Chapter 4. Turkey Beyond Istanbul
Stepping past Istanbul in those days was very much a leap into the dark.
—Simon Dring, On the Road Again
For the traveller setting off from Istanbul, much of interior Turkey seemed harsh and unrelenting—small towns and shepherd’s huts, people trying to eke out a living from a dry, unforgiving land. Westerners intent on getting to India quickly spent little time in any interior town or city. A stop might be required in Ankara, a fairly modern city, to get a travel visa, or in other cities, such as Erzurum, out of curiosity. Otherwise, stops were mainly caused by vehicle repairs or extreme weather: heavy rains and flooding in spring, punishingly hot temperatures in summer, and bone-chilling cold in the fall and winter.
Following my brief arrest in Syria, I travelled eastwards to the city of Diyarbakir, a fortified ancient city that remains one of Turkey’s primary military outposts. There, I again met several Turkish youths eager to know my impressions of their country. We strolled along the city’s crumbling parapets for several hours, talking.
The next day I travelled to Lake Van. I took a small room at a small hotel abutting a simple farm outside the city of Van. The city borders on the lake, beyond which rises Mount Ararat.
I did not know when I arrived there of the region’s troubled history, but I soon learned. In the spring of 1915, during the early stages of the Armenian genocide, Van was the site of a protracted battle between Ottoman forces and the city’s Armenian residents, who were facing certain death. They were ultimately rescued after Russian troops arrived and liberated the city, but at least another three-quarters of a million Armenians were not as lucky. Yet the Turkish government continues to deny that any genocide occurred, preferring to claim that the Ottomans never intended to kill Armenians—merely to resettle them for their own protection.
One day, as I sat reading, a young boy—the hotel keeper’s son—came by, obviously curious of the stranger. We had a brief conversation, as best we could. Afterwards, I wrote a poem recounting our meeting:
On the banks of Lake Van,
I sit reading Hesse
and looking out upon the turquoise and chalk water.
The local women,
faceless in their niqab,
walk to the reedy shore.
Ten miles to the west lies Akdomar Isle;
at my back, an ancient Urartu Temple,
now a peasant hut
hung with white laundry.
In the mornings, I bathe my face
in the glacial stream
that flows from the hills.
There is a boy, the hotel owner’s son.
He is a Kurd.
One day he tells me of a time, long ago,
when his people were shot in the fields
by Turks on horseback.
He wears a pin
beneath his coat lapel bearing
the image of a Kurdish leader
who was hanged.
The boy makes me tea.
We speak no more.
The boy gave me his pin, which I still have.
The moment was quite moving. I have thought often of that encounter in the years since. After 1984, Kurdish nationalists intensified their fight for an independent country that would include parts of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, as well as Turkey. Following a brief ceasefire from 2013 to 2015, fighting between the Kurdish and Turkish forces has renewed with no end in sight.
On July 15, I waved goodbye to the boy and took a bus to the Gürbulak–Bazargan border crossing into Iran.
No description of Turkey of the period is complete without reference to its roads. In all seasons, Turkey’s notoriously poor road conditions added to the difficulties faced by overland travellers. Basil Jay, who set off on the journey with his family by van in 1974, notes that “The road surface was bad all day. The bends treacherous. Drops to both right and left of at least 2 feet.… There was no hard shoulder.… There appeared to be no road network whatsoever, just meandering tracks.”1
Margot Miller recounted a particularly harrowing experience that she and her companions had driving in their van along Turkey’s coastal northeast in late 1971. The road was at first paved and “gorgeous,” but soon after, as they headed into the mountains, it became a “dark and dangerous, narrow dirt road.” Their driver downshifted on some gravel, causing the van to head toward a cliff, stopping just on the edge, with “the van’s lights shining out into the abyss, going nowhere, hitting nothing.” They all sat paralyzed, then leaned to the left as they gingerly got out the front of the vehicle. It “teetered like a rectangle,” Margot recalled, “its left front and the rear right wheels on the road, while the left rear tire clawed for air.”
Miller and her colleagues were saved when a Turkish farmer, who had seen the van’s lights, came along with his tractor and, tying a rope to their vehicle, pulled it back onto the road.
