friday, 13 May 2005
By day 4 on Santorini, the apartments around me were filled with Aussies and Kiwi-born Aussies. Monica and Kevin from Sydney, Chris and George ditto — but George was also Kiwi and Greek — and spoke Greek (handy). We all went out to dinner last night. I had been planning to leave on the 7:15 ferry this morning but decided to blow the ferry ticket and stay another night.
I went up the hill and arranged that — plus a caldera tour.
By the time we left Nea Kameni, our group had expanded. I found myself chatting to the two French girls next to me, Laurence and Alexia. Meanwhile Chris and George had sat next to Ellie (Elanor), a Perth girl on their flight, and she turned up at the port this morning, booked on the same cruise.
That evening on our little perch on the edge of a volcano was loud, long and memorable.
Saturday, 14 May 2005
By 11:00 I was all checked out and sitting on the terrace, while the shade lasted. Ferry booked, laundry was to be ready around 12:00, and Fanos had arranged a place for me on Naxos at €25.
After the shade gave out, I moved to the terrace at Oasis, overlooking my old home, with filter coffee and choc ice cream in front of me. The liner out in the harbour appeared to be getting ready to leave — if it did, that would make the guys happy tonight!
I moved on to Caffe Portioli, stretching out an espresso. And then I realised I could have done some email while waiting — but it was too late now. My lift to the port was due to leave Loizzos at 14:30.
Naxos with Morris DancersThe voyage to Naxos was uneventful, and I danced ashore about 17:45. An hour later I was gazing from close up at the unfinished temple doorway — the Portara of Lygdamis — that was Naxos’ landmark icon. Even a tyrant doesn’t always get everything they want.
Sunday, 15 May 2005
Late “Greek Breakfast” breakfast at café-Lotto — that looked more like an American breakfast. Scrambled eggs with cheese, tomatoes, juice, toast & jam, unlimited coffee. The coffee arrived accompanied by orange juice — I thought, “that’s gonna be extra,” but nope.
The best sight of the day was the (free) archaological site. Apart from the determination of the signboard to draw your attention to the five Christian churches arrayed around it, it was almost as good as the (€3) Museum, and it allowed photography whereas the Museum did not. There wasn't a lot to the ruins, but the effort required was equally small. The Kastro was fun to wander around in.
It started spotting with rain, so I decided to go home until the day made up its mind. I bought munchies on the way back and defied the rain by having lunch on the terrace. It was actually quite a cool day, with a cold breeze that added to the chill. Still, after the heat down south it was not entirely unwelcome, and I expected the warmth would pick up as summer approached.
I thought of a way to stay an extra night without letting my schedule slip, which was to make Paros a day trip. Since I was paying only €25 here, depending on room rates in Paros the cost of the additional fare back to Naxos could be negligible. But it wouldn’t work. The sights in Paros would be closed on Monday, rendering a day trip largely pointless.
To amuse myself, I used my 2002 photos to identify where the ferry docked in 2002. It was out on the branch of the main pier that closed the harbour. This year’s ferry docked at a different spot, the end of the main pier. I played this game with my previous and remaining 2002 reprises, some of which I hadn't been sure of until I saw them again in 2005.
Around sunset, the rain stopped and I walked back out to the Temple of Apollo. I was planning to photograph the setting sun through the unfinished doorway. A bunch of other tourists obviously had the same idea, but it seemed we were all to be disappointed, as the sun —
— fooled us all by dropping out of the clouds just in time. Afterwards I had the surreal experience of watched Morris dancers perform for themselves beside the temple. Wicket Brood, from Herefordshire. All of the dancers were full of Ouzo. “Woman, you’re mad,” said one drunken dancer to another. “I’m not mad, I’m lovely,” said the other as she reeled through the throng.
Afterwards I went to café Plateia — Monica & Kevin had recommended it. Asked for retsina — got a bottle of Boutari, which I remembered now was the good stuff in 2002 that originally gave me the taste for retsina. Made in Thessaloniki. Hard to get in Oz.
At 22:08 I saw the Windmill minibus heading downtown. Checked my 2002 photos — sure enough, my Naxos photo was taken at 22:09.
Later, I found myself sitting on the bog, waiting to see what would happen. My belly was not happy — something disagreed with it. Nothing presented itself, but it was the harbinger of a night's broken sleep.
Monday, 16 May 2005
Despite my stomach problems, I was packed, fed and ready to go by 8:30. I still felt clogged up, but I could function, although I felt a lump moving down. Halfway through breakfast I felt the urge and dashed to the restaurant facility to deliver myself of the wretched thing in one orgasmic blast, after which I felt fine. Based on time, that “thing” would be Popi’s souvlaki. So, OK, maybe I should lay off the lamb!
I killed the last of the wait with coffee at café Diogones down by the quay; actually my second random choice, because the first I tried showed so little comprehension of English that the chances of getting the coffee I wanted seemed poor. Here I said “coffee”, he said “yes”, and brought a jar of perked coffee, an empty cup, two sachets of sugar, and a tiny biscuit that looked like a dog turd. Just what I needed.
ParosDeparture was right on time, and 3.5 hours later I was again sitting in a café, contemplating a light lunch, if I could find one. I had already seen such of Paros’ sights as were open or convenient, and had cashed the rest of my Euro Travellers’ Cheques. For the moment I was uncomfortably flush with cash, but I was confident that wouldn’t last. So I ordered an omelet — omelets were off. I ordered some ice cream — it never arrived. All they got from me for my half-hour there was €2 for my coffee, instead of the €10-€15 they could have extracted in an hour by simply doing their job. Café Castello would go out of business at this rate.
I moved on and found an internet café — but they wanted payment up front. “Forget it”, quoth I and walked 100 metres to the next joint, which offered one minute less per Euro, but was happy to take payment in arrears. I preferred to surf till I was finished, and I could well afford whatever it cost. Surfing to a prepaid schedule (“I’m done, but I paid for another 15 minutes” or “shit, I’m almost out of time”) was not on my list of fun things to do, and such places often stuffed up secure connections if time ran out inconveniently.
The sights? A windmill by the port, the remains of the Frankish Kastro, Panagia Ekantontapyliani, "Our Lady of the Hundred Doors", the Museum (closed on Mondays), an ancient cemetery, a Hellenistic Scupture Workshop, an Ancient “Potery” Workshop. I was amused by a park, where all the trees leaned the same way. I guessed the meltemi was the cause of that.
I went to the Levanti for dinner. The pear salad was delicious — a creative dissonance of flavours, like sweet & sour but using pears, lettuce and cheese. The mushroom steak and “one hell of a pear” were also great. Seemed to be the place for pears. Or perhaps it was just the season. I paid with credit and stupidly wrote “38” against the tip — hoped they realise that nobody tips €38 against a €36.50 meal.
(My bank statement said: “16-May-2005 Levantis Restaurant, EUR38, fee AUD1.58, AUD64.61.” So they figured out I meant total €38, i.e. a €1.50 tip.)
21:14 SHIT! Potential disaster. Just rolled over on the iPaq power cord and ripped the wire from the jack in the charger. I can’t fix it. I was using the iPaq heavily at dinner and have only 75 percent power remaining. Will have to ration the remaining power and hope to repair the cord or replace the charger at Mykonos.
This was before the days of universal jacks. The HP iPaq hx4700 I was using had only a custom USB socket unique to the device, and the charger terminated in a plug for that socket. I did have a special cable that had a USB-A connector on the other end, but back then USB-A was for connecting devices to PCs, and I didn't bring a laptop. I didn't think of plugging the cable into a powered USB-A socket on a PC in an internet café!
Tuesday, 17 May 2005
Tuesday’s journal entry was lost to file corruption (flashback to 2001). The barebones account below was reconstructed from memory and photos.
The Pharos Museum was open. I saw the Fat Lady of Saliagos. A broken statue of a lion paw clawing a horse’s head looked like modern art. There was a time-worn Gorgon, potter, reliefs, and Some column bases.
At 10:50 I was down by the harbour to watch SeaJet II arrive. An hour later it left, with me aboard.
MykonosBy noon I was on Mykonos, booked into the Apollon. My room had a balcony with a harbour view.
I went for a walk and admired a pink pelican grooming itself by the harbour. I was amused by some old churches apparently melting into one ruin, like sugar cubes dissolving.
My walk took me up a hill, looking for a rumoured place to buy a replacement power supply. I passed a well-stocked garden supplies place with lots of pots and fountains and a view over to Delos. But how would I get them home? At the top of the hill I met disappintment in the Vodafone shop beside the Blue Ginger Thai/Chinese restaurant. They had nothing suitable to my iPaq’s needs.
There was a nice sunset, though I couldn’t quite see it from my balcony and had to go down to the harbour.
Wednesday, 18 May 2005
Today was Delos. I struck it lucky — Delos, usually €5, was free today. I took the ferry Orca across; it departed 09:00 and took half an hour for the crossing.
The iPaq was down to 60%, so I had to keep my notes minimal. Fortunately my camera charger was fine, so I had three fully charged batteries. I took a lot of photos of Delos.
I disembarked and walked fast across the Agora of the Competialists, trying to get a better lead on the rush of tourists behind me.
The Tholos House of Dionysos in the Agora had a pattern on the roof which appeared designed to mimic tiles or possibly even thatch. I was intrigued by the seating in the Portico of Phillipos. Who sat here long ago and watched the people walk by? The Offering House of the Naxiots was mostly not there any more.
I walked along the Terrace of the Lions, where the famous statues had been replaced by replicas that looked so worn and damged it made me sad. If they were going to replace them with replicas anyway you’d think they would fill some of the gaps with undamaged modern versions.
The Sacred Lake had been drained to prevent malarial mosquitoes breeding, but everywhere I went there were water-filled pits that swarmed with larvae. It seemed a bit pointless.
I circumnavigated the lake. The houses around it brought the past very close, though vultures had ripped up and taken the best mosaic floors. A set of heavy doors once opened on rollers; semicircular sections of stone set in the floor still showed the care taken to allow for wear and tear. Places of honour were visible at the ends of rooms denuded of their mosaic floors. Atriums lay open to the sky, surrounded by the column bases that once supported their vanished roofs. The houses were a mishmash of Hellenic and Roman era construction. Some still had plaster on the interior walls. One of the most evocative was the so-called “Lake House”, which could be easily understood, although here too someone had ripped up the best parts of the mosaic floors.
The Museum had a model of the site that helped put things into the mind's eye better than the maps. The Museum also had a good collection of stuff found in the area, including naive frescoes, Aphrodites, cheerfully erect red-tipped penises, and some of the missing mosaic floors. They had a wall of garden ornaments including theatrical masks and a couple of lovely Bes vases. And they had half a dozen of the real lions, roped-off and poorly displayed but in better condition than the replicas. Interestingly, the lions had no or only minor manes. There were game counters and glass knucklebones. The knucklebones looked just like the plastic ones I played with as a child. Wish I'd kept some to compare.
I climbed Mount Kynthos, of course. The Sanctuary of the Egyptian Gods was up there. Some walls still stood; one cella was now a storehouse for fallen columns. The Temple of Isis was amazingly well preserved, and Isis was still in residence, though headless. The top of the mountain was covered in cairns and other trashy tourist improvisations.
The most intact structure I could see from the top was the House of Masks, which I'd somehow missed. From the top, the expanse of the ancient roadstead was clear — Mark Twain had been disparaging of it, but the island Renia meant that the port bay was the smallest part of the sheltered anchorage.
