Compared With Me You Are All Tourists

"Hell, yeah"

2011-10-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

At the end of our street lives a man whose remarkable skills and talent I cannot laud enough, whose virtues and good intent it is impossible to exaggerate: He has refined the great art of vodka distilling. His products indeed excel in quality, and can usually be ranged somewhere on a scale between delicious and ambrosial, except the one or other misfired jugful every eight weeks or so.
The house where he lives is a curiosity in and of itself. Having initially been a glue factory, it was used after several years of emptiness as a building for the Dutch police to train themselves on evicting squats. They would move in once or twice a month, smash in doors just to replace them, saw through barricaded windows or even the roof. This sort of business went on up until the day before the squatting action. Reparing work on the building evidently represented an almost sisyphian task, but the squatters did an ingenious job of it and live in a very cosy and even rather swank place now, almost two years later.

But back to Aad, and why I write about him here. At the end of the nineties this guy went on a quite incredible round-the-world trip with his brother. In a small port on the Dutch island Texel, they "abducted" an over 20-metres long luxury yacht which was worth something to the tune of two million Euros; then they sailed it around the world for one and a half years.
They started off sailing down to Spain and Portugal. From there their prime intent was to move away as fast as possible from the police on their heels, choosing whichever direction the trade winds would take them. This happened to be first to Madeira, then across the Atlantic to Brazil.

Initially I was sceptical about Aad's story. You hear all sorts of people making up all sorts of tall tales after all. So, I tried to verify at least one partof it: Aad said at the end they abandoned the yacht in Senegal and he hydro-hitchhiked from Dakar North on a ship transporting French wines.
Having myself worked on a cargo ship in Senegal in the year 2003, I was in a good position to ask those of my sailor friends who were there before me, whether such a ship as Aad claimed existed. In my time in Senegal and neighbouring countries, there was no single other vessel transporting anything except the one we were on ourselves, the Oméga, a French owned, Tonga-flagged eighty meter long cargo ship which carried anything, from carparts to rice sacks. Those sailor friends I asked informed me from the nineties until 2002 there indeed was a ship that did the very route Aad asserted, that is from Senegal to France carrying wine. Its route was nicknamed Le Tour du Pomerol, Pomerol being a kind of French wine. The near-infinite stacks of alcohol sure must have kept Aad happy for the time of the voyage.
This is no proof, but I am not completely disinclined to believe Aad's story after all.

It usually being three or four in the morning when we chatted, I have forgotten most of the numerous anecdotes Aad told me from his journey. There is only one story I have been able to retain, one about Italy, from the very end, when Aad and his brother got arrested. The two of them spent the initial few weeks of their two year prison stint in Italian jails, before being sent to their home country, the Netherlands.
"Sure, the cells were more squalid, but on being transferred to Dutch prisons, there was one outstanding feature which made me wish I had remained down South: They gave you a pack of wine each Friday there. It wasn't enough for the whole week, but it got you sufficiently drunk for a day. In my second week, I went on a short, alcohol-fuelled prison riot. I managed even to kick down one of my cell's walls - it was a very old jail as you can imagine. In consequence they first they put me in solitary confinement, but later they had me change cells, and put me together with six Moroccans. They were all Muslims, so that meant I had six times the ration of alcohol. I could not have wished for a better result of my violent outburst! "

There is one question Aad is understandably asked a lot: Were two entire years of being locked up worth the 18 months trip around the world?

"Hell yeah", is his answer.

Home through the eyes of a stranger

2011-09-26T05:23:00.000-07:00

One evening this September, I was watching a shitty DVD while lying on the sofa out in the vast hall of our squatted car repair shop where we arranged what we call our living room out of a large square of moquette and a rather wild assembly of furniture once found on a scrapheap. Next to me, somewhat squeezed, was Andy, who had recently charmed me with his assumption that the capital city of Finland was "Heineken".

It had been a rainy evening, and the sound of water drops plopping in the back of the hall reverberated over to us through the dark. In the past our living group had tried several times to fix the leaks in the roof with asphalt cartridges or tarpaulin, but evidently it had proven too formidable a task for us. This made the atmosphere rather spooky, especially late in the night as it was now.

It was already two o'clock when abruptly our cosy-eerie get-together was interrupted by Eline's voice echoing over from the entrance via the former reception desk: "Hoi Iris, ik heb een verjaardagskadootje voor jou!" It wasn't my birthday, but, hey, whatever, I propped myself up on my elbows and turned my head. Accompanying our friend as she approached was a young, stridently blond woman. "Here, I found a chick for you to speak Russian to," Eline introduced the girl jokingly, and after asking her to sit down, added with a wink, "thought you would like her".

Natasha was her name and she told me she had just run into Eline after having been desperate enough to choose a Centraal Station train platform as a publically available bed. She had been dropped off around an hour earlier in Amsterdam by a driver who had picked her up hitchhiking all the way back in France. After having reached his destination in Western Belgium, he had taken it upon him to do the long, 250 kilometer haul to the Dutch capital city, seemingly entirely out of a mixture of sheer kindness and a good measure of boredom... until he proposed to drive her all the way to Berlin a few days later, if she'd first come back to Belgium with him.
The girl declined, and that was that.

Natasha was a Russian beauty from Nizhny Novgorod with water-blue eyes and near-translucent skin, adorning herself with elaborately ornamented silver and turquoise earrings. The jewelry didn't mean she wasn't a tough girl. For her it was the end of a two months hitchhiking and wild camping trip around Spain and Portugal, and she was on her gradual way home. In Barcelona all her valuable belongings and money had been stolen out of the tent she and a friend had pitched on the beach, and she was left with a 20 Euro bill handed to her by a French travel mate from a week back.
Conditions being as they were she announced, "I am leaving straight away tomorrow morning".
Supine Andy groaned that he wanted to hear what the actors were saying, but me and Eline, after a short translation action on my part, began to remonstrate vociferously : "You can't just come and breeze through like that, you have to at least come on a bike tour around the city tomorrow!"

Natasha's opinion could be swayed. She was to be with us the following day.

Being the house's only Russian speaker, I automatically became the designated tourist guide. It turned out to be raining cats and dogs, and coming from our house in the rather far out yet lovely, canal and river-streaked suburb of Zeeburg, by the time we'd reached the centre already we were soaked to the skin. Natasha was none the less enthusiastic. I asked what she wanted to see first, and the answer was direct and curt: The Red Light District. And not only that, she wanted to see "those girls behind their window panes."

For inexplicable reasons, despite having lived this long in Amsterdam, I had no real idea how to precisely locate the hookers and their walk-in windows and had to touch-feel my way around the Red Light District. We started along Warmoestaaat, one of the oldest streets of Amsterdam, a touristy main artery adjacent to the real seedy areas of town. It is lined with innocuous pubs and the one or other sexshop. On our way we came across what you can really also see elsewhere in the city centre: Naked female mannequins wearing strap-on dicks, vitrines stuffed with granny fetish porn, and drunken Germans hanging drunkenly out of coffeeshop doors shouting "Scheiße, Scheiße" at this still early forenoon hour. Ducking into a small alleyway to the left, and then again left, we finally found the stuff Natasha wanted; dapper young ladies behind glassdoors, strutting their stuff under the soft glow of crimson tinted lamps in nothing but black bras and panties. She was positively thrilled of her discovery, "Какие они красивые!" - "Wow, what beautiful girls!" One young lady, having wrapped herself up in a large dark towel, was just striding out on dizzyingly high high-heels, leaving her door open. Natasha and I glanced inside and could see all sorts of mountaineering equipment, with which the lady was daily tying up up expectedly large, quivering mountains of customers to mount them and flagellate and generally mistreat. "Look at all the stuff she has in there! Handcuffs, whips, studded leather straps!", Natasha shrieked happily.
Around us, all other tourists were men alone. One Dutch guy stood out who looked about 16 years of age, affecting airs of having stranded here by accident and being the least of all interested in the women on show, casting only sidelong glances at them; although we presently would see him come circling around the same alleyway a second time. A fat Italian guy with his group of homies was negotiating half-jokingly, leaning to the brick wall near one of the display windows fractionally held ajar by the "inmate" on the other side, just enough so her voice could be filter through; "nah, I think I will come back after a few pints with my mates", the Italian seemed to be saying, then waddled off after his friends.

Next, Natasha was less interested in seeing some of the quainter small streets and canals of the Jordaan, as I proposed, than in doing a round of the famous squats, real deal or legalized. So we breezed on, through the rain, to the other side of the city centre, through the verdant Vondelpark and the villas exorbitant in size and comforts surrounding it. I took her all this way to catch a glimpse of the Occii, the formerly squatted now legalized punk rock club, and seriously one of the most beautiful ancient buildings of Amsterdam. It still being early in the day and the place being closed, we could only glance at the façade, but that being the Occii's prime touristic allurement, that may have been all the better. I myself remembered the building from before the summer, remembered the moldy, dark wood carvings whose desolate state spoke of the great age of the building, and found its newly renovated, particoloured and shiny as if lacquered, present state rather tacky.

On we went to the Hallen, the imposing former tramway depot. Robbie having left her bike there some Friday bar-night and having handed me the key to pick it up turned out a perfect excuse for ringing the bell and letting Natasha see the building's entrails. Its inside being similar to our own industrial area squat, although a bit larger, and maybe even damper, it was the outside, the vastness and the gloom of the row of high gables under the cloudy sky that Natasha found more impressive than the saw-tooth roof of our own current home back in Zeeburg.

We went to the wonderfully cheap and multicultural neighbourhood market round the corner to buy a small picknick, then we popped into a big-chain supermarket where, taking into account that all her money had been stolen, I looted all the ingredients for Natasha to cook Borshchsh later on tonight for the gang at home. On the way back, we rode through parts of Amsterdam home to my own or our living group's shared history in the city, and I could not stop myself from telling stories.

First we cycled past the bar my friends from another, smaller town squatted one and a half years ago, with whom I first came to the city, helping them with the action and the first week's occupation.
About ten days after the opening of the squat, I had just had a quick breakfast and gone out the house, as one of the lads, Matt, was trodding around in his pyjamas probably searching for the coffee, when a man politely knocked outside at the door. Neighbbours had been regularly presenting themselves in this way, and Matt, in all innocence suspecting nothing, unlocked the door from inside and... - found himself grabbed like a kitten by the scruff of the neck and put out on the street in his socks. Around the corner, in a blind spot from the door, eight other men had stood in wait, and they were now flowing inside, quick to change the lock. Then they dug into the crate of beer they brought along for the occasion, much like squatters themselves do the day of an action.
Now, the nice detail was that at those times, squatting was still legal, and Matt being the legal resident had no qualms about going to the police. So in the very same evening, it was Matt, Étienne, I and our friends back in there, drinking their beer.
It is not always possible to rely on the righteousness of the law-enforcers, but when it happens, it can have some amusing outcomes.

Although, to be honest, I don't know why I still tell this story. Matt and Étienne clearly were fly-by-night squatters. They had not even barricaded the door in the simplest of fashions.
Coming to think of it, maybe Matt was actually lucky, being so harmless and naïve to even open the door for the guys. A gang of musclemen assembled for the very purpose of coming in would probably have been ready for rather more distressing actions.

The next stop on Natasha's and my road was a house where I lived for a few months: "A friend of mine from a smaller city started it. She knew the location and figured as a squat it would might have a chance to last a while. In the last minute before the action, she ended up giving her room away to someone else, being from then on involved only as an outsider. The first few months the one-house squat bided its time quietly, but then, in the summer, the three houses next to it were occupied by squatters as well, and the whole thing rapidly swole up into a city-wide campaign against the company owning the dilapidated structures, the speculation giant Ymere. Not a week went past that there wasn't at least a small notice about it in one of the national newspapers."
That I (luckily) had already moved out when that sort of craziness started and am on bad terms with most of the members of this particular gang of hippies today, I conveniently left out.

Then, as we began crossing a bridge over the river Amstel, I pointed my finger at a row of appartment blocks on the other side, nice examples of riverine architecture: "It was in one of the appartments of those houses, that we all met, Eline, Robbie and I".
It was Eline and her friend Dirk's plan to squat two adjacent properties each one million Euros worth. The space required more people though. Eline somehow chanced upon this new girl Robbie, whereas Dirk invited his friend Dotty, who invited her friend Dolly, who invited her friend Iris, that is, me.
The action itself had rather more political motives than being a good plan for setting up a domicile: Still a few years ago, the building had been ascribed for social housing. The inhabitants however had got evicted, in order to renovate the flats and sell them for a much higher price. The owner at the time was a well-known speculant and low rank Mafiosi, the middleman for big scale drug-dealers, white-washing money through buying up immobilia. He finally had died through a bullet in his head in 2004, after which the house was sold to the large Estate company Libra.
When so much money as a million Euros is involved, it could only be expected that we would last no more than three weeks in the habitations, which is exactly what happened.
Yet, new friendships were visibly kindled. We were the core of the living group of the new industrial squat we were to open, around whom a bigger group finally gelled.

Natasha was getting dizzy from all the talk and exclaimed, "Jesus, I want to come and live in Amsterdam. How can I get a job here?"

That evening at dinner, with our house group of eight complemented by our two guests, Andy and Natasha, all of us slobbering tasty Borshchsh (typical Russian vegetable soup bloodred from the beetroot in it), and with everyone joking around and laughing, I guess it was exactly what Dutch people call gezellig - convivial, cosy, fun.
At the dinner table, Natasha spotted a cute guy, and started riotously flirting with him. The cute guy was Andy. Always one quick to accomodate myself to the fact that my lovers will be snitched by lassies of a more extroverted fibre, I resigned myself to do nothing but sort of wiggle my chair further away from the table and let the free love axiom run its course.

Anyway, later on that night, I correctly assumed Andy would be up for coming along on an evening adventure: Eline and I wanted to round off the evening by taking Natasha to a coffee shop, an activity she had wished for during the daytime. It just so happened that on our way to Muntplein, where we knew a nice exemplary, I wanted to get some beer, because neither Natasha nor I actually smoked weed. So I spurted into a supermarket and pilfered a six-pack, which spurted mucho-macho Andy, peeved at my superior stealing skills, into wanting to outdo me, so he pilfered another one... Suddenly we had a lot of beer, and somehow we ended up in a park, drinking.

Not too late after midnight, the beer was finished and the air started to become night-time nippy. Time to go home. Natasha had expressed interest in the archetypal Dutch experience of riding on the rear carrier, usually a rather uncomfortable way of travelling, although in the given case it was probably msotly an excuse to be able to pat Andy's back. So Eline and I took our two bikes, leaving the couple with the third one we had brought and shouted: "Andy, just don't forget to take your girlfriend with you!"

The next day, after breakfast, Natasha stood bright-eyed at the kitchen table, said she had a gut feeling it was time to leave, hitchhike on. On Tuesday her school started, 400 km East of Moscow, some 3000 km from here.
The whole group of us protested emphatically: "You cannot leave yet, you only spent two nights here, that is hardly a flattering gesture of you to want to leave!", each and every of us providing a different reason for her to abide with us for just a few more days. After all the incalculable hospitality I personally have received around the world, I must honestly say I was extremely happy my so very disparate group of housemates, bike-nerd Tobbie, opium-eyed Matza, trippy-hippy Eline, and usually so lackadaisical Robbie were all so readily and unreservedly hospitable.
In the end, Natasha's gut feeling won over our collective expostulations though, and Eline, Robbie and I got Tobbie's car and drove Natasha to the motorway.

Our road took us past the kringloopwinkel (that's a second hand shop) round the corner, over the bridge under which Matza spraypaints his artwork, over the riparian, lush greenery hugging the IJ's confluence with the IJmeer, straight past the student homes we sneak in to wash our laundry for free. There we turned into a garage to tank up and buy a last souvenir, a packet of drop (liquorice).
At the exit back to the ring road, another hitchhiker. Eline, ever the communicator, approached him. He was a German student, living in the very same student residence we know so well, and who had just walked out his door and started hitching from right there. Bad idea, he had been there for an hour already. Heading he was to Hamburg for the birthday of his older brother.
That is more than half the way to Berlin, where our guest was heading for.
Great news for Natasha who now had a hitch-hiking partner.

Indeed, she was duly delighted, "Oh cool, I think I'm going to Hamburg next!"

Pssht.

2011-09-12T05:53:00.000-07:00

With Eline on bikes, searching for empty houses to occupy in the North of Amsterdam, across the river IJ. Right next to the industrial area we are roaming, an inviting wooded path takes you bang into what feels like the middle of the Dutch countryside. Preposterously cute streets lined by wonky, multi-coloured brick houses with their stair-stepped gables. The insect-like metal whizz of the bikes rushing past carrying their brightly blond riders. Groups of dazzlingly blond children in their pink dresses or yellow shirts with their ice-cream or balloons.
Steeples guide you to the small marinas of wooden sailing boats that they overlook.

Hard to believe we are technically in a nearby suburb of the capital city of this country.

Keep it a secret, don't tell anyone.

2011-08-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

Given that this was Iran, that it was Ramadan, and that it was already noon time, it seemed about the right moment to get drunk. We started off with some shots of moonlight whisky with mint and lemon cordial, then followed up with vodka that was good enough to be downed straight.

The way to procure alcohol in this country is to call up the person that amounts to the equivalent of a (drug) dealer in Europe. Beer not being popular they will let you choose from the types of wine and liquors at hand over the phone, either homemade or imported. Imports are the more expensive option. Then you will usually be given an appointment somewhere on the streets. The "dealers" are men from young to middle age, dressed in varying degrees of neatness or sloppiness, all generally respectable people, nowhere in the vicinity of the European prototype of a drugdealer in terms of sleaziness.
They wait in a car somewhere, you walk up and exchange a few bills with one or two bottles of your chosen poison wrapped up in black plasticbag that you promptly slip in your rucksack or handbag. One dealer once gave my friend Maryam an appointment right in front of a police station. Even though supremely awkward, it certainly was the safest option, said my friend. The police at the station trust people who meet just outside their door intuitively, and it can be glaringly incongruous for a prim 20-something to walk up to a battered old Paykan with a balding fifty-something wearing slacker's clothes at the steering wheel. I don't know if being safer is necessarily true for the police station scenario. Some people might get so nervous, their visibly shaky hands would certainly give them away and attract the police's attention.
In any case, to remedy such predicaments, in Teheran there is even door-to-door service.

As for my friend Pouya and me, we were soon off to take a taxi to his friends' house. It was hard to stop the bottles in my bag from clunking against each other, making that sound that only wine bottles can make. This would have been too risky on a public bus.

Having arrived in the luxurious appartment in Northern Teheran, where the Alborz mountains loomed seemingly within touching distance outside the window, the general atmosphere was one of laid-back nonchalance. Everyone was there with their boyfriend and the bong circulated as Hollywood movies rotated in the DVD player. I felt like I might have just as well been in a rich kids' parents' appartment in the 16th arrondissement in Paris, or elsewhere in Europe.

Mahan leaned back on the couch holding the bong with both hands on his lap, informing me, "so many of my friends like opium, they smoke it all the time, opium is just anywhere in this country," only to add, tapping his thigh with the lighter that was balanced on his knee, "but I just love my weed."
As for personal, anecdotal evidence, in rural Iran I had certainly seen my share of opium-smokers, although in Teheran marijuana had seemed to me thus far to prevail.

Pseudo-philosophical conversation kept flowing, annoying me just as much as the brainless flicks on the plasma TV. There were moments when you were reminded you were in Iran: Like When the girls got up and served a platter of sliced watermelon to everyone, then took away the plates to share doing the dishes between themselves.

The risk of it being too great, Iranians don't go out of the house once they are drunk. So I was stuck with the rich kids for the remainder of the day. It was a good thing I could medicate my ennui with the red wine for those few hours.

