Finally, after all this asking around and people who obviously had no idea what place I was talking about, trying so hard to be helpful that I was sent this way and that way, ending up making circles of wrong directions, I have found the dolmush. Inside so far is only one single girl who seems surprised enough that I want to go to B... at all. She speaks some English and says she comes from Istanbul, but to get work had to move all the way east over here, and now is 5th year teacher. When she tells me that the trip up will take about three hours but in winter takes eight hours because of snow I suddenly don’t doubt anymore this will be worth the trip. The wait is long, but the minibus fills up and off we go. Half an hour till we get to the road crossing where we turn away from lake van and drive into the hills, prelude to the mountains further in.
The landscape changes shape and texture very gradually, for a long time the mountains remain parched and dessertlike, changing from lighter colours only to a slightly earthier tinge, moving tighter together, joining their shoulders to make steeper gorges to look up into from the road.
Landscape watching being a temporal pleasure this seems to happen systematically, which is partly what lends the road ist beauty, not randomly, like what a bland landscape would behave like.
We go past a first village, and a second one, and in between, past many goats and sheep herds, with women in colourful skirts and headscarfs squatting fat bummed on stools milking the animals like i imagine they have done 200 years and longer ago, with their men chasing the stock over with sticks in their hand and red checkered yashmaks over their brown, furrowed faces.
Parallel to the wildly meandering stream, that first purles along sprightly, then suddenly only leaves the dry stones of ist riverbed as a reminder of ist former presence, the road tugs us along and then, when the mountains’ shoulders have molten to one broad back for the path to climb, it enters serpentines to propel us higher. Up and up we go now, and soon i see the first slabs of snow eternally clinging grey to their assigned groove in the rocks.
Then, suddenly, one more bend, and BAM- the view opens to new colours.
„It’s beautiful“ I remark to the school teacher, and she says „the first time I came here I was scared, I had never seen such mountains before“. They are quite dramatic, and I suppose this road can seem quite precarious if all you are used to is the broad, tarred highways of mainstream turkey.
To the backdrop of the black mountains whose upper tips i before only saw in the far corner of my vista as untouchable hinterland, but that are now majestically rolling out their folds right in front of me, a valley drops steep around a pond of green trees surrounding the pebbles of a few grey roofs. Like a little oasis after all this, I think.
We start descending slowly, and although the road is stony and serpentine we get nearer soon and when we have got to the bottom the tar reappears and we roll on, ah, so smoothly and join a large, clear, resplendent stream, turquoise when ist naked to the sun, blue when in the shade of the birchwood trees whose leaves are softly moving, reflecting the sunlight white, making wind.
Entering „maintown“ B... we actually go and drop my seat neighbour straight off at her school. While some guys are busy tying loose the load on the dolmush roof that she supposedly brought for the school, the blue-coated kids, some munching biscuits on their break, some only their hair, group round the opened door of the dolmush to inspect the blond haired entity inside. More and more come and stare, but when I return their curious looks and concentrate my eyes on each one of them singularily for a few seconds they disperse faster than they have gathered!
I ask the driver if there is a hotel in town when he asks where to drop me off after the dolmush has emptied, but he replies that there is no such thing in this place. He also communicates to me that there won’t be a bus down to van or anywhere out of town tonight.
That’s a bit of a bummer.
Since there is no place to stay he offers to go and have some food and then he says he can sort something out.
He actually seems quite nice so far so i go in for it. The van is parked on a main street and Önul, as he has introduced himself , takes me down to a little restaurant with a little picturesque balcony giving onto the river. Too touristy for my taste I’d say if there ever were any tourists around in this place. I can have fish, a welcome change from the eternal kebap, and cool water from the stream freshly fished with a plastic bucket dangling on a leash from the balustrade. On the other side there is a row of birchtrees under which a group of little schoolboys in their blue mechanics coats stare at me and snicker. Not far from them three middle aged guys are cutting up a watermelon for tea time. And another five metres up from them a narrow set of stairs descend to a platform along the river for washing with another set of stairs leading up to another square platform serving as a praying place, where right now an old man with a hat is kneeling, deghishtirmek, their mary chain like plaything.