On the way down I made sure to catch both the House of the Dolphins and the House of the Masks. The latter was impressive, but the floors, protected from wind by the roof, were dusty. They could do with a good sweep. Outside, a masive water-filled cistern bred mosquitoes.
The Theatre was small. Inevitably, it had people in it striking poses and testing out the acoustics.
The House of the Trident also had a roof, and lived up to its name. I was enchanted by the two small lions protruding from one of the columns in front — so frivolous that I wondered if it was original or if someone had just inserted a random piece of gable during reconstruction.
The House of Cleopatra had two headless statues side by side. The woman appeared to be original, but the man beside her stood on a separate block of squared stone.
Around here I encountered the only cat of the day. She was evidentally exhausted from feeding her kittens (who were nowhere to be seen) and ignored my overtures.
The Stoa of Philip, the Southern Portico, the Square Agora of the Delians, the Prytaneum, I mostly zoomed through. I paused to check out an extremely tall Herm. His junk, if he'd had any, had been chipped away. There did seem to be a spot where the surface of the pillar was different. The Temple of Dionysos made up for that, though the penises had all been decapitated.
Around 13:15 a ferry that had come in sounded its horn. I hustled, but missed it and spent the extra time exploring the waterfront. Once proud houses had lined it; their columns remained.
There was another ferry at 13:45, and this one I caught. I was back on Mykonos by 14:15. Back at the hotel, the floor felt like it was moving; my legs were still adjusting after the boatride, or else I was wonky from the sun.
I had dinner on the waterfront, then hit the sea wall for the sunset. The clouds mostly defeated the sunset. The sun did drop out of them briefly near the end, but then sank back into them. The weather forecast said rain in Athens (damn!).
Later, I watched the passing parade from my balcony. One woman, an “8” pinned to her back, who was having no luck selling her menagerie of helium balloons, went and sat on a beached dinghy by the waterside. The playful wind kept trying to pull her flock from her hand, interrupting her terminal ennui.
No one will offer a better plan than this …
— Homer, The Iliad
Athens and CorinthThursday, 19 May 2005
At 05:35, I was waiting at the Mykonos airport, waiting for my 07:15 flight. All counters deserted. It was now clear that when they said “be there an hour before”, what they really meant was, don’t bother turning up more than an hour before!
At 08:35 I was sitting on the 09:00 Metro train waiting to depart the airport. So my retired friend in Mykonos had been wrong — Line 3 did go all the way to the airport. But either there wasn’t an 08:30, or thanks to my baggage debacle [no idea now what that was; I don’t remember], I missed it by seconds. My timetable had me on an 08:30 metro, an 09:45 bus 51, a 10:30 bus to Corinth, and in Corinth at 12:00.
Due to the need to find a replacement power supply for the iPaq, my schedule was going to slip anyway. My plan was to walk down Ermou from Syntagma to Monastiraki (about 950 metres). If I found something in that space I could grab a taxi up Athinas, or walk to Omonaia (about 1200 metres) and catch bus 51. Depending on when the Metro reached Syntagma (say 09:45), how long the search for a power supply took (say an hour, 10:45), I could be on an 11:30 or 12:00 bus to Corinth, losing only an hour and a half. And pigs had wings. This day had started badly: why should I think that it would improve?
Beneath Athens’ murky grey sky, I trudged down Ermou and up Mitropolis, following leads. The last lead gave me a phone number for HP. That call gave me an address, 267 Patision. The address said they didn’t handle Pocket PCs, but their maintenance dept might be able to repair the damaged charger. 50% power left. But by 12:30 I was in a taxi headed for Bus Station A. The maintenance guy had repaired the power connection — hallelujah!
I caught the 13:10 Korinthos bus. Net delay to plans: 2h40. An hour and a half later, my hungry iPaq (down to 45%) was gulping down a charge at Hotel Apollon, Korinthos. On the way I’d managed to catch a glimpse of the Corinth Canal as the bus zoomed over a bridge. Even better, the skies in the Peloponnese were clear. I had left Attica’s grey murk behind.
The late closing of Ancient Corinth and Acrocorinth gave me the opportunity to make good most of the time lost in Athens — and, OK, sitting in my room catching up on several days worth of photographic housework. I got in a fair look at Ancient Corinth and the Museum, and a quick look at the parts of Acrocorinth nearest the gate. The latter cost me €15 for a return taxi, but transformed the day from a half-failure or half-success into a modest but definite success.
Ancient Corinth was jumbled eras and mediocre headless statues, the best parts being the seven columns of the Doric Temple of Apollo, and the Peirene Fountain.
… After this is the entrance to the water of Peirene. The legend about Peirene is that she was a woman who became a spring because of her tears shed in lamentation for her son Cenchrias, who was unintentionally killed by Artemis. The spring is ornamented with white marble, and there have been made chambers like caves, out of which the water flows into an open-air well. It is pleasant to drink … (Pausanias, Description of Greece, III 2-3, after Jones, 1918),
The Museum was packed with amusing stuff. Two statues of Augustus, side by side, one modestly robed, the other heroically naked. A happy Nero with wispy sideboards. Apollo gazing quizzically from the centre of a mosaic floor. Caracalla with a neckbeard. Julius Caesar with a 3-day-growth and a 3rd eye. A smug Sphinx. Well-worn well-heads of who knew whom.
I walked up to Acrocorinth. It felt incredibly familiar, and then I knew it. This was what a ruined Minas Tirith would look like in a later age. I ran out of time when it closed at 19:00, but I had seen enough to content me. It was the topper on a good day’s sightseeing. I took a taxi back down.
I had dinner in Ancient Corinth, gyros and orange juice, while waiting for the bus back to Corinth.
To Kalamata and on to PylosFriday, 20 May 2005
I had looked forward to riding the Kalamata train — except the guy forgot to mention that I had to change onto a bus at Argos. So much for my leisurely 4-hour train ride through the heart of the Peloponnese. Instead, after an hour on the train I was turned into one more sardine crammed in a tin can rumbling down the highway. I had expected something of the sort, but it was not a prophecy I wanted fulfilled.
The bus was an old junker with broken bits and pieces everywhere, and gaping holes in the backs of the seats where it had been converted from Smoking to Non-Smoking by the simple expedient of removing all the ash-trays.
Sure, it was a cheap ride to Kalamata — but I wasn’t out to save money, just hassles. The only hassle I saved myself was the two-step shuffle from Korinthos to the Corinth Canal interchange. I did have the minor satisfaction of screwing over the KTELs that had set up that cosy arrangement. Actually, the arrangement griped me less than the fact that the Korinthos KTEL, in true Peloponnese tradition, wouldn’t tell you what other services passed through the Canal stop, or when. Pelops was still carved in pieces.
We had a 20-minute comfort break in Tripoli. Sparti 57km, Kalamata 88km. An hour and a half later we had a smoking break somewhere in the back-wops — we’d been pissing around at 32-35 km from Kalamata for the last 20 minutes. My bladder was starting to make its opinion known, but there were no toilets here. The bus driver suggested an unfinished house nearby, but I declined.
We reached Kalamata about 13:30, and I had lunch in the greasy spoon across from the bus station. The next Pylos bus was 15:15 — I figured that the previous one departed while I was slogging my way up from the train station where the bus dropped its passengers.
However, I actually arrived at the bus station “on time” by my itinerary — so I shouldn’t complain, as obviously my pre-trip planning was faulty. It seemed logical for a bus to leave timed to arrive at destination just in time for siesta, and indeed the last bus may have been so timed, but the final destination would not have been Pylos but Chora or Gargliani, probably half an hour further on. So my planning was out by probably about half an hour.
I arrived in Pylos just after 17:00 and hustled to book into the Hotel Karalis, have a shower, and take a short pseudo-siesta lying on the bed enjoying the breeze off the bay. I had a bay view and my own balcony. Pylos looked delightful, so far.
I recalled chatting to an American and his wife one night at a restaurant in Iraklio. Could have sworn I saw the same guy from the bus as we came down into town.
This was the moment I realised that SGD35 in notes (worth more than €15) was tucked into the back of the red portfolio when I lost it at Gortyn. Since SGD were freely exchangeable, that represented more than enough dosh to cover posting it back to me. More likely, whoever found it simply pocketed the money and turfed the trashy portfolio. But this newly realised cash angle added tangibly to the loss, because it went to the bottom line!
I took a photo of the timetable board at the Pylos Bus Station. I noticed one entry, "Methoni". This set the seed of an idea that fruited two years later.
PylosSaturday, 21 May 2005
Breakfast at the Karalis was “Continental”, but I managed to gather a fair spread from what was available. Some cornflakes, some cheese and ham, two slices of marmelade bread, a glass of orange juice, and two cups of coffee later ... I was ready for the Palace of Nestor!
When I got there, the Palace took me less than an hour to cover. The Minoan town was roped off, and most of the Palace as well. What was left was a well defined set of walkways from which all the key points were marked and visible and everything else was unmarked and hard to make out.
I walked in the main entrance of the outer Propylon, passing a column base. There was an ancient guard post against the wall to the left of the doorway. Inside, in the second Propylon, was another column base, and beyond that the main courtyard. A portico with two columns had another guard post at right and led into a vestibule with yet another guard post. From that I entered the throne room, dominated by the hearth, surrounded by four columns. Inside, the throne faced the hearth, halfway down the wall at right. The floor tile between the throneand the hearth had an octopus motif. To the throne occupant's right was a depression in the floor, connected to another depression by a not-quite-straight line. Libations went in one and drained to the other. To my surprise, there was only one entrance to the throne room.
The thick, ruined walls were low enough so that I could look over them to try to figure out the order of the store rooms. They clustered around the throne room, acessed by a series of doors that made them into a continuous loop. The rooms over the back wall, for example, once stored pithoi containing oil. Those to the west were pantries.
From the throneroom I went northeast, through what appeared to be residential rooms and offices. I passed the bathroom, with its massive clay bath. No visible drain, how did they empty it? I had encountered water pipes through nearby walls, so getting the water looked easy, but getting rid of it afterward was not clear to me.
The so-called Queen’s Hall with its small hearth seemed to me more likely to be the wanax’s private quarters; if the Mycenaeans were like the Greeks who suceeded them, women would have been segregated away from places frequented by men, such as upstairs. The Hall was part of a suite that included a likely toilet, plus stairs leading up.
I walked across the courtyard and out through the propylon to the west side. Most of the clay tablets were found in the “archive” here. Back through the propylon, still on the west, I found the “waiting room” with its seating benchs and attached cup-filled pantry.
The South West Building (the “Old palace”) was roped off and looked rarher neglected and overgrown. I stuck to the main building and found some more steps going up. If the steps in the Queen’s suite went up to women’s quarters and the larger stairs nearby went up to more oil storage rooms, what was up there on the west side? Food stores? Fabrics?
I completed the circuit. It didn’t take long. Then I looped back through, taking photos wide angle photos and looking for overlooked items, and trying to get the system of the palace into my head. Then I walked the perimeter of the site, trying to figure out what had made this seem such a good place for a palace. Done.