In the night Pouya had planned to go to some sort of birthday party. It seemed to be one of those Teherani parties where men and women mingle freely, the females wearing deep decolletés and having their hair styled up, everyone nibbling on canapés and sipping on glasses of whisky on the rocks. I had never attended such a party, but heard and read much about them, so I was curious. Organizing the evening was Pouya's official girl-friend, a suppposedly platonic affair(I don't know if that's true).
Turned out though that the plan fell through. It just happened so that today the girl-friend had a chat with Pouya's mother, and found out about some recent cavortings of his (while not being exactly happy about my presence neither). Whereas on the phone she sounded supremely cheesed off, when we were at the doorstep of her tower block flat, -her leaning out of the door with her long hair flowing down over her skimpy cocktail party dress with the (not particularly appealing) party music spilling out onto the street from the closed appartment door behind her- she worked herself right up into a frenzy, producing an unabating flow of reprehensions, ultimately rejecting us. As we turned away, deciding to go for a stroll through the city instead, Pouya told me sourly in his discontent that every girlfriend of his always had a separate relationship with his mother, "They talk to each other to find out more about me. The girls to get to know me, my mother to control me."

We walked through the Ramadan night, grabbing free tea and sweets to nurse our onsetting hangovers at some sort of band stand in the neighbourhood. Enormous loudspeakers blared noisy trance music weirdly inappropriate for the holy occasion.

Riet Not Diot

2011-08-02T08:33:00.000-07:00

My hands are crusted with carmine flakes of dried blood coming off my skin, and there are brown stains of dried blood all over my clothes, only some of which are from my periods.
I have been smashing in glass windows like when I was a teenager.
Throwing strops like when I was a little kid.
The taxi driver in the late evening invited me to stay at his house. I took my usual precautions and asked whether he lived with his family. Yes, he said, with his wife and little boy. It just turned out that when we arrived at the apartment, they both had gone to see a relative. He kept saying, “she’ll be back soon”, but the wife never came. The inevitable happened: The guy tried to sneak a look at me when taking a shower, asked me whether at home in Europe I would wear what I was wearing and not shorts ending above the knee, -as if that would make me an extremely easy girl-, and was actually holding his hand on his crotch while he was asking me that, too. Ultimately, of course, he asked to sleep next to me. Usually I would leave the house in such a situation, but it was after midnight and he hadn’t actually tried to touch me, so I quickly took a room that I could lock from the inside and went to bed. It turned out fine. I slept till the morning and left the flat.

Nothing worse than that. However, as I stepped outside the house, I picked up half a brick and tried to smash in his car windows. I left out the windshield which from experience I know to be purposefully built very tough and for me unbreakable. Althought they sometimes break with a single large pebble launched hard enough, this time around it took me several tries on the side windows, but I finally broke one of them, plus the car’s back window. I had to use both my hands to hold the stone, since my right hand was already weak from the previous day’s excesses –A soft drink vendor asked me for sex and I punched in his shop window with my bare fist. That the shop window actually broke was to my own surprise. I had to pull out my hand bleeding all over.
My second to last week in Iran, when my nerves were already thread-bare, I threw an item of canned food at some old fat guy who annoyed me with nothing more than a muttered "Masha'allah" (the equivalent of a wolf whistle in Europe) as I walked by on the street. A tree of sparkling blood branching down his forehead soon became the most appealing aspect of his physique. Had he been young and cute, I would have still thrown the can, although I might have cared less about throwing it that hard.
Other misadventrues include slapping as hard as I could a man sitting behind me on the bus trying to grope me, and emptying the content of an ice-cold water-bottle on a man in the city offering me a hundred dollars if I fucked him. The other three times someone grabbed my ass on the street and the other sixty-seven times I got verbally sexually harassed are, of course, not even worth mentioning.

By the way, I had a much better memory of the behavior of Iranian men from my first trip four years ago. That just goes to show that the tombola of one-off trips can yield very different impressions.

A very old one (2004!)

2011-07-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

Life here in Russia is conveniently unexpensive enough for me to let hang out one of my most likeable properties: the eternal sluggish idler.
I spend my time sipping milkless tea in cafes, engaging in the simple art of observation.

I watch flowerprint skirted babooshkas, black booted militsia and grossly pink-lipsticked platinum blond ladies and their dutifully moustached male counterparts on their lunchbreaks. They usually uniformally absorb tiny portions of fatty carbohydrates as a side dish to their alcoholic mains -beer-sized cans of gin and tonic mainly- then have shots of brandylike substances for pudding, and maybe stock up on one or the other bottle of vodka -a pound fifty per item- while they're at it.
In the parks -where strawberry nosed singletons are hugging trees with at least some motoric difficulty- you'll really stick out if you are not with your bottle of beer after half past four.

All this, of course, is nothing new for me, but, rather than blending in with the general dipsomania, I simply sit down in another cafe to another cup of milkless tea and indulge in the narcissistic cacographia of diary writing.
Life here in Pskov -I poetically ponder over my book of days- is one of these proverbial long, tranquil rivers, carving its serpentine way between the gold-onioned kremlin, the few silver-onioned churches and those stark naked brick chimneys rising like raised middle fingers from the greenery by the riverside... Then, abruptly -and pleasantly often- I get disturbed by some sleazy Slav wanting my phone number, the occasion of which I selfishly play out to my own advantage by retaining him for a short lesson of Russian conversation -with a native speaker, too!-and all the reason I came here, really- before ditching him rudely. My Russian so far is just rudimentary enough (largely pantomimic in fact to be quite honest) for me to indiscriminatorily entertain chit-chats with these pitiable desperate specimen of the male kind whom, back home, I'd only grant a deprecating sneer to quickly gain back my peace.

Back with my pen and book, I get so carried away in the idleness of the days that it even seems otiose to specify the brilliant colour of the sky(it's blue!) on my page of descriptions, when I might as well get engrossed in some more of that simple, but effective, milkless tea sipping, and also some more of what now, by the end of the day, might simply term, um, staring, really.

Anarcho-Tourism

2011-05-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

Indonesia was very punk. They definetely liked their tattoos and mowhawks and their leather jackets with studs, studs and more studs there. Gigs as a rule cannot be organised in nighttime, because of neighbours complaining of noise pollution, so the punks pogo-ed in full daylight. Alcohol not being served in the world's largest Muslim nation, the kids got droopy eyelids from the valium that they swallowed at nine in the morning. One guy was walking around with a matchbox-car sized black specimen of ichthyes in an Evian bottle. I was explained this fish was for a fish-fight (like a cockfight, just for our aquatic friends...).

Incongruously for people from Europe -where at the end of a gig at four in the night, people have to carry their friends home drunk and puking all over-, at sundown, everyone went home, sat in a circle and had tea.

Seeing a prayer mat between two stacks of hardcore CDs was like a scene from that book, the Taqwacores.

2011-05-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

In the second week of April, my friend John and I set off hitchhiking the Karakoram highway up into the mountains of Northern Pakistan. John is English, and whenever mention of prospective tea was made, he jumped up in his seat and his eyes alit at the proposition. As always in Muslim countries, our drivers vied with each other for being the most forthcoming and hospitable, and such overtures of a shared cuppa were numerous. But we had a long road, so we could not accept all invitations, and I had to be firm with my friend and tell him we could still have tea further down the road, higher up the mountains, once the sun had set.
One of the many settlements we passed through fighting off such invitations to tea was a relatively large but tranquil town set in a rather wide, verdant valley, a town called Abbotabad, the place in which Bin Laden got killed three weeks later.

The US don't publish the pictures of the famous man shot in the head for fear of fueling extremists instigating others to more crimes, but in Pakistan this makes that people simply don't believe Bin Laden died that day. (Indeed, it is easy to believe Bin Laden is still alive in this country, a younger version of the man just showed me the way this morning...)
One theory is that he was taken alive and is now in US custody. Another, more outlandish one, that he did not exist at all, but was impersonated by an actor. The most common one is that he died years ago. It is common knowledge that Bin Laden was on dialysis since the 1980s, and in a very poor state of health for many years.
One story that hit the national newspapers and that many Pakistanis still remember is when in 2005 and 2006 two doctors got kidnapped from Lahore hospital, and smuggled into Afghanistan to treat Osama Bin Laden. One got subsequently killed, the other lived to tell his story. He said Bin Laden was in such a weak condition the doctor gave him hardly a few months more to survive.

This last theory is the one my current driver propounds: "To our eyes it's clear the story is one made up by US media: In the West, where neighbours don't even know each others' names, hiding someone like Osama Bin Laden in a house like this, in a town like this, may have been possible. But in our culture this is just impossible. People go in and out of each others' houses all day, you know. Everyone knows what their neighbours are up to at any given time!"

On the television that evening I see the Pakistani General Staff at a meeting. They all look pretty doltish in their uniforms, feeling more than awkward at the international embarrassment.

The Pakistani public however feel more indignation at the violation of their national sovereignty that the US operation represents, than embarrassment at their own army's failures.
A much repeated mantra in Pakistan is that the US are at the origin of all the country' woes. With my basic Persian, a language showing much similarity to Pakistani national language Urdu and also spelt in the same Arabic-derived alphabet, I have been able to decipher graffiti on the walls here and there spelling out the sentence : "Murdabad Amriki" - "Death to America". Seeing outside influence as the culprit of all one's country's deficiency is a common self-deception seen elsewhere in the extended Middle East (for example in Turkey...). However, in one way Pakistanis are right when they say they are the principal sufferers of some of American policies in the world: The Taliban cannot reach the US, so they attack the collaborating Pakistani government, claiming innocent Pakistani lives on the way; and indeed another bomb blast claiming more than 10 lives in Peshawar was perpetrated by Taliban only ten days after Ben Laden's death.

2011-04-07T22:03:00.001-07:00

Since Ivory Coast is on the news again and embattled Gbagbo hopefully about to go, I thought I'd post this story, which relates how I traversed the already civil war torn country in early 2004.

It's been three days that the blue helmets have arrived in Ivory Coast. I'm approaching the rebel occupied territory in the north and west from the country's capital Yamoussoukro which is situated just on the "frontier" of the gouvernment controlled areas in the south east. Man, a town not far from the Guinean border (my destination), has been occupied for the past one and a half years. One and a half years that the inhabitants have to pay the many barricaded posts to enter or leave their town, that there is no post, that only some telephone lines aren't cut, and that there are regular shoot outs in the picturesque hills that surround the town.
Half (approximatively, I don't know the real numbers) of the rebels are renegades, deserters of the national army. When you arrive at their barricades (rice sacks stacked or piled up tree trunks) they asks everyone to get out of the vehicle to show their passport. They certainly don't joke around and look grimly at whoever is coming from the east, although the white one is waved to pass after one indifferent glimpse at the passport, hassled less than anyone else.
Presently we have passed several roadblocks, all of them renegades? barricades, and every time there has been an official procedure, people got out to line up to show their identification, and were systematically given a scornful glance coming from the south east as they were.
We are now approaching the first UN blockade. Seeing the tanks -big UN inscriptions on them, too- at the side, and the white guys in their uniforms amidst this tropical landscape, aloe veras and a palm tree in the foreground, I feel immediately like zoomed into a scene from some war film. A young UN soldier of about my age is signalling the vehicles to stop, then approach one after the other to talk to the drivers. "Vous venez d'ou? Vous êtes destinés à ? Combien de passagères y a-t-il dans la voiture ? »
He has hesitant, faltering ways, and pale-faced he clings to his MG, his eyes stumbling nervously over his field of vision, he never focuses too long on his interlocutor. "Vous avez entendu qu'il y a eu des coups de feu à Man cette après-midi ? -Vous me faîtes gaffe » He pronounces each phrase with solemnity, maybe with difficulty; "You know there have been shoot-outs again today?".
"Vous allez voire de la famille là-bas? » He asks the white girl, "are you going to see family where you are going?". « Yes" I lie. "Tu me fais gaffe, hein. Tu me fais gaffe. » he reiterates and signals our van to pass with an inclination of the head, "be careful, be careful".
Suddenly, the sweat on his forehead -although it is hot enough to be of ordinary kind- seems to be cold, fear induced. His frightened manners intimidate me more than the actual words he has uttered.
Afterwards I think it must just have been the poor guys first day.

Even in government territory at each stop someone has asked me for my number. Now, half an hour after the last one of those, we get to the next blockade, one of a very different kind, our first one of the second type of rebels, the "volunteers from the general public".
A young man comes running toward our vehicle, one hand clutching an MG, both arms spread out, teeth shining white in a big smile "Bonne Arrivée! Bonne Arrivée" , welcome, welcome. "How are you doing? Having a good one? Tremendous!"
Behind him groups of young people hang out in small circles smoking joints and cigarettes and listening to music on a small boom box. I get more the impression to have chanced upon a teenagers week-end party than on a road blockage of political rebels. When we are asked to get out our identity cards I am offered fags from all sides. No, thanks, I don?t smoke these, but I'll have a draw at that spliff. I am welcomed warmly and asked for my phone number and my adress. Their nicknames are Saddam and Ben Laden, or, les popularly, Hitler. But then, so are many schoolboys' under the age of ten all over West Africa.
When they find out I'm German, everyone wants to have a go to practice a phrase of their school German and I'm talked to about Rudi Voeller and Bayern Munich. One guy asks me how my digestion is going, a phrase that German tourists have taught him on the south coast.
Some rebels have come far, they are Burkinabé or Senegalese -this one next to me boastingly tells me of having experience in rebellions, he has ?done? Sierra Leone before- only to soon after quickly avow he loves me, as is in fashion with Africans, hoping I'll agree to marry and have him shipped to my home address in Europe. When I unexpectedly decline his offer he retires from the scene with a vexed facial expression shouldering his MG ostentatiously to regain countenance.

The day after I get the chance to talk to two young rebels in the bus toward the Guinean border. One proclaims himself a Rasta and it's a white girl that has to explain to him that being a rasta and a rebel should mutually exclude each other, especially since he doesn?t seem to know what exactly he is fighting for neither. The two admit without prevaricating that for them it's mostly about partying, being able to hang out all day, play with guns in the hills, and intimidate people, other than that their activities are devoid of objectives or reasons. Arriva, la revolution!

I have to hire a motorcycle with driver in Danane to get me to the border. I ask at a gas station and quickly they say they can get a driver for me with whom I negotiate the prize. The tank is filled up and off we go. It turns out this will be my favourite frontier. The ride takes us along an awful narrow road through the rain forest, lined with massive trees hung with lianas, through, under tall lithe groupings of bamboo, and past spread out lakes encircling palmtrees that are exuding the intense, fruity, heavy and humid air. Villages pop up, the inhabitants smiling and waving from under their mudhuts' shade spending verandas as we speed past. We cross young men on their way to one of the villages carrying a good seven, eight metres of bamboo on their heads. Big slow hogs are taking their mud baths in the puddles on the dirt road -a road with massive holes in the road that no bush taxi could ever manage and even with the motorcycle at one point we slither and fall. It must be quite the ordeal for the driver. Before we get back on he smiles at me wipes the mud running down his face in sweaty beads.
And the smells! It smells so good I don't even want to breathe out because these smells are just so lush, sweet and thick, potent. Smells of forest and heat, trees and fruit and flowers and rain. Slightly alcoholic, like the forest is distilling its own exotic liquor and invading the air with it. Definetely intoxicating. Repeatedly we drive through a cloud of butterflies that go up like clouds of dust whirling around us. From white static dots on the ground as we are approaching, they turn into a rainbow of colours around us. I follow each flapping triangular softest pink blushing red sky blue emerald and moss coloured pair of wings luminous in the sunlight, and it feels like we have entered one fluttering vortex for the short moment that my head, dizzy, is turning back for one last glimpse of the colours, settling down palely to rest again.

Catholic Block

2011-03-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

At the town entrance we see pizzerias and banks. "You mean this is a town like all the others?", I ask mock-increduously. "N'inquiète, je me sens déjà transpercé par le saint esprit", answers Tom snidely, "don't worry, I am already transfigured by the Holy Spirit". He lets me feel it wasn't him who wanted to come to Lourdes, the holy site for Catholic pilgrims. I have had a rather hard time persuading him, citing the excuse to go on a jaunt into the mountains at the same time. Thankfully, the crown of snow-capped Pyrenees clasping the town circularly are indeed awe-inspiring.

We arrive around six o'clock p.m., when most of the souvenir outlets that close in on the cathedral already have their doors locked and their neon signs switched off. I do wonder whether Mecca, too, has become a paradise for believing money-makers (or maybe make-believe moneymen?). Gladly the hour spares us the sight of the excesses of pious consumption, although Tom actually takes a couple of pictures of the flashy lettering announcing the shop names: "Palace of the Rosary", "Under the Protection of Holy Mary". As the cherry on the cake, above our heads in the night-sky flickers the sign of the "Hotel of the Saviour".

The cathedral on the hill jutting out over the cave where Bernadette saw the Virgin Mary 150 years ago is massive, and I admit I kind of like its fairy-tale like style. It is a relatively recent, 19th century construction and gives you a break from usual French ecclesiastic architecture. When I enter the chapel I dip my fingers into the stoup at the door and cross myself. I even light a candle and make a wish for my cat allergy to be cured. If a wonder happens I'll come back and ask for my insomnia, indigestion and bad temper to be alleviated as well, and hey, I will be ready to become all religious all of a sudden. In reality of course, I see the finger-dipping and candle-lighting as hollow formalities, fun to perform this one time that I act the part of the pilgrim. Even though I could probably not be more cynical, Tom makes fun of me, says I am a crypto-catholic. I retort that I have been a staunch atheist since early teenage years, and have nothing to proove. Just one remark: I assume that those searching for spirituality in these gestures feel above suffering offence by me mimicking them in this manner.
The way I see it is this: With all the trips I have made to other religions' holy sites, be they Alevite springs in Dersim, Shi'i shrines in Iran, or Druze mausoleums in Syria, by now I think it ridiculous to try to ignore as much as possible the religion passed down to me culturally by my family. Tant qu'à faire, I might as well go back to the roots.
Indeed, catholic devotion runs in my blood: It was my grandma who first told me of Lourdes. She used to send me letters urging me to pray three times a day so I would never have any worries in life, enclosing each time a vial of holy water. So later that evening I write post-cards to my brother and cousins, "Today our grandmother would have become fulfilled with bliss, because I finally visited Lourdes".

In the evening, after dusk, we retire to our van. Tom plays his instrument. With a grave voice he executes this sad, beautiful and touching song:

"J'aurais voulu être président,
mais maintenant je joue à l'accordéon,
même si c'est un instrument pour les cons"

Later, when we go to bed, sleeping uncomfortably in the back of the rickety jalopy of our van, which is too short to stretch out our legs, we decide not to tease from fecundity this time. Usually shielding ourselves from unwanted gravidity through the ancient art of belly painting - that night we take the road of Immaculate Contraception.

Antiochia

2011-02-14T11:38:00.000-08:00

I had just arrived in the region and was half-way on the road to the town Samandağ when a man stopped for me in a grey estate car (one of the most typical cars to have in Turkey, including the colour, the kind you sooner or later always end up getting a lift). He introduced himself as “Ali”. I was puzzled, because I was aware that in Turkey usually only Alevites give their kids this name, and I had not known that Alevites also existed in this region, thinking them restricted to the Hacı Bektaş Turks in Central Anatolia and the Kızılbaş Kurds of the East. Mr. Ali cleared up my confusion, and I got to understand that the Shi'a subgroup of Alawites, most famously known as the denomination the al-Assad regime of Syria belongs to, call themselves 'Alevi' in Turkish, too. A more bookish term is Nusayrı.