After our meal we go sit down in another cafe and have a sequence of teas and an orange coloured, hot drink served in tea glasses, to which, despite its being very sweet already, they add another two or three sugarcubes and which I suspect being nothing else than heated lemonade. My pidgin turkish gets me juts far enough to find out this is a kurdish town, not like i had expected anything else, and that önul’s friends invite me to have a bottle of whisky with them some other night. And at one point Önul goes through my scrapbook, commenting on every page, wants to know which texts I wrote about which countries. What startles me, is that when he gets to the little goodbye note Anahid, my host in Yerevan, wrote to me the day I left and he reads the adress she noted underneath, he says, „Ah, Spain“. Is that ignorance or is he deliberately avoiding the touchy topic of the Armenians? I had noticed before in Trabzone, that people didn’t seem to want to hear about the fact that i had been to „Ermenistan“.
I am then taken for a half an hours ride down the other direction of the valley to a big cold cave where the stream gurgles out from which on the whole is pretty enough to be mentionned.
And at the end of the day we pick up a grey haired but fresh looking man, good teeth, too, whose name is Nürettin, and it is just assumed i drive home to their place and stay there for the night.
The place they live in is a beautiful little enclave ten kilometres out of town, on a hill inside a little forest, well, a dense accumulation of birchwod and pine trees. Here their little community (four or five families I reckon-or maybe the various parts of one big family?) is living with donkeys and chicken around a stream, in the middle of walnut and pomegrenate trees, alongside their cabbage, potato and tomato fields. Later on I will be given a tour round the territory and will have to sample fruit and nuts and veggies till my belly feels near bursting.
Inside Nürettins families house expectedly there are kilims on the floor, but other than that the walls are left blank. I dont quite understand Önul’s relationship to everyone, but i clearly grasp that his job, driving the dolmush between Van and here, requires him to stay overnight in each place and this is where he sleeps when he is up in the mountains.
Nürettin really is a very sympathetic guy, after a couple of hours of tea and talk, which on my behalf is mostly restricted to siping and smiling rather than actual talking, he gets out the sass and as he is playing i am entranced for the next half an hour at his fingertips flicking over the fretboard. Soon his wife Aiser comes in, squats next to the sofa and starts conversing in kurdish with the guys while smiling at me. She then comments in Turkish and with gestures that she finds my eyes and hair very pretty.
They tell me aroung the regions of hasankeyf and mardin people have traditional facial tatoos, after pitying me with compassionate face for the stupidity i did to my chest in younger years. Three of Nürettins and Aisers kids, in the meantime have invaded the living room and are engrossed in figuring out the art of sticking a lighter to one’s finger tip in such a manner that it won’t fall off while performing a speedy circular run around the sofa. Then they insist I have a shower which i gladly accept, too, since here is hot water!
When I get back from my wash I smile to the girl in the doorway to the women’s room, one of Aiser’s friends, and am generously smiled back at and waved in as hoped for. Aiser sits with another of her friends among an array of kids lopping around on the floor, the oldest daughter -the pretty about 11 year old girl i remarked earlier who was serving us the tea- sitting in one corner, too. Fittingly to the situation there is the film „Mutant X“ on the telly.
Being white -or maybe simply foreign- you have a certain special status and will be invited sitting round with the opossite sex , getting to know the world of the men. As a guy i doubt you’d have the right to sit with the women and discuss the merits of the contraceptive pill as i do. Aiser has four kids -right now spread around the room in all corners and various positions of sleeping- and is big bellied pregnant with a fifth one. Sonra -after- she says and throws a couple of imaginary pills into her mouth, then with a circular movement around the room points at her progeny loafing on the floor and performs a gesture with her two hands like a baker wiping off the surplus of flour on his fingers after rolling bread. Lots more smiling, i astonish them by the fact that i am travelling alone, and they make me try on one of their pretty white headscarfs, too, with little beads clacking on my forehead. At ten the mattrasses that are stacked in the corner of the living room are rolled out and everyone goes to bed.
After another estimated 27 glasses of tea today i think i should have trouble going to sleep, but two litres of any caffeine containing beverage seem to be easily cancelled out by two precedent overnight busses and i nod off as soon as my socks are off.
