So I must have passed the entire day of Friday 14 September. The next day it seems that I went to see Saint Mary's Church and the Basilica of Saint John in the morning. They can't have been very spectacular because I didn't take any pictures. The Ephesus book says that 4 or 6 years (NB not 4 or 5 years or 5 or 6 years but 4 or 6 years) after Jesus' death Saint John and the Virgin Mary came together in Ephesus. He moved her to a house at Bulbul Dagi the location of which was forgotten after her death. It's location was pinpointed by the revelations of a German nun called Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824) who had never left the town in Germany where she was born, yet her description exactly fits the house in Panaya Kapulu. Everyone has gone along with this and it was made an official place of pilgrimage. Pope John Paul II was there in 1979. It is a fact that Mary was in Ephesus but I fear it may not be an actual fact that what they say is Mary's house is actually the house she stayed in. St. John was buried in the church that bears his name and wrote his Book of Revelations while living in Ephesus.
I then went to the bazaar. I recall that I bought the Ephesus book and a couple of cassettes for the walkman. I definitely bought a turkish made RCA Victor "Papillon Collection" recording of the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy performing Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" and "Night on a Bare Mountain" which was intriguingly called "A Night on Bald Mountain", Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony and Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances". I listened to this on the bus to Kusadasi where I spent an hour or so on the beach. This was the only time I spent at a beach anywhere in Turkey on this trip. Of course, in the past I had visited Kas and Fethiye and the beach at Olu Deniz is very impressive.
I seem to have done nothing at all for the next couple of days. My ticket to Turkey on Turkish Airlines was to Delhi via Istanbul and Gold Air had also sold me 3 internal flight tickets (which they said was a special offer on at the time I was making my bookings) so on Tuesday 18 September I went to Izmir's airport in order to fly to Konya. They tried to tell me the ticket wasn't valid. I refused to believe them and refused simply to accept a flight back to Istanbul. I didn't want to go there. I left the airport and returned to Selcuk and had to check back in to the Australian Pension.
I arrived back there quite late and Meryl (who had spent time living in Australia before her family returned to Turkey to set up in business at the guesthouse) let me back in after I explained what happened. There was room in one of the dormitory rooms. I found myself sharing with a Canadian guy called Adam Griff and Gina Angland from Timaru, New Zealand.
Adam Griff was quite a character. He was cheerful and ebullient and good company even though his face had been quite severely disfigured by an accident in his school chemistry lab. He was a Monty Python nut (not the only one I met in Turkey) who (like all Python fans) was able to perform whole chunks of the routines/sketches. His favourite was the sketch from the Contractual Obligation album about the man who had inherited a large quantity of string in very short lengths. He was consulting an advertising/marketing man called Adrian Wapkaplett who said he could sell anything "washing powder, string? What's the difference?" "Simpson's Emperor Stringettes - 1001 household uses!" etc etc. He was a good guy and seemed to bear his chemistry teacher no ill will for the terrible injuries caused in the accident.
Gina Angland was nice. I'd been to Kusadasi with her a couple of days before. She had been four years away from home on the road. The urge to travel seemed to be pretty strong in people from Australia and New Zealand. There were a lot of them traveling. I'm sure I heard that it was almost expected of young people there to get up and go and see something else of the world. There are limits, however, and to me it seemed that Gina would have quite liked to have gone home but had been away so long it was if she were afraid of not fitting in there.
Sleeping in the small dorm room was not easy. Poor Adam suffered from the most chronic sleep apnea you can imagine. You'd drift off and then be awoken with a start by the most horrendous snorting noise. It was really really loud and very disconcerting.
I vaguely remember someone being afflicted by a severe stomach upset and my going to a pharmacy with a young American (who had more than a passing resemblance to William S. Preston Esquire a.k.a Bill of Bill and Ted fame) to buy re-hydration powders. This "dude" (there was no other word for him) showed me how to flick open my Zippo one handed - a trick I have never forgotten and which has caused the hinge on that Zippo to break twice and on another one I bought because my original was broken, once . As I write both are with Zippo to be repaired under their fantastic lifetime guarantee.
At last on the 20th of September I was able to get away. My persistence and refusal to be fobbed off at Izmir airport led one of the staff there to compare me to Margaret Thatcher. I suppose it was a compliment. My flight to Konya was via Istanbul which was a bit daft - there were no direct flights from Izmir to Konya.