The “massive blaze” and instant abandonment that destroyed the palace in antiquity has been reduced and moved earlier in time by more recent research. There was definitely a big fire, but parts of the palace appear to have remained usable, accounting for later pottery finds in the ruins. The palace may already have been destroyed long before the days of the sea people, and may have come back into limited and temporary use during the end of the Mycenaean world. Some of the ruination we see seems more likely due to wind and weather.
I stopped in at the nearby tholos tomb. It was smaller than those at Mycenae, only about 10 metres across, and had no inner chamber. The sarcophagus stood against one wall. The ceiling looked to be in good condition, but had collapsed long ago and had been reconstructed by the archaeologists. The tomb had some small finds but had been throughly looted in antiquity.
I decided to add to my day by walking to Chora, 4km on, where there was a museum. I figured could get there almost as fast on foot as by waiting for the next bus from Pylos, whenever that might come by. More “healthy exercise”, bah!
As it happened, the bus passed me as I was approaching the bus stop in Chora. I would have saved less than 10 minutes by kicking my heels at Englianos. Chora’s Museum was on the far edge of the town. The Museum had a good collection of finds from the Palace, including masses of pottery, bronze swords, parts of a griffin and leopard frieze from the Queen’s Hall, the lyre player and bird fresco from the Throne Room, a tiny golden helmet and two Frankish gold coins probably dropped by plunderers who came to rob stone from the Palace. One face of a woman reminded me of the majestic woman with the pendulous breast that I had seen bending down in the Akrotiri friezes, albeit that woman’s face had been damaged.
Back at the hotel, I washed my emergency laundry and laid it out to dry on the chairs on the balcony. I’d hang it on the balcony railing, but this way they dried just as fast but didn’t make the hotel look untidy. The desk man said last night that he knew where I could get my laundry done, but this arfternoon he said it was closed. Hence Plan B, which featured a tube of Travel Wash and the surreptitious use of the bathroom basin. Worked fine.
I took a long wander to find dinner. I checked out Codrington’s Memorial, and the house of the local Olympic hero, and finally ended up at the local pizzeria. I tried one other place, but they were so lethargic about taking my order — and so prompt about coming back to tell me Saganaki was off — that I left to find a place that wasn’t going to complete my dismay by also barraging me with soccer on a too-loud TV. I could work with a certain degree of inefficiency, but sheer disregard for the customer is beyond inefficient.
The night was filled with Olympic chants and air horns — I soon remembered why I’d initially skipped past the pizza place earlier.
I gave up, went back to the hotel, and started watching Eurovision, in Greek — then decided enough was enough. I took my glasses off, put them beside me where the other pillow would go, rolled over and tried to sleep. But the air con made the air too dry and I was feeling bloated from my pizza dinner. At one point during the night, when the worst street noise was gone (I hoped), I got up and opened the window so I could turn off the air con without getting too hot. Getting back into bed, I put my elbow on the glasses and the left lens shattered.
Because it was the left lens, the disaster was not as bad as it would have been if it had been the right lens, as my right eye is much the weaker of the two. With the polarised clip-on in place, it was not obvious that one lens was gone, so in an emergency I could still get useful service from the glasses. But I needed to get the lens replaced. Maybe I could find a place in Navplio or Athens that grounds lenses on the premises and could therefore make the replacement the same day. But since I didn’t have my prescription with me, I’d need to sit for a full eye test. That could prohibit solving the problem before I got back to Melbourne.
I decided to plunder my budget for a proper pair of sunnies.
Sunday, 22 May 2005
Sunday was a rest day. It went pretty much as planned, although I did go to the Pylos Museum and explore the Neokastro. The Museum had some nice bronze statues and a couple of beautiful Hellenistic glass bowls dug from a tumulus. The Ottoman Neokastro had a nice little mosque that had been converted into a church, its minaret amputated. From the Kastro walls I had grand views over the Bay of Navarino. The area of the modern town of Pylos was previously known as Navarino for many years, until 1833.
One certainty was that Pylos would not win any catering awards. None of its eateries appeared to be up to par.
NavplioMonday, 23 May 2005
I was out of the hotel before 06:00, hoping for an early Kalamata bus. A succession of buses for other destinations rolled through but nothing saying Kalamata. Finally, just after 08:00, I asked a driver of a bus that had just pulled in, who admitted that his 08:30 service, flagged “Pylos”, was actually going to Kalamata. I saw several “Pylos” buses go through earlier. The “answer”, such as it is, was that due to school exams, early buses were running half an hour earlier. But if the Kalamata bus came at 6:00, I should have seen it — had it had Kalamata on the front. Lesson learned!
The 10:30 Athens bus from Kalamata took me to Tripoli, which the guy selling tickets said was my best bet for a connection to Navplio, either direct or through Argos. Having experienced Tripolis’s bus connection before, I gave side-eye to any hope of a bus link to Navplio, and sure enough, I got to Navplio by taxi around 13:30. I checked in to the Pension Bekas. My room had a balcony with excellent views out into the bay.
I had a walk around the town for a couple of hours in the afternoon, refreshing memories from 2002 and burning CDs of my trip photos to date, then settled in for my siesta.
O Noules for dinner. No English spoken, by the waitress anyway — the waiter did the English. The Sakanaki Pastourma was good — a spicy cheese omelet with fragments of bacon. The home-made sausage was OK, though the chips were soggy.
Tuesday, 24 May 2005
I started my day early. I took the 07:00 bus to Argos, passing Tiryns at 07:10 and arriving about 07:20. From Argos I grabbed a taxi to Mycenae, hoping to be there before the tour buses arrived. By 07:40 I was there.
I got out by the lower town and walked up to the Lion Gate along the modern road, looking over the wire fences to pick out ruins of cenmeteries, houses and workshops. I walked in through the Lion Gate just before 08:00.
I walked around the Grave Circles and Cult Centre, and looked out over the lower town, picking out key locations. When I moved on, I noted that the destruction being wrought by the “workmen” being paid to restore the place had continued apace. Some of the new damage was wear and tear from inadequately braced doorsteps and the like, but much was clearly deliberate, with the hammer marks clearly visible.
As I walked round, I noticed that strategic parts of the valley between the citadel and Mt Zara were overlooked by ancient bastions. These outliers were probably for early warning and discouraging reconnaisance; they would have been too small to offer serious resistance to an invader.
I did correct one misperception from 2002: I could not have seen Tiryns from here. It was out of sight around the mountain flank. I had wanted to see it, despite the murk, and had fixed on what I thought I saw rather than acknowledging it wasn’t there.
17:14 A thunderstorm. Looks like Epidavros is off for today.
21:01 But the clouds did make for an excellent sunset!
Wednesday, 25 May 2005
At noon I was treed at a café by a rainstorm — while across town my just-washed trousers, hanging on the hotel balcony to dry, received an extra rinse. My budget suggests that my lunch that day cost a little more than usual …
Later I defied the rain and set out for Palamidi, taking a taxi to the main entrance and walking mostly down, except that sometimes I was tempted out on beckoning sections of wall. In places, they were so slippery that I took my shoes off on the way down and negotiated the paths barefoot, as that way there was less chance of going arse over tit and reaching the bottom much sooner than expected. At one point I turned away from a “dangerous” area (falling rocks), only to find myself looking own on it ten minutes later. So I went down it, in safely. Despite the weather, I achieved my itinerary — apart from the Museum, which had been closed for some time for renovations and would be, by appearances, closed for some time longer.
For dinner, I went back to the same place I had the rain-punctuated lunch at. The swordfish was excellent, so much so that I wonder if it might even have been fresh rather than frozen. The texture was fine and crumbly. They even gave me a freebie dessert — apple slices in honey. The freebie made me suspicious, so I played a quick game of Solitaire to test my luck — and won on the first hand! I wish I’d recorded the name of the restaurant somewhere.
AthensThursday, 26 May 2005
By 07:00 I was on the Athens bus. There was a nice dawn — it looked promising for Navplio, so I hoped Athens would be good too. Well, I could hope. By noon I was treed by rain for the second time — the first time at the Stoa of Attalus, this time a taverna near Thisio station. I decided I might as well have lunch. I'd seen both Agoras and was on my way to the Kerameikos when the rain closed in. Not to worry: since I was right on schedule by my itinerary, lunch was next anyway. The rain might stop and I could get to the Kerameikos afterwards. But … I was Treed for the third time just as I finished with the Museum at the Kerameikos and was about to go exploring.
So it was back to the hotel for me. Alas, my hotel was a bad joke. For €50 per night — comprising €35 for the room, plus a mandatory €15 breakfast, I get en suite, aircon and unnecessary TV. But the window “locked” with a sliding bolt (the lock was busted) and had only a single curtain, so I could either do everything under the gaze of the windows next door or lights-off in an artificial twilight. The en suite came with a towel the size of a postage stamp, to match the minute shower. The toilet came equipped with the expected but not loved used paper bin. The bed came with a central ridge that had already nearly caused me to fall off it. I found an extra pillow in a cupboard, but it had no pillow case. After a search, I found a single power point, hidden behind the desk.
This was a C-class hotel, said so right there on the back of the door, but the facilities fell short of what I’d expect. I didn’t expect flash from C-class, but I did expect function, and this place on this rainy afternoon was right on the edge of “I’m outa here”! It cost €6 more than the Lonely Planet said, and I doubted that the 12% price rise since 2003 was backed up by a 12 percent improvement in amenities.
The Festival of Athens was under way — big queues outside the Theatre of Herod Atticus. I was tempted to go queue up, but queueing was not what I wanted to do tonight. Made a note to check what’s on, though, in case I felt like it another night.
Restaurant Dionysus for dinner. Great view of the Acropolis, though the sunset was a bit of a fizzer — I was hoping it would highlight the Parthenon in pink, but I was to be disappointed. No real colour in the sky. No moon, either — it was not due till after midnight.
I was tempted to take a pepper-steak main, but my heavy lunch argued against it — so I settled for a reprise on France last year — Salad Nicoise, bread & butter, a rosé, followed by a fruit salad and coffee. I might still have eaten too much.
Sitting on the terrace, looking over to the floodlit Parthenon, felt unreal. Even the scaffolding on the entrance to the Acropolis didn’t ruin the effect. In the history books, it was always being built: there was little reference to its ruination. So somehow the scaffolding was a connection with the past.
Going on 2439 years. Not an impressive age compared with Knossos or Mycenae, and especially not when compared with the Great Pyramid, but the Parthenon stands at the heart of history in a way that even the pyramids do not.
Friday, 27 May 2005
Had dinner at Sikinos, just across from the little one-lung cinema (“Cine Paris”) showing Star Wars III at 20:45. [Image: waiter unscrewing a plastic bottle of water. New insight on the nature of “corkage” fees.] The place offered a €12 “set menu” — Greek salad and moussaka, with beer. They were willing to substitute retsina for beer. A small salad, a moussaka that’d seen better times — but I’d eaten worse. Unfortunately.
Another taverna suddenly burst out with a too-familiar march anthem, and I tasted pizza in reaction. Fortunately the volume was lower — and nobody was blasting on a horn. Yet. It was still 15 minutes short of show time.
To kill the taste of pizza I decided to have coffee, which came with another of those little dog-turd shaped cinnamon biscuits.
After dinner, I watched Star Wars III in a rooftop cinema, beneath the evening sky, with pastel clouds to my right and the Acropolis visible through tree branches to my left. End of a 27-year wait: Now I had seen the set. I saw baby Luke and Leia, I heard Darth Vader take his first breath from his mask, and so on. Lucas did a reasonable job of tying the threads together and showing how the universe of episodes I to III became the universe of episodes IV to VI. Padme died, but Leia never did say that her sad mother was her natural mother, she just assumed it was so. The transformation of Anakin to Vader was well handled. But overall, it was disappointing compared to the original trilogy.