When I arrived in Mr. Ali's house, I met the family. The female family servant, a poor class lady wearing sharval and headscarf, was delighted at my coming. “Oh Mr. Ali, did I not predict you that you would have a foreign guest when reading your coffee grounds a few weeks ago?”, she exclaimed. That may not have been the case, but it was a nice way to be welcomed.

Only a single time before someone had read my fortune. There was no remonstrating that I did not believe in such humbug, Candan (whose name translates as ´from the heart´), the neighbour girl of my friend Kerim, went straight ahead: `You will take on your back one person and the two of you will go to another person. Then three people, maybe you and these two people, maybe you and one of them and another one, will go and meet someone who has the letter M in their name. There will be a soft breeze the moment you meet.` She might as well have been predicting an ice storm on a summer´s night, nothing remotely the like ever happened afterwards, but I did appreciate her poetic way of stating these things. In any way, in my time in Hatay, Mr. Ali was not the last of the people I met, who told me my arrival had been predicted in their turned over coffee cups some time earlier.

Nargiz, the daughter-in-law, was 23, and wore tight, tapered jeans as they are fashionable across the globe now. But she was originally from a poor family in a village, and was married when she was 16, had her first kid the same year, and now already had her fourth baby.
Ipek, the daughter, was 18, and dressed in fashionable jeans and T-shirt. Up in her room between the two of us, she said to me she could not wait to go to university. It wasn't important where, but far far away from the society here with its stifling codes. “Here, people marry each other right after meeting, as a deal between families. Usually you cannot divorce. Only if there is domestic violence involved it is seen as acceptable. But if a woman that has been married is seen talking to a married man, the gossip immediately starts. And here it is even not that bad. Further East, in towns like Mardin and Urfa, the locals even make fun of foreigners wearing short-sleeved shirts and so on.” Over the following days, showing me around became an excuse for Ipek to avoid family events and hang out with her friends instead. Her parents thought it was just her and me going on her scooter, but in reality, there were three of us, taking a friend's car: Fine-limbed, honey-eyed Ipek was flirting with a handsome, tanned young lad wearing crisp bright blue and green shirts. He lived in Saudi Arabia, where a working stint is very lucrative for the Arabs of less-developped Turkey. He had previously been in Dubai, but after the economic crisis of 2008 left the UAE. They drove me to the seaside and showed me some thousands of years old graves and tunnels, and also made me visit the last Armenian village of Turkey, in the mountains above the town. The villagers of Vakıflı are used to tourists visiting them and their modest and modern (but not entirely unprepossessing) church. But, to be honest, mostly we were out drinking.

One evening out in the bars by the seaside with them and some other friends, a middle-aged woman looked at me intently for a short moment, before her eyes wandered down to my bare, ringless hands. Instead of adressing me she approached Ipek, who was standing next to me. “Bu kız evli mi?”, she asked, 'is this girl married?'. She was thinking of her unmarried son.
Ipek did me a favour and just dryly said 'yes'.

Our Lady of the Moors

2011-02-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

"It is never the same landscape, depending on what the weather is like, or what time of day it is", V. describes the region where she lives. "The same field can be luminous and vivid, giving off gold reflects in the sun; it can be of a saturated green at the end of a rainy day, or shine silvery in a full-moon night." We are in the ZAD, the "Autonomous Zone of the (planned) Airport" of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in North Western France.

In this picturesque area the local authorities want to built a new airport of a 30 kilometre perimeter, and two large roads cutting through the countryside in order to connect it to the large agglomerations Rennes and Nantes to the North and South. The local ecosystem will be destroyed, as will be the lives of the people inhabiting this land. The state tries to buy the properties of the owners, in order to evict them or their renters. Nantes actually already has an airport, but in the name of "progress" a bigger one must be built, the authorities decided as far back as twenty years ago. A campaign against this has been going on for almost as long, intensifying over the past couple of years.
A local boy I met said to me: "My father already was implicated in this struggle. We had our pigs killed and our sheep stolen from our farm because of this."

The house V. lives in was squatted only a few months ago. It is one of many houses whose owners sold to the state a long time ago. The police subsequently destroyed the building, taking out all doors and windows and smashing a large hole into the
roof, in order to make it un-liveable. Of course this does not scare off squatters, as it was intended to. V.'s housemate Noémie and two friends of hers went in a few months ago and made the thing inhabitable in a mere three days. The only problem is intermittent watercuts, since the plumbing freezes over in the harsh winter temperatures.

This is the case the evening that I arrive. The only drink water in the house are three plastic bottles filled up at the neighbours'. Luckily, there is a healthy alternative to water present: V. and Noémie just had their vats filled by the local winery. Their reservoir is impressive; over the next few days the pitcher just keeps getting filled up, the wine keeps flowing. We finally drink all the wine there is, but it takes us a good few days, sometimes starting with red wine at breakfast. We keep drinking and drinking as we go through this week's task which is cleaning out the neighbour's shed, and dolling it up for a party this week-end. We knock together a bar and paint the walls. I paint a pair of goofy police running after three pogoing, mowahawked punks. Julien paints a pair of fucking chicken.
They go well with the shed-theme.

One night after a day's work V. and I go to the skips of the local supermarket. V. climbs over the fence, with her head-lamp on, filling up plastic-bag after plastic bag, handing them out to me. Among tons of fruit, bread and biscuits, we skip smoked salmon and even the lemon to squeeze over it. Later that evening back in the house, at the dinner table, V. jokes "on est à l'Elysée là ou quoi?", "this is what it's like at the presidential palace".

V. is a musician. Once, on a demo against the planned airport she played the piano in front of a row of CRS, French riot cops. "Merci d'être venus si nombreux", she addressed them as she sat down, rubbing her fingers because of the cold before starting to play, "Thanks for having come in such great numbers".

Another evening we decide to extend the drinking session till after dinner and have a little knees-up before the final big bang on sunday.
The party is comic to the point of tragedy. At a certain point of the evening, males and females, everyone gets topless, including the old, fat guy whom I believe no one particularly desires to see naked. But hey, he is everyone's mate, of course he is part of the party. Noémie even grabs his ass in the generalized comical exuberance of the night.

I really feel a little as if in a liberated zone, with all the drunk driving after the party, and with everyone leaving their houses unlocked, and the cars in front parked for a few hours with the doors wide open or even with the keys on them.

Most of the squats in the area are farm or family houses, although Le Cent-Chêne, the squatters bakery, is an impressive self-made house in the greenery, and another part of the ZAD is an occupied forest area, where an international crowd of people built treehouses at 15 metres above the ground in the pine trees. The first evening I come round there and spend a few hours chatting, I am unimpressed, thinking "met these kind of hippies before." Only the next day I am to realize how, in thinking so, I entirely missed the point: That day I lean how to use the rope to climb up the trees! Seeing that I am daunted by the task, Daniel, who teaches me how to climb, says to me: "I also used to be afraid of heights, now I am addicted to them."

Up I go to Peg's treehouse. Peg tells me he just used his treehouse to sleep in, but spends the day time on the ground.
What a place to wake up to see the sunrise indeed, with its complete, circular view of the horizon through the tree-tops! Looking out from up there throughout our conversation, I realize I am no less scared to get back down than I was to get up there.
"I think I am also going to sleep here", I joke, meaning I am too chicken to connect myself back to the rope and rappel down. It honestly hasn't even occured to me that there is only one bed up here. My comment however provokes Peg to move away from me with a daunted look on his face, which makes me laugh.

Sure enough, that night I am on my bike, back to "le Tertre", the name given to V's house - meaning "the hillock".
The neighbours bulls are good buddies of each other, always hanging out together. In the night, as you ride home with your bicycle lamp showing the way, three pairs of eyes glow red and threatening from behind the tick of the electric fence where they stand aligned.

Dersim

2011-01-03T12:33:00.001-08:00

Many lifts further on, evening is approaching.
Picking a random village on the map, we decide to make it our end-point for today. Two roads lead there, and we have been dropped not far from where they branch off. Rüya looks on the map and with practical judgement says: 'The road on the right is the fastest one, that's the one we have to take''. I, however, employ a different logic. I like to travel in counter-intuitive ways. The road to the left, longer and more curvy on the map, is probably the one with the nicer views. I even sometimes like to stop a direct lift somewhere, just so that I can take a side-road that took my fancy. Indeed it is the side-roads, that make me come back for more to Kurdistan. If one year I take one road, I am bound to see another one branch off, a road to take next year.
Anyways, this time around, I try to have my way: 'I think we agree, that the road itself is the goal here, and all we lose by arriving an hour later is a few cups of tea among the three of us', is how I go about persuading my road-buddies. They are not entirely convinced, but chance acts in my favour, and the first ride that comes along goes to a village that is on the way that I chose, along the longer road. So off we go.
The landscape is indeed superb, and finally sundown comes around. With the lift we just got, we have wound our way up a steep escarpment, when our driver says - 'I am taking the way to the right here, up to my village', pointing at a dirt track winding higher still. Personally, standing on the road in the dusk does not appeal to me, but taking a road further up the mountain does, so I ask, in the name of all of us, if we can come along. The driver says, 'sure, as you wish', Rüya and Onur don't remonstrate, and so we are on our way. It does not take long until I feel that this was the right choice. The views up there are sublime. The outlines of many peaks align on the horizon, beneath them the deep waters of barrages take shape, discolored by the livid twilight sky. When the driver lets us out in the centre of the small group of houses that constitute his village, the few young people lingering on the small square acknowledge our presence with a laconic ' hoş geldiniz' -'welcome'. 'You can see immediately this is a Turkish village', says Rüya, ' if they were Kurds, their welcome would be so much warmer!', and Onur had to agree with her.
We decide to walk away from the settlement, possibly make a fire somewhere under some trees, and then go to sleep in the warm summer air. The road winds its way out of the village and around the following mountain most invitingly to my eye. However, we do not get far. We just watched the mountain gulp down the glib red egg yolk of the sun fanning its last golden rays across the sky, when a car with several men inside pulls up beside us. A man with white hair and a white beard introduces himself as the muhtar, the village chief, and demands to see our papers, “You cannot sleep outside here, this road leads straight into guerrilla territory, there isn't even a last military post there”. Perfect, I think. Anyway I am more afraid of the military than the guerrilla who have a reputation of treating hostages well, but the men really won't let us go. They say they will let us sleep in the villages’ administrative building and ask us to show our ID once again. Having toured lost little mountain villages in Eastern Turkey all over, I know this is standard procedure, but Onur, unaccustomed to travel in a war zone, refuses. Or maybe it is that I am without principles. I would have just done as we were told, but he is truly anarchist. In any case, he makes a whole fuss about it, will not show his ID. So it turns out, we cannot stay, and the idyllic village on top of the world is being relegated to memory too soon: We are escorted back down to the main road in someone else’s car.
Another lift materializes from out of the dark mercifully quickly. It is a road engineer from Diyarbakir, having come to the region to work on the local infrastructure. The road until the next village feels a bit like a slalom race, so many military road-stops are there. Of course every time we are asked to identify ourselves. I cast a slightly reproachful glance to Onur. Now he is well obliged to deliver his ID, but we're already out of paradise. At the entrance to the village we have chosen as our endpoint, Yayladere, the military commander, a friendly, podgy man in glasses, does not only glance at our passports, but takes them inside the hut for a minute. When he comes back out, he adresses Onur, who is sitting on the passenger seat: ' Niye buraya geldiniz?'- 'Why did you come here?' Onur seems at a loss for a coherent answer, 'uhm, we, uh...' he stammers. I think I know what will sound good as an answer and jump in: 'We were on our way to the festival in Kıyi, but thought it started tomorrow. We heard today that it starts two days later, so are taking a detour to see some villages.' The military commander seems understanding, but admonishes us: ''This is a very dangerous region. The fighting is intense. There is 80 of them out there, they are constantly doing actions. Be careful''. And he waves our car through.

Whole story here.

Oniony (Soğanlı köyü)

2010-12-04T09:21:00.000-08:00

Well, I thought Cappadocia was not for me. That was before I made my way south to the village Soğanlı. The village, whose name translates as "with onions", or "oniony", is mentionned on the tourist maps, but without public transport connections, only the richest ones making there. Accordingly, I got a quick lift in a hired Mercedes with some Italians.

The village was situated in a pleasantly verdant canyon with large leafy trees spending shade on the banks of a coolly rippling brook. Some of the paths off to the sides were clearly more used by herders and their sheep than tourists, but to me they seemed more than inviting. The troglodytes in this place I soon discovered were as ramified, layered, even convoluted as nowhere else in Cappadocia.

I am one of many who grew up devouring "Famous Five" novels of Julian, Dick, Anne and George, if not finding some hundreds of years old smuggler's tunnel, most of the time crawling around some sort of secret underground passage. For me as a grown up, caves and catacombs are about the coolest thing I can imagine. Obviously, this village was like paradise to me.
I love the thrill of absolute darkness, a darkness through which hands and feet tap and grope their tentative way before being lit up by a torch (it´s a sin to travel without one) to discover the size of the halls. Or the thrill of completely unlit tunnels leading... where? where? Maybe nowhere but sending you straight into the inside of the mountain for a while.
This thrill, in Cappadocia, I found it only in Soğanlı.
In a place like this, I felt like a kid. It can be considered telltale that early into my day, I met two of them. Their names were Erem and İsmet, and they soon played guide to me. They pretended to know the way and make sure it was not dangerous for me to climb inside or on top of something. But, as I soon realized, they had not been around all these places before themselves. I made them discover their own village. At some point Erem said: "Today my life changed in a very good way"!

Of course, the illusion that I was a lone foreign adventurer among the locals did not last long. There they came: A busload of rosy-faced Europeans with summerhats on, showing their pink knees sticking out from under their brightly patterned holiday-shorts. Erem and İsmet got all excited and whistled and shouted: "Hell-Loh! Hell-Loh!"
The excursionists came and left, taking their picture under the relief and not even venturing inside any of the much ramified rock churches. All the while, the boys and I were still frolicking inside the rocks, enjoying the views from the top windows, down over the villagers orchads.
"Destek, destek", Erem shouted behind me, "hold me, hold me", and I whirled around quickly to plead "don't climb up, it's dangerous!", but İsmet stood already with his hands over his head holding the bigger boy up like an Atlas propping the world on his shoulders. From the top level Erem surely had an even better view.

I admit, also from the purely historical, or artistical perspective, of course these very ancient churches had much to impress.
Graffitis dating to the 1950's of the style "Yusuf was here" angered a little, even though I cannot be said to be a church aficionado. I cannot decide which is worse, those of the graffities stemming from ignorance, or those from extremist Muslims who scratch out the faces of Jesus and other holy men, because the Qu'ran forbids depiction. Now, if Islam did not accept the Christian religion, but saw Jesus as a bearded hippy who became the centre of a pagan cult, these ancient frescoes would still be intact.

To end the day, I got the boys some ice-cream, then they took their leave, going back home.
As for me, I ventured on, taking a shepherd's path that led up the steep slope to the top rim of the canyon, where the path went parallel to a row of windholes in the naked vertical rock. I regaled myself with some wild fruit on the way. Just off the main path grape and brambles, dark and heavy with sweetness, and fresh as the rain, hung so bountifully that even picking tourists could not prevent them from withering away in their abundance. About 3/4 up the path the blue mountains of Kayseri began to show above the brim in the distance, and once I had scaled up to the very top and out of the canyon, above the brim of red earth, I had the burnt Anatolian flatness in my back and the view of the gash was complete and certainly something to remember.

Since it got late in the afternoon, I asked whether it was okay to sleep on the village's only eatery's terrace (I pretended I had a tent). The owners granted me that and asked, was I hungry, the dinner was already on the table. It did not take much and at the end of the delicious meal (grilled fish), I had advanced from front porch camper to house guest.

The girl who invited me had the pretty sounding name of Yeter. This means "it's enough" in Turkish. It is a name given to girls when the parents decided they have had enough kids. The Kurdish name "Besi" means the same. A comparable name is for example Yaşar (as of the famous writer, Mr. Kemal), which translates to "he lives", which is given to a baby after his older sister or brother died in infancy - "this one will stay alive...".

She told me much about village life in that place. People lived well, but they worked pretty hard, and a holiday was out of the question. Half of the people of the village were Alevite, and if they wanted to go on a holiday, they would not go further than Hacı Bektaş, the point of pilgrimage some 70 km away.
Tensions between Sunnis and Alevites are felt here as everywhere. Yeter is Alevite herself and she has a poetic way of formulating her faith: "Being an Alevi is much harder than being a Sunni. We don´t fast for a month - all our life must be a fasting. We don´t pray five times a day - our whole being must be prayer. We don't travel to Mecca - we know the real pilgrimage is interior." About Sunnis she crabs: "Konya (the metropolis 150 km away) is considered the most conservative, even fanatically religious city of Turkey. But at the same time, more beer is sold there per capita than in Istanbul, and it is famous for the amount of prostitutes working there. Can someone explain this to me?"

She takes me to her neighbours' house, where a whole family is sitting in the midst of a pile of colourful tissue. The dolls people like to decorate their homes and pensions with in Göreme come from here, I now find out. They use expensive patterned textiles as well as torn towels acting as padding stuff, each of the family members doing one small task over again, assembly line style: One makes a torso, one dresses it, one makes the head, one paints a face on it.
The main source of income in this village is making these dolls, or agrarian activity. The women make their own bread in the communal ovens on the street, there is not even a bakery here.

Maccan

2010-11-11T08:04:00.000-08:00

My trip was nighing its end. I had no further plans. The last place I had been was the small town Hacı Bektaş, where I had been the guest of a clan of gypsies in the temporarily squatted carcass of an unfinished building. They had shared their low quality tea and white bread with me, and my heart had warmed especially to the blond, blue-eyed boy Serhan, a 10-year old orphan, who, despite the fact that he had the mien of a mischievous mini-macho, was actually hard-working and very generous, giving me food and all his candy. He was taken care of by his grandmother, who was mostly seen sitting in the corner on her own, a glum look on her face. Her husband had recently died.

From there on, my road was unclear. One evening I just decided I had to move on out of Hacı Bektaş, and so there I was by the roadside. And that is how once again, fate's little sister, chance, took my hand and led me on... in the guise of a lift I got hitchhiking, of course.

I had not planned to come to Cappadocia, that most touristy of regions of Turkey, even though I was just round the corner. However, the next thing that came along was a car full of young travellers, most of them from France, who were going just that way. Slightly inebriated from an afternoon of Rakı drinking, they were gushing about the feast they had had in the company of some or other spiritual leader that afternoon at the Alevite city Hacı Bektaş. Everyone who had entered the room had gone to kiss the eldest man's hand, speeches had been made, and two men had kept passing the saz from one to another at the table all the while a bounteous meal was being served. The travellers had been taken on this adventure by the owner of the pension where they had hung their hats the past few nights, and who was presently driving the car. The sun was already going down, and I quickly struck a deal with him; I would help him do some work round his pension, in exchange for a bed.
Turned out, I ended up staying a week (...and could have stayed much longer).

As we rolled into the village, its name being Göreme, at the centre of the region, I was duely impressed. The first thing I saw were the -literally- 100s of tanned white people´s limbs, in shorts and sleeveless shirts, having gathered on the central square for the night busses. In Central Turkey that much flesh revealed is a thing to shock the prudish eyes of the veteran traveler!
I had last visited the region seven years ago, and whereas I would not say that Göreme was then a pristine Anatolian village, it had been a far cry from the spectacle before my eyes right now. I remembered the village as one of dusty, unasphalted streets, and indeed, I admit, over all these years I had kept a cherished memory of beautiful hikes through the wondrous landscapes surrounding it.
When I first visited I had of course the benefit of the feeling, for that only the French have a curt word that captures it so well -se sentir dépaysé - best rendered as...well, to feel pleasantly transported when being in a different culture, a strong change of scenery. A feeling you can only get in a place much unlike your own, and to which you are still not acclimatized. Quite accustomed to the charms of Turkey now, and so without this benefit, today I was still going to see the beauty of the troglodytes and the stranger ones of the rock formations when they were in front of me, but, surrounded by so many tourists, I did not again manage to feel elated by these sights.

