A'ight, so, I've been wicked busy. I just signed the contract for my third simultaneous job. It's not that I'm desperate for money so much as all three were too plum to pass up (Editor of the national beekeeping magazine, Senior [extension] Officer (entering public service two pay levels above normal entry!), and now I will teach at Melbourne Polytechnic), which all in all obligates me to 70 hours a week of work (but really its much more than that). So of course this sounded like the perfect time to enter a weekly writing contest with my Copious Free Time. This week I was able to relate the prompt ("without you") to the next installment of the ongoing Apinautica project, which is ideal because it gave me the motivation I needed to finally carve out some time to advance it along. And while I already had a draft of this sitting there, it had completely lacked an emotional arc so the need to make it be able to carry itself as an LJI Entry and to fit the prompt gave me the direction to actually give it a bit of emotional depth.
In case you forgot, in August 2013 after a fight (in which for poetical sake we may say she breathe fire) my Turkish girlfriend cast me adrift to wander Turkey alone. That should be all the context you need for the rest of this to make sense but if you're curious:
this is the immediately prior installment,
beginning of the Turkey Chapter, and
this is the beginning of this currently 70,000 word project.
The Chimaera
August 24th, 1233 BC - Fethi blinks the salt spray from his eyes and leans over the heaving gunwale to peer into the dark ahead. Between the sparkling starry canopy of the sky and the inky blackness of the sea the mountains of the coast can be discerned more a a negative space, except .. there seems to be a flickering orange glow near the top of one of them just coming in to view.
He scampers back along the edge of the small boat, for the middle is heaped with cargo, to where the rotund first mate is holding the tiller.
“Sir, sir, what is that??” he asks the mate, pointing.
“Ah that, that’s the Chimaera” the man answers with an aura of mystery and a chuckle. Above them in the darkness the sail billows and the lines creak.
“What’s the chimaera?” asks the boy.
“It’s a terrible monster.” says the man trying to sound Very Serious, “with the head of a lion, its tail is a snake, and on it’s back it has… um … the head of a goat!”
“Really?”
“Yes and it breaths fire, as you can see.”
“Wow”
The mate struggles not to laugh at the gullibility of the youngest member of his crew. But really the the perpetual fire there is an important landmark. They wouldn’t normally be sailing at night but the pirates are rumored to be operating in the area and in addition to their regular cargo they need to bring this passenger Bellerophon to the city of Telmessos up the coast. The mate glances back at Bellerophon, who is also still up, gazing at the glow of fire on the hill.
July 17th, 2013 - Up ahead in the darkness, the sharp sinister yellow glow of fire flickers beyond the silhouetted trees dancing in the wavering light. “The Chimaera!” someone whispers, as we pause on the dark path up the mountain. “According to Greek mythology, it was a creature with the head of a lion, a fire-breathing goat’s head coming out of its back, and a snake's head on its tail” our guide explains. I try to picture it. A fire-breathing goat’s head on its back!
It’s a long walk up the mountain path through the forest by night, lit along by flashlights. I haven’t met anyone else on the tour and the darkness doesn’t lend itself to making friends. Despite being surrounded by other groups of tourists I am alone in the dark forest. We emerge from the trees into a stoney clearing, fire licks up from a dozen different places in the rock. Apparently, it is a natural vent of methane from the ground that has been continuously on fire for all of known history.
“Hot dogs! Marshmallows! Hot dogs!” a Turkish man strolls among the tourists who have scrambled up the mountain trail in the dark, pitching his wares. They come with free use of his roasting poles. For just a few lira you too can roast a hot dog in Chimaera’s breath!
“Hey … hey!” I realize someone in the group of people drinking is trying to get my attention, as I make my way through the open area of the hostel after returning from the Chimaera. The hostel, in the valley of Olympos just below Mt Chimaera, consists of a bunch of glorified sheds (“tree houses”) spread about among the trees, lights hung festively between them and the trees, spreading a cheery lighting among the area of couches, hammocks and picnic tables. Several groups have been cheerfully drinking all evening. I’m aiming to head to bed and depart in the morning.
“Did you just come from Chimaera?” this guy with an Australian accent asks me.
“Yeah”
“How was it?”
