Wasting Time and Becalmed

I really wish I had been better at keeping notes at this stage in the trip. From what I can make out I was wasting time. I spent the next day in Selcuk and more than likely wrote a few postcards despite having been away barely 5 days. I do remember how much I could enjoy just sitting outside a tea shop smoking cigarettes, reading, writing and drinking glass after glass of sweet black tea at about 2p (or even less) per glass.



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.

Selcuk & Ephesus

The first thing I had to do on arrival was find a place to stay. I picked a place recommended by the Lonely Planet Guide called the Australian Pension. The Aegean coastal resorts have strong connections with Australia and New Zealand because of Gallipoli. Selcuk had loads of Pansiyons (Pensions - Guesthouses) and other establishments with antipodean names. There was even a Bob Hawke Bar. My room cost 45,000TL but I can't remember very much else about the place at all except that it was good and clean and reasonably priced. It had a kind of central courtyard and all day long Morning Glory blossoms dropped from above. I remember that I got talking to two South African girls staying there called Gayl and Lola. Gayl was from Port Elizabeth and we had an interesting chat about the fact that she had an Afrikaaner boyfriend/fiancé but since she was an English speaking South African and could not speak Afrikaans his parents did not approve of her at all. There seemed to be a degree of Apartheid even between the white South Africans. Nelson Mandela had been out of prison just under seven months at this point in time.

I wasted no time and, having dumped the rucksack, I was off to see the ruins of Ephesus. Pretty impressive ruins they are too. At this stage this Blog may start to look like a photo album. That's half the point.



The Library of Celsus pictured above was, it says in a book written by the Director of the Ephesus Museum that I bought after my visit, built by Tiberius Julius Aquila as a mausoleum for his father Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus the proconsul (governor) of the Asian province of the Roman Empire, the capital of which was Ephesus, who died aged 70 in 114 AD. It took 3 years to build by which time the governor's son had also died having bequeathed 25,000 dinars to make sure 12,000 scrolls were acquired. The scrolls were kept in rows of niches on the side walls. The scrolls aren't there now. The book doesn't say what happened to them. I wonder whether they were gradually all borrowed and never returned (but of course it wasn't that kind of library). More probably they were destroyed in 262 when the Goths set fire to the interior. The book says the interior of the Library was burnt completely during the Gothic attacks in 262. It wasn't vandalism because the Vandals didn't really get going untill about 250 years later and I don't think they got as far as what is now Turkey. Had they done they would have found that Ephesus had already been vandalised.



The picture above shows the view to the Library of Celsus as you look down the Curetes Street. The Curetes were a class of priests who founded a collegium that was considered to be the largest cult in Ephesus. Their aim was to recreate the birth of Artemis Ephesia in Ortygia, near Ephesus. In mythology Curetes were semi deities. "According to mythology," writes Sellahattin Erdemgil in the book Ephesus Ruins and Museum (the book I mentioned), "while Leto, impregnated by Zeus, was giving birth to the twins, Artemis and Apollo, Curetes made a lot of noise with their weapons so that Zeus' wife Hera who was jealous of Leto, would be confused and not see the birth of the twins." As aims for groups go, recreating the scene described would have been a pretty tall order and you have got to wonder why they wanted to do it. Suppose they had succeeded, what then?



The Temple of Hadrian was dedicated to Emperor Hadrian by P. Quintilius around the year 138. The centre of the arch is adorned with the bust of Tyche, the goddess of the city and on the semi-circular frontal over the door, the figure of a maiden resembling Medusa is depicted among flowers and acanthus leaves. I know this now because I'm reading it in the book. At the time I couldn't honestly say that I knew anything other than it was worth taking a picture of as I walked down what I was blissfully unaware was Curetes Street.

I really enjoyed wandering aound the ruins. There were a lot of other tourists but it didn't spoil the experience. The weather was great. I think this was the first highlight of my journey. I strolled down the Marble Road to the the Theatre.



The view from the top down the Harbour Road was terrific. This was (and is) the best Theatre of its kind I have visited. The Harbour Road pictured below explains why Ephesus went into decline. Around the year 100 the population was around half a million and it was the largest city in Roman Asia. Gradually the harbour silted up and the sea got further and further away and the city became of increasingly less commercial importance. It is now 5 kilometres from the end of the Harbour Road to the coastline. Mind you, being sacked by Goths; reduced to rubble by earthquakes at least twice; and being sacked again by Arabs on three occasions would make you wonder if it was worth hanging about. The city was actually abandoned in the 15th Century.