Yet, Cappadocia is historically impressive. The many churches left in the region are ancient. As far back as in Roman times, the eroded landscape of volcanic rock lent itself to some of the earliest Christians, who, persecuted by the Empire, could live and practice their faith in the reclusion of underground cities and churches. Even under Byzantine rule, when Cappadocia was situated on the Eastern fringe of the state, the particularities of the region helped the locals withstand the frequent raids of the Persian Sassanide enemies.
Much later still, the cool troglodytes of Ortahisar served as a depository for the citrus fruit of the Mediterranean, before being exported all across what is now the Republic of Turkey.

If, in hindsight, I remember my week in Göreme, it seems to me, I had a rather sleep-deprived one. This had several reasons.

The pension, Tabiat (meaning "Nature"), where I was staying, was right next to the mosque. The booming voice of the muezzin that came on at prayer time, was enough to shake even the soundest sleeper awake. It was so loud that when it came on in the evening, during dinner time, all conversation died down in the court yard, you simply could not hear a thing. "Once I asked the imam, 'why do you guys always shout so loud? It is annoying my guests, you know'", Ibrahim, the owner of the pension, liked to joke, "and the next thing they did was they put another speaker up".
As for me, every night, I waited for the crackle of the microphone at the end of the long call for prayer as a kind of Pavlovian signal to let the dizziness of sleep creep back over me. I got maybe another three hours more sleep, because in the mornings, likewise, something was bound to awaken me early. Ibrahim had said to me I could take a bed in the empty dormitory, but out of politeness I insisted to sleep in the yard. It is true I prefer open sky to any kind of roof any way.
And so, every morning at around 6 o'clock, right after sunrise, the feral roar of the hot air balloons right over me would disrupt my sleep and make for early get ups.

But what was worse, was that it was Ramadan. During this holy month, believing Muslims are not allowed to eat or drink in the daytime, which I am sure is common knowledge. Now, villagers anywhere in Muslim countries organise themselves so as to have some sort of nightly wake-up call in the early morning hours (usually a boy with a drum), so they can eat their breakfast (the Sahura meal) before going back to bed. This made for yet another nightly disruption. Almost pointless to go to bed, right? Knowing that the call to prayer would shatter the silence again a short two hours later, I usually relinquished the temptation to try to go back to sleep and went for walks through the village during this time.

In my first night in the village, I did not walk far from my place before I started talking to the young man at nightwatch at the carpet shop. That night´s adventure was that he made me climb the Roman Cemetary tower, very close to there. It was a truely difficult climb up the brittle Tuff rock, which crumbles and slides so easily under your grip. The tower also accordingly has huge `Do not enter, Danger´ signs outside, and is only used by village youth to stack their weed in a place the police will not look. And so, as we watched the sunrise from up there, we only had to roll a joint and light it up to round off the moment.

The second night I wanted to find out who that madman with the drum was who came for the second time now, rudely rousing me from sleep. Awaking people in the night with a drum seems like the right kind of teenage activity to me. And so, as I followed the sound of the drum at two at night, it was a bunch of kids taking turns beating the shit out of the instrument and singing the Ramadan manisi. There are many versions of this kind of folk poetry made into a song on Ramadan nights, and the one I got to hear here was rather funny:

"Akşamdan pilavı pişirdim
Gene karnımı şişirdim
Çok mani diyecektim ama
Defteri yolda düşürdüm"

"Çatal kaşık elimde,
Besmele var dilimde,
Fazla kaşık salladım,
Bir sızı var kolumda"

"In the evening I cooked some rice,
again I filled my belly well,
I was going to sing many verses to you tonight,
but I lost the sheet with the lyrics on the way"

or

"A "Bismillah" on my lips
I ate so much with that spoon of mine
my arm is in pain."

The boy finished his singsong with the injunction "üstüne bir kahve iç, Terâviheye geç kalma!"-"Drink a coffee while you can and don't be late for the Terâvihe prayer".
That night, just when I had caught up with the gang of boys taking turns in doing the drumming, they had climed onto a rock and the echo was reverberating across the hollow pit of the village at their feet. For a minute it sounded like there was a second drummer out there somewhere. I followed the group in their trail. The boys told me they worked in a pide restaurant in the evenings, and during Ramadan they spend their night playing cards or backgammon in the café by the canal, until it was time to do their job (payed by the local imam, one person per night got some pocket-money for it). After eating, they went to bed at dawn, sleeping away the heat, and most of the fasting hours.

Of course I was hoping one of the boys would invite me home for Sahura. Not feeling hungry, I saw myself picking at the olives a little bit, maybe eating a slice of bread and honey. But when you want it most, the trick does not work of course and the hospitality was not forth-coming. I just wasn't lucky this time around.

In any case, my nightly escapades did help me to scratch through the surface of this tourist trap of a village. You had to scratch pretty hard, I admit it, but you could find it, the "real" Turkey, the "normal" Turkey, what do you call it...
Despite the massive houses made of local stone that can only be seen in Cappadoccia, and which betray the richness that tourism has brought to this region, underneath it all - it was there - a quite normal, Central Anatolian village.
There was the café with the men playing tavela, deserted at the time of the evening prayer, but becoming slowly populated again shortly after everyone had eaten (gluttonously at the end of a long day of fasting...). In the early evenings, there were the teenage girls in their colourful fake-silk headscarf walking around, indulging in the Ramadan-night frenzy of constant consumption, even if it was only sunflower seeds. Maybe you'd see small boys on their way home from the shop, having both hands full of ice-cream bought for everyone. On the streetcorner, also a typical sight, there would be the women of several families together (the region being rather conservative, few local women went unveiled), cooking their kışlık on the street, that is, preparing great quantities of tomato sauce or frying aubergines to can them for the winter. In the night you could see the wandering watermelon vendors sleep on the back of their trucks, among all the fruit, just like anywhere else in Turkey.
When it was market time, people from surrounding villages would come and sell all and everything out of their car boots: Fruit and vegetables, knifes and forks, even plastic brooms and toys.

Moreover, after a few days already, the village had started to know me. Le bruit court vite, especially in Turkey. "You are German and you speak Turkish well", a woman I had never seen before stopped me on the street. The latter assessment was an exaggeration of course, but in any case, rising notoriety obliges, and I made mental note not to pilfer any more ice-cream from the overpriced shops from now on.

I would not have made any true friends though, if it was not for Brutus, Ibrahim´s canine cohort. He was a hip-high Kangal, Turkey´s national breed, and made for a good hiking companion. He was still young and a bit of a kid, chasing cats round the corner, or chicken up the fence, and had to be rebuked for that sometimes.
When Ibrahim pointed out to me why he chose that name for the dog, I could see it immediately: Ibrahim´s dignified grey hair and aquiline nose in profile indeed made him resemble a certain Roman emperor, whose sidekick Brutus had historically been.

The way these two found each other was as follows: Ibrahim had found Brutus on his doorstep one day, as an orphaned puppy. In order to raise the Kangal puppy, Ibrahim gave the dog milk, and cooked meals not only consisting of potatoes and macaroni, but also containing meat and liver. You had to do that, Ibrahim explained to me otherwise a dog without mother´s milk would not grow as tall as Brutus had done.

Kangals can be dangerous, too. Most to be afraid of are the dogs you meet out in the nature. Maybe the sheep they guard are somewhere around. But beware of stray dogs, too. Sometimes people let their former guard dogs free, if they don´t need them anymore. In this way, dangerous dogs come to roam the street. Especially in winter when they are hungry you must watch out.

Taking Brutus with me, one evening I made it to the designated `sunset spot´ at the other end of a long valley. When the two of us arrived, the crowd had already duely gathered. The glowing, red ball began its ratcheting descent in a steep arch, growing gradually closer to the vertical. Finally, the sun was slurped down as quickly as a Tequila Sunrise, and only the afterglow remained. On the other side of the horizon the night seeped up stealthily, pale, ashen, the foreglow of darkness. I ticked the activity off my "to-do" list, but did not exactly feel touched by the moment.

During the preceding few days, I had made friends with some Spanish tourists and shared their day trips and midnight barbecue at the feet of impressive, sleek white Tuff rock, folded like pale giants limbs, made more dramatic by the full moon shadows. In other free moments I took the dog and walked the Gothic jaggedness of the Rose Valley, or that assembly of huge, carmine shards jutting up from the ground, the Red Valley. It is true that in my week in the village, the most fun I had was probably by sneaking into rich hotels to use their swimming pools, day time or night time, for whatever that is worth. Ultimately Cappadoccia remained a place where I was bound to get bored quickly...

Hitchhiking Turkey Solo

2010-11-02T04:58:00.000-07:00

At a bend in the road we stop, and a four- and a five-year-old, one standing, one squatting, have a quick peeing competition. The girl wins, pulls up her panties and runs to jump back into her seat in the car.

We approach Gazi Antep - an uninteresting, grey cluster of a town. Houses of brick and cement, unfinished, plastered, unpainted. The woman and her kids are going there. The driver, a guy in his early thirties and her cousin, says he will get her home, then put me back on the road.
As soon as we are alone, I have reason to be annoyed: There, I put so much effort into getting a lift with a family, showing that I am perfectly respectable and neither looking for a date. But still, so tediously predictable, as soon as the protecting female presence is gone, the fucker hits on you again. But it is okay, it happens to be around lunchtime: As usually I say, "No thanks, I really don't need food", but still he insists. Takes me to a (fancy!) restaurant, orders a kebab.
I remonstrate that I prefer to eat vegetarian, but that is an unknown word in these latitudes that has an absurd ring to it. The guy, some Mehmet or Ahmet or Ömür or Eser, has already ordered Adana for me. Since I seem to be insisting I don't want this, he orders Chicken Kebab next. Oh great, I wanted a meatless meal, and instead they killed two animals for me. Now, it is already dead, it is already there, so I dig in. While I am munching away, Mehmet or Ahmet or Ömür or Eser tells me I have pretty eyes. I take another swig from my lemonade, and dig my fork into the salad. He tells me I have pretty lips. I roll a mint leaf into the warm folds of Turkish pita bread together with a piece of my spicy Adana Kebab. He tells me he is looking for a girl-friend. I grimace a smirk and before I dig my teeth into the kebab roll, insist I don't need a dessert. I let him pay the bill, make him drive me back to the highway. Ciao ciao Mehmet or Ahmet or Ömür or Eser.

Unfortunately, it takes forever for the next decent lift to materialize, I wait forever by the roadside. I let a few cars pass, because there is only guys in there, and quite frankly, I simply can't be bothered. Then at some point, boredom gets the better of me, and the following car that comes, I stop. It is a single guy, a village man, who, with his salt-and-pepper hair, looks around 55, or maybe 45. Village life in the South East can be hard and makes people age faster after all. The man probably has around six or seven kids, coming from around here. Thing is he tells me, "I am 27 and unmarried". I can't be arsed to put energy into fending off his absurd advances and ask to be let out a few kilometers on. So there I am again, with my thumb out.

The next car that stops is a family with seven kids. I feel inclined to wave them on, but they insist I climb in with them! The driving dad is a chatterbox: "We Muslims, we wash five times a day! But you guys, you are dirty! You" - and he makes obscene hand gestures, meaning, I assume, 'you guys fuck' - "and you don't even wash!" I don't think it is up to a squatter to try to change his ideas on this one, so I mostly just let him talk. Finally, even though I am a dodgy, dirty European, he thinks he found one point we certainly agree on: "But the worst are the Jews! You Germans, you did it right, you heaped those guys into ovens!", and he pantomimes someone shovelling corpses into a furnace.
I am too lazy to tell him about the 1950's when Konrad Adenhauer apologized profusely for the Holocaust to all the concerned communities, or the modern political situation with Germany's government being an eternal yes-man for all Israel ever does. I just tell him that I personally thought the shovelling business was a mistake (to put it mildly).

2010-10-29T09:51:00.000-07:00

It was when, instead of waiting for another lift on the outskirts of Antwerpen, I ventured into the city in search of lunch, that I met a guy on a bike. He was about twenty and had an excentric looking long moustache that lend itself copiously to twirling. He said he was a traveller, too, just back from Istanbul where he had made an arts exhibition, and did I need a place to stay, would I like to meet his hippy friends...? Altogether this seemed random enough, so I accepted the invitation.

The place where he picked me up was the Jewish quarter of town, an interesting place to be in, crawling with those readically retro people, snatched right from a fifties film in their long monochrome coats and frilly dresses, when black and white TV forbade even the thought of colour.
He took me to the place he lived, in a rented house of a community of friends, in a part of town mostly inhabitant by immigrants.
By most standards, the young men had a pretty cool house. There was a mess all over of all sorts of contrivances used to make techno music, as well as tall abstract-paintings leaning against the walls. In lieu of posters, they had hung up oil-painted "jokes" such as Keith Haring stickmen performing cunnilingus, or a pizza-sized amoeba in an antique looking fancy gold frame that had probably been found on the street.
Somehow, I never broke it to the guy (his name was Gilles) that I hate arts, and find it a shameful waste of time and resources, so when he proposed a free lift to Brussels to go to a gallery in the evening I did not demur. Gilles wanted to introduce me to some artist of Roma origin. However we never found the adress and ended up spending the evening drinking beer on a church square in the town centre of Brussels.
That evening Gilles said to me: "Tomorrow, before you leave, would you like to come see the house I squatted in a village up North?" -"Why not", was my answer.

We ended that night at half past four in the morning walking from the curious mix of architecture Brussels' town centre sports -elegant buildings dating from the 19th century, shoulder-to-shoulder with eye sore 80's tower blocks- on to some seedy areas further out. There we walked amidst scanty-clad shop-window ladies lolling on their tall stools, insinuatingly sucking on cigarettes under the rose lamp light, and the rats flitting past us out from under the rubbish bins. Finally we took a turn and when our little group of four started trudging up a street on the steep hills, this was in complete solitude. We had been walking for a while like this when suddenly, the street behind us began to stream with rows of silent walkers, males of all ages, some in djebalas, some with taqiya (prayer caps) on. Prayer in the mosque seemed to have finished right there and then and people were returning to their houses. It was still Ramadan, and they were beginning their day's fast right now.
Finally we arrived in front of the house in the residential area on a hill where my new-found friends lived, St. Mary's gold cuppola gleaming at the bottom of the street.

The next day, as announced, Gilles took me to the house he had squatted in the macabre village of Doel.
As we rolled into the village my trained squatter's eye spotted immediately another empty house at the village entrance, a red-brick construction with boarded up windows. Then immediately I saw another one, and another one, until with a sort of shock I realized the whole street was empty. And then, as we rolled past some pretty cool graffiti of house-high rats and crows, headless pigs and sleeping bulls, screaming girls and male, muscular angels, I made another realization: No, it was the whole village that was empty.

Big corporations wanted to empty out the village from as early as 40 years ago in order to be able to expand the harbour. The process got finally started 10 years ago, and the job is essentially done now, with only 16 houses still being inhabited. As it was, squatters were quick to move in.
The peak of the squatting was three years ago. A whole circus even had taken residence in a large farm on the Northern outskirts of the village. Not only the usual type of politically active squatters or the crazy artist-hippy type used to basic conditions had come and nested, there were even people like a young married couple whom Gilles knew: They had come to live here while their newly bought house inside the city was being rented out to pay off the mortgage.
Of course one day, the crackdown came: The squatters were not only evicted, but many of the houses that had been squatted were entirely razed to the ground. The tragic thing is that the company did not actually have the permits for demolishing the houses, and they were thus flattened completely illegally. Electricity and water were switched off for all the other empty houses, so as to discourage further squatting.

Gilles of course is unreformable and to this day he dreams of making something like the Dutch hippy colony Ruigoord out of Doel. Ruigoord is a lively artists village near Amsterdam, which attracts people to garish Goa parties almost weekly in the summer. It was originally squatted almost 40 years ago after it had been empty for several years for much the same reasons as Doel: The owners of the territory had sold it to the large industries of the nearby harbour, and forcibly evicted the inhabitants of that land. In the 70's it had been the petrol crisis that had thwarted the plans of expansion of the harbour; for Doel in this day it was to be the economic crisis of 2008.

To round off the spooky atmosphere reigning in Doel, the village is actually situated right next to a nuclear power plant. The twin towers of the plant, those cloud makers, stand proudly, majestically emitting the snow-white swirl of toxicity in perfectly vertical colons into sky when it is windstill.
Some graffitis made fun of this saying "You are in Doel. Now breathe!"

After I had roamed the village for a couple of hours and seen countless smashed in windows, burnt roofs, and abandoned dog huts, I just wanted to leave. The illusion of a squatters' paradise had worn off quickly: It had finally hit me how sad it all was. I'd seen people's black and white school photographs on the walls, memories abandonned, left behind. I'd seen toy cars, broken, but the plastic still lustrous, astray in the backyard, as if some kid would still come running out the door to play any moment. The good quality of the wooden furniture still left in the houses was astonishing. On one window was a print-out of someone saying "if I catch you looting my stuff, I will shoot without discrimination". I am ready to believe that the person writing this was not of the crazy and violent type, but simply desperate and hurt because all his personal stuff had been vandalised and looted, until there was nothing left to loot.
On the walls in the village there were "Wanted for murder on Doel" posters, with the names of those responsible for the tragedy.

The most ironic item of the village was perhaps the yellowed poster, once put up by the municipality, showing a boy in sailor costume and a girl in a hat feeding the birds reading "Voor een reine, bloeiende stad" - "For a clean, flourishing town".

2010-10-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

I was still walking along the road out of Aksaray and hadn't even propped up my thumb, when a car pulled up to my side, with a five-headed family infecting me with their white-toothed smiles, and the silver-haired man at the stirring wheel speaking to me in accentless Austrian German: "Are you going to Sultanhanı? That is where our house is, come and jump on in!" I marveled once more at how easy my traveler's life had become and took a squeezed seat in the back with them all.

It was a curious assemblage of a family. There were granddad and grandma, grandma's spitting image of a younger sister, as well as grandma's and granddad's daughter-in-law with the twin grandchildren. The kids names were Rabia and Menderes, same as were the grandparents'. Calling one's kids after one's parents is a common practice in several cultures. For example Russians traditionally do it, Georgians sometimes do it, and I have even heard the same about Icelanders. Jews apparently do it only when the grandparent is not alive anymore. It is a bit old fashioned way of showing respect I believe. Only about a month earlier I had been invited to have lunch in the company of four generations of an Arabic Alawi Imam family in Antiochia, from the two-year-old grandson Sefid to the bespectacled grand-dad Adnan, where there were two names for the four males, alternating generation-wise.
As for the kids in the car right now, what pretty names they had! Menderes like the sinuous river on the Egean sea coast whose name is at the origin of the English verb "meander", Rabia like Rabi`a al `Adawiyya, the famous 8th century Sufi princess whose spiritual powers were so potent she could fly her carpet through the air, and when in prayer, the room around her alit. On her first hajj the Ka'aba came to meet her half-way through the dessert. She was a cool chick who once said she wanted to "douse the fires of hell, and burn the gardens of heaven", because morality should need neither punishment nor incentive.

It was not a long drive through the desolate Central Anatolian landscape. On our right flitted past sad, decapitated fields of sunflowers, to our left were heaped up small desert dunes of their kernels. The white ones are generally to roast and be eaten, the black ones are better to make oil out of.