In the morning Önül wakes me way too early, then takes me out to a waterplace down near the cabbages for our morning wash. There is an Armenian cross on the heavy stone platform at the waterplace. Wow, i find that quite impressive, I think to myself.
When I sit on the bus a few hours later, with my bag full of pomegranates I feel like I am winding my way out of a little paradise.
The landscape changes shape and texture very gradually, for a long time the mountains remain parched and dessertlike, changing from lighter colours only to a slightly earthier tinge, moving tighter together, joining their shoulders to make steeper gorges to look up into from the road.
Landscape watching being a temporal pleasure this seems to happen systematically, which is partly what lends the road ist beauty, not randomly, like what a bland landscape would behave like.
We go past a first village, and a second one, and in between, past many goats and sheep herds, with women in colourful skirts and headscarfs squatting fat bummed on stools milking the animals like i imagine they have done 200 years and longer ago, with their men chasing the stock over with sticks in their hand and red checkered yashmaks over their brown, furrowed faces.
Parallel to the wildly meandering stream, that first purles along sprightly, then suddenly only leaves the dry stones of ist riverbed as a reminder of ist former presence, the road tugs us along and then, when the mountains’ shoulders have molten to one broad back for the path to climb, it enters serpentines to propel us higher. Up and up we go now, and soon i see the first slabs of snow eternally clinging grey to their assigned groove in the rocks.
Then, suddenly, one more bend, and BAM- the view opens to new colours.
„It’s beautiful“ I remark to the school teacher, and she says „the first time I came here I was scared, I had never seen such mountains before“. They are quite dramatic, and I suppose this road can seem quite precarious if all you are used to is the broad, tarred highways of mainstream turkey.
To the backdrop of the black mountains whose upper tips i before only saw in the far corner of my vista as untouchable hinterland, but that are now majestically rolling out their folds right in front of me, a valley drops steep around a pond of green trees surrounding the pebbles of a few grey roofs. Like a little oasis after all this, I think.
We start descending slowly, and although the road is stony and serpentine we get nearer soon and when we have got to the bottom the tar reappears and we roll on, ah, so smoothly and join a large, clear, resplendent stream, turquoise when ist naked to the sun, blue when in the shade of the birchwood trees whose leaves are softly moving, reflecting the sunlight white, making wind.
Entering „maintown“ B... we actually go and drop my seat neighbour straight off at her school. While some guys are busy tying loose the load on the dolmush roof that she supposedly brought for the school, the blue-coated kids, some munching biscuits on their break, some only their hair, group round the opened door of the dolmush to inspect the blond haired entity inside. More and more come and stare, but when I return their curious looks and concentrate my eyes on each one of them singularily for a few seconds they disperse faster than they have gathered!
I ask the driver if there is a hotel in town when he asks where to drop me off after the dolmush has emptied, but he replies that there is no such thing in this place. He also communicates to me that there won’t be a bus down to van or anywhere out of town tonight.
That’s a bit of a bummer.
Since there is no place to stay he offers to go and have some food and then he says he can sort something out.
He actually seems quite nice so far so i go in for it. The van is parked on a main street and Önul, as he has introduced himself , takes me down to a little restaurant with a little picturesque balcony giving onto the river. Too touristy for my taste I’d say if there ever were any tourists around in this place. I can have fish, a welcome change from the eternal kebap, and cool water from the stream freshly fished with a plastic bucket dangling on a leash from the balustrade. On the other side there is a row of birchtrees under which a group of little schoolboys in their blue mechanics coats stare at me and snicker. Not far from them three middle aged guys are cutting up a watermelon for tea time. And another five metres up from them a narrow set of stairs descend to a platform along the river for washing with another set of stairs leading up to another square platform serving as a praying place, where right now an old man with a hat is kneeling, deghishtirmek, their mary chain like plaything.