Saturday, 28 May 2005
Had Lunch at the Byzantine Taverna, which seemed to have spread across a whole intersection.
After such a slow start I decided to use up the last segment of my Acropolis ticket on a return visit to the Agora. I missed quite a few things on my first time there — I let myself get too distracted by the rain. This time I came in from the Acropolis side and let my mind’s eye lead me, and suddenly the place was transformed from piles of mysterious rocks to the ghost of what was once there. Score one for revisiting!
Today should have been for Salamis, but that required at least clear vistas if not clear skies, and today Athens was clamped beneath iron-grey overcast and blinded by drizzle, with the occasional roll of thunder. Decided that even if it cleared later, it may be too late for my purposes. And sure enough … Ended up going to rewatch SW III
I’m having a hard time with my red portfolios this trip. I’ve now lost the red plastic folder I was using as a replacement for the DIY guidebook holding functionality of the lost portfolio. I had it on the way to the theatre: that’s the last I remember of it. I probably left it on the counter at the cafétaria there when I bought some corn chips in cheese.
I might be able to recover it if so, but it’s little loss. Unlike the original portfolio it had no place to cache things so all I’ve lost this time is the DIY Athens guide and the Battle for the West section. The only irreplaceable thing was the map section from the 2001 Lonely Planet I used to make the DIY, and since the information in that DIY has proven obsolete over and over on this trip I’ll need to buy a new LP anyway if I ever come back to Athens.
I still have the 2003 Greek Islands LP, which has a small but more up-to-date Athens section, I have two Athens maps for navigation, I have the torn-out Athens section of my old Greece Blue Guide, and I have only one day left in Athens on this trip. No problem, just annoying — tomorrow I need to find something suitable to wrap my Turkey DIYs in.
Sunday, 29 May 2005
I finally found out what the hotel’s compulsory €15 breakfast was made of: a couple of slices of bread, a couple of pieces of dried bread, butter & jam to go with the bread, a slice of cake, two wedges of cheese, a glass of orange juice, and a jar of coffee or tea. It would take quite a bit of creativity to make this add up to €15. I could have as good a breakfast for half the price from a taverna. As expected, an outrageous ripoff.
19:17 Dept of Weird Events: just went into the loo and discovered an unused roll of loo paper lying on the floor. It wasn’t there the last time I used the loo and I haven’t left the room in that time. The window is open. It opens at the top. Kids are playing in the stairwells, driven crazy by a day confined by rain. Hypothesis: the roll is from next door or thrown up from a lower floor.
Had dinner beneath a tree, by the Tower of the Winds, with the lit-up Acropolis beyond it. Wish I’d brought my camera. Never mind. Everyone needs a lost day from time to time. This moment was mine — to be seen by others, if ever, only through my words, not my photos. Not that there weren’t plenty of flashes going off. No more lightning flashes, though — the sky had cleared. A busker was playing slightly Greekified tunes — El Condor Pasa, Parsley Sage, Stairway to Heaven. I had only a few small coins, but he was good, so I tipped him a fiver. When leaving he paused to thank me.
The taverna had a large itinerant population of dogs and cats. They were tolerated, except when one became a nuisance, when the offender was gently urged away. Every so often there was a hiss and spat when a cat got up the nose of a dog. There were also mosquitoes, alas. I would itch tonight.
Baklava for dessert. Usually too simultaneously gooey and dry for my taste, but I risked it based on the rest of the fare. And I was right: it was delicious.
The place did a roaring trade — no table was left empty for long: there was always another group of strollers moving in to take the vacated seats. The prices reflected the location, but for once the food was also up to scratch. It was a good way to say goodbye to Athens.
There are two great jars that stand on the floor of Zeus’s halls and hold his gifts, our miseries one, the other blessings. When Zeus who loves the lightning mixes gifts for a man, now he meets with misfortune, now good times in turn.
— Homer, The Iliad
EdirneMonday, 30 May 2005
My taxi was 15 mins early. Fortunately I was ready, though I resented the loss of my 15 remaining minutes of stuffing-round time. By 04:30 I was checked in and cooling my heels at Athens airport waiting for my 05:40 flight. Takeoff was 15 minutes lates, but by 06:40 I was in Alexandropoulos, waiting for my pack to come off the plane.
I splurged €6 on a taxi from the airport to the train station, only to find that the next train was noon, not 08:45as I'd been told. But buses ran regularly, so my next stop was the bus terminus. I left Alexandropouls on the 07:45 Orestiada bus, putting me an an hour ahead of my nominal schedule. The conductor said the Orestiada buses pick up at the stop outside the airport. Handy if I'd known!
I got into Orestiada just after 10, and by 10:15 I had a ticket for the 10:30 bus to Kastanies at the Turkish border, a 15 minute run. My schedule was, “11:15 Orestiada, 12:00 Edirne”, so I was still running an hour ahead. The next hurdle would getting over the border, if I wasn’t not allowed to walk across.
Walk I did, across a nice bridge. By 11:20, I was checked into Turkey, and by the look of it I would be walking the rest of the way to Edirne — but just then a taxi came along and I accepted what felt like a mildly extortionate €10 (alternative ₺20) charge to run me into town. I even had a bargaining position, as I could have waited for the dolmuş and paid almost nothing. Not a good start! I had to start thinking Eastern again. I needed to bargain for things like taxis and accomodation, not meekly pay what the asked price.
In Edirne I discovered another issue: a 10:00 bus to Çanakkale I’d been told about, might not exist. I checked with a booking office: they could only find a 19:15 daily. That seemed odd. I could zag through Istanbul, at the cost of two extra hours on buses plus waiting time, but it wasn’t appealing. I needed to go out to the otogar and do some research.
I booked into a local hotel for a much needed siesta. Later I went out and found a place that was able to burn photos to CD (two copies, stored separately), freeing up space on my CF/SD cards. “Dinner” was a kebab in a pocket and a tub of yoghurt, fixed price 1 lira. I ditched the yoghurt: the kebab was almost as filling as one that cost three times as much earlier. The the drinks portion of the meal was orange juice and cappuchino in an outdoor café spread across a terrace in sight of the Selimiye.
I decided hedge my bets: to go to the otogar tomorrow morning and hop the first available bus to Istanbul, or else that maybe mythical 10:00 to Çanakkale. Two booking agencies said the same thing — the only Çanakkale bus tomorrow was 19:15. If I’d gone on tonight’s bus it would have worked out, but after wasting tomorrow kicking my heels it would be pointless. Going tonight wasn’t really an option: after 7 hours in the afternoon heat followed by 3.5 hours on the bus, on top of this morning’s grotesquely early wake-up, I’d have arrived in Eceabat totally knackered and incapable of getting out of bed. Of course, having booked a hotel room here and used it for the arvo I could have blown the bed and gone on the 19:15 tonight, but I was not desperate enough to get to Gallipoli to do that. I enjoyed my siesta and relaxed evening.
The extra time in Istanbul could be put to good use. I could add day trips to destinations around about. I could even do an excursion to Ankara — two nights with a day trip to Hattusas. However, if that 10:00 bus existed, I would take it and continue as originally planned.
Çanakkale and EceabatTuesday, 31 May 2005
As it happened, my plan was impossible. Today’s itinerary was intended to be Troy, but a 10:00 bus would get me to Eceabat after 13:00. With hotel and ferry time I couldn’t see myself in Çanakkale before 14:00, so even if I took a taxi out to Troy it would be a hurried visit to be ready for the 16:00 dolmuş back. Well, it only mattered if that bus existed.
09:35 It exists. It’s an Izmir bus.
The fare was ₺20 — and since the LP said USD 9, even in these days of a decrepit USD, I suspected I’d either paid over the odds — or prices in Turkey were running well ahead of inflation. Since I’d started this trip in Turkey in April, I now had good reason to distrust the guide book. Also, that fare into Edirne from the border no longer looked so extortionate.
We started moving — and the engine immediately conked out and had to be restarted. And it was raining and thundering. The omens, it would seem, were inauspicious. However, 10 minutes later the clouds cracked open and the sun shone through the rain. A sunderstorm!
At Eceabat, I checked in to TJ’s, Eceabat's answer to Anzac House. The place was a dump, with the paint peeling from the walls. The room was pervaded with a stench of dirty socks and mold. But the facilities worked — once I reinforced a loose hose with a rubber band — and the shower cubicle was a good size. Worth the money? No. But if everything else was similarly overpriced, I must pay or leave. And now I was here I was determined to finish off Gallipoli so I would never have to come back. So I paid. Price wasn’t the main consideration here. I opened the windows and took a shower, then rested as well as I could.
In the afternoon I took the ferry across to Çanakkale. It wasn’t worth trying for Troy this late — I’d almost certainly get stranded there if I tried — but I felt like having a wander round Çanakkale for memory’s sake. Çanakkale had certainly done more with its frontage than Eceabat. Eceabat’s waterfront looked like a bad dream, and yet it had the same views and a better geography. By 15:20 I was sitting on the waterfront waiting for a salad. When the weather closed in again, I went back across to eceabat
A TJ’s, the dirty socks stench was gone, but the room still smelt of rising damp, so the open window wasn’t a total success but not a waste either.
Dinner was punctuated by a thunderstorm breaking across the straits. After dinner I sat upstairs at TJ’s, knocking back wine and avoiding my room. I hoped the weather would start co-operating. I didn’t come here to sit in a dingy room and watch the rain fall! The weather forecast for the rest of the week was “more of the same”. Oops. Later, defying the rain, I went and found a supermarket that had air fresheners.
According to TJ, a taxi to Gully Ravine would be about ₺80. Ouch. Robbery! But if I took a dolmuş to Alçıtepe I could walk to Gully Ravine then on to Helles, and there was a dolmuş back from Helles. No need to price that — it took a lot of dolmuş rides to balance ₺80.
Wednesday, 1 june 2005
I decided to try for Helles & Gully Ravine, despite grey clouds and yesterday’s warnings. TJ’s “8:30” from Eceabat to Alçıtepe existed, but he neglected to mention that it only went as far as Kilitbahir, where it squatted to wait for 10:00. Ghu knew when it gets to Alçıtepe. This put serious pressure on my timetable for today since TJ also said the last dolmuş from Helles departed around 16:00. From Alçıtepe I faced at least 15 km of straight hiking to get to Helles, plus detours and delays. It was possible, but I would need to curtail my exploration of Gully Ravine — I simply didn’t have the time to struggle down it. I’d have to look at the head, then go by road to the mouth, then move on to Helles.
Çay at Kilitbahir: plastic chairs and tables scattered on the dirt beneath a bamboo awning. By the look of the pock-marks in the dirt, the awning was not particularly rain-proof. There was a section of the café with a concrete floor beneath a tighter roof, but the cigarette smoke was thick there.
About 10:15, with no movement on the vehicle front, I gave up my plans for Gully Ravine and Helles and walked back to Eceabat. Even if the dolmuş guy suddenly sprang into action, the time available for my itinerary had evaporated.
Back at Eceabat, I finally did what I should have done first thing this morning — asked a taxi driver roughly how much to Pink Farm Cemetery (a handy landmark). “Forty million”.
