we continued from the german/greek island of samos across to the western coast of turkey. travelling by ferry we crossed the aegean sea to the turkish port of kusadsi. here, we instantly realized that without even my sweet husband's few greek phrases like Θα ήθελα μια κρύα μπύρα, we were in over our heads. our go to side splitter when faced with phrases like Adam çit ötesinde kaplanlar doğuya doğru yönelme, girmeyin was
i dunno, it's greek to me.
but we made our way along merrily, lugging our bags to the car rental place easily located near the ferry terminal on a small side street. if you are imaging an avis with it's own gas pump, let me stop you right there. if you know anyone who has been a tourist in turkey in the last 20 years or so, it's quite likely that if their itinerary called for motor travel of any significance, they found a driver with his own high end car to take them. there are many reasons for this: the language, the roads. and the roads. but for the same reason that my sweet husband thought it would be a reasonable adventure to travel by truck in rwanda with one bag in 1988, he decided that getting a car and driver for his honeymoon in turkey would be gauche.
so after some pantomime with the fellow in the upstairs office at the "car rental" establishment, we mounted up the Sahim 5 litre, tossing our bags in the trunk. Naturally, the car had it's own lucky rabbit foot hanging around the rear view mirror which looked like a good thing until I noticed that there were hand written notes and some chap stick in the glove box. clearly, this wasn't really a rental car. it was the guy's brother in law's car. before we started, MSH went to the trunk and moved our bags, accompanied by the strong scent of gasoline, to the back seat. I asked why and he responded it will just be easier to get what we need that way. which is honeymoon code for well honey, I noticed that the gas tank was visible in the trunk of the car and I'm not sure if you were really tracking that little issue with the ford Pinto back when you were just a little girl, but it's my idea that this little trip is the beginning of our lovely life together, not that we go up in flames somewhere near pamukkale.
We set off to see Ephesus, one of the most amazing structures in antiquity where you too can capture an image of your spouse sitting on the oldest flush toilet in the world holding a copy of the international herald tribune sports page. It is a site of quite unparalleled splendor, if even back then in 1994, a little over touristed. Our afternoon plan involved a visit to a more remote and much less travelled site of priene. Should you ever find yourself in turkey, please visit this wonderful place. Chugging along in the sahim 5 ltire, narrowly missing only one accident (who knew that a right turn signal, when made from a tractor with a grandmother dangling off of the back actually means that you are going to swing left and cut off the road completely - perhaps another point in support of the driver), we came upon a little villa with some men playing backgammon out front. A terraced garden had a few tables and it seemed like a good idea to stop and get some lunch so we pulled in. naturally, as I was wearing my "too cute not to buy for your honeymoon" pink seersucker above the knee dress, we got some attention as we walked on to the terrace. It was mid afternoon and there was no one in sight other that the backgammon players. We sat down and MSH put forth his few recently learned phrases in turkish. one of the backgammon players hopped up and brought us some cokes and we managed to indicate that we wanted food. there was no menu, so we were directed back to the kitchen where pot lids were raised and food was stirred so that we could see what was cooking. we pointed and smiled, and returned to our table. amazingly, we were served one of the most delicious meals I have ever had in my life. we smiled and beamed and made it clear that we loved this food to the great joy of our hosts. by the end they were laughing and talking to us in turkish and we were talking to them in english - they even poured warm lemon scented water on our hands before we left, smiling and waving along the road to priene. now that was a day on your honeymoon to remember.
especially when, the next day, after a night in a huge, tacky modern hotel, we set out to go to the salt bath spa of pamukkele. Along the road, as we ventured further away from some of the more traveled destinations, we found a nameless side of the road side site where the archaeologist himself showed us what he was dusting off. to this day, you can ask our children about our honeymoon and they are likely to come back with a verbatim of that moment along the lines of and then there was the place where they stopped and actually met the archaeologist who was still discovering what was there. After that, we were thrust along a series of roads with the steepest drop off I have seen since I made the mistake of going to corsica with my italian friend and her crazy boyfriend for a week of "camping" at the age of 18. as a survival mechanism, I clutched the inside door handle of the sahim 5 litre and read aloud from the book of turkish history so as to avoid looking out the window at the ravine soaring away from underneath the right tires.
In about 2000 BC Asia Minor was in the hands of the Hittites, who migrated from the area east of the Black Sea. Their civilization rivaled that of the Egyptians and Babylonians. In the 12th century BC their empire fell to the Assyrians. Small seaboard states grew up, only to fall to the Greeks, OH SHIT SLOW DOWN WE ARE GOING TO GO OVER THE CLIFF OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT.....
this trick only worked so well and soon enough the concentration it was taking my sweet husband to drive with his new wife on the verge of tears and mania, and the self control it was taking me not to push him out of the way and take the wheel so that I could pilot the car at a safer speed meant that we were both extremely hungry. confident that we would be able to find an oasis like the one we had discovered near priene, we refused to stop at just any roadside spot. it had to be right, with a terrace overhung by trees and a friendly but not too much so group of men rattling the dice and clicking backgammon men as they drank their turkish coffee.
our first attempt at recreating the lunchtime eden was downright ominous. the roadside inn had all of the earmarks of success. well, it had some men playing backgammon. in fact, it had a large number of men playing backgammon and they weren't all that interested in being joined by a couple of blonds including a 20 something young woman in a skirt. we hopped back in to the sahim 5 litre and moseyed on down the road. well, along and around and up and down. maybe these 16 odd years later it's a little different there on the inner road from ephesus to antalya, but back then there wasn't much to be seen. a few three wheeler skoda trucks, early stage turkish entrepreneurs on mobile phones in big mercedes, and us in the sahim. perhaps everyone else had a bag lunched packed by their mom. MSH sought that lunch just as hard as he had sought the pristine beach on samos. to no avail.
at long last, we were just starving and potentially delirious. a roadside structure emerged as in a mirage and a small haunch of meat being grilled on a vertical spit - now familiar to most NYers as the roadside gyros that is more or less untouchable except in the most extreme emergency. MSH pulled the sahim in and gassed up at the pump then went and ordered up a couple of plates of the special of the day. always one to make the best of it, he exclaimed as we sat at the listing plastic picnic table shouting over the grinding gears of the trucks as they passed - isn't it amazing that you can pull in to a little place like this and get such an amazing meal. Something was not right, but I didn't have the heart to break it to him so instead just picked at the pita bread and pushed the meat around without eating it, as any well intentioned newlywed would have done at that moment. I would love to remember this and be able to tell you that everything was fine after that. But my sweet husband, for all of his exotic and death defying globe trotting, possesses a singular combination of a tricky stomach and a grim determination to avoid any over the counter medication of any form. We lived in memory of that rancid meat (lamb, cow, goat, what was it exactly?) for several days and for many months thereafter I affixed to our fridge a photo of MSH looking particularly miserable on a poolside chaise lounge at the very first proper hotel of the trip.
thank god, after a few days of white rice and coke he was recovered to the point where we were able to enjoy one of our all time favorites: order everything and anything on the menu that is prepared table-side, preferably involving flames: Cesar salad, steak diane and baked alaska. Now, what they were doing serving baked alaska in a hotel restaurant on the southern coast of turkey is really beyond me.
Must have been the Disney Cruise ship that had just docked in the bay.
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