Once we arrived in their village, the family duely made me see the 12th century Seldjukid caravanserai that had made this place such a tourist trap to begin with. It was a pleasant enough visit: The high, dark and shady camel stable ressembled a cathedral from the inside, with bright sun rays entering only through narrow apertures that were hewn into the stone in lieu of windows. Fear of thieves climbing in, you see.
In the kitchen, the stones were still blackened from smoke 800 years ago.

Afterwards, I was to take a look at the family's carpet shop. The granddad was just turning the key in the door to his shop, when his neighbour walked by, advising him: "Kandırma"- "Don't rip her off". I chuckled at the notion, because I was certainly not going to buy anything. Still, it was fairly fun to look at different kinds of carpets and learn about them.
"In the 60's people still made kilims for their own houses, that's why you will find the best quality from those times", Menderes the elder said, rolling out some stunning exemplaries in front of me. I learnt to distinguish the really good ones from the merely tape-à-l'oeil ones. You have to look closely: Quality is determined by how tightly the carpet is knotted (a halı) or woven (a kilim), as well as by the quality of the material utilized.

Presently we were looking at a large and very expensive halı from the region. The colour was a velvety dark green from one angle, and a much lighter cottony turquoise from another. Knotting carpets is an art. "At the end of the 90's there were only four women in the entire city of Konya (a metropolis of 1,000,000 inhabitants), who could knot like that. Very soon, their eyes are going to fail and they are going to be too old to still practice their mastery. Then, this great old art will die out with them", Menderes told me.
Today, no young people accept to work under such hard conditions and earn so little.
Before it took one month to cut off the long threads by hand in order to finish off a newly knotted halı. Today it is done with a clipping machine usually used for sheep within two days. Machines can weave much quicker and more efficiently today.
But of course, true beauty is achieved by the small irregularities only human hands create.

Later on that day we went to visit some women knotting at their home. They were working 8 to 10 hours a day to finish the piece they were working on, and after three weeks of such work would receive the equivalent of 200 Euros, for the both of them. A few months later, the merchant paying them however, might make between 3,000 and 4,000 Euros out of the finished product.

By what magic this price difference was to come about I was to learn only a little later, by accident, when we rode across town. "Why are these carpets lying there?", I asked with astonishment, since our car was going over one lying smack in the middle of the road. To me, this seemed a rather strange place to put one of these beautiful and expensive pieces.
"Oh, I'll show you more", Menderes said enigmatically and turned round his car at the following corner. We drove a bit closer to the outskirts, and for sure there were more of them there, lying outside of houses in the dust of the street, straight under the sun. "It takes about a year to make an antique one out of a perfectly acceptable new carpet. You lay them out in the midday sun, or wetten them and let cars drive over them. If you use chemicals, it goes even faster. American traders come and ship home several containers at the time. You can make thousands of dollars for one 'antique' carpet. Americans especially love those carpets where the colours have faded away almost completely. Then they feel like they really own an antiquity, one several hundred years old."

Another way of making "antique" carpets is using genuinely old thread to knit or weave a new one. Old saddlebags or flour bags still abound. You can unravel them, then dye the threads any colour you want to weave a kilim. In this case, even in a laboratory test, the newly woven carpet will prove positive as a truely antique one. Menderes acknowledged one thing: "I left school when I was 12 years old, and since then I have been trading carpets. And yet, not even I can tell the difference most of the time between a real Ottoman carpet, and a fake one".

2010-10-13T05:06:00.000-07:00

My friend Bahri and I, we like to eat.
We stroll around İzmir bazar and, as a dessert avant-l'heure we pick up a box of donuts, fried and doused in sugar water. The family of a deceased person pays a company to hand these out for free, so that prayers be spoken for their lost loved one. What we are eating are İzmir lokması, typical to the region: elsewhere in the country Helva is usually used.
Out of politeness I do as the other line-standers and mumble a few words for a just-in-case deity as I receive my plate, but Volkan is more rigorous in his atheism, and just happily munches away.

Next thing, we get truely hungry though, so we go for a a Kumru sandviç (Kumru being the sesame covered buns special to Izmir), before picking up plastic cups of turşu, that is, pickled cabbage and cucumber in their brine. The 2-4-1 snack and drink combination is sold with a straw, and changes its colour to a bright orange as the street vendor ("Does our little sister like it spicey?") adds a shot of hot sauce to it all.
Duely refreshed we head to an alleyway eatery where we order some cheap but delicious cheese Pide which, along with a small plastic basket of large-leafed and spicey roca salad, are served plateless, on a sheet of paper, with only a large kitchen knife handed to each of us by way of cutlery.

2010-07-13T04:13:00.000-07:00

The evening before a middle-aged man had called us over from our table in the central tea garden of this village, picturesquely situated in the midst of olive groves on the hills of the Aegan sea coast. Thinking we did not speak Turkish he made the gesture of a pair of scissors cutting, repeating "snippety-snipp" a couple of times, while pointing at an embarrassed 11-year-old on a bike, indicating that he was 'benim oğlum' -his male offspring. What he meant was "my son had his circumcision done". Seeing that we responded in Turkish, he then said "Tomorrow night will be the celebration. I love having guests, please come to the party!".
And so we did.

We arrived rather early in the morning. This way we had occasion to watch the ladies of the house prepare the feast for the evening. On the open charcoal hearths baby baths of broth were bubbling. An elderly woman dressed in a sharwal with flower print, wearing an equally colourful headscarf, was doing the round of them, sliding two entire blocks of butter into each pot, using wooden spoons so large and coarsely cut they ressembled oars. Next to her stood two buckets that held shiny, deep-green olive oil almost up to the brim, and at her feet in a massive marmite a white mountain of quivering hot rice was steaming. In a pan on the fire decapitated, plucked chicken jostled each other, slowly getting a tan. They resembled ugly and deformed human fetuses. On a spread-out newspaper on the ground next to them was waiting the concentration camp pile of those whose turn was yet to come. Later Keşkek, an Anatolian stew made of barley and chicken which is made on festive occasions would be prepared in marmites so gigantic, they used a tractor for stirring!
Noémie was on cloud nine. This was exactly the massive sort of Volxkeuken she always dreamt of organizing back home in Belgium.

The musicians arrived around noon. There were five of them: They had three different kinds of drums, a zurna -a wind instrument typically used at occasions like this-, and the singer also played the violin, which he had to hold at a strange angle away from his chin. The 11-year old kid whose party it was going to be, and who had just changed into his cream-coloured, gold-embroidered Persian prince costume replete with sceptre and triangular hat, which is traditionally reserved for the Circumcision celebration, started to dance with his friends. The boys spread their arms, snapping their fingers, and circled around each other as is the local fashion. After their dance, the child lit a cigarette. You could tell by his way of smoking this was by far not the first fag of his life. His uncle, a silver-haired man in his 50's, taunted him by asking: "Adam mı oldun?" -"So, we have become a man?".

2010-04-01T05:49:00.000-07:00

The following text is another old, almost ancient story, that I only came round to edit right now. In order to morph the discordant chunks of inspiration of this trip into a readable whole I made this a hell of a lot shorter than my original scribbled notes...

Leaning over the railing, I cough up a knot of mucus and spit into the sea. The black water carries away the phloating phosphorescent phlegm, and I look up, back to the cloud-draped peninsula we are sailing away from.
Approaching Gibraltar in the night time it at first looked like a deformed eyeless elephant to me through the bus window. Or like a head and feet-less sphinx as Paul Theroux remarked. Now moving away from it, it looks like an oversize mole with its head stuck between its front paws, sulking under the massive rain cloud that has condensed around its top. We are heading just left of the sunset, making our way between the waves and the private rainbows attached to each crest's halo of spray. It eerily feels like we are sailing away from the English weather and into the eternal sunshine of tropical realms that are waiting just beyond the horizon I am sure.
The army of aeolians on the crests of the Spanish hills are waving goodbye with their massive three fingered hands. We head off, away from the two fog-shrouded continents out our flanks, and into the watery mists in the distance where the ships with the Arabic writing on them are coming from...

First day: Boredom prevails.
Second day: You get used to the slow smooth creaking of the wood and the screaming baby of the autopilot turning the rudder. You watch that eternally splintering, black metal mirror mosaic of the water surface; a thousand irregular slivers reassembling constantly, as they are trying to recreate the sunlight itself.

The nights are passed not exactly sleeping more than rubbing indecently closely up to sleep. Our three hours off, three hours on -apart from pretty much corresponding to my sleeping pattern anyway-, perfectly make the elasticity of time feelable, how three hours can alternatively, and alternatingly, be ever so short (when you are trying to catch some sleep), and ever so long (when you are on watch).
The positive side to this is that it helps my sleeping disorder in such a way that I have to learn to drop out of consciousness in any given position in any random place on the boat for the three hours I am off duty. The negative sides are that for a time span of something like the following year I probably won't be able to sleep any longer than three hours in a go.

Still being on watch from three to five in the morning includes some joys: nightly dolphins look like immanently lit underwater neon torpedoes with the phosphorescence of the plankton playing around their bodies.
And the black-washed emptiness of the night spurs your imagination: Oligando, the first island of the Canaries approaching, lights up its tiny spot on the horizon like a faint halo of some underwater goddess waiting to rise above the surface, trident and all, about to cause a storm. It is a little version of the dawn not quite yet about to break, softly huddling in an arch close to the horizon. After a few hours of what seems to be a never ending, excruciatingly slow approach, the mathematically pure linearity of the horizon is broken by the minute outlines of land rising in the midst of this loom. And it takes yet more patience for these jags to fledge into the clear cut silhouette of an island inside its cosy little spotlight, while the night around it keeps it enormous fat black ass glued to the ocean.

It is a slow rhythm that you are caught in. Most of the time there is nothing to do except mentally, by pure willpower, make time move on, make the seconds plop like lollipop raindrops each time you count one off. You make these seconds push one another over the brink into the nothingness of the past. It is a never-ending game of tag, each discrete moment in time eternally turning around to tap the next one on its shoulder before hopping off.
For you, on night watch, there is nothing else to do than go for a walk along that line, the lining of time: the Now. The front-line of our perceptions that limits the spherical prison of our consciousness, embodied by the concentric black prison of the night out there, closing around you, pushing you closer to the most austere frugality of being: Counting seconds.

When you are at the end of your night-shift you hang onto the loom of an island or a coastal town as if it was the dawn itself. You hang on to that rag of rounded light, like to a rag of hope that you will soon be able to get more than those standard three hours of sleep. I coil the thread of hope emanating from that sunken town tighter and tighter round my fingers as we motor towards it -but no matter how fast I grip it, that fine, imaginary thread soon slips from my grasp. The soft light of the town beyond the horizon dissipates on the surface of the sea and into the night.

The fourth day, we get into a storm. The luminosity of the setting sun lends the savage scenery a false glacial air and an eerie slowness to nature's spectacle happening around us. The broken white water that is gushing over us seems to do so in slow motion, like snow falling. It seems like we are sailing down not a fluid valley of breaking waves, but a white gash of snow paralysed in between each bat of the eyelash. It is my first ever storm on sea, and since I am not seasick I actually enjoy this roller-coaster-like ride, blissfully ignorant of all the things that could go wrong. Better not let my grin grow too big though in the presence of our understandably less amused and actually worried captain. After a few hours the main sail starts tearing, and the wind, far from taming its furious tongues, resumes even wilder, lashing out at the sea till its entire surface has turned into foaming white whipped cream.
In the storm, down in the belly of the beast, in my cabin, I feel like imprisoned in the negative of an aquarium -I hear the water around me, around the narrow wooden cage around me, the bluster, the riot outside, whipping with sharp tongues over the hatch on top of my cabin.

Then for days the ocean is as flat as the sky.
Again you learn patience, you reinvent time.
In the monotony of the days it becomes more than a habit, a sort of ritual, a little benign addiction, to follow all celestial movements. At night you watch the order of the stars rotate, in the daytime you attend to the ascent of the sun each morning, as well as drink up its last coloured rays as it dissappears from the sky in the evening.

And of course, even on the chance that I am granted a rare eight hours in bed, I awake in the middle. I lie in the dark, like a whale stranded on the raw, alien shores of an unwanted island, and like her I just want back into my night. But here I am, prisoner of the nutshell of my consciousness, condemned to suffer the wound it cuts into my rest. Behind closed eyes I float on the low rumble of the engine that seem to vibrate concentrically under the cruel waves of my insomnia.

I manage to drop into sleep again for a couple of hours, until I wake up early again and climb outside. Huddled in a blanket I make myself cozy for my daily ritual, sit and wait under the expanding cellophane skies. The sun ratchets its ideally rounded shape out from the cool depths, spattering sanguine streaks of light back onto its surface in the process. The fuzzy edge that seperates darkness from light eats its slow way across the firmament until only a thin reminder of the past night is left cowering in one corner of the sky. Then this also dissappears.

I stay put for a while and muse that it will only be a couple of short hours till the day will punish us with the heat of a thousand suns. I stand up, ready to make my way to bed to catch some more sleep before the inside of my cabin will become stifling. In that very moment, something ENORMOUS jumps right in the middle of my field of vision. It is that kind of whole body out of water, hip-wiggling, tail-beating jump that ends with the animal splashing back into the element, spine bent over backwards, and a fountain of triumph seemingly circumscribing the shape of its silhouette whose white negative is still imprinted on your eye for that split second that you shake yourself out of disbelief. Never yet to this point have I seen dolphins leap from the ocean like this in full breach. I run to the railing, almost falling over myself, nearly sending myself flying overboard. My eyes jump from individual to individual of the group of animals, mesmerised by the characteristic way they move, weaving their way between each other and the waves, describing the same movement as the waves. Even though their faces are defigured by those risible paralysed grimaces that all mammals of their kind are cursed with, I am taken over by an immediate sympathy for them. Out in the emptiness of the ocean, you are grateful for any company. There is a large number of them, and it grows steadily, in the end they are just under a hundred. They are approaching from all sides, I can see them from the distance, hurrying here, from either side of the horizon. Sitting down at the stern I offer my feet for the occasional caress. I observe them closely: Old dolphins with serrated, eaten fins and bodies blotched with age spots, which I find especially beautiful, and all the way at the bottom, many yards under them, small, young ones with skin as shiny and bright as the morning dew, well protected by the many adults swimming over them.
When the lads, the other sailors on this boat, are up, they usually start to sing at this moment. Being on my own with everyone being asleep under deck I have no choice but have to do so myself now and so I started humming the only song that I can muster up, the one song that is floating around in my mind in that moment, Ani DiFranco's "Angel Food". And indeed, whether this is really a corollary of my incantatory efforts or in spite of them, the dolphins stay with me.

And the day passes. The golden penny of the sun climbs the sky, summoning the heat to rise in relation to the height of its own soar. Then, at the altitude, it smiles down genially at the day spread out at its feet. As if effortlessly, it glides on over the suave surface of the untroubled afternoon sky until it begins its curved descend, glossing the limpid immensity of the sea with twinkle, permitting the heat finally to disperse again, and not much later send us all hurrying down to our cabins and slipping into overcoats to brave the nightshift's wind.

The night passes, too, and when the next day beckons, we understamd it to be our last one out on sea. We have some 17 seamiles left, with winds that seem to average on 6 knots an hour, and the loom of our destination has already been visible the last few hours of the night. We are bound to reach the safe harbour this afternoon without the sighting of any larger mammals. By now we had seen hundreds of dolphins, but my childhood's dream of seeing a whale has not been granted to come true. I have given up on my hopes. Quite frankly, all of us are too eager to arrive and set foot on land again, too.

But then, I have a change of luck. A few hours later, on this last day of the trip, while the others are all expectant leaning over the railing with their eyes clinging hungrily to the island rising from the blue, I happen to stand with my back to them. I am shading my eyes with one hand, blinking back to where we've come from. And accidentally, I set my eyes something incredible: Way out there, at the horizon exactly, something is jumping. A whale breaching. I see water splashing and a tiny speck of dirt, it seems, having risen from the surface. It is the gigantic body of a massive mammal reduced by distance to a tiny dark blotch, only faintly more noticeable than one of those dancing specks of light at the surface of your eyes. The fact that I can see something at all at this distance means the thing must be of enormous size. As we sail our way, the animals catch up with us: We see they are two humpback whales. We see them breathing their characteristic fountains and watch them circling playfully around each other. The closest we get to pass them are about 10 yards. On the whole the beautiful two animals stay in sight for about half an hour, but they will be engraved in my memory for much, much longer.

Hitchhike to Timbuktu

2010-03-13T07:45:00.000-08:00

A while back I published a post called "Help...!" about some writings of mine that I lost in cyberspace. Bog be praised, I found them all safe and sound, archived by the website ws.geocities this drab Dutch afternoon after another despaired fit of rummaging the internet for my lost memories.

Let me just celebrate this moment of relief by posting an excerpt of one of the lost texts and tell you that the whole story is visitable here again, in all its former gore and glory.

That day was not a day of rest for the elements of the dessert. The day was one the air was astir. The wind was taking off the tops of the dunes and carrying them away, whipping the sand on, along the plains, and between the rise and fall of the landscape. It was a day the dunes were wandering. Travelling like us.

We had been stuck in the little place in the middle of nowhere for two days before we found a lift out -now on the road again, we got caught in a minor sandstorm. Translucent banners of sand could be seen waving, drifting off the crests of dunes. And even though the tops of each hill our 4-by-4 climbed were tall and set wide apart, you could not see beyond the top of the next hill, so densely was the atmosphere hung with dust.
The mountain range of Hombori hid in the mist like the silhouette of a fat snake having swallowed a hat. The dirt track we were gliding along on send off thick cloud-like mushrooms of sand in our wake, rising up into the air like a wall of smoke rising from a fire. Fleeing the ground to unite itselves with the wandering dunes. The sun lingered behind these yellow curtains of dust, feebly, sickly yellow itself, crushing the day with heat, a jaundiced juggernaut in the discoloured sky. It was still long hours but when it finally lost its blinding luminosity spilling over its limits, blurring its contours and eventually gained edges -that was when you knew it was about to set. It would soon simply be too weak to pierce the swaying curtains of dust. Then, violet twilight would descend unglamorously, rendering the atmosphere nothing more than more opaque and soon we were shook and knocked about in the dark. "It is amazing how the sky is so naked now" said Kati to me, but then, of course, one by one the stars came out and soon Cassiopeia had assembled herself straight ahead, right in our field of vision, humming her great M down on us. The moon in the meantime had hung up its waxing sicle backwards as is her habit down there, like some sort of sardonic smiley, so eery without eyes. Before midnight we stopped to spend the night.

When we got up in the morning, the wind had settled and over tea our eyes reached out to that long mountain ridge, clear cut and imposing in the early light, clutching the ground with broad elephant feet. It was to run parallel to our route this morning, those few hours of our bumpy ride, till the distance would begin to colour the red cliffs in our rear blue, and they they would start to become pure silhouette, ever shrinking. Fastening my gaze onto the former towering heights reduced by distance to those unspectacular zaggy slabs pressing to the ground -ducking from the greater, brighter blue of the vast sky- I watched their final dissappearance, becoming mere shadows, disturbances on the horizon, lurking behind, not even reaching up over the low bushes of the savannah.
And so, we made it to Timbuktu.

It is amazing how one country's proverbial epitome of a town at the end of the world is another country's bustling metropolis. Or appeared to be so coming from where we'd come from right then.
The place we had been stuck in had had one single dust-swept main street lined with six or seven stores, all with the same limited stock -hairgel, tea, biscuits, batteries- who refused to sell anything if you didn't have the right change. So now once again being on a tarred road felt uncannily like "being back", and when we were dropped off in the first village after the river where we were about to spend the night, we threw ourselves rapaciously onto the food stalls lining the street. "I'm going to spoil myself and splurge! Salad, mayonnaise, potatoes... I don't care even if I spend, like, -a dollar fifty!!" Kati flipped discovering the range of foods available.