After our meal we go sit down in another cafe and have a sequence of teas and an orange coloured, hot drink served in tea glasses, to which, despite its being very sweet already, they add another two or three sugarcubes and which I suspect being nothing else than heated lemonade. My pidgin turkish gets me juts far enough to find out this is a kurdish town, not like i had expected anything else, and that önul’s friends invite me to have a bottle of whisky with them some other night. And at one point Önul goes through my scrapbook, commenting on every page, wants to know which texts I wrote about which countries. What startles me, is that when he gets to the little goodbye note Anahid, my host in Yerevan, wrote to me the day I left and he reads the adress she noted underneath, he says, „Ah, Spain“. Is that ignorance or is he deliberately avoiding the touchy topic of the Armenians? I had noticed before in Trabzone, that people didn’t seem to want to hear about the fact that i had been to „Ermenistan“.
I am then taken for a half an hours ride down the other direction of the valley to a big cold cave where the stream gurgles out from which on the whole is pretty enough to be mentionned.
And at the end of the day we pick up a grey haired but fresh looking man, good teeth, too, whose name is Nürettin, and it is just assumed i drive home to their place and stay there for the night.
The place they live in is a beautiful little enclave ten kilometres out of town, on a hill inside a little forest, well, a dense accumulation of birchwod and pine trees. Here their little community (four or five families I reckon-or maybe the various parts of one big family?) is living with donkeys and chicken around a stream, in the middle of walnut and pomegrenate trees, alongside their cabbage, potato and tomato fields. Later on I will be given a tour round the territory and will have to sample fruit and nuts and veggies till my belly feels near bursting.
Inside Nürettins families house expectedly there are kilims on the floor, but other than that the walls are left blank. I dont quite understand Önul’s relationship to everyone, but i clearly grasp that his job, driving the dolmush between Van and here, requires him to stay overnight in each place and this is where he sleeps when he is up in the mountains.
Nürettin really is a very sympathetic guy, after a couple of hours of tea and talk, which on my behalf is mostly restricted to siping and smiling rather than actual talking, he gets out the sass and as he is playing i am entranced for the next half an hour at his fingertips flicking over the fretboard. Soon his wife Aiser comes in, squats next to the sofa and starts conversing in kurdish with the guys while smiling at me. She then comments in Turkish and with gestures that she finds my eyes and hair very pretty.
They tell me aroung the regions of hasankeyf and mardin people have traditional facial tatoos, after pitying me with compassionate face for the stupidity i did to my chest in younger years. Three of Nürettins and Aisers kids, in the meantime have invaded the living room and are engrossed in figuring out the art of sticking a lighter to one’s finger tip in such a manner that it won’t fall off while performing a speedy circular run around the sofa. Then they insist I have a shower which i gladly accept, too, since here is hot water!
When I get back from my wash I smile to the girl in the doorway to the women’s room, one of Aiser’s friends, and am generously smiled back at and waved in as hoped for. Aiser sits with another of her friends among an array of kids lopping around on the floor, the oldest daughter -the pretty about 11 year old girl i remarked earlier who was serving us the tea- sitting in one corner, too. Fittingly to the situation there is the film „Mutant X“ on the telly.
Being white -or maybe simply foreign- you have a certain special status and will be invited sitting round with the opossite sex , getting to know the world of the men. As a guy i doubt you’d have the right to sit with the women and discuss the merits of the contraceptive pill as i do. Aiser has four kids -right now spread around the room in all corners and various positions of sleeping- and is big bellied pregnant with a fifth one. Sonra -after- she says and throws a couple of imaginary pills into her mouth, then with a circular movement around the room points at her progeny loafing on the floor and performs a gesture with her two hands like a baker wiping off the surplus of flour on his fingers after rolling bread. Lots more smiling, i astonish them by the fact that i am travelling alone, and they make me try on one of their pretty white headscarfs, too, with little beads clacking on my forehead. At ten the mattrasses that are stacked in the corner of the living room are rolled out and everyone goes to bed.
After another estimated 27 glasses of tea today i think i should have trouble going to sleep, but two litres of any caffeine containing beverage seem to be easily cancelled out by two precedent overnight busses and i nod off as soon as my socks are off.
In the morning Önül wakes me way too early, then takes me out to a waterplace down near the cabbages for our morning wash. There is an Armenian cross on the heavy stone platform at the waterplace. Wow, i find that quite impressive, I think to myself.
When I sit on the bus a few hours later, with my bag full of pomegranates I feel like I am winding my way out of a little paradise.