I approach the group, they appear to be all in their 20s (Turkey is not a first trip abroad kind of place), from all over the world, having just met here at this impromptu gathering. My friendly interlocutor is Stephen, from Melbourne, Australia. I’m drawn into the group and we play drinking games for an hour or two before walking a short distance up the road past several similar hostels to the one nightclub in the valley, where not even the bartender speaks Turkish (he appears to be from Jamaica). In the early hours of the morning, the sky already becoming pale, we all stumble back down the road arms around eachother trying not to collectively crash.
The next morning I was planning on moving on. But as I make my way to the front desk, my planned escape is interrupted by my new friends lounging about on the divans.
“Don’t leave already, come to the beach with us!”
Well, okay what’s the hurry. I ask the hostel manager if it would be at all possible to extend my stay, he vaguely waves me away with “just tell me when you’re leaving.” Continual postponements of departure are apparently common in this valley of the lotus eaters. Stephen has already postponed several times from his original intended departure date
We spend most of the day lounging on the pebbly beach, swimming, and playing card games. Soon growing impatient with that I wander along among the ancient ruins overgrown with foliage just inland from the beach. In places, the walls are intact above head height and one can walk along the cobbled narrow streets and imagine it as it had once been. It had been a pirate haven in ancient times, but the ancient Greek hero Bellerophon killed all of a band of pirates in the area before going on to face the Chimaera, and in 78 BC a Roman expedition including a 22-year-old Julius Caeser once and for all quelled the pirates living there (and the pirate king, Zenicetus, set fire to his own house and perished, according to the Greek historian Strabo, which I feel like is a vague hint at a more interesting story).
In the afternoon I find a Turk sitting in a plastic chair by the trail to the beach, with a sign for Alaturka Cruises, and decide to set up my next move. He tells me to come back at 7 pm to talk to his boss.
I return at 7:00 to be informed his boss had passed out drunk, but it’s no matter, I should come at 7 am for pickup.
That night we all go out again, and at 2am I’m feeling the warm summer night air whipping past my face as with newfound friends I’m heading back down the curvy mountain road in someone’s swanky convertible.
The Turquoise Coast
As a sailor myself I generally disdain “cruises,” but I had been convinced that this would be worthwhile by the simple math that $200 for four days, would be cheaper than accommodation and food would be otherwise anyway, and this would be the most practical way to see a number of places on the rugged coast. And it would be a small sailboat with just about a dozen passengers. Okay, sign me up.
When the dolmuş (passenger minivan, from the Turkish word for “stuffed” that also gives rise to the stuffed grapeleaf dish of “dolmas”) arrives to pick me up the next morning, one of my new friends, an Australian from Melbourne makes an instant snap decision to come along as well - this is how you live the backpacker life properly!
“We’re here to pick up…” the driver pauses to look at his list “Michelle Robertson?” the driver asks at the next hostel.
“Oh, um, she just got in a different dolmuş”
“What do you mean a different dolmuş?”
“There was another here a moment ago she must have thought it was you and she got in”
“Where was that one going?”
A helpless shrug greets this. What unhappy fate has Michelle from Brisbane been whisked off to? Will she be fed to the Chimaera?”
Well, there’s nothing for it but to continue on our way without her. As we wend up the curvy mountain road through the pine forest suddenly around a corner a lone girl on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere is waving us down - it’s our missing passenger! Apparently realizing her mistake she had immediately disembarked the dolmuş even though it was in the middle of nowhere.
Half an hour later we arrive at the little coastal town of Demre, where the 65-foot traditional “gulet” schooner Eleutheria is one of the few vessels tied up to the dock in the broad shallow bay.
Our crew consists of a cheerful suntanned weather-beaten captain; his rotund jovial father-in-law as first mate, who doesn’t speak any English but always has a sly conspiratorial grin on his face and laughing eyes; and the cook, a slight man who always seems to be out of sight but can whip up amazing Turkish meals in the little galley..
As for passengers, from the dolmuş we have myself, my friend Stephen from Melbourne, Nick from Canada, two more guys from Melbourne who will spend the entire time fairly intoxicated, and the girl from Brisbane whom we’d nearly lost; on the boat itself we find two cute Spanish girls, a middle-aged Spanish couple (both journalists), and the last addition to join us on deck, via the captain diving in and pulling her back from where she was slowly drifting away on a pool noodle, another girl from Melbourne. We are soon underway and being served the first of many delicious meals.