My travel companions were also gifted story-tellers. Same story, different view point here: Through the eyes of Kat.

Eerily familiar

2010-02-17T07:03:00.000-08:00

There is something that feels like home in the diminishing light of a Northern European afternoon. The early orange lamps ablaze in the low blue glow of the winter sky. The pale faces of the travellers, like paintings projected twice, once right beside them, leaning their heads onto themselves, once in a distance out in the flatness of the fields. Deep green fields that are here and gone in a flash, a brief spasm of Dutch countryside.

Help...!

2010-02-04T02:35:00.001-08:00

Until not long ago I had a site called "About Africa" made with Yahoo Geocities. Geocities closed down their services and I did not recover my writings.

A part of me actually likes the loss -for it makes me appreciate the moments of inspiration and creativity, the process of writing, and not focus on the product. Because product it is, whether it is plastic preparation purchaseable in stores, or a punk song screamed into the microphone (or, as it happens to be, memories bottled up in words and sentences...).

Yet: If any of you computer savvy ones out there know a way to get back the content of my site please leave me a comment or send me a mail to my adress in the profile. at the adress http://www.about-africa.tk/ I had made the site using yahoo geocities. The geocities adresses used to be http://www.geocities.com/iris_neva/myafricawritings.html.
So far, I have tried archive.net and "the way back machine", but to no avail.

A great many thanks for any suggestions as regards my pages, so dear to my heart.

Cheerio

Cyax'

De Couch

2010-01-26T09:39:00.000-08:00

Formerly a night-club, this house has now become the designated place in town for travellers passing through to rest their weary heads. Rather than just offering respite, it has become a black hole of a place, the centre of which no daylight ever touches (there simply are no windows), and which sucks people in, spitting them out hours, or days, or months later, with an acute sense of temporal disorientation. "Time stops at the door", is what is said of this place. It is paradoxical, because there are so many clocks attached to the walls inside, but each of them is frozen at a different hour.

For the chronically insomnia-stricken like I it is impossible to tell, did I sleep two hours or fourteen? There is always voices in the living room, be it two in the morning or at eight, or at four in the afternoon. Noon may be the only time when quiet and black can be expected (but not guaranteed...).

In the past, before being turned into the squatted social centre that it is now, the place was one of the city's most notorious backstreet dives, a place that with time had got out of hand, and become a den for drug-dealers and mobsters. It was actually closed down after two men had their brains blown out in the men's room in what seemed to be members of the mafia settling old scores.
Right now, the men's room, cleaned out and refurbished, is converted into one of the rooms people live in, and it happens to be mine. I may loudly proclaim my gratitude to some ad hoc deity for the fact that I don't believe in anything like evil spirits.

After being left empty for over a year after the double murder, the old backstreet dive was turned into a squat. Occupied about two years ago, the original occupants of the place were Barry, Nadin and Giel.

Barry is a fellow traveller, a great guy who always has a serene smile on his face and who likes to try out different kinds of attires and headgear which lend him a completely different look every time.

Nadin happens to be the first person I ever met in the city of Leiden, back in June. She is a Reggae-loving gal with brunette rastas originally from Curaçao, today striving to make a living out of recycling rubbish into art. The way I relate to her can be summed up much like the Pixies song:I la-la-love that girl, as well as her funky new "family": the metal-loving boy-friend and the tender pair of cats, "Apple" and "Pie".

As for Giel, he is a lanky and tall hippy with long, platinum blond dreads reaching all the way down to his waist. His frame towers as high as the tall trees, and if he ever tries to hug you, he may just end up flinging his arms around himself, clasping the air above your head, because you just are too low to him.

The current inhabitants include Toni, a Welsh boy of imposing posture with cuddly teddy-bear paws, and his Swedish girlfriend Nina, who steps out of the dark cavern of de Couch in her number nine miner's boots (she wears what she finds).

Residents switch around a lot, though: One person who just left is Greg, one of the many travelers passing through, an almost infallibly happy-go-lucky guy, who yet is perspicacious and acutely observant, and whom we may forgive for this fact his Murkin origin.

Replaced he was by Rob, a bearded man from Scandinavia who with his glasses askew and beat poet books under the arm looks like an intellectual viking, and Tom, a Brit with stunning eyes and slender limbs, who is a musician and whose very gestures seem musical to me.

Slovakia

2009-11-07T01:39:00.000-08:00

Refusing to be ill and sit home, I did what you are never supposed to do: hitchhike while feeling poorly. Probably a fluke that the third lift I got after leaving Paris was one straight from somewhere in Southern Germany all the way to Slovakia. Feverish, I rode these 100s of kilometres, lapsing in and out of sleep. The last thing I remembered in Bavaria was a radio announcement that deer were on the motorway, then I snoozed all through Austria and when I was finally shaken awake, it was to the familiar hiss and lilt of a Slavic language.
I couldn't resist and celebrated the arrival in the new country with some zmrzlina quickly snaffled from the roadhouse café. A great word for a great thing: Zmrzlina means ice-cream. Listening closer to the language spoken around me, intelligible tatters of speech wafted over to my ears, some of them sounding like archaisms to the Russian-speaker's ear.
I was on the northern fringes of the continuum of mostly southern Slavic languages whose conspicuous absence of vowels inspired a nineties Onion article about Bill Clinton airlifting A's,I's and E's to the area since they were obviously in dire need of them. In reality, it is the letters "R" and "L", semi-vowels in English, which function as full ones here, I was told. That's how you get people with names like Vlk Trlin, which I would like to pretend was the name of my next driver, but that would be taking too much literary licence.

It took me three rides to get across the country, lengthwise. Each driver turned out more forthcoming than the precedent one. The first one bought me coffee, the second one bought me lunch, the third one dinner and drove a 80 km detour to drop me off at the border. Some 20 kilometers before it we sailed past a war monument. A first sign of the real East. "Russia is not very far from here", the locals said when we chatted with them at the garage where we stopped for tea. It was not without a certain degree of pride that my driver, a very knowledgeable man, sub rosa informed me that the country's actual name was now "Ukraine".

The penultimate small town before the border was called Lúcky. And, notwithstanding the errant accent, that's how I felt.

2009-10-04T07:28:00.000-07:00

We sit like Platon's ideals in front of our fickle, monstrously distorted shadows, projected behind our backs by the force of a single frail flame of a candle propped up in the sand at our feet. The thick traces of soot on the ceiling melt and morph like shapeshifting ghosts when you put your head in your neck. When you stare straight ahead the vault of the sky stretches white with starlight out from under this blackened, soot-smeared arch.
Mars is laboriously slowly making its way through Taurus. Along the frayed edge of a neighbouring mountain ridge a first corner of grey augurs the idle advent of the following day.

The inside of the cave echoes with the music produced by Pedro on his Hutsul dulcimer. There are no words for this beauty. These are the most wondrous, fairy tale-like sounds I've ever heard. Vasya sits beside Pedro, blowing the Jew's harp.

I absolutely wanted my new friend Vasya here with me when playing stone age in the cave city Mangup. With his long scraggy dreads that reach down to his waist and his wild, tangled beard which right now hangs seperated in two braids of different sizes from his chin, he looks the closest to a paleolithic man I have ever seen.

As for Pedro, his hair is shaved to what some call "an inverted monk", and an assymetrical one at that.

Livadia

2009-08-10T06:59:00.000-07:00

Livadia - Where the sea is the distance, and lies unreal, softer, softest, under a livid sky.

Under Quarantine

2009-06-27T12:13:00.000-07:00

Wies is 22 and still lives with his mum and dad. It may seem strange at first, but when you see how he actually lives, you understand. What he calls his home is a massive complex of houses, with a beach just at the back of his living room. Squatted in the early 80's by a group of hippies among whom his parents, the lodgings have been constructed in the 1920's as a hospital complex immediately opposite the international harbour Rotterdam. The idea was that sailors staggering onto land with their heads in the clutches of fevers brought about by vicious tropical diseases could be stacked away immediately from society at large. The street is up to this day called Quarantaineweg and neighbours are few and far in between.

What a luck that the day I made it there, I just happened to come down with swine flu. Perfect place to cough and sneeze and feel miserable.

The symptoms could be excrutiating: At every breath my aching lungs rattled like a beat-up toy car sent to lumber round the model race track one last time. The air wheezed in and out of my respiratory tract, crackling and going through my clotted windpipes like sludge moves through a sieve crusted with dried mud at the end of a long day of sifting for nuggets of precious metal in a silty river. And indeed the search would yield: From time to time my dried lips would part and spit out an half-liquid and amorphous marble of gold.

Whenever I decided I could get up now and drag my body two steps across the room, the plan was foiled at once: I'd have to turn round, plunge back into bed from instant exhaustion, and sleep would crash back over me in cold waves of fever and fatigue. Again I'd be paralysed in horizontal position, stapled to the bedsheets.

2009-03-29T08:13:00.001-07:00

By means of finger on world-map, we travel. We imagine the house we are going to move into in Kirgistan, imagine the fruit we are going to pick from trees along the streets in our village, imagine ourselves cook large pots of гречка for our house full of hungry hitchhikers. We push on the months by pure willpower and already follow the road we are going to hitch down to Tibet. Mountains tower up higher and higher before our inner eyes. Ultramarine blue lakes plunge deeper and colder between their tops. Our fingertips travel on and on, cross borders at random, get lost in Indian jungles and so rainforests are made to grow straight out of those Himalayan slopes, volcanoes appear in their place, rivers waver and whirl, become waterfalls, become a sea we sail across, and -clink- we are celebrating next new Year's Eve at the Equator. Our fingers retrace their path. Pages of my passport flash by and fill themselves with visas - long hours waited in queues at embassies, money, stamps, stickers, signatures -all here and gone in a flash.

Travelling with a large fish

2009-02-04T04:26:00.000-08:00

Hitchhiking came in the shape and colour you usually get it in Muslim countries: lifts within the blink of an eye, out of their way helpful and friendly drivers, quick kidnappings for improvised barbecues.

The roads were better and the donkeys alongside it not as beat up as those in Morrocco, or neighbouring Algeria.
The presence of well-fed and handsome odd-toed ungulates must surely be "proof that trickle-down economics really work. Even the lowest layer of society is reached!", as John remarked.

As far as tourist touts go, I learnt to say "no, thanks" in as accent-free an Arabic as I could master pretty quickly; John just professionally stuck to the old axiom that "silence is the unbearable repartee" (G.K. Chesterton said it first).

Despite his often eloquent pronouncements, travelling with a thoroughly monolingual Englishman is best likened to travelling with a large fish.
Whenever a local talked to him John just helplessly goggled with his mouth agape like a herring on land.

And although there were some pleasant moments on sandy hilltops (the things they call dunes down there) it can't be a compliment to Tunisia's natural sights when I say that I thought that the best bit of our trip was the night when we drunkenly snuck into the dinosaur park to have our pictures taken with nocturnal brontosauri.

Jebel-Al-Tariq

2008-12-12T12:41:00.000-08:00

After a snog goodbye at la Linea bus-station with that handsome Scottish lad I had befriended two days earlier, I was left to my own devices again and out on the streets another time.
The same afternoon in the marina I ran into a fashionably shabby looking guy with a backpack, one look on whom sufficed to make out that he was on the same mission as I -another someone trying to hidrostop out of Europe. Turned out he was Czech and lived on one of those squatted farms around Utregg and we had shared acquaintances. From easy chatting, it was thus an easy step to hospitality and I was invited along to join his camp, out on some sort of rubbish dump on the windbeaten side of the great rock whose foot we clung to. Czech boy had been there for two days, at first alone, then with an English bloke whom he met on the backside of Saypheway's, both of them bending over the bins to see what was being chucked away that evening. During the conversation all three of us had around our campfire that night, I got to find out "English bloke" was an ex-hell´s angel. Since hitting people over the head with iron-bars was part of the deal, he had done something like 8 years in prison. He had five daughters, from three or four different mothers, and because of his love for his offspring, he had, somewhat late in life, become a repentant Christian. Rarely do a wooden cross around one's neck and a facial tattoo go together, but here they did.
We ended up talking from moonrise to sunrise that night. The moonrise was blood orange red and sawtooth edged like a bad sign, the sunrise kitschy pink like the dawn of a new day.
Surrounded though by dead tyres and other rotten car-parts we may have been, these were for the moment shrouded in embellishing obscurity, and we felt we were truely in a beautiful spot, perched upon this ledge of rock jutting out over the sea with the waves crashing under us. In any case we had a grandiose view over the freighter strewn sea stretching from the Spanish coastline receding beyond the horizon to the outermost tip of morrocco vanishing in the haze.
As things came, we were to stay in that spot another four days more. And at the end of them our little crowd of three would have become a real party : our number augmented to five, night after night another person joining our little congregation by the bonfire which kept us warm.
On the evening of my second night (or Czech boy's fourth night) we were joined by a student from England. As I saw him in the darkness over the uneven territory carefully make his way over to us, carrying his bike on his shoulder, all this without shoes on, an alarm bell rang in my head: "uh-oh - hippy alarm!". Dunno if this was for the better or for the worse, but it actually turned out he had just had his 500 Pound shoes stolen as he was taking a shower, so he was in fact a perfectly gentrified type of lad. We chatted another night away and it turned out he was of Egyptian Coptic origin and on a trip biking from Hove to Senegal.
The third evening (on Czech boy's account that would have been the fifth) a Polish guy happening to amble past saw the glimmer of our cigarettes lit and came over to ask for a fag. He was on a hitchhiking trip from Warsaw to Swakopmund, if I recall correctly. We chatted among each other and we all got along jolly well.

We were nearing the end of the third week of December and the next day, we found a little christmas tree to put up in order to lend to our improvised camp a homely seasonal allure. Yes, you got it, happenings were getting just a little bit too outlandish and it was time we left.
And so that day, just in time for kismet to strike, Czech boy found an embarcation for both of us on a 30 metre Australian yacht sailing all the way to St. Nevis. On our last evening our bonfire was violently whipped to rags by the nightly wind and we figured it was going to be an uncomfortable night. But the worst surprise was in the morning because as a proper storm was breaking lose, we were awoken not by the soft blue light of dawn tickling with cool fingers on our eyelids as we had been the other mornings, but by the icy crush of ocean rollers breaking on the rock we slept on and swashing all over ourselves. We were drenched and each of us knew we couldn't stay there another night. So while Marek and I moved to our bunkbeds in the marina which were tiny but nonetheless dry and even sported crisp white sheets on the yacht, the other three adventurers set off to find a house to squat. Apparently they were lucky quickly, because they found an abandonned villa that day, with still some dry matresses and the ashes of their predecessors in it.
For Marek and me, the real trip began now : We were sailing the Atlantic.

Hitchhikers of the world unite

2008-12-07T05:19:00.001-08:00

Forgive me the, um, populist header, but it was after a good few days of intense communist conversation (stretching my wonky makeshift Turkish to its utter bounds) that I left Ankara and started carving an eastward groove out of the map.
The night before I had sold a stack of old, rancid books on a street market showcasing my superior bargaining skills: "How much do you want?" asked the book vendor, entering business with me mostly out of indulgence. "Urgh, um, five, maybe", I answered. "You mean fifty?" - "No, no, five" -and he handed me twenty lira.
The ticket was 19 so I had one lira to spend on a lavish dinner of a bag of nuts to nosh on while I was finally rolling due east on an Erzurum bound train tugging its tottering frame forward at snail speed.

In the morning I hitched on. I had already set my head on entering Iran so it was with a certain reluctance that I accepted an invitation, and that by midday only. But I always wanted to go to the Kachkar region in Turkey and that was where this little family were heading for precisely, just an hour north of my route. It turned out to be one of the most wonderful invitations I have had anywhere in Turkey. The house was full of smiling young mothers, all my age or younger, each with 2 or 3 incredibly ugly kids with crumpled red babyfaces. The village streets were roamed by doting mother cows lovingly licking their tousled, sleepy eyed young, and I discovered the gorgeous rocky surroundings of the village and a few kilometres on I was led down one alice-in-wonderland-like magical canyon of wondrous rock formations that I will never forget.

One day later I entered Iran. Hitching went very well -I found myself sipping on deliciously flavoured tea from a thermos in the first lift- so people turned out just as generous and hospitable as I always heard. Quite honestly after three years of wanting to come here, hearing more and more stories and building up expectations, I am prepared that almost anything can only be an anti-climax…

Limburg

2008-09-01T04:25:00.000-07:00

Off the plain, onto a trane. After half a year in the South, people's blue eyes mesmerize me. I sit and stare. I am under light shock. The marvelous little apparatus radiate. They gleam like the wavy blue insides of polished little marbles. Shiny and reflective they throw the light back like the surface of the sea at the cote d'Azure. Even adults have them.

These are the Netherlands, where people are as tall as trees, and houses small and rattly like shoe-boxes kicked about by kids. Where push bikes flit and whir through the narrow streets like metal insects on an automatic electric mobilé. The Netherlands, where peoples' skins are near translucent and blue veins pulsate their way from cheek to eye.

I'm on my way to Valkenburg near Maastricht. My friend Lynda from there is a singer. We've been friends for four years, since she picked me up hitchhiking one winter and subsequently invited me to one hell of a New Year's Eve party that her housemates still talk about to this day. I remember that it involved people getting all splatter-filmy-ish by engaging in a macaroni-and-ketchup fight, a girl burning her dress at midnight while wearing only high-heels and a slip, and a very memorable morning-after which I had written a story about at the time. It started off like this: "It was half past eight in the morning and I was still rushing along on that comet's tail of the speed spiked drinks I had had. The music was off and most of the drunken people had turned into alcohol corpses sprinkled over all the usual corners of the house, sofas and bathtubs and the like. Our after-party gathered on the first floor around the battlefield sight of a table crowded with dead souls (empty beer bottles), with everyone tapping their foot over some morning rhum and coke and looking out for that spliff to come their way..."

Anyway, back to present times. Maastricht hasn't moved an inch. It still sits on a narrow lapel of land called Limburg, which is a Southern extension of the Netherlands. With the French highspeed train TGV having yet become faster, Paris is now "nearer" than the North of the country from here. Limburg's people are very multi-lingual and even multi-cultural, I daresay. On open mike night in the café down the road songs are performed in four main languages; French, English, German and Dutch; with the last one being the least represented in the two hours that I am present to take the statistics. But the one or other song in Italian or Spanish is also thrown in.

The next day we hop across the border for a gig. Insiduously, almost imperceptibly, the architecture becomes a little charmless, all the while building materials stay the same (dark brown baked brick, white mortar). Street signs change. Apparently, Germany started just after that round-about before the garage we stopped at for Bifi sausages and Milka chocolate.

My friends are playing at a wedding party in a Greek restaurant. After having spent forty years together the couple decided to tie the knot officially. The crowd is good, starts to cheer straight after the first song. "Dutch crowds are lamer", Lynda says in the break.
I am having a good time, enjoying the music and the free alcohol at the bar. I offered to pay at the beginning of the evening, but the hosts just waved their hand and said "Don't you know the German saying that on every wedding at least one stranger should be invited?!". The kindness of strangers -it's true even in your own country.
In any case after plenty of beer and a shot or three of ouzo, I start having heated case conversations with complete strangers. One of them, exhibiting typical German modesty, tells me the following: "I am from Cologne, but I live in Aachen." (These two towns are less than 80 km apart.) "I live here, and I do my best to integrate: I try to speak the local dialect, I even do without my Kölsch and drink the local beer." When I say I just flew in from Turkey he comments on Turkish immigrants: "It's not only a case of demanding them to integrate, but of us being receptive to being integrated!"
I hear that and think of how much more instantly at home I can feel in this country, after the many conversations I had in the South with people bringing forth the be-all, end-all argument to really anything you say, "Biz Türküz".