₺40 was at the bottom end of the ₺40-50 I had expected and the ₺60 I would have paid at a pinch. If TJ had said “forty million” and not “eighty million” last night I could have taken an 08:00 taxi to Gully Ravine and I’d probably be at Helles by now.
Staying at TJ’s had turned out to be a dud investment. I was paying over the odds for a crappy room in a noisy location and achieving nothing.
I’ll probably go to Istanbul first thing tomorrow morning. I can’t get back the ₺50 I’ve already wasted on TJ’s (last night and tonight, since it’s too late to leave today), but I can avoid throwing another ₺25 down the same hole.
By noon I was on the Çanakkale ferry, going for Troy. A ₺3 dolmuş dropped me at the gate.
I’ll skip the blow by blow. This time, I covered the site thoroughly. I should have no need to come back again. Sadly, this time, I succumbed to temptation and took a little spear-shaped fragment of crumbled Troy VI wall with me. It was still in position when I found it, but so loose and ready to fall that it came away at the light touch of my fingertips. I merely hastened the process of disintegration by a month or so, I assured my prickling concience.
The souvenir shops had a new line of tourist tat: horses modelled on the tacky one in the 2004 film Troy rather than the tackier one that still stood at the Troy site. More authentic in feel and certainly more impressive to look at, but it was still just mass-produced tat. I did see a postcard that suggested that the horse from the film had been set up somewhere as a tourist attraction. I decided I must find out more about that, although I rather doubted the place would be in Turkey. But on the 17:00 dolmuş, a couple of other tourists said the horse was in Çanakkkale, 200m N of the ferry terminal. Wow! How had I missed it last night?
And it was there, complete with a local seagull perched on its left ear and a model of Troy VI nearby. The Troy model included a reconstruction of the sorrounding town, not just the acropolis. The town was mostly speculative, no doubt, built from post holes and imagination, but it made for an arresting conjuration of the ghost.
Thursday, 2 june 2005
I threw money at a local taxi driver, and by 08:30 I was walking down the main street of Alçıtepe, once known as Kritia. Three minutes later I was on the outskirts. 15 minutes later, having missed the turnoff to Y Beach, I reached Twelve Copse Cemetery, which holds 179 Kiwis who fell at Helles. Several cemeteries scattered across a couple of kilometres of ground — this cemetery, Skew Ridge Cemetery, Pink Farm Cemery, and Redoubt Cemetery, house about 7,000 bodies from the combined French, British, Indian, Australian and NZ landings. They mark the high water mark of the Allied advance at Helles. Between 28th April and 28th June the total advance from the high points of the initial landings was about 3 km on a 5 km front. Today the british lines were hip deep in ripening grain.
Looking down to the tip of the peninsula, I could see a tiny white spike: a lighthouse. Left of it was a slightly larger brown spike: the Helles Memorial to the Missing (British). Left again, the ruined fortress at Seddülbahir. Just beyond these, invisible, were the beaches. Beyond Seddülbahir I could see the Dardanelles, a tanker sailing up towards İstanbul, and beyond that, the shoreline near Kumkale. It was all so very compact.
I decided against walking back to pick up Y Beach. Instead, I continued south down the road to Pink Farm Cemetery, passing some loud guard dogs, who were warning me against approaching the farm-workers’ tents I could see off in the trees. I was perfectly safe as long as I stayed on the road.
At Pink Farm, the road bent west towards the coast. Just at the point where it turned away again, I found a beaten path that led across fields towards some cliffs. I followed the path and at 9:54 saw a very familiar bluff through the brush.
Gully Beach, also known as Y2 Beach, lies halfway between Y Beach and X Beach. It provided a flanking route via Gully Ravine — Zığındere Sahili — that supported advances from and the defence of, Y Beach. The Allies eventually controlled most of the ravine. Alas, although Gully Ravine came out near Alçıtepe and was used as a route to attack the town, the Allies never managed to capture it.
In 1915 there was a pier at the beach, and the slopes of the overlooking bluff were heavily populated by soldiers living in tents and dugouts. On the beach itelf, I could still make out the posts of the pier, and the ribs of a barge that was driven ashore beside it. A well was dug in the mouth of the gull and lined with concrete. The well is still there, its walls still showing the wavy profile of the corrugated iron that was used as a coffer when the concrete was poured. By lining up landmarks with care, I was able to identify the locations of tents, horse pickets, and other things that I could see in old photos from the time. Here and there today I found little ridges of stones carefully set in the ground outlining tent sites. In the bushes, I found a large bone — horse or mule, not human — and some small pottery remains.
It was an evocative spot, and the hand of time had passed lightly over it. The ghost came easily.
I moved on. By turning my head. I could see the Çanakkale Martyr's Memorial, and the Memorial to the Missing. At 11:20 I was standing on the cliff above X Beach, but I felt no desire to descend to the beach. I could see a pillbox on the cliff at its north end.
The road bent east. I could see the Memorial to the Missing and the lighthouse ahead, with the Asian coast on the horizon beyond them. At 11:45 I was standing outside the Lancashire Landing Cemetery. Inland, on the horizon, stood low hills the Allies had hoped to capture in the first days of the landings, but never reached.
Just before noon I turned down a side road towards W Beach. Soon I passed a small Turkish cemetery, Tekke Koyu Kadiri Şehitliği. By 12:15 I was standing beside some pillboxes on W Beach, with its rotted remains of several piers. Walking along the beach, I encountered an abandoned pair of scuffs branded “K.K.K.”. The imprint of a bare foot suggested that their owner just stepped out of them, right foot, left foot, and walked on. The footprint was fresh, but except for the tourists, who both had their footwear, I was alone on the beach. There was now a car with its boot open back by the pillboxes, and a couple of tourists looking the things over, but the car had just arrived. Who left the scuffs? Why did they leave them? Where were they now? It was almost too emphatic a metaphor for this day.
I walked back up to the road, and by 12:50 I was at Helles Memorial to the Missing. A plaque on one side commemorated the Allied ships that fought here, a number of which were sunk. I was settling in to spend a while here talking to the ghosts of time and writing up my journal, but a noisy Turkish tour arrived and took over the monument, making further quiet reflection impossible. So I walked on towards V Beach.
Soon I was standing on a bluff looking down on V Beach, the Old Fort(Seddülbahir), and the spit on which the River Clyde was run aground. Some Turkish guys were joking around nearby, but they were walking away from me. (They all had footwear; I checked.) I followed, more slowly.
A little further on I found an old Turkish gun in “Fort No. 1”. For many years it lay on the far side of the road; I'd seen it in old photos. It wasn't clear to me whether it had now been moved back to its original spot, or if someone had moved it here because it was in their way, or looked better overlooking the sea. There had clearly been a gun emplacement on this spot, even if this particular gun had not been part of it. There was a Turkish cemetery on the far side of the road, with food and souvenir stalls and busy roving groups of Turkish sightseers.
The views from the bluff were grand, and the landscape was not so very changed from 1915. It was easy to conjur the ghost. The River Clyde was there, there had been piers there (the stumps of their posts were still visible). Over there, a pair of bronze statues memorialised Yahya Çavus' defense of V Beach. Down there, another ruined Turkish gun battery (that gun was smaller, supporting my notion that the other had been moved from some farmer’s field.)
At 13:15 I was outside V Beach Cemetery. Soon done. This was the end of my planned itinerary. Time for a long lunch at a nearby restaurant!
The place had a pair of friendly dogs. During my walk on V Beach, I had picked up a piece of concrete with a fragment of marble embedded in it, remnant of some vanished memorial. I had vaguely considered souveniring it, but finally decided it belonged here; so I threw it high and far along the beach. And one of the dogs ran and fetched it! But he wouldn't give it back, so that was the end of that game.
After lunch, I walked over to Seddülbahir, where I met the dolmuş — a beat-up red car. By 15:00 we were passing through Alçitepe.
The dolmuş driver told me a taxi from Eceabat to Alçıtepe should be about ₺30, a taxi driver yesterday said ₺40, my ride this morning came to ₺60 — by the meter. That man was clearly a magician. He did manage to stick me with some of that by his little detour to a petrol station while the meter was running, but where the rest of it came from is a mystery to me, unless it was that odd long loop down the coast instead of going direct as the dolmuş was doing. No matter, it had been an excellent day!
It was pretty quiet in the roof bar at TJ’s that night, just a couple of Austral-Americans watching Gallipoli, a guy waiting for the overnight bus to Selçuk, and me.
İstanbulFriday, 3 June 2005
In the morning, Eceabat’s square abounds with dogs. Some clearly sleep here overnight, but others arrive in joyously raucous packs. But once in the square, they split up and become sedate and solemn. They scan the square. They creep up to any friendly voice or face and radiate friendliness. If rebuffed, they settle to the ground and go back to people-watching.
I didn't care. By 07:30 I was riding the İstanbul bus. Çanakkale Truva Turism seemed to be economising on service. Almost an hour on our way, there’d been to tea or water, and the only person smelling of lemon cologne was the steward, who helped himself to a dose at each stop. The guy didn’t know how to smile either, it seemed. But then, as feast follows famine, behold, mosaic cake and coffee.
We passed roadworks. At one point, we passed a diesel powered steam roller. When did I last see a working steam powered steam roller? Not in 30 years, at least.
At about 13:00 I snapped a photo of the Land Walls as we entered Constantinople. There's a mystery here, as Esenler Otogarı is outside the walls and there is a lacuna in both my journal and my memory between the steam roller at 11:19 and Cistern Basilica (Yerebatan Sarnıcı) at 14:38. There's no tram or taxi ride in my expenditures that day. However, my itinerary shows that I expected to be at İstanbul at 13:00, expected to be in Yerebatan Sarnıcı at 14:30, and expected to be at my chosen accommodation by 14:00. In short, everything ran exactly to plan.
Due to price, Ayasofya Pansiyonları in Soğukçeşme Sokak had not been my first choice for this time in İstanbul, but it had been firmly on my short list. Then I walked past this adorable row of heritage Ottoman era houses back in April and fell in love with the idea of staying here, if my budget allowed. At €80 per night it was, this late in my trip, affordable. My six-night stint here would put at least an additional $600 on the bottom line, eating up the slack I’d built up, but I had plenty of slack. And who cared? I had Aya Sofia in my window, just across the road, and the ancient wall of the Hospital of Samson behind me.
So I checked in, tossed my gear on the bed, and headed off to enjoy Çay and a Mars Bar in the Cistern Basilica. It may not have been the most expensive Mars I’d ever eaten — but if so I couldn’t remember the other one! Still, it was an atmospheric location to sit and take stock, and buying the noms gave me an excuse to take up a rickety table.
But first I had to see some familiar faces. I entered the Cistern about 13:55 and quickly revisited the sights I remembered. Long vistas of roman brick and mortar, glasswork displays, the Wishing Pool, the carp and the coins, the eyeball column, the recycled monument bases, and of course, the two Medusa heads. Soon done, and 40 minutes later I sat down for refreshments and to bring my journal up to date. Except I didn’t. I do recall why. After writing a few brief notes, I fell into a reverie. I was where I expected to be, exactly when I expected to be there. I was healthy, happy, and under budget. It was a moment to be enjoyed and savoured.
After the Cistern I went and paid my respects at Ayasofya. The main dome was still ensnared by massive scaffolding, but I spent more than two hours renewing my memories from 2002 and discovering new things.
