Turkey 2

I arrive in Ankara in the early evening. It’s cold and wet and I am about to experience the full and terrible majesty of Turkish city driving. Up till now it’s just been practice, the light-hearted frolics of the only partially demented. In the ensuing melee it’s hard to stay upright and moving, never mind find your way round the city. In the apocalyptic cacophony of horns, squealing tyres and revving engines I just keep moving blindly, determined to stay at the first hotel I see. I don’t care if it’s Bates Motel, I’m checking in and having a shower, it’d be safer than staying out here.

Eventually, exhausted by what can only be described as the Turkish ‘Shock and Awe’ driving technique, I see a tall, slender finger of hope rising from the smog. It’s a twenty storey Radisson. I shamble in, trying to look more rakish than ravaged to discover it’s forty five quid a night. I decide that despite this being three times my normal budget I really don’t care and book in. I’m whisked up to the seventh floor where a scene of unparalleled luxury awaits my gaze. It’s all so clean and comfy. The bed is huge and flat and unbearably soft, there’s free wireless internet and little doodads of soap and even shampoo. ‘Oh my hairs getting a treat tonight!’ I mumble happily, ‘Yer actual shampoo!’ It’s the first time it’s seen such David Beckham style pampering since I left the UK. I turn on the shower to see if it runs asses milk, but no, it’s just steaming, hot water.

On goes the telly, and yes there is the usual, hypercoloured Turkish soap operas: smouldering eyed, moustachioed men and breathless women who appear to be a curious mixture of ecstatic and stroppy. But there is also BBC World. Only just managing to refrain from saluting the female newsreader in dewy eyed gratitude for the British Broadcasting Corporation, I sink back on my bed and let her clipped, perfectly formed vowels and consonants wash over me. It’s the perfect antidote to the stresses of the day. Tomorrow I’ll have to move somewhere cheap and grubby, but for now I’m in heaven.

Two days later it’s Monday, time to apply for a visa for Iran. I take a critical look in the mirror before leaving the hotel. My hair is combed, the worst of the fluff picked from my t-shirt and I am wearing my least oily trousers. I notice I’m getting split ends on my moustache and make a mental note to stop chewing it. I’m looking as respectable as I’m going to get without a high pressure hose and somebody else’s wardrobe, so head to Embassy. It’s all much easier than I expected, there’s hardly a queue and the official speaks good English and is very helpful. I will find out the next day if I have been deemed respectable enough.
And, to my surprise, they give me a ten day transit visa, a grin and an ‘Enjoy your trip!’
I’d been preparing myself to be rejected following the current contretemps over Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, but it would seem not to have been an issue.
One last kebab in the great, greasy eatery around the corner from my hotel and I’m off for Amasya in Eastern Turkey.

Amasya huddles in a rocky gorge 330km north east of Ankara. It’s sympathetically restored Ottoman houses crouch on the banks of a café au lait river, tiny private balconies overhanging the water. I find a hotel with rooms possessing just such balconies and move in for a couple of days.

The following day I do an oil change and head up to explore the rock cut tombs that surround the town. Hewn from the living rock the black eyes of their entrances have stared out across the valley for two and a half thousand years. The tombs are the size of a small room with a door raised between three and six feet from the ground, the lower edges of which have been polished to marble smoothness by two millennia of curious hands who’s owners have stretched to peer inside.
Wandering around I find a heavily overgrown path and can’t resist the urge to see what it leads to. I follow it up through the bushes as it climbs on and on. I consider giving up but decide there must be something at the end of it. It gets steeper and steeper and soon I’m clambering over smooth rocks and tiny ancient steps to the base of a cliff. In the cliff is a natural cave. It looks like it may have been widened by human hand but it’s hard to tell. I wonder if this cave was also used as a tomb. Perhaps it was the first, giving the inspiration for the tombs lower down. I creep slowly into it’s dark depths wondering what strange rituals may have been played out here. Suddenly my foot lands in something soft. I peer into the gloom to see what it is and discover a pair of pants half buried in the mud, circa 1970, the ‘Bri-nylon Period’. It occurs to me these pants might lie here for a thousand years before some archaeologist in a silver jumpsuit and Buck Rogers haircut discovers them and soberly displays them in a museum as ‘grave goods’.
On the way down I am given a chicken sandwich in the latest of a string of friendly gestures from the Turks. I wander back to the hotel happy with the Turks and regretful us Brits aren’t more like that.

That evening I sit on my own private balcony as the sediment laden waters rush past on their way to the Black Sea. I study my map in search of the road to Dogubayazit as night falls and the town eases to a halt in natural symbiosis with the darkening sky.