Trip to North Ossetia

2008-08-13T04:28:00.001-07:00

A few years ago Russia made a rule that with regular tourist visas you could no longer visit most of the regions close to borders (except while provably on the way somewhere else)-since then for example Vyborg next to the Finnish border was off-limits to holders of foreign passports, but also all of the northern Caucasus range except Sochi. Just in the nick of time before these new regulations I embarked on a trip that took me from Mt. Elbrus to Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia.
It just so happens that the last thing I heard from there was "things are quiet as usual, except from the boom of warplanes coming from the South".

The first town in the Northern Caucasus that I visited was Kislovodsk which with its steep hills, leafy town-centre and pretty bridges over a lazy river was the one place in the world that reminded me most closely of my hometown, Baden-Baden. Needless to say I stayed only a few hours.

In that town however I got the first taste of a region that is a preferred Russian holiday destination. Superficially instantly endearing with its handsome towns and natural surroundings ranging from soft rolling hills to dramatic snowy mountainscapes, it seems quiet and relaxing, sometimes deceivingly. When my Norwegian friend Ivar had visited Kislovodsk a couple of years before me he had taken up the rack railway to a view point above the town -only to arrive at the top and hear that in the next carriage after them a bomb planted by Chechen rebels had killed some 15 people. And especially the next town I visited, Nalchik, capital of the republic Kabardia-Balkaria, should make cameo appearances on international news because of Chechen raids and other unrest in the years following my visit there. These were the symptoms of a low-key war that had been simmering -and continues to simmer- in the region for over a decade now and that hardly ever makes it into international spotlight. The biggest tragical incident, one that didn't confine itself to a "cameo" on foreign news channels, but one that positively shook the world, was to happen as I was still down there in the Northern Caucasus, although already a few hundreds of kilometres away from the location.

In Nalchik I stayed in a not far from the town centre. The room alloted to me was so dirty that my dust allergy obliged me to spend the night uncomfortably rolled up in the bathtub. Taking the extremely creaky and shaky hotel's lift for the first time had proved such a stirring experience that I didn't care to repeat it and henceforth took to sprinting up the stairs when I came back from a walk and wanted to lounge in my room on the 14th floor. The only detail of interest might be the hotels name, 'Nard', an allusion to a mythological race of giants whose adventures are related in the legends and sagas of the many Caucasian peoples, such as the Balkars the mountain people that live in villages on the foothills and in the deep-cut gorges of this region .

From Nalchik's towncentre the mountains are barely visible, reduced to ducking dark green shapes on the horizon. They are only a short ride away though, and as you approach them, delve into them on roads first dug, then dynamited into their flanks you are quickly transported into a world of towering rock inebriating any mountaineer by their sheer sight. Like many of their Caucasian brother peoples the Balkars are Muslims, and so on the way from your car-window you can see mosques with half-moon-topped onion-domed minarets; that is to say mosques with the physique usually attributed to orthodox churches, to all appearances buildings not converted but constructed that way.

As for me, I took public transportation to the village Dombay, a serious tourist trap where you can buy pairs of thick woolen socks from one of the plentiful souvenir vendors and then take two scarily shaky gondola rides up a to watch Mt. Elbrus, Europe's highest summit, sit perfectly stoically under an unbroken table-cloth of snow as thick white rags of clouds condense around it and veil and unveil the sight of it in a rhythm dictated by the wind.

On my way back I hitched a lift with a group of youths who were astonished I was hitchhiking, telling me 'It is so dangerous!', all the while making it a point of not putting their seat-belts on as we were curving down the winding mountain street at a serious break-neck speed... with a two-litre plastic bottle of beer being passed from mouth to mouth -including the driver's.

The next day I was on the road again, hitching out of Nalchik. Again a woman approached me telling me I shouldn't hitchhike here, since it was dangerous. She asked me where I was from and on my answer she gratified me with a lovely smile embellished by an entire front row of gold-teeth. Then a dark spasm flashed across her face: “I am from Chechnya. But you know, we had to leave. ”- “Are you Chechen?”, I asked - “No, Russian”; and she hung her head in sorrow.
With time I learnt that the tragically bruised are often quick to impart their grief this way.

It was a bad idea to hitch that day and I finally gave up and hopped on of the ramshackle buses coming my way.

Somewhere along that boring, pot-holed highway that leads in a straight line from Nalchik to Grozny, then a war zone, my bus made a stop-over in a lightless, non-descript town called Beslan. I remember watching a lady struggling to stuff the large plastic sacks she had by way of baggage into the luggage space before boarding; then the bus jerked back into motion and off we were.

About an hour later we took a right turn off the main road. Appearantly the road led off into the plain, but soon the electrocardiogramme-like irregularity of the horizon began to fledge out into proper mountains whose silhouettes were scragging the sky. We were approaching Vladikavkaz ,the city whose name translates as 'Ruler of the Caucasus'. The famous Georgia military highway starts here, connecting the capital of North Ossetia with Kazbegi and finally Tbilisi to the south. Many a famous explorer and poet have taken it before.

Since it has been long closed to foreigners though I had to content myself with strolling about the city itself. I wandered the pleasant leafy avenues along the riverside, engaging in the Russian summer pass-times of drinking slightly fermented Kvas sold out of rusty yellow tanks on the street, and sucking the salt off the husks of sunflower-seeds before cracking them open with my teeth. Thus entertaining myself I gaze into the snowcapped world that dominates all the open spaces of the city like parks and boulevards.

Hanging out on a bench somewhere, I started to talk to a group of youth. They couldn't believe it that I had just come all the way from Estonia via Pskov, Moscow and Volgograd. It had taken me just over two weeks, but a trip of such scope was beyond their imaginations. We chatted and as the evening moved on they invited me to dinner in a simple restaurant down the road and finally proposed I could come and stay at one of their houses. To celebrate the occasion we were going to stop by the shop and take home a few of bottles of vodka. In the perfect Caucasian pretense that drinking is only auxiliary to eating large chunks of cheese and bread were also bought along with the spirit, even though our bellies had been filled to more than satiety at dinner. Needless to say once at the apartment the foodstuff was heaped onto a plate in the middle of the table not to be touched once during the evening. We talked about everything and nothing in particular and at some point during the evening one of the boys said to me: 'You should come back in winter, then we could go snowboarding!'.

A day later, I took an overnight bus to Sochi, the spa town and tourist resort on the Black Sea coast which at the moment has its surrounding nature resorts destroyed because in the not too distant future will be in the spotlight for the Olympic wintergames. I spent a short few days lounging on its pebbled beaches, drinking ice-cool Kvas and making friends with two teenage girls who had come ten days on a train from somewhere in Siberia to stay for two weeks, enjoy the sun and get as much of a tan as possible so it could still be seen when they'd debark in their home town after another ten days' train ride home.
Then, one evening we watched the news together and I was shaken awake from my perception of the region I had just travelled through as only pretty and relaxing. The Khrushchevka-dominated hole of a town that my bus had stopped in that day before it dropped me off in Vladikavkaz had become instant famous. It's name would connote tragedy for many years, if not decades, to come.
It's name, of course, was Beslan.

The Craving

2008-08-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

The sun is blazing. Gypsy kids splashing naked in the fountain at Rustaveli Metro today. I've started to talk to an old man whose grey full beard and little blue marble eyes behind his pair of glasses have intrigued me for weeks now as I have been striding past him begging on Tbilisi's main avenue. He usually sits under a tree in the shade, somewhere across from another beggar, a histrionic lady in black, whom from time to time you can see sneaking out into a nearby back-alley for cigarette breaks. If I had to put my money on either of them as to who earns more a day I would without hesitation opt for the lady, whose perfectly shrouded figure strikes a very theatrical pose, with her left arm hugging an icon, the other hand laid palm open in her lap. The old guy's trick for attracting by-walkers' sympathies is less melodramatic, but equally cunning: in front of the little stool on which he sits is poised a large sign in four languages designed to deceive gullible tourists. It identifies him as a political dissident under some sort of duress from the Saakashvili government.
I've just started to realize that, just by giving him the time of day to as much as open his mouth, I've been had. It has dawned on me that I am in for a solid hour-long ramble if I don't act quickly, that if I don't escape now his tangents are going to pile up and up on each other, his elaborations are going to spiral out of control, his sentences are going to get longer and longer, and my nerves thinner and thinner. It was in this embroiled state of thinking about how to get out of this dilemma, when the craving hit me. A craving of a special kind. A craving for that toxic kind of extra-artificial lemonade of viridescent colour that probably only an Ex-Soviet country can sell as tasty to the masses. Tarragon Lemonade!

It is with an absent-minded naturalness as if a foreign force has taken hold of me that I politely get rid of my discursive dissenter and sleep-walk across the street. I just decided it's time to make it over there to check out that flashy supermarket I've been seeing sitting at the street corner, but never entered so far. Once I've penetrated into the shady cool of the interior, I walk the shelves and notice that, although there are almost 20 types of tea on display, this place is nothing as showy and class struggle inciting as the over-the-top shopping centres of Moscow; far from it actually. I am almost pleasantly surprised by the modesty of the goods on show -were it not for the glaring absence of exactly the type of lemonade I came to seek out among the Bebsis and Calocacos in the fridge. The poisonous green, plastic-flavoured, oversugary kind of lemonade that tastes off-putting the first time you try it, but to which you soon grow not only an irrational liking, but an outright addiction.
In fact right now I covete the chemical concoction as intensely as a chain smoker covetes her first cigarette after an overseas flight. My hands are almost trembling.

The result is that in the blink of an eye you can see me flying down Rustaveli avenue direction Chavchavadze checking out all the kiosks where they sell those squishy oily potatoe cakes you can eat on the run at lunchbreak, scanning their fridge shelfs in the back of the display for my poison of choice. Only when I have finally found it, -at an eatery in sight of Philharmony square-, torn off the plastic seal, screwed off the top, and inhaled its noxious smell particles deep into my infected lungs I pause and revel doe-eyed for a moment, in the gentle glow of satisfaction.

Good Riddance

2008-08-06T03:48:00.000-07:00

When, while travelling around the world, people ask me where I am from, I say 'the Black Forest', creating an imagery of wolfs and witches, and lots of trees to climb as a kid. Barring the last point, the reality is slightly more prosaic. Because even though the town I'm from is surrounded by slopes of pine forest dotted with lookout points affording lovely views, you will only see wolves' turquoise lozenge eyes lurking in the dark if you walk away from the camp fire some saturday night that you're on acid. Evil wizards wield their wands -the shape and size of pointers- in schoolrooms only, and don't produce magic so much as detention classes.

Anyway, Baden-Baden really is a peculiar place. Its average age must be higher than life expectancy in the rest of the country, and its mean yearly per capita expenditures must number in the hundreds of thousands. Yes, you got it: Baden-Baden is a natural habitat for millionaires and OAPs. And even though this townlet counts only 30,000 inhabitants, its name is widely recognized: In Georgia people know my town because their ex-president Shevardnadze has a villa there. In Russia or Armenia its appelation rings familiar because of a shoe-brand of the same name. In other places around the world people like to name kuaförs after it. Italians often know it because it counts as the Italian mafia's capital beyond the borders of their own country. And of course in languages around the world there are jokes about the place, like the Spanish ''Where have you been on holiday?' -'In Baden-Baden. And you?'-'I went to Villabajo de la Consuegra Villabajo de la Consuegra'.

The mafia connection -the fact that every single pizzeria across town is paying protection money, as an Italian schoolmate once told me-, is because we sport a large luxury laundrette of a special kind: our casino.

Lev Tolstoy, the great Christian anarchist, came here to gamble his money away. Dostoevsky, a minor columnist interested in crime and its conclusion, even scribbled together a famous story about compulsively playing roulette at those same tables.

Other Russians of true note were equally present: Turgenev's old residence reads 'This house is not a museum'; and Gogol came, and came back again and again, to heal his health at our sanatoria.

It is probably correspondingly that even today when I go to my local supermarket I hear five times Russian spoken (and maybe three times another Slavic language) before I catch the first snippet of German -from the woman on the till informing me it's 5,75 Euros, with a perfect Russian accent.

If not for Russian roulette and Italian ice-cream, Baden-Idem is famous for its hot springs. The finest of our public baths is the Friedrichsbad where you have to go in the nude and must show proof of being over 78 to enter (the easiest task for the majority of Baden-Idem's population most of whom saw the continents in the making). ''The bath dates from almost 2000 years ago, is located in an underground vault whose walls are ornamented by original Roman mosaics, and entry costs about 74 Euros'', I always tell when travelling. I may be exaggerating, though: not like I could go and check for myself.

During World War II Baden-Idem constituted a hideaway where wealthy Germans drank champagne and danced the charleston while in the rest of Europe bombs were falling. Ferdinand Celine chronicled this in his book 'North' which was based on his own experience of passing through the town at the time. But by no means everyone there lived the high life: My father, a simple wood trader's son, told me of those same times, of collecting edible chestnuts in the forests surrounding our town because there was no other food.

Forever a centre of conservativism, at the height of the 1968 revolution in Paris, Charles de Gaulle took his whole family to Baden-Idem, probably taking the first steps in case he'd have to make a run for it should the hippies take the upper hand at home. His token reason for the trip was to speak about the crisis with General Massu, Algerian veteran and then chief of the French forces stationed in the region since 1945.
The French army stayed up until my own childhood, the French quarter of town just across the river from our house. Before the troops left at the very end of the 1990s I myself had time to kiss French boys as a young teenager. The black ones were especially a hit with us girls. We didn't really have Germans of any other colour than the lame old white in our town at that time. (Cosmopolitanism of the coloured kind taking foothold only surprised me when I came back to visit my family a few years after I left!)

At the turn of the century I got kicked out of highschool which gave me the stimulus to run and leave the place in a trail of dust behind. Whenever, once every year or so, I now go back there, I open the newspaper and find stories that capture the spirit of the town all too well, stories like these: 'After a shoot-out between different mafia-members in front of a disco which left four of the participants dead and two by-standers wounded, one of Italy's biggest mafia-bosses, Paulo Aureliano, was captured last night.' or
'Last night the octogenarian Baroness of Windeck was found dead in the masterbedroom of her manor. She had been murdered with 14 knife wounds while she was sleeping. The police are puzzled about possible motives: Not only nothing was stolen, but on the table next to her bed a stack of money notes amounting to more than 20,000 Euros were left untouched.'

Tugs and Hisses

2008-07-01T04:04:00.000-07:00

When I first arrived in Tbilisi I fell into one of those golden cages of hospitality which in Georgia, due to the country's drinking habits, most closely resemble black holes. For two weeks it was cosy and merry at Azelma's and Shako's place, but when I was finally spat out again from the intense gravitational field of daily inebriation that their home represented, I decided it was time to search for a more permanent place to stay. Thus, I went through the following row of adventures:

After trying to rent a room with an elderly lady who forbade me to touch the tea-pot "lest it explode", or take a shower without her supervision, I crashed one night at the house of an amiable elder Japanese man who spoke Georgian, Russian and French, but none of them enough to comunicate; then I stayed a few nights at my friend Mtvarisa's, who, along with other former refugees who refuse to be bought out, still has a small room in an old athlete's home, assigned to her family when they fled Abkhazia over 15 years ago; and finally, I found a new abode: I now have a room in a dinky family home around the train station.

It is a dodgy part of town where mini-tornadoes form towers of dirt in the air and the wind whirls up the rubbish and chases it down the street before me as I walk home. Fat men in yellow shirts follow me from the metro exit and mumble "Haven't I seen you here before?" in my ear, which is code for "how much are you?". Indeed the whores cost less than two Euros around here I was informed ("No, prices have already gone up", corrects the chatty lady on night duty at the chemists').
When Shako and Azelma lived down the road, the scuffles on the street frequently got so noisy that Shako once felt impelled to stop the nightly disturbance by emptying a pot of cold water on the louts from his third floor balcony.

Meanwhile the 'boudoir' I have been allocated is a stuffy, rectangular chamber whose size is yet diminished by the tall bookshelves obstructing its walls. They are impressive in both size and garniture: The crème de la crème of European classics seem to be crowded onto them. Their natural alphabetical order has been partially disrupted only by the last earthquake I am explained.
The lodging has two beds, the other one of which is warmed at nights by a hefty Georgian spinster around fifty who gets up before dawn to sell washcloths and potholders on the market, then comes home around nine to watch Brazilian telenovelas on the flickering telly in the kitchen and forthwith drop to sleep. I, meanwhile, make good use of our room's paraphernalia and sit and read in the fading evening light by the window in the hall.

The family who rents out to us is constituted of mummy, daddy, two teenage boys and a tottering old granny who was especially quick to take me to her heart: ""Какая ты глупая -что ты хочешь опять, придурка? И какая ты неряха -Ты же женщина! Женщинам надо всё убирать! Женщинам надо аккуратно быть! Очевидно, чем-то тебе не хватает в голове. Ты просто помешанная...
Когда ты уедешь?"

Au Diable Vauvert

2008-06-27T04:55:00.001-07:00

Kars is a lightless town where the few rays of sunshine that reach it are swallowed by the black basalt architecture that has been sitting motionless, holding its ground, since the hoary times of Russian occupation. At the foot of the horse statue at its town centre, tiny street boys with grown-up macho manners squirm under the burden of their superstition as you pat their heads and tell them how cute they are before you don't let slip that saving "mashalla". You're only having them on, you'll finally buy one of those pens or packets of tissue that they sell out of these rough cut hands that should belong to adult craftsmen, not to creatures with such squeaky little voices.

Kars even has its own "village idiot" (as she was presented to me), a strumpet called Sultan, famous all over the place for her appearance. You can't help but notice when the Russian entity strides past you on the main boulevard: peroxide blonde, garish make-up (thick powder on her nose making it look plastic-like, a lipstick as pink as you would not even choose your baby daughter's playthings to be), and clothes that have her boobies bouncing out as if there was a dwarf beneath them juggling with wobbly globes three times his size. At this point you may well find yourself unintentionally exclaiming "Jesus Christ, I have never seen a prostitute before!".

At the end of the day, more or less recent literary fame notwithstanding, Kars is a bland, unexceptional town at the centre of barren flatness. A quick escape should be appreciated.

Back in the USSR

2008-06-23T06:03:00.000-07:00

So it is from there, from the desolate remoteness that Kars represents, that once more I take the winding road up to greener pastures. To where the lands rise in lush greenery, and where, in June, snow still lingers in the distance. My final destination, the sleepy border town of Posof, clings flatly to a plateau above terraced lands where barley, wheat and fodder crops are cultivated. Some of the last farmers riding out to their fields on the ox-carts which are traditional here can be seen sometimes.
On the other side of the depression at our feet, a red rock karst formation rises picturesquely above steep, densely forested slopes. In short, here is a lovely place.

From the town centre I start ambling out, along the dirt road leading East. Except for a flock of turkey hens absent-mindedly picking the ground around their blue headed and red necked turkey cock, boastfully fanning out his bronze tail-feathers, the area around the exit of the town seems deserted.

It is only ten minutes later, that, as if by magic, a lift comes along: I make the 14 remaining kilometres to the border gate with an Iranian lorry driver. It is a short ride, which involves a quick stab at trying to remember some of my Persian, - which except "ne mixorim" -"I don't eat", is bound to utterly fail- , but smacking on the piece of banana chewing gum that I really could not decline is just enough to stir some sweet memories from the time I spent travelling in my driver's beautiful country.