I finally got back to my expensive room about 17:30, and spent a while resting in it and just letting the antique ambience sink in.
That night I spent three hours on the internet and cunningly evaded a souvenir shop, only to get snared by a kebab salon! Must remember: eat first, do internet later.
Saturday, 4 June 2005
My first stop in Topkapı after entering through the First Court was in the Divan in the Second Court, to admire the eponymous couch that the Sultan sat on for audiences. Then I went out and through the Gate of Felicity, pausing to admire the landscape frescoes above the gate. I briefly wandered the Third Court, then went through to the Fourth Court and explored the terraces and looked through, or sometimes through the windows of, the kiosks (the Terrace Mosque, Mustafa Pasha’s Kiosk, Baghdad Kiosk, Sofa Kiosk). I admired the İznik tiles on the walls outside the Sacred Safekeeping Rooms and in the Circumcision Room of the Summer Pavilion. I walked the Marble Terrace and watched the fountains play. At various spots I looked over to Galata and up the Golden Horn, and over the trees I caught the Sulimaniye and Fatih mosques in one photo. Later I looked up the Bosphorus. I looked over the edge of a terrace, down to the Statue of Piri Reis on the edge of the Marmara, which had grafitti on its base and a train line running behind it, and was flanked by battered Byzantine bastions.
At 10:30 I stopped for coffee and salad at the Konyali Restaurant on the Konyali Terrace. It was obvious they were making money like bandits on the prices, nor did the prices reflect any superiority in the preparation of the food. The coffee came from an urn and had the texture and some of the taste of sewer water. The salad tasted OK but was clearly mass-produced. They sold bottled water, too. Turkuaz. ₺1.50 for that, triple the regular price.
Rested and nourished, I moved on, past the Treasury, with its recycled Ionic capitals, and between the kitchens. I went in and browsed the exhibits, which were often exquisite but could do with some dusting. Blue vases with brass crescents on the lids. Ming dishes and Yuan vases. Inscriptions. Two-wheeled horse-drawn rickshaws. A lovely model of the palace. I wandered the Stables, then made my way back to the First Court and out and around to Aya Irini, which was lovely outside but rudely bare and plundered inside.
Next stop, the Achaeology Museum, which definitely was not bare inside. The Necropolis of Sidon was a winner here. In one frieze someone had souvenired the combatants bronze spears and bows, leaving one poor empty-handed archer in a pose that was more recently pilloried by the “let’s do lunch” pistol-fingers meme (3:45).
The façade of the Temple of Athena from Assos was evocative, and there were superb mosaics from the Great Palace and other places. The bronze snake head from the Spiral Column. A bell from galata Tower. A section of Byzantine chain that once closed the Golden Horn to enemies. A plaque with the Hittite Soldier’s Oath. A sweet-faced but chipped Aphrodite removing her sandal. A male torso wearing a really tight belt and jock strap; the guy woud have been in so much pain! (Some wag had carved a vaginal slit in the jock strap.) Artifacts from Troy VI and VII. A view from a window over to the Tiled Kiosk. A statue of Hadrian from Adana. A lion from the Mausoleum. An excellent Hermaphroditus. Lions and bulls from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. Stuff pinched from Assur, including bronze door plates. The Hittite version of the 1269 BC Kadesh Treaty.
Around 14:00 I went out and bought a kebab for lunch, then turned right at the city wall and walked down through Gülhane Park. Around 14:50, I stopped to rest at Seraglio Point. The tide was on the race — or perhaps the Bosphorus always foamed past here like that. Ferries roamed up and down, ducking around the freighters. It took me a while to pick out Kiz Kulesi — it merged with the Asian shore.
Tired, I walked back to my lovely room and took a long siesta, sometimes rousing to idly watch the sunbeams play across the antique furniture. I had nothing to do, an afternoon to do it in, and exquisite surroundings to enjoy it in.
I went down to the Golden Horn for the sunset. After having fun with the restaurant touts by asking if they had moussaka and looking sad when they didn’t, I bought a kebab from a wharf-side joint and followed it up on the way home with some sort of sweet bread from a wandering vendor and an ice tea from a hole in the wall, total ₺2.50 for a satisfying meal with no bitter financial aftertaste. Two bottles of Turkuaz for ₺1 filled out my expenditures.
En passant I razzed the place that fleeced me last night, then went on to take some snaps of the Blue Mosque. Watched some fireworks. Fell to talking with a Turkish guy from eastern Turkey, working near Yenikapı on a Russian-language newspaper. His English was halting but improved a bit as we chatted. I gave him my email address. He gave me his, but he didn’t know if it was still active. He paid a wandering vendor for tea. I took a small risk and drank it. It was fine.
Sunday, 5 June 2005
My first stop was the Achaeological Museum, picking up on missed items. In particular I tracked down two Medusa heads, twins to the ones in Yerebatan Sarnıcı. These faces were still on the ends of a single massive keystone, taken from an arch in the Forum of Constantine. The heads in then Cistern would have been from a similar keystone. I also saw a column carved like the trunk of a palm tree, provenance unknown.
Next stop was the Tiled Kiosk, with its intricate stone tracery and stained glass windows. I also admired some gold-leaf inlaid tiles and a peacock fountain.
Inside I encountered an Aphrodite whose big puffy nipples pushed out through her tunic. Arresting, but WtF? The river god from Miletus. Apparently the one I saw there was a replica. I approved! Put the originals of outdoor art in a museum, but keep a replica in the original position. Some exquisite inlaid glass bottles. Someone’s donated collection of an intricate lace coat, painted ostrich eggs, abacus, and a miniature sewing machine. The surviving portion of Shliemann’s faux “Treasure of Priam”.
I walked back down through Gülhane Park and found the Goth’s Column near the back gate into the Palace’s Fourth Court. “To Fortune, who returns by reason of the victory over the Goths.” I actually spelled out most of the Latin inscription, but lost the notes. The boards in the nearby tea garden offered various beverages, with tea for one being ₺4.50 and the coffee being ₺3 — but coffee was not available. The ₺2.50 hamburger was served cold and obviously followed the Macca’s School of Plastic Food.
I decided to go over to Tünel to climb Galata Tower. The days was clear and the views from the top were outstanding! On the horizon behind the Blue Mosque the Princes’ Islands were sharply outlined against the sky. Afterward I walked up İstiklal Caddesi to Taksim Square. Half the city was out for a Sunday walk in the sunshine. Somewhere along here I bought a small embroidered shoulder bag as a souvenir.
When I hit the Bosphorus, I noticed Dolmabahçe Palace just upstream, so I went past the gates but this time did not go in. I walked up to Beşiktaş ferry terminal with its gorgeous antique building, and took a ferry across to Kadiköy and then (after buying a chicken doner for dinner) another ferry back down to the Horn at Eminönü.
I finished my day by walking back to my hotel through the back streets, stopping in at the Ali Muhiddin Hacı Bekir shop to buy some Turkish Delight.
Monday, 6 June 2005
I started my day with the hotel’s buffet breakfast. I was paying for it, might as well use it to fuel up for the walls! Fueled up, I walked down to Cankurtaran Station and caught a train out to Yedikule. From Yedikule Station I walked through incredibly picturesque old streets to Yedikule Hisarı, the Seven Towers Fortress, where I found to my joy that the site was open. Yay! I looped through the preliminaries, including climbing the Dungeon Tower, the Gun Tower, the Small Tower for the views. And then I went for the big one.
Getting there involved a bit of guesswork, peering through obscure doorways and testing shadowy, unlabelled stairs. But I found my way to the inner gates. I could not reach the northern gate, as it was totally walled up. The much-reduced central gate, through which the Emperors would ride, was closed by rickety wooden doors, which were locked. And at the southern gate, now the largest of the three, my way was barred by a modern metal grate. Pressing against the bars, I could see through into the inner courtyard and across to the outer gates where in 2002 I had desperately held my camera at arm’s length to snap a couple of upside-down images of the courtyard.
And then, the miracle. A gardener came by and opened the grate for me! I walked into the courtyardof the Golden Gate and stood where victorious Emperors had passed. I looked up and saw a Byzantine eagle on the stone cornice of a tower overhead, and a Christian symbol carved in boss on the wall at head height. I walked across, climbed some steps and reached through a gap to shake hands with my 2002 self. I found the northern inner gate, which had a door in it but was no longer directly accessible from inside. It opened into the walls instead.
I went back inside and found my way into a tower. After a while I reached a dead end, an arched room with a shaky floor, feeling none too safe. I retraced my steps a short distance and took a dark, unpromising passage. Stairs led up …
10:36 Sitting atop the Golden Gate, looking out. Below me on one hand the land walls march south to the Marmara and the Marble Tower. On the other hand they march away out of sight across the peninsula. East lies Constaninople, its domes and minarets gleaming like the helmets and spears of its conquerors. West lies İstanbul, pinned to the flat land by brilliant white minarets.
The sun is shining, but not too hot — there is a gentle breeze blowing to ensure that. The sky is a blue bowl, painted with only a few tiny, fluffy clouds.
I have seen Yedikule. I have walked through the central arch of the Golden Gate.
Time to descend. The walls are waiting.
I left Yedikule Hisarı and turned south, seeking the near end of the Land Walls. By 11:05 I had reached the point where I stopped in 2002, but that wasn't quite the end. In 2002 I thought I found the Marble Tower, but mistook the real tower for part for the Sea Walls. This time I went there. I would have climbed it, but a stench of occupancy and a sense of danger sent me down again. It was time to start the walk in earnest, from beside the Marbel Tower, at 11:22.
By 11:38 I was back at Yedicule Gate, looking south to the Golden Gate. Looking up, I saw an Eagle emblem in the wall. I climbed some steps and looked down on the vege gardens between the walls. I tried to walk the walls from here, but it felt to precarious, so I descended and walked outside the walls.
By 12:06 I was looking in through Belgrad Kapı, the former Second Military Gate. I climbed up here to walk the reconstructed battlement and explore an open tower. Soon I reached the end of the reconstructed area and continued along the unreconstructed section beyond it. This eventually gave out near a mosque, where I had to retrace some steps and descend. The area was attractive and someone had put time and effort into the landscaping for the surrounding residential towers, with lawns, kiosks, and an old rowboat boat filled with growing plants.
At 12:33 I reached Silivri Kapı. This was the gate the Byzantines used when recapturing Constantinople from the Latins. Then it was known as Porta tou Pege, Gate of the Spring. Here the landscaping extended between the walls, making it a very pleasant walk. In a few minutes found an Ottoman inscription where a stone cannonball was suspended against the wall. A few minutes later I found a Byzantine inscription.
Back at Silivri Kapı at 12:40, I went through and found my way to the Shrine of Zoodochus Pege, filled with clear water and an Orthodox iconostasis. Two tombs held Byzantine eagles on their lids. I found Ann interesting hybrid from 1810: a Byzantine double-eagle surmounted by a Turkish helmet. I found the grave of Victor G Zographos, 1960. I found an angel with rusty iron wings. A cleaner's red plastic cart and red rubber gloves stood incongruously beside a skull and crossbones. A red plastic bucket sat in the trough of a fountain, beneath a tap. It was a rich experience, but by 13:10 I was headed back to the walls.