Another Day and Two More Seas

I really wanted to get moving. Having been to Istanbul twice before I didn't want to hang around there too long. I didn't meet anyone at all while I was there which made the place a little less interesting. Furthermore there was very little time to waste if I was going to fit in everything I planned to see in Turkey. As it happens the next day it was raining so I went down to the docks and bought a ticket for a ferry to Izmir. Departure was 14.00.


Now this was an experience I can recommend. The ferry was very comfortable indeed. What's more, I immediately met somebody I knew. I bumped into a girl called Louise with whom I had been to 6th Form College. As a matter of fact I'm sure that at one time she had been my mate Brendan's girlfriend. A respectable time after they had finished with eachother I recall that she and I had an encounter in a bedroom in Dave "Bunny" Warren's house. Many years later while I was waiting for my Law Society finals results I recall we had a brief dalliance too. I remember her letting me get her completely naked only to find there wasn't much further we could go at that particular time. So it was a little strange to bump into her and her new husband, Peter, on this ferry.

I also got into conversation, or tried to get into conversation with a man called Baghban Bashi. I had noticed him sitting with his children behind me. What caught my attention was that he had discovered the flash unit for his camera was not working. I watched him unfold a hankerchief and then painstakingly take apart the flash unit laying each tiny component on the handkerchief. He then carefully put it all back together again after repairing whatever it was that had broken and it worked again. This impressed me at the time and has remained with me. There is no way I could even have contemplated such a task then nor now. Things like flash units when they stop working are not considered worth repairing. Unless you knew what you were doing it would be pointless to try and the cost of having anyone else do it for you would far outweigh the cost of simply buying a new one. So it sort of amazed me that he had the patience and skill to take the thing apart and then reassemble it in the way he did.

I managed to get to speak with Baghban at the ferry's bar. I discovered he was from Tehran, Iran. He told me was travelling back to Iran overland from Greece where his brother was studying. He said he was driving a white Land Rover which he had collected from his brother. He had his wife and children with him. They had their own cay (tea), almonds and pistachio nuts taken from Iran to Greece and back. He was fascinated by the SW radio Robin and Donna had given me and offered me $150 for it. He had a couple of Efes Pilsens and opened up a bit. I discovered he had been an F14 Fighter pilot during the Iran/Iraq war. He didn't say much but was quite gloomy about life under the Mullahs in Iran. He was a good guy, you could tell.

The Ferry was an overnight sailing from Istanbul along the Golden Horn into the sea of Marmara and into the Aegean Sea. One of the bulkier items that I'd packed was a sleeping bag. It was a very thin one. I think it was called a moon bag. The selling point, apart from it's small size when rolled up, was the fact it had some kind of metallic thermal lining that was supposed to have been a bi-product of the Space Program. Now that I think about it I recall that I also had a sleeping bag liner (I was really well equipped). So at some stage I was able to stretch out between the seats and get a good night's sleep. The ferry docked in Izmir the following morning shortly before 9.00.

My destination was Selcuk being the closest place to Efes. I was not going there for the Pilsen but to visit the ruins of Ephesus.

Istanbul, Turkey

The flight must have been fairly uneventful after the plane eventually took off for the second time. I can't recall any part of it. Neither can I remember landing or the process of coming though passport control etc. I took a taxi, or taksi, to a hotel mentioned in the Lonely Planet Guide. If I still had the book I'd be able to tell you exactly where it was. It was the Otel Rio and my room cost 50,000 lire per night.

What I do remember is that the room I had was on an upper floor. The building had a kind of light well. I'm not sure how to describe this properly but effectively the building was hollow so that light came from the roof down to the ground floor. Each room had an internal window onto this shaft which probably improved the ventillation too. It meant that you could hear what was going on in the rooms on other floors and a couple of floors below me there was quite a lot of noise coming from one particular room. I couldn't say for sure but my guess was that the occupants were Russian.

