Turkey (part 4)
Turkey Superlatives, continued...
Most beautiful building we visited: A toss-up between the eighteenth-century Ismail Pasha Palace in Doğubeyazıt (you were right about that one, mitzimaybe!) and the thirteenth-century Great Mosque in Divriği, both monochrome yellowish buildings with elaborate carvings instead of the more common coloured tiles. As much as I love coloured tiles, I fell in love with the simple elegance and muted colour schemes of the Doğubeyazıt and Divriği World Heritage sites. The stunning location of the Ismail Pasha Palace (atop a mountain overlooking a valley and Mt Ararat in the distance) didn't hurt, either.
Two Turkish ladies (mother and daughter) at the Ismail Pasha Palace who really wanted me to take their photo. With hindsight, I wish I had taken more photos of the old lady; she was quite a character.
Most masochistic thing we did: Cycling a mountainous thirty-kilometre loop around Göreme, Cappadocia, on a day on which the mercury hit 45 degrees (for the Americans among you, that's 113 degrees Fahrenheit), all because (1) K and I were too cheap to hire scooters, and (2) we had this vague notion that riding scooters was only for wimps, which we obviously weren't. It probably would have been OK if we had had proper Dutch bikes, but sadly, all that could be found in the way of bicycles in Göreme was shitty mountain bikes with 42 different gears, none of which was the slightest bit comfortable. Once we got under way, we first had an awful time walking our bikes uphill (the first two kilometres were steep!). Then we had a splendid time racing downhill (I now understand why people get addicted to speed; I got a tremendous kick out of the downhill bit), and finally we struggled through the loooooong flat stretch, until we got to the point where we hardly seemed to move forwards any more, no matter which gear we tried. We walked our bikes for a while, then decided we honestly couldn't go any farther. So we did what any desperate female would have done in our position: we rang a Turkish guy we'd met the night before, who had warned us against cycling the itinerary we had set our minds on and had half-jokingly promised to come and pick us up if it became a little too much for us. He was true to his word: half an hour later K and I were back in Göreme, bikes, bad moods and everything. We felt rather silly when we saw how close we'd come to Göreme before giving up, but again, we honestly couldn't have gone any farther -- not on those bikes, and not in those temperatures. The scenery on the way was great, though, as you'll see for yourself once I get around to posting the black-and-white pictures I took in Cappadocia.
Instruments of torture: the worst bikes K and I have ever had the misfortune of riding. Six weeks onwards, I still curse myself for not hiring scooters instead.
One of the many aspects of Cappadocia. I'm absolutely dying to go back to that place. It's meant to look fantastic in winter, too.
Weirdest thing we did: Watching a dubbed version of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest in a cinema in Diyarbakır, just to hear what Johnny Depp sounded like in Turkish. It was a good thing K and I had seen the film before, or we wouldn't have understood much of it. To my disappointment, my Turkish hardly benefitted from the experience. On the other hand, watching Heights and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in English with Turkish subtitles (what can I say? There was little else to do in Ankara...) did wonders for my Turkish, proving once again that subtitles are a great way to learn a language. It's a pity so many countries prefer dubbed films instead. (Sadly, I didn't get any pictures of Johnny Depp speaking Turkish. Sorry.)
Most obsessive thing I did: On one of the lower travertines of Pamukkale I came across two floating leaves from the trees atop the hill, one black and one yellow. I loved the way they were lying there on the beautiful white surface, half submerged by little trickles of water, so I spent the next half hour or so taking pictures of them, to the bafflement of some Russian and Turkish tourists who kept throwing me "barmy" looks and must have asked each other at least twenty times what on earth I was doing ("Doesn't she know the whole point of visiting Pamukkale is going uphill?"). In retrospect, even *I* think taking over thirty photos of the leaves was probably a tad excessive, but at the time, it seemed absolutely imperative.
This would be one of the leaf pictures, then. I suspect many of these will work better in black and white.
Up next: Scary encounters of the unpleasant kind.