13:34 saw me at Mevlevihane Gate, with an inscription mentioning Theodosius and Constantine dating back to 447, when the walls were being completed. A decorated underpass nearby provided a way to get to the other side of the busy road that runs along the walls, but it stank of piss and I walked on by. There was nothing out there I wanted to see anyway. I dived back between the walls.
Millet Caddesi at 14:09, followed by another reconstructed section at 14:17. By 14:20 I was looking at a sign that among other things told me that in 1453 this (then the Byzantine Gate of St Romanus) faced the great cannon. Now known as the Cannon Gate (Top Kapı).
By 14:27 I was looking down into a long, deep dip in the landscape as the Land walls descended into the valley of the Lycus River. Somewhere down there, the Turks broke in on 29 May 1453. Five minutes later I crossed Adnan Menderes Caddesi, which follows the former course of the Lycus. I walked inside the walls until I found a point where in 2002 the Police directed me through an underpass. Outside the walls again, I proceeded north.
The Fifth Military Gate, also known as the Gate of the Assault, at 12:42. Constantine XI was last seen fighting near here when the Turks broke through. In 2002 it was under a different Turkish assault: a man ambled out through it in front of me and casually pissed against the outer side. It had an inscription recording a repair by Pusaeus in the 5th C. I walked between the walls a short way, then found myself outside the walls looking south across the valley of the Lycus.
I had been watching Mihrimah Camii aproach, and at 14:59 I finally passed it as I reached Edirne Kapı. Mehmet II Fatih (“the Conqueror”) rode in here on 29 May 1453. here I found a confused and ill-prepared German walking the walls in the other direction. Kinda like me in 2002, but even less prepared than I had been. I helped him out. In 2002 I arrived just as prayers ended, and I was immediately surrounded by a mob of curious Turks, none of whom spoke English.
At 15:14 I saw the end of the Theodosian walls, where the layered Byzantine brickwork merged with the darker façade of the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus (Tekfur Sarayı), which marked the start of the newer section that surrounded the Palace of Blachernae. It’s believed the Kerkaporta Postern, Achilles heel of the defense, was located where the Theodosian walls join the walls around Blachernae.
Tekfur Sarayı looked ruined. Arched windows peered at me, but only sky could be seen through those that were not bricked up entirely. Tour buses lurked in a big carpark nearby, rear view mirrors drooping like the antennae of gigantic bugs.
15:25 Tekfursarayı — Palace of the Porphyrogenitus. In a nice little park beside it, just inside the walls. It has taken me five hours to get here — an average since Yedikule of just one kilometre per hour! Where did the time go? Side trips, detours, backtracking, and just plain standing trying to get my head around some spot.
At Eğri Kapı (the Crooked Gate), 15:53. The roadway from the gate has to swerve around an 18th C tomb built by some pious individual who decided that this was the exact spot where some martyr died. There was also now a small cemetery in the shadow of the gate.
I dodged around a bit trying to get a feel for the outline of Blachernae, but never really conjured the ghost. At 16:25 I could see it pretty well from a road bridge, that also gave me a nice view up the Golden Horn. In 2002 I dropped Eyüp frommy itinerary, and this year I dropped it again. Not worth the effort.
I started to walk back, but came to a ferry terminal and saw that one was due. So I rode the ferry back down the Golden Horn, passing a Marine Museum and the pieces of the old Galata Bridge on the way, and getting new perspectives on some very old buildings. At Eminonu I debarked and headed up to Kapalı Çarşı, the Grand bazaar, where I bought some souvenir tulip tea glasses, a new supply of Turkish delight, and some plasters for my tired, cracked feet.
Tuesday, 7 June 2005
After a slow start, I levered myself out of my comfy room and set off to walk the remains of Constantinople’s Great Palace of the Emperors, which once covered pretty much the entire south-east corner of the peninsula, the area now known as Sultanahmet.
I turned left out of the hotel into Soğukçeşme Sokak, after the usual pause to admire the looming bulk of Ayasofya just across the road, turned right into Kabasakal Caddesi, passed a remnant of the Great Palace on the left, and stopped at Ayasofya Meydanı, the wide plaza that separates Ayasofya and Sultanahmet Camii (the Blue Mosque).
This was once known as the Augustaion, and the south end of it where I was standing held the Chalke, the main gate to the Great Palace. In the distance, I could see the battered remnant of the Million, milestone 0 of the Eastern Roman Empire, set at the near end of the Meze, Constantinople’s main street, now known as Divan Yolu. I had walked down part of that yesterday, on my way home from the Covered Market, passing Çemberlitaş Sütunu, the ruinous Column of Constantine. But that was yesterday.
Since I was already standing in the Chalke, I continued down Kabasakal, working around the south side of the Blue Mosque. Less than 15 minutes after leaving my hotel, I was gazing at an amusing mosaic of a man falling off a horse. Nearby, two children in short tunics rode a camel that another man was leading by the nose.
Büyük Saray Mozaikleri Müzesi, the Great palace Mosaics Museum, is located in Kabasakal Caddesi just opposite the the south corner of the Blue Mosque. It collects most of the surviving mosaic floors of the Great Palace. Many of the mosaics here appear designed to amuse children, leading to the suspicion that these floors belonged to a peristyle in the gynaecium. Some of the scenes are clearly mythological.
A man feeds a dubious donkey. A child rides a satyr. A boy uses a stick to drive a pair of geese. A mother breats-feeds a boy on her knee while a dog watches. An ape or pygmy with a cage or basket hitched to his back uses a stick to dislodge dates from a palm tree; a hawk perches on the edge of the basket. A pensive, balding, white-bearded man sits looking at something that has not survived.
But not all were childish. There were gladiatorial scenes, dogs tearing a hare apart, lions, bears and leopards tearing men apart. A tiger-griffin hybrid chows down on a bleeding lizard, while nearby two leopards split an antelope. An eagle snaps at a snake that is wound around its body. A lion fights an elephant, and a gladiator fights a leopard. Two men, shoulder to shoulder, with spears levelled, fight a tiger. A man on a horse, chased by a lion, fires a Parthian shot from his bow.
Here and there, battered Roman foundations intrude through the Museum floor or even rise to form a wall. Not all the mosaics displayed here were found here, but the preserved ruins give the whole thing an air of legitimacy.
I left the Museum and went north up Torun and Tavukak Sokaks, to emerge at the south-west corner of the Hippodrome. The length of the Hippodrome lay right along the side of the Palace, and the Emperor's box was connected to the Palace. I walked along the south side of the Hippodrome, passing the Rough Stone Column, the Spiral Column, and the broken Egyptian Obelisk. On the north side of the well worn marble base of the Obleisk, Theodosius supervises the erection of the Obelisk. East: Theodosius prepares to present a laurel to the winner of a chariot race. Below are some spectators and a line of musicians and dancing girls. South: the Emperor watches a chariot race. West: the Emperor with his family, receiving homage from captives.
I tuned south and entered the Blue Mosque. It obviously long post-dates the Palace, but it was right there and it stands on the grounds of the Palace. You don't have to be a believer to enjoy a beautiful building. It was gorgeous, and since its gold, red and green artwork had never displayed awkward human likenesses, none of it it had ever been whitewashed over. It showed in full what the conquerors had been trying to turn Aysofya into.
I emerged from the mosque facing east to Ayasofya. The Blue Mosque is a young lady, pretty and pampered and dolled up; Hagia Sophia is a grand dame, showing the cracks of age and wearing her minarets grudgingly, but still gorgeous in her own right despite every indignity.
I broke off my tour here, for lunch, for siesta, and, later, to do some more shopping at Kapalı Çarşı and burn a last CD of photos. My shorts had grown holes and I wanted to replace them, but İstanbul is not fertile ground for shorts; the pair I found turned out to be too tight in the leg and too cramped in the crotch. If I lost a lot of weight, perhaps pigs would fly.
Since I was there, I also went to loook around the Suleymaniye and Valens Aqueduct. I never did get back to my tour of the Great Palace that day. That evening I went down to Eminonu for the atmosphere and a sunset cruise.
20:55 Waiting for the Uskudar ferry to depart and give me a short evening cruise on the Bosphorus. It’s currently giving my lungs a nicotine veneer.
21:27 Waiting to return to Eminonu. One building, looks to be near Taksim, is rather irritating. It looks like it has a giant TV panel on top. The panel will be dark for a while, then will flash on, startling the eye which has relaxed and started to enjoy the view.
Pretty much a nothing day, except that I knocked off the Blue Mosque, the Mosaics Museum, and my souvenir hunting.
21:30 Off we go.
Wednesday, 8 June 2005
I breakfasted in the courtyard of the hotel, surrounded by hungry cats, then walked down to the Million and turned up Divan Yolu. The Triumphal Arch of Theodosius had columns like some of those I saw in the Cistern and the Archaeological Museum. Polyeuctes, which I saw in 2002, was closed off, so I went and found the Column of Marcian. After that I walked the length of Valens Aqueduct, made a close circuit of the Suleymaniye, including the tomb of Sinan, and came back through the Kapalı Çarşı.
After my siesta, I headed out again about 16:30 with no itinerary in mind, just a general feeling that it was my last afternoon in Istanbul, my last afternoon in Turkey, my last afternoon in Europe — I should be making use of it.
I wandered through Gülhane Park, and by the time I reached Seraglio Point I knew that I was going to walk the sea walls of Constantinople. And for more than three hours that’s just what I did.
My first sight of the walls wasca section flanked by towers and with a blocked-off doorway and three windows. It was likely to be an old section of the Great Palace incorporated into the walls. Further along, the towers flanking the Piri Reis Monument (Towers 5 and 6) had incriptions by theophilus. Further along still, I found the Mill Gate (Değirmen Kapısı), still in use. With a large, scruffy but (at least by day) friendly guard dog.
I found a stretch where the outer curtain wall had been demolished, exposing a row of arched rooms or foundations within the inner wall. I was tempted to go into an impressive structure nearby, probably what’s left of the Church of St Saviour Philanthropus, but just then a man stepped out from behind a pillar inside and I decided to pursue discretion instead. As I moved on, a worker in yellow overalls walked up and began haranguing the guy through a grating.
I came to a nice marble strucure built against the wall. Incili Köşk, Kiosk of the Pearl, a one-time Turkish sea pavilion. It had an inscription to Sinan Pasha, 1578. Further on, looking in through a hole in wall, I could see grimy patterned tiles on the wall inside. Everywhere along this stretch I found bricked-up doorways and gates. In many places, repairs of contrasting quality and design turned the walls into a patchwork quilt. Modern buildings overlooked or even perched on sections of the wall.
I found another open gate, the Stable Gate (Ahırkapı), with a large Ottoman inscription above it. Then the Armada Inn. A big tower that was once a lighthouse. I was hunting, now, ducking in and out of the walls, back and forth, searching, and I found it.
The remaining fragment of the Boukoleon Palace, with its marbled window frames. Emperors must have looked out from those windows. There was apparently a balcony outside them and a dock and harbour below them. The modern road would have been in the sea — and suddenly the rush of traffic ceased to bother me, becoming the rush of the waves against ancient moorings.
The wall was a fragment, just a splinter of the ancient Palace, but it was enough. The tenements beyond the railway track became the ramparts of the palace, and my imagination filled the slopes and terraces beyond with other palaces: huge buildings within which the Romans went about the business of running their empire.