I only say this because of the way the evening developed. At first there was just talking, quite loud talking but obviously friendly conversation. It was clear that the men and I think there were only two of them, were drinking. There was a series of toasts. Glasses clinked and I imagined a bottle of vodka being lifted to refill the glasses continuously. The talking became more animated and the men seemed to be telling each other funny stories, at least there was a fair bit of laughter. The drinking continued and the men became more agitated in their conversation. One of them must have said something that upset the other and they began to shout loudly at eachother. There was the sound of furniture falling over and some sort of a scuffle. After that the two of them were crying together and there was more clinking of glasses until I suppose they both passed out.

I woke early. It was a Monday morning and I was in Instanbul. I had been to the city before and limited my sightseeing. It was right at the beginning of the trip and I felt a little self conscious on my own. I was immediately aware that I was in the Orient. Istanbul is an international melting pot. Somehow Africans in flowing robes didn't look out of place like they sometimes do on Oxford Street. They seemed to have something in common with the locals. I don't know but there was a possibility that even in Istanbul they might have been able to converse with business associates in some version of arabic that all of them understood. It wasn't hard to imagine that they were traders who had come by various routes whether by sea from Egypt or overland through the Middle East laden with goods and treasures from all over the African Continent to trade in this gateway to Europe.




In fact this was still Europe. The Bosphorus is the dividing line between the continents of Europe and Asia. On my second day I decided to take a trip up the Bosphorus and the picture below shows "Rumelihisarı" a fortress on the European side of the straits originally built by Sultan Mehmet II in 4 months and 16 days between April 15 1452 and 31 August 1452. It makes you wonder about the speed of modern construction projects. Just up the road from here they've been building a retail development which is to house a Debenhams Department Store amongst other things. I'm sure it has already taken three times longer than that and it is nowhere near finished.



Below is a picture of a "yalı". These were residences built in 18th and 19th centuries where well to do families would resort for some part of the year. I've no idea how old the one in this picture might be. A time-share it ain't.



I seem to remember writing a postcard to my parents while I was on this ferry ride up the Bosphorus. I wish I knew where I went, I wasn't entirely sure where I was going. I got off at one point but couldn't say for sure where. It was peaceful.

Buy One Take-Off, Get One Free!

I had never been to London Heathrow before. What did strike me was how little space there was between the entrance doors and the check-in desks. Perhaps it is my memory playing tricks on me but it seemed like it was about 5 yards. It was very cramped. There was hardly room to move. There were hundreds of people with mountains of luggage shuffling about and there seemed to be pillars to negotiate too. It wasn't the sort of place anyone would want to hang around and so I said my goodbyes to Brian and Emma and I checked in.

I suppose my slightly reddened eyes could have been mistaken for those of someone who had just said a tearful goodbye. My slightly hazy fazed demeanour was probably not unusual either. The fact was that I was more than slightly stoned and didn't really have a clue what was going on but no-one noticed. I checked my rucksack into the hold and took that step through passport control into the departure lounge. I didn't buy any duty free. I had enough to carry and fags were going to be cheap in Turkey anyway.

Things are very different today. All this was before the era of the mobile phone. Today I would have probably spent the last 45 minutes before boarding the plane making last minute calls to all and sundry on a tiny handset that would have replaced my Walkman and my camera. I'm sure I did make a couple of calls from a public telephone to call home and say a final goodbye but otherwise I just must have wandered around aimlessly until it was time to go to the Gate.

Of course mobile phones did exist. Who can forget the phone Michael Douglas had as Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street"?That film came out just 3 years before I set off. I don't think I could have carried anything else with me and certainly not a phone that weighed nearly 2lbs!

Everything was bigger back then. In a way the world was bigger back then too. Once I got on the plane I was unreachable except by post. I had left a list of poste restante addresses with friends and relatives so that I could get some news while I was away but that was it. The cost of international telephone calls would have been out of the question on a budget. It is not the same now with internet cafés and VOIP. I'm not sure the trip I was about to take would have been quite such an adventure today.

So I boarded the plane and it took off. About 10 minutes into the flight it became clear that the plane was flying in circles. It wasn't actually going anywhere. Eventually there was an announcement by the Captain that we were returning to Heathrow because there was a technical problem. It crossed my mind that it would be something of a tragedy for my trip to end in a plane crash at Heathrow without having been anywhere at all. It obviously didn't happen or I wouldn't be tapping this out today. After flying in a holding pattern for another 10 minutes or so the pilot got a chance to land again and about 30 minutes later the rush you get as the plane hurtles down the runway and takes off was repeated and this time we didn't turn back.