David Pearson recalled a different kind of harrowing incident in Kurdistan. He and Bess Blackwell had stopped their Land Rover on a hillside to watch sheep grazing and began climbing the hill. But partway up, David turned back to get something from the vehicle only to see a Turkish man get out of a car stopped by the road and point to the gas tanks on the side of their Land Rover. The tanks carried thirty gallons of gas due to the scarcity of gas stations in eastern Turkey. The man pointed at the tanks and made it clear he wanted at least two cans of the gas, which he took down the road to a larger storage tank nearby. “When I gestured that he should pay for the gas,” Pearson said, “the man moved his hand across his throat. That was the end of the discussion.”
An accident or vehicle breakdown in winter could be equally life-threatening. The winters in eastern Turkey are extremely cold and usually accompanied by an enormous amount of snow. John Wall told of a journey in 1968 when the bus he was on went through “a tunnel cut through the compacted snow. The passageway was about one foot wider than the bus and well above window height.” Erik Pontoppidan similarly recalls a two-day train ride in 1969, during which they passed through “a beautiful, but very desolate landscape of plains and mountain” before arriving in the city of Erzurum, which sits on a high plateau in the eastern Anatolian region. Throughout a bitterly cold February night, he drank “gallons of tea to keep warm, watching the horse-drawn sledges on the streets,” while waiting for a local bus delayed by snowstorms to take him eastwards.2
David Dudeck provided a wonderful account of a journey by Magic Bus through eastern Turkey in 1974:
The owner was English. The bus was old and only got us to around Erzurum. It was February and really cold—it might have been minus forty. The radiator didn’t work—they didn’t have much in the way of antifreeze—and finally the bus wouldn’t start. Someone was pulling the bus and sure enough the driver didn’t hit the brakes in time and, “crack,” the windshield broke. But even then, the driver didn’t want to stop. He was like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We drove with a broken windshield for a while, but it was just too friggin’ cold, and we couldn’t get someone to tow us. Finally, we gave up and took a taxi into Erzurum. I huddled in a little hotel where we had to buy wood for the little wood stoves. Not expecting it, I didn’t have a thick blanket or sleeping bag. I woke up in the middle of the night with ice a quarter inch thick on the inside of the windows. Luckily, we were in the last place in eastern Turkey where you could still buy beer.
Such accounts of travel on Turkish roads are commonplace in the stories I gathered about travels on the Hippie Trail. In retrospect, they offer a sense of shared experience in what could often be a lonely, isolating, and greatly varied existence on the road.
After departing Turkey in mid-July, I spent about ten days in Iran before crossing into Afghanistan. Around the end of the first week in August, I interrupted my journey to make my ultimately fruitless trip to Germany to see my Swiss girlfriend, but I was back in Turkey by late September. My second journey across Turkey followed a more conventional, and more direct, route, which led initially from Istanbul southeast to Ankara, the Turkish capital. I travelled by bus, entranced by the landscape along the way:
The countryside is exquisitely beautiful, a gentle blending of greens and yellows, parcelled out in even patches between the smooth, deep hills. At times the earth turns the red colour of dried blood, or maybe a brown, but whereas the Greek landscape is so rugged and majestic, its colours vibrantly bursting out at your senses, the Turkish terrain flows gentler, more serene. Near the city of Bolu, a bank of clouds, like hard-edged wool, shot out of the valleys and sifted over the slopes, a frail and conjuring mist that set me pondering as to where the road was leading. For it seemed as though some frozen waste, a no man’s land was beckoning just ahead, a mysterious cleft in history spilling out into the Anatolian Plateau.
But then it began to rain, and in the last villages before Ankara, the streets were flooding, sewers backing up. In Ankara, amid violent downpours, I followed a generous Turk to where I might find a cheap hotel. I was hungry, but I was too wet to go out in the storm. Instead, I read for a while. A tourist manual’s disparaging description of the city mirrored my less than positive initial reaction of Ankara. I left for Kayseri the next day.
From Kayseri, which is situated roughly in the middle of the country, I travelled northeast to Erzurum and shortly thereafter to the border to begin my second journey across Iran.