“Hello, hello!” said some kids sitting on the wall, but I was more interested in the half-buried doorway beneath them. Someone had daubed “WC” on the lintel, but the fragments supporting that lintel, no doubt cribbed from a church nearby, held a fragmentary Byzantine inscription.
Finally I came to a structure with a parasol roof over it, the former Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, “Little Aya Sofya”. It would probably have been left to ruin, had it not been converted to a mosque. It was now being restored.
I headed east along Küçük Ayasofya Caddesi, then turned at Akburçak Sokaks. A huge terrace that once supported some part of the Great Palace, or possibly the Hippodrome, loomed ahead. Soon I was in a restaurant district, it was 19:30, I was hungry, so I stopped at the Havuzbasi Restaurant, beside the Hippodrome, for a long, celebratory, last-night dinner in Constantinople. Then home past my massive neighbourhood landmark, to bed.
Thursday, 9 June 2005
At my late breakfast, around 10:00, I was pestered by an irresistable black and white cat, who claimed a significant portion of the meat off my plate. Where she kept it all, I don’t know.
My flight to Dubai was at 13:30. My last photo of İstanbul was an overgrown section of Sea Wall slipping past the taxi window at 10:37. All too soon I was sitting in the airport food lounge, killing time by nursing a ₺8.50 capucchino. Ouch!
I gave the girl ₺13.50 — a ₺10 note and some coins — to clean out my Turkish shrapnel, and waited for my change. We stood there facing each other until it percolated into her head that I was still standing there. Now, a ₺10 note is red and a ₺5 is brown: it is conceivable that she was dozing and didn’t notice the difference. More likely she thought I didn’t notice the difference.
I have no memory of the actual flights. At Dubai I had a 1h20 gap before my 20:00 flight to Singapore, but neither my memory, my budget nor my camera record anything between the İstanbul capucchino and the taxi from Changi into Singapore. All I have is a single laconic journal entry from the next morning:
05:26 Somewhere nearing Singapore. Watched movies and a few TV episodes.
SingaporeFriday, 10 June 2005
I took a taxi from the airport. By 08:35 I was booked into the South East Asia Hotel, as planned. The room smelt of must and damp, and the bathroom smelt of socks. Or pork. Hopefully the aircon and a shower would reduce these problems. Everything seemed clean enough, it was probably just from the heat and the amount of moisture in the air. Opening a window was not really an option, as it was hot and 90 percent humidity out there! The combination of toilet exhaust and aircon should replace the air in the room. But as with Eceabat, buying an air freshener might be a worthwhile investment.
I thought of burning incense to mask the smell. There was a Buddhist temple just metres up the street — acquiring incense was not a problem in this largely Buddhist country. When I went past earlier, I walked through a fume of incense smoke. It was exotic, oozing the mystique of the Far East. The Buddhist chanting from the temple made a change after the dreary orthodox chanting and the equally dreary but inescapable moslem calls to prayer.
I took a shower to wash off the travel grime and cool myself down. The room smelt little better when I came out of the shower, but it was cooler. In fact, I decided on reflection that the odour may owe something to the temples. It seemed to be coming from the aircon, so it might be blended from stale incense. But it didn’t smell quite like that. More like ripe pork.
I don’t think we’re in Kansas any longer, Toto, Dept: I plugged in the jug to make coffee, and realised that the electrical outlets were the British type — and I didn’t bring a British adaptor. Not being able to recharge the camera disn’t worry me as I could coast two days on the spare batteries, but the iPaq was already down to 54 percent. However, it should be easy enough to find a European to British (Singaporean) converter. If not, I’d have to ration my use. Again. I was getting used to that.
I had a worthwhile afternoon, if not the one I originally planned. I swapped the planned boat rides for an excellent museum, and did some fruitful shopping. I had a new pair of properly fitting shorts for tomorrow, a new strap for the camera, a macro wide-angle lens for the camera, and three sturdy socket adapters (European, British, American) that would each take any other plug, not just Australian one. I also cashed in my spare Euros so I had extra SGD for tomorrow.
I started my sightseeing with Juan-Yin Temple in Waterloo Street, the Buddhist temple mentioned above. It was hard to see the temple through the riot of small stalls outside, each with a yellow-and-red striped umbrella. Next door was the more modest Sri Krishnan (Hindu) Temple.
I walked down to the Raffles. As you do. There was an initially-impressive fountain there, with the water running in precise arcs and nary a splash. When I got closer, I realised it was because the water was running in plastic tubes. Oh, well.
City Hall and the Supreme Court looked suitably British-Imperial. Nearby was the Padang, a playing field which, naturally, included a cricket ground. They did things that was in British india, too. In 1850, Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of India, visited, so the authorities erected an obelisk to sommemorate the event. As you do. In 1871, the King of Siam paid a visit, so the authorities erected a statue of an elephant outside the Arts House. As you do. I met a dapper Sir Stamford Raffles in effigy outside the Opera house. As you do. Somewhere along the way I acquired the camera strap, the plug adaptors, and the shorts, but I don’t recall where.
The Asian Museum was the highlight of the day, packed with exhibits including sampans; the Legend of Badang the Magnificent; bronze drums; Hindu and Buddhist statues and temple reliefs; an ornate Buddha footprint; theatre intruments; a scene from the Devi Mahatma where Kali chows down on an elephant while Durga, looking rather out of it, rides a cat; a three-way Mexican stand-off between archers iullustrating the Mahabharata; painted silk; and someone’s wooden sedan chair.
From the Museum, I went down to the Steps near Cavenagh Bridge. The river, once a bustling place, was now as void and dreary as the Yarra. I did not regret my decision to skip the boat ride. I did admire a vibrant sculture of naked boys, shouting, jumping and pushing each other off the edge into the river. One cleverly-posed figure even appeared to be using a bollard as a handhold while kicking off his pants. Further down, The River Merchants by Aw Tee Hong showed a European administrator mediating a local dispute betwen a Malay chielf and a Chinese trader while coolies load sacks onto a bullock cart nearby.
At Boat Quay, once a thriving boat community, now a massive outdoors food court, a fat Bird by Fernando Botero watched people eat. I saw a place that offered salads — and their Greek salad appeared to at least contain the right ingredients. Add retsina, and that was dinner sorted.
Afterwards, I walked into a camera shop and bought the wide-angle macro lens and a lens-cleaning kit.
At the hotel later that night I realised that I was coming down with something. The Singaporean girl in the next seat on the plane had been sniffling heavily, but I could also have caught it downtown. I hoped it was only an allergy, but my nose had been acting up all day and it was getting worse, starting to stuff, and I had developed a sore throat and a headache. So after seven weeks of sterling health (barring wear and tear from all the exercise) I’d stumbled at the final gate, probably aided and abetted by the stress of the flight, the outside heat and humidity, and the hotel’s aircon.
Saturday, 11 June 2005
After a night of relatively breathable air, by 8:20 the room was starting to fill with the odour of sanctity. Or of ripe pork. I now thought it was cooking odours. The kitchen apeared to be directly below me, and one of the breakfast selections smelt like my room. I did not choose that one, instead going for noodles, a big meat dumpling, and a side of veges. With a tiny round sesame bun.
I was late starting. My itinerary had me headed out to Changi at 07:00 and starting back to town at 10:00. Instead I headed out at 09:30, heading back at 11:20. The ride out took about an hour. The buses ran so frequently that the average wait time was just 5 to 10 minutes.
The Changi Museum and Chapel were interesting, and I was glad to go, but I was disappointed that it was no longer on the original site, which had been reclaimed by the Singapore prison system. The new Museum and reconstructed Chapel were flashy, but did not have the same the impact as seeing the exhibits on the original site would have.
But that completed today’s planned activities until the 19:30 Night Safari. Now what?
I went down to Little India. Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple was a riot of colour and statues. Elsewhere, a temporary temple had been erected for a Hindu festival; the shikhara was a riot of colorful figurines. From there I wandered into more Chinese areas, Leong San See Temple and then the Temple of 1000 Lights with its 15 metre Buddha. I came home via the thronged street stalls of New Bugis Street.
A man in a turban told me today that I was lucky — he saw luck in my face for July. He said he was a fortune teller. Was he just angling for trade? I was hardly going to sit down for a fortune reading on the basis of jam tomorrow. If July was going to be lucky for me, it was a bit far to come back here looking for him!
Around 14:00, I settled into my pork-infused room for a siesta, not veturing forth again for three hours, thinking then to do a little last-minute shopping before the Night Safari. Once outside, with my shirt sticking to my back, I quickly decided to blow off the Night Safari. It was simply too bloody humid to be galloping around! I briefly considered an air conditioned movie theatre, but there was nothing on that I wanted to see. Instead I went for dinner at Esmirada at Chijmes, playing Backgammon on the iPaq. Moussaka, Singapore Sling, OJ, and the candle-holder was an empty Marlborough Sounds wine bottle. I liked the Sling, and it was a good moussaka.
Afterwards, feeling washed-out, I decided to make my last night on holiday an early night. I figured on an early start to beat the heat, and might need to walk over to Victoria to flag down a cab. The cheapskate in me was tempted to ride a bus to the nearest suburban centre near Changi and catch a cab from there, but nah. If I was going to do that, I might as well catch an airport shuttle.
It was time to start packing, for the last time on this trip.
HomeboundSunday, 12 June 2005
Day 52. Changi, 7:44.
It was hard walking past the bulging eateries in Waterloo and New Bugis Streets at 6:55, but I got up too late to have a proper final breakfast in town without risking running short of time for my 9:55 flight. I splurged on a taxi direct to the airport, figuring to find something to eat in the slack time after check-in. I expected a SGD> 16 fare, paid SGD> 12. Well, that was something; better than the SGD 20 I paid on the taxi into town when I arrived.
Turns out Chani airport is great for showers before or after a long flight, but less impressive for finding a filling meal early in the morning. The Maccas in the Arrivals hall was the only place open that was serving some facsimile of breakfast. I bought their “Big McBreakfast”. This comprised: a small turd of vulcanised homogenised scrambled egg, a toasted hamburger bun, a meat pattie (would normally be served in the bun but here it was beneath the egg), a “hash brown” (toasted mashed potato cake, a good place to put an egg), coffee (standard carbon infusion), grape jam (intended to go in the hamburger bun). Hardly a big breakfast, unless you’re European or very small.
A sad end for a great trip. As I mopped up the crumbs left on my plate, I already knew that my emotional landing in Melbourne was going to be hard, no matter how well the flight went.
Monday, 13 June 2005
19:02 Spent all day in bed reading my Singapore-purchased book on Alexander, until driven out to do the laundry. Now waiting for dinner: a pizza from Silvio’s. Haven’t checked the cupboards, but Coles will be closed for Queen’s B’day and I’m not in the mood to cook anything anyway.
Hard to tell how much of my mood is the lurgy, jet-lag and post-trip depression. It’s an amalgam, each component reinforcing the others. If I don’t feel better tomorrow morning, I may call in sick.
Post-trip trauma. The only cure is time, or planning your next trip.
Saturday, 13 August 2005
18:27 To: [email address redacted]
Dear Sir,
I refer to your website page [redacted, and link-rotted anyway].
Please advise me on the availability of places in a tour to see the eclipse.
I DO NOT require airfare to Egypt nor accommodation in Alexandria as I have arranged these myself. However, I will consider possible side-trips (such as Siwa).
I will arrive at Alexandria on the 25th of March 2006.