Time To Go

So that was it. The months of planning were at last at an end. Everything was in place. There was nothing else that I could do. I'd had all the jabs, bought all the essential and a lot of unecessary kit and was fully packed; and all with a whole day to spare. I have absolutely no idea what I did on the Saturday before I set off. If anyone can remember I'd be glad to know.

Sunday 9 September 1990 dawned and I was on my way. The first leg was from Brian's in Muswell Hill to Heathrow. Emma came too. She was due to set off on her own trip some time later. There was a suggestion that we might meet up when I got to Australia. Brian drove to the Airport. I was really nervous. This was a step into the unknown. It wasn't excitement I felt. It was fear. What was I doing? Okay, so I had done some sort of independent travelling before. Both times it was to to Turkey and on both occasions it was with Emma. This time I was alone. My heart was certainly beating much faster than usual by the time Brian parked the car. In those pre 9/11 days you didn't have to check in until 2 hours before take-off. We were a bit early. It wasn't my idea but it might not have been entirely sensible to have decided to have a quick smoke in the car before going down to the check-in area. When we did get down there the trepidation was verging on paranoia. How stupid would I look if I wasn't allowed through check-in because I was obviously under the influence of something? How would I explain that? I needn't have worried. I looked pretty stupid anyway. Just look at the picture! The problem with rather too much time to plan something is that every last detail is covered. Look at all the stuff I had with me! I did need everything. At least, I thought I did. When I think about it I did use practically all of the kit I took with me and if I had been doing the same thing now I'm not sure what I would have left behind.

Time Is Running Out

The next day I picked up my tickets from GoldAir. Now it was real. There was no turning back from this point. I ordered some Turkish cash. I had to be at London Heathrow Terminal 2 at 11.00am on 9 September.

Despite the fact that I had arranged to let the flat there was the little matter of advising the Nationwide that I was proposing to part with possession of it. I needed the building society's consent. I had to chase them up about that. I went to Dick and Chris' for dinner up in Highgate. Over the next few days I packed up the flat and my notes say I moved out on 1 September. I went home to Gresford where my brother Hugo helped me do a spreadsheet to present to the bank to ensure that they stayed onside whatever happened. These were turbulent times in terms of interest rates. I needed to set up arrangements to be able to collect cash and travellers cheques at various places on my route and felt I had to demonstrate that I had worked out what the effect on my budget might be if interest rates were to go up. They were cool about everything and the various transfers were put in place. I said goodbye to all and sundry at home and set off back to London on 5 September.

I stayed that night at Brian's. Emma came over too. There's a note in the filofax that indicates that Emma and I must have been on pretty good terms notwithstanding that we were no longer an item.

Brian had suffered a break in to his flat. Someone had basically smashed their way through the plasterboard next to his flat door. What was strange was that nothing had been stolen. The mystery of how the guy in the ground floor flat had acquired the music recording and production equipment was revealed. It seems that shortly after this guy had moved into his flat he had replaced one of the windows. In doing so the window sill had been removed and beneath it was a plastic tube. In the tube was a vast quantity of white powder! Clearly the person who had "left" it there had come back looking for it.

The reason that we stayed with Brian was because the next day we were going to Lowestoft where Brian wanted to shoot a scene for another film. Emma was to be in it. There was a maze in this place Brian knew and he wanted to shoot a scene in it. The effect was to be a continuous shot ending with Emma being in the centre of the maze. I think he intended to shoot the scene backwards (from the end to the beginning) and then play it the other way round and quicker when the film was projected. The effect was to have the viewer whizzed though to the centre of the maze. It was the kind of shot that you need three hands to do (unless you had one of those tracks they mount cameras on in film sets, which we didn't have). So my role was as the "focus puller". We did it but I have no idea whether Brian's film project came to anything. Emma and Brian are pictured here on location in Lowestoft (how exciting does that sound?!). In Brian's hands is his prized Eumig.

I completed the Shorthold Tenancy agreement with Geraint and Tina on Friday 7 September and had my last Hepatitis jab and got the Doctor to sign my Anti AIDS and Hepatitis kit so that I could dispel any concerns about having needles in my rucksack whenever I crossed a border and went through customs.