Our first destination is a cave on the coast. The captain practically puts the boat’s nose right into. A banner above the cave advertises a pirate bar, which I feel rather diminishes the atmosphere.
Our next destination is a cute little village just off the coast. With no road access to the mainland, the streets are just two or three people wide between the beautiful little cottages. All three crewmembers apparently live here. The rocky hilltop above the village is crowned with the ruins of a fortress built to fight pirates. From the walls of the fortress ruin, more foundations and old paths are visible in shallow water beside the village where either the land had subsided or the water level has risen.
In the evening, anchored off some unknown cove, we passengers linger over another delicious meal (the things they can do with eggplant!), without cell phones or television or video games no one is in a hurry to do anything other than enjoy the conversation. Until we cast off from the flimsy Demre dock I had been neurotically checking my phone for any signs of rapprochement from Her, but with no signal and my phone long dead, there’s nothing for it but to put it out of mind. After dinner, we play backgammon or swam lazily about the boat, cans of Efes in one hand and a pool noodle in the other. It is so pleasant and warm that even coming out of the water dripping at 2 am I don’t feel cold, we all sleep on deck.
The next day we stop in at the coastal town of Kaş (pronounced cash), another town of authentically beautiful Turkish architecture draped in purple bougainvilleas on the steep Lycian coast. Just outside of town, a large ancient amphitheater still stands facing the sea,
one can easily imagine what a nice place it would have been to see any kind of show, in fact it’s in such good condition surely they must still have shows here.
At anchor in another cove that night we once again while away the hours after the delicious dinner playing backgammon and chatting. I wish I could more often force a group of friendly strangers to forgo electronic entertainments and connections, though sadly as they make electronic devices ever better to connect from anywhere this dream just becomes ever more chimerical.
The beach of Oludeniz is our next stop. This beautiful beach features in most Turkish tourism montages, as a peninsula and sandbar give the beach a distinct semicircular shape. Somehow all the promotional pictures get it looking pristine and empty (of course), but after I swim to shore I find myself carefully picking my way through a thriving rookery of pale, pasty, bulgey Russian walruses in speedoes, packing every square foot of the gravelly strand. High above, paragliders circle in the updraft, having launched from the steep slopes surrounding the beach. Strolling on shore I find the road lined with “British Fish and Chips!” shops.
We continue to “Santa Claus Island.” St Nicholas Island is a small island just off the coast covered with the ruins of an ancient monastery where Saint Nicholas, yes, that one, Santa Claus himself, had presided. Interesting fact, the actual Saint Nicholas famously punched a priest he disagreed with in the face over a disagreement about the formulation of the Nicene Creed - so be wary of his naughty list!
We while away the afternoon with our usual rounds of swimming, backgammon, delicious meals, and meandering conversations. At first backgammon, a national pastime of Turks, had looked to me like a very simple game, but the more I play it the more I realize it’s akin to some sort of linear chess. Turks such as the captain patiently explain strategy to us while doing their best to hold back and not beat the rest of us too badly.
A Turkish husband and wife
come along in a small wooden boat propelled only by the husband at the oars, while the wife makes fresh crepes on a stove in the boat and sells them to us and other boats in the area.
Our usually-wise captain recommended we visit the ruins at sunset to enjoy the view but on this advice, I’m going to disagree with him - the sun set behind a hill anyway and we just found ourselves squinting in the fading light trying to read the informational signs. I never even found where Rudolf had been disallowed from playing in reindeer games!
Back aboard the Eleutheria we are treated to the grandest most delicious dinner of them all, as the cook magically brings dish after dish from the galley. At one end of the table the Australians tell stories of drunken adventure while at the other end the journalists and others discuss current events, until it all melds together. The boat’s beer supply actually runs out and the captain breaks into his personal supply. I wistfully reflect what a nice distraction this has been - the next day the journey will end and I’ll have to find out if She has been trying to email me or has been happily ambivalent - not having any way to know has been nice but it can’t last forever. But such thoughts are quickly swept away by the engaging conversations around me. The moon slowly rises, a big red crescent, low over the eastern point we had sailed around to get here.
And this, conveniently, brings us right up to immediately prior to the beginning of an LJ entry I had written for the 2014 season of LJ Idol:
The Faraway Land and City of Light