I arrive at 10 Minutes to six, just before the border guards were about to close the gate. Before stamping my passport, the lads in uniforms wave me inside for a share of the grilled meat and cucumbers they are having for dinner. "Eat more, eat more" they press me on in typical sincere Turkish hospitality. One of them especially seems to have become slightly enamored with me, for he walks me over to the Georgian side, and on the way asks me for my home number and says "we'll talk on the phone, I'll call you every day, and maybe, just maybe, we will marry after, ... if you agree, of course!"
This kind of marriage proposal, though quaintly amusing in its own right, certainly is not going to be the one taking the cake in the yet-to-be written memoir of a single female traveller. The funniest border guard in this sense must have been the Syrian guy who, hoping for a fuck in the park, indecisive whether to ask me the rather impolite "Are you (a) virgin?", or the improbable (in his eyes) "Are you married?", got all muddled up and ended asking me "Are you Virgin Mary?". I, by the way, chose to forego an answer.

In any case I only smile kindly back at the Turk, then cross the lines and bid him adieu (on Judgement Day there'll still be time to change my mind, right?).

On the other side the single female traveller is equally welcomed with over-eager smiles and, this time, a lie: "It's too late now no busses go to Tiflis anymore!" 'Luckily for me', the border guards can care for me, though: Again I am invited inside, invited to food, but no thanks, I'm full this time. "You can stay here. Consider this a hotel: there are 13 rooms up there. And tomorrow we'll find you a straight lift to Tiflis" Hmm... if I was just another rough traveller jumping at free accomodation and food, maybe,... but I am on a mission this time, so: No.

I actually find a lift to Akhaltsikhe, the first town after the border, about 30 km from here, with a young border official on her way home. And, she tells me, if we speed up a little bit, I might just make the over-night train to Tbilisi. As we rumble uncomfortably over the unasphalted, potholed tracks cutting through a couple of villages on the way, I remark to myself that the scenery of the sequence of habitations didn't really change all that much from their Turkish counterparts, except that here female hair is not only shown, but dyed a failed blond, and the fingernails a lacquered red.
Meanwhile dusk is descending on us all, thereby transforming the sky as if by enchantment into what seems like an immutable impressionist sunset painting, rose, orange, red. Since this immutability of course is an illusion, soon the colours fade into black: As we finally make it to the train stop (rather than "station"), were it not for the full moon spookily lighting the scenery, we would be pitched in perfect darkness.

The 'train' actually consists of one single, run-down wagon. The eight hour journey costs me four Lari, which amounts to about a pound twenty. Correspondingly, the bone-shaker moves so slowly that a jogging dog could easily outrun it. The lamps inside keep flickering on and off -when we attain the speed of light of about 15 km an hour they light steadily for a while, only to fall back into flickering as soon as we slow down in approaching a bend. The neon-lit crosses that beam in the night from the darkened hillsides of the Lesser Caucasus and the alcohol breath rising from the pallet below me make sure I am aware I am definetely outside of Turkey this time.
Soon sleep will swallow me up.

In the morning I find myself rudely awoken by the train attendant -I'm back in Tbilisi.

Yaylalar (Summer Meadows)

2008-05-31T04:03:00.003-07:00

The ride begins like any ride up to a Yayla - ever further from the city, ever further from the river gushing at the base of tall trees, ever further, ever higher, creeping round the hairpin bends, towards the mountain tops coloured a misty blue.
Up, up, until you can go no further, until cool winds caress your face and, in a curious reversal of realms, according to a mysterious symmetry of annihilation, the world below has become an azure haze.

Easter Celebrations

2008-05-06T05:32:00.000-07:00

Traditionally Easter Sunday in Georgia (which according to the Gregorian calender is about a month after the Western holiday), is observed by dressing in black, going to church at midnight and hollering your eyes out in mourning for the dead.
My friends and I celebrated the ocasion rather differently: we went on an outing in the greenery around Tibilisi. We drove up one of the roads winding up the green, rocky hills at the centre of which the sinuous streets and Soviet monuments of Tiblisi are spattered so amorphously, up to a friend's dacha, or summerhouse, for Barbecue and ღვინო (ghvino, or Georgian wine).

I have long wondered about this obstructive gh-sound (ღ) so indescribably difficult to pronounce for a foreigner, which sits at the beginning of this word whose following syllables otherwise seem all too familiar for a speaker of the large neighbouring Indo-European language. An acquaintance of mine analysed it the way that it is probably an attempt to capture the initial consonant of the word in whatever language Georgian borrowed it from, as with the Welsh gw- or the Greek oi-.
At the same time, isn't Georgia proper supposed to be the cradle of winemaking itself, so wouldn't they also maybe have invented the word for the potable, and it was us foreigners who chose to do away with that rough projection
of a sound at the beginning of a beloved product? A linguists will know the answer.

During that sunny afternoon on the lofty altitudes, drinking glass after glass of this sweet amber homebrew that comes out of old Pepsi-bottles and flows down the gorge like warm butter, I came to a different analysis: I think the ღ might simply be onomatopoeic. Because after a few glasses of this unsuspiciously sweet and spicy liquid that still retains a decisive taste of the grapes it is made from, suddenly, unexpectedly, it will wrench off your head as if a well-oiled garrote had been jerked into motion. So I think the letter ღ may simply be an anticipation of the crack your neck is going to emit at that point.

The sea-breeze started to blow colder as the sun went down and, although we were already swaying in our seats from the swell, we followed up the wine with a bottle of vodka, its content translucent and luminous as the beams of the full moon that had began to lay its eery light on our faces, and pure and biting like a splash of fresh spring water.
One slop of the crystal clear spirit down my gullet sufficed to erase my consciousness completely, cloak all following events in dense darkness. Because how many hours later, and how exactly we made it home, I don't know.
But wake up in the middle of night in my bed, next to a puddle of well-digested chicken and leek the colour of marmelade, I did. Outside of my door I heard Azelma and Shakro quarreling noisily. I stumbled outside, begging for help to clean up the mess in the room. I was still too drunk to make use of my gross motor skills in that way.
After my sheets were changed, and my head had cleared sufficiently to wipe the floor, we decided to sit down and have a cup of tea before going back to bed. Azelma
and Shakro couldn't lay their argument to rest however. After Azelma went to bed alone, sulking, Shakro, still drunk, tried to persuade me to sleep with him. Bleeding Georgian men again.

To heal our hang-overs on Easter Monday, we opened a 2 litre bottle of beer straight after breakfast (which was around lunch time anyway). There simply is no better medication:Quaffing large quantities of low quality Georgian beer from plastic bottles worked wonders for my dried-out brain which was agonizingly rasping at the inner walls of my skull for lack of liquid. It also took away the overall pain in my muscles, the feeling of having been beaten up by an army of Lilliputian strongmen working from underneath my skin. After the first few glasses, I felt like myself again.
We spent the day watching trashy horrorfilms where people had their eyes poked out with biros, their brains
exploded by screw-wrenches that were introduced into their mouths, and where husbands were strangled by small intestines slung around their necks pulled out from their wives' bellies. All in all another cosy day off.

The problem came the day after. I am a journalist after all. I am here on business. I had an appointment for an interview at noon the next day, which for me is a difficult endeavour on regular days, but on the second day of hangover after two days and nights of Georgian style drinking, peeling myself out of the bed sheets at 11 proved especially difficult. I put the kettle on, took a shower, put on the neatest clothes that I have and that vaguely might be considered professionally looking, rushed back to the kitchen, made a cup of coffee and one of strongly caffeinated green tea, did something to my hair in front of the mirror in the hall, and then realised there was no time to so much as even put my lips on one of the still piping hot mugs I had prepared. So I washed out an old nescafe tinpot into which I poured the black-brackish solution of instant coffee. For the tea I took an empty cola bottle, and off I was. Only in the metro I noticed I had had better to wash the latter one out, too, for the liquid was opaque with minuscule disgusting floaters. No sane human being would have dared to even sip at the concoction. But I had no choice. So I drank it.

The interview went just fine.

Safety Hitchhiking Guide to Turkey (for Girls)

2008-04-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

I have been toying with the thought of writing a female hitch-hiking guide especially for Turkey for about a year. It was the recent killing of Italian peace-activist and hitchhiker Picca Bacca has startled me into action.
I am dedicating this article to her.

At first I thought it is pointless to put so much time into formulating a longwinded article about an obscure topic such as this, since surely not a lot of people are going to read this. However with the experiences I have from months of solo-hitchhiking around Turkey, I feel there are a lot of tips I can give to others who want to set off into this amazing beautiful country in which in the end I still feel entirely comfortable.
Maybe some people other than the strict target group -girls setting off hitchhiking around Turkey- will read it for the whiff of adventure they get from armchair travelling...

Here it goes:

Turkey is a country of stunning natural beauty and of exceptional hospitality. However, for female hitchhikers, single or in pairs, I recommend certain areas only for experienced hitchers who have been in a certain number of situations before and feel comfortable about keeping the right attitude up. The main problem in Turkey for hitchhiking women is the presence of exceedingly large numbers of prostitutes. Because the prostitution situation is comparable in the Balkans, in my opinion the tips that I will give are also valid there.

Some of the tips may even come in handy for a guy. On an internet hitchhiking list a Turkish hitchhiker gave the following tip to solo male hitchhikers: "[In Turkey] truck drivers are really hospitable, but it is clever to talk about your girlfriend even if you dont have one. Guys here are very openminded and will sometimes make proposals to you."

There is such a thing as beginner's 'luck'-when I first breezed through Turkey by thumb from Hakkari to Istanbul I was on a natural high from the sheer beauty of the country and had only laughs for the dodgy truck drivers. I intuitively did and said the right things to make it all turn out right. However, as any hitchhiker should know, intuition and luck don't always add up that way.

Before continuing to read this article at first make sure you have read http://girls.hitchbase.com/ -although I may repeat certain things said there to drive home certain points more assertively I generally assume 'knowledge' of the things mentionned there and build on them.

1st: In Turkey some regions are dodgier than others. What are they?

As a woman you should be most careful in the North-East, and the entire Black Sea region, which is where those Russian ladies, who arrive in scores to earn money as prostitutes, debark first and hence are present working in larger numbers than anywhere else.

Other regions that are dodgy are the main arteries around Ankara (including Istanbul-Ankara) and the Istanbul-Bulgaria highway. The reason for this is that these roads are the most frequented by heavy loads -i.e. professional drivers- and thus also preferred by prostitutes.

The following tips are tailoured especially to the North-East and the roads around Ankara. If you don't want the hassle of being taken for a prostitute, just take busses. Don't panic, the following tips are valid for other regions of Turkey only to a certain degree!

By the way, even though most Turks will tell you that you should avoid the South East or the East in general this is certainly not true. The people inhabiting this region, the Kurds, are poorer and have historically been brigands, and it is because of internal Turkish racism that they still have a bad reputation up to this day. I assure you it is entirely ill-deserved. I have a deep love for the Kurdish people and I guarantee that you will have the warmest experiences in their heart-wrenchingly beautiful region.

Don't get me wrong though: I am not telling you to blow all warnings by locals to the wind. On the contrary when talking about the 'immediate' surroundings (the surrounding 150 km or so) the locals in Turkey usually have it right if they warn you to be careful in a certain area: the only time that I got near getting raped was when I decided to visit some villages up a beautiful, deserted canyon near a very touristy region, self-assured that nothing would happen to me even after three groups of people seperately from each other had warned me not to take that road, making throat-cutting signs to get their point across. Don't be as stupid as me, don't ever think you are immortal: When I met a German-speaker later on he told me that 4 Dutchmen had been thrown off an a few kilometres high rock only a year earlier.

By the way, I do know from police statistics that by far the most dangerous spot in the entire country of Turkey is tourist hot spot Alanya -way outdoing either of the twin capitals! Not something your regular charter tourist agency would like to become widely known, but let me tell you that to encourage you to visit the more out of the way regions!

This is off-topic but worth mentionning: For entirely different reasons do also avoid (at all, not just for hitchhiking!) the regions of Tunceli and Şirnak-Hakkari; travelling there right now you are exposed to a great risk of being kidnapped by the PKK (or by Turkish undercover police who want to shed a bad light on the guerrillas!).

Back to hitching: It is lamentable to say, it does not matter what you wear or just how big your bag is, on these roads, drivers will take you for a prostitute. Even men with children in the back have stopped, solliciting me for sex. Once even a man who to all appearances was in the company of his wife stopped and made a direct 'appeal' to me -he spoke in Russian to me which I assume his wife did not understand!

It is maybe an advantage that at a first approach you may look like a guy, but as soon as the drivers see who is entering the car this will probably change. In winter looking like a guy may well be manageable, but in hot summer weather it is certainly impracticable/impossible to dress up like this.

Incidentally, I have even tried hitchhiking in full hejab gear (headscarf, body fully covered), or in the company of a kid, but neither of this did prevent inappropriate men from coming on to me.

The police may from time to time approach you as you stand by the roadside. Just act like you have nothing to hide, say openly that you are hitchhiking, state your route, cooperate in showing your passport and you should be fine. Even if you were a prostitute putting your thumb out is hardly any incriminating evidence against you.

Contrariwise it is entirely your behaviour which will govern those of your drivers. These days I hitchhike with a small bag and wear clothes which give away my gender (I do recommend un-sexy and trousers though), but I have less hassle with Turkish drivers because of I have internalised the behavourial techniques more completely.

One simple advise straight ahead: Stay clear of truck drivers. This is because a) They are the main clients of prostitute, so that is definetely what is on their mind when they stop; and b) in a truck you cannot just pull the hand-brake and easily jump out if the driver is driving to a deserted area (you don't have to worry about that in Europe, but in Turkey this commonsensical consideration needs to be applied!)

From far-reaching experience, I also have come to the appreciation that more upper class drivers tend to be politer: Look at what brand of car, and whether it is clean, not dusty etc. and try to stop these specifically.

In Turkey drivers stop very easily, so don't worry about being picky!
It is even possible to apply the technique of only accepting lifts with women, although it may (sometimes considerably) prolong your waiting time. I have explained how to do this before here, but I will reiterate: It is definetely difficult to judge from a distance whether in a car speeding past there is a woman, but generally women rarely drive in Turkey, so punctuatedly try to stop cars in which more than one person is sitting, and chances are high a woman will be among them. If the car stops and there are only guys in there, just politely decline the lift. Do feel free to tell people that you are only accept lifts with women since this gives a clear message that you are acting responsibly and are out to travel and nothing else.

Strangely, there is something in the way a driver stops which makes you understand clearly whom they are stopping for -a hitchhiker or (someone perceived as a) prostitute. If people stop for a hitchhiker, they take a long time to slow down and will usually bring the car to stop at a fairly large distance from you. If men stop for who they think is a prostitutes this happens quickly and assertively in a quickly executed turn to the side of the road! But even these men you can turn into forth-coming gentlemen with the right technique:
Make up a story that ties your sympathies to Turkey -the Turkish diaspora is large in a lot of countries so for example a Turkish boyfriend back home is a perfectly plausible story. This will endear you to your drivers and they will try to show you the best side of their country they can.

For a while I kept telling people who gave me lifts that I had just missed the dolmuş (minibus) to this or that destination. This is slightly illogical in a country with the flawless public transportation system as Turkey has, but it works very well to make clear to people that you are a travelling to get somewhere and not 'looking for work'. I finally grew tired of lying so I don't tell that story anymore, but I do think it is a good idea for others. The phrase 'Usually I wouldn't hitchhike but I thought I'd give it a try...' works well (shows that you are naive and not aware that this might be something prostitutes might do), but at the same time you should insist that that in your country it is totally normal to hitchhike and that you feel perfectly safe. For a hitchhiker -for a guy or a gal, in Europe or around the world- it always puts you in a weaker position to admit any kind of fear: this is strictly inadvisable!

As you see communication is essential. This is generally true for all hitchhikers but especially for single women. I have hitchhiked in over 50 countries but I still do feel uncomfortable all over again if I have to do it in a country where I cannot at least to a certain degree make myself understood. I disrecommend hitchiking without being linguistically prepared. Before setting off, get down the basics of a language. It also adds to the fun mind you!
At this point maybe I should mention that of course you cannot expect drivers to know English or other European languages in Turkey. In touristy areas Turks are astonishingly talented and sometimes speak several European languages accentless without ever having been outside the boundaries of their own country, however, this does not apply to the regular village people who are the ones most likely to give you lifts. I cannot repeat this enough: it is essential to have a certain set of phrases ready. I will add a short hitchhiking glossary at the end of this. With faltering Turkish you will still be able to express what beautiful an impression Turkey has made on you: you won't have to pretend! Don't be afraid of overegging the pudding, just keep repeating how beautiful Turkey is and how hospitable its people are. This will also endear you to people and bring out the best in them.

One of the most important things to know is the following: As elsewhere in the Middle East the question 'Are you Russian?' (Rus musun?) means 'Are you a prostitute?'. (The same counts for the question 'Where are you from?' ('Neredelisin?') followed by the answer 'Rusya'.) In the case that you are actually Russian, unfortunately I'll have to strongly recommend to lie about it! Even if you are from a different Eastern European country it may be a good idea to lie about it: Best thing is you are ('are') from a well-known rich Western country, say, Germany. Usually I would feel flattered if someone thought I was from one of those Eastern European countries like Russia or Bulgaria that I love so much (especially considering the gross German accent I have when speaking Turkish!), but, however lamentably, and as silly as this sounds, I keep pounding on about the fact that I am not Russian, nor Bulgarian or Armenian, but German.

To illustrate this point I will narrate one (of a total of two!) unsavoury situation I got myself into and point out the mistakes that I made:

It is sometime last summer, in South-Western Anatolia: I had waited for a long time in the boiling heat on the wind-swept dusty outskirts of a faceless provincial town when a dirty grey Volvo stopped. I asked the guy where he was going, his answer was 'Doesn't matter, just get in!' Already a clear sign that he was up to something fishy.

He insisted even after I had declined several times -all too obvious a sign he was up to something bad! Really a classic case of when not to get into a car. There is such a thing as becoming too self-assured -it had happened to me at that point. How many drivers had I turned from dodgy to polite and generous hosts with my 'hitchhiking skills'? Countless ones. But this case really bears out the basic principle mentionned on the regular http://girls.hitchbase.com/ site: Trust your instinct, and if you have a bad feeling, do not under any circumstances get into the car.

The way the story proceeded is scary: We drove several kilometres along the main road to a sort of perfunctory service station where a single lorry was parked. Even this was just off the main road, not one car or inhabited area was around. I could have started running but how far could I have gone on my mere feet? The driver of the lorry got out of his vehicle and as he came walking towards us he yelled 'Where is this girl from?'-actually a rhethorical question: He expected me to be Russian. I, loudly, shouted my answer: 'Almanya!' ('Germany' ) which was enough for him to get back into his driver seat and drive off. The first guy left too, and there I was hitching like usually again.
The next person to give me a lift materialised quickly. It was an absolutely gentlemanly nice lad who ended up buying me lunch at the next village.

There is one more thing I want to say: Obviously it is desirable to avoid sexual advances from drivers not only because it may be dangerous, but simply because it is annoying and lowers your spirits. As I mentioned, the first few times I hitched around Turkey I managed just fine even despite the constant hassle with men, because of what I call ''beginner's impetus''. The pure excitement of movement and seeing new places that makes you oblivious to the dodgy stuff around you.
However after I had spent another month in the country I became increasingly irritated by always being taken for a prostitute.
After three months hitchhiking experience in Turkey, the most important trick in my opinion is the following: Stay entirely cool as you approach a car. It is a natural reaction for any hitchhiker to be excited when a car stops, so this maybe trickier than it sounds. Don't smile and ask very dryly where the driver is going, then ask matter-of-factly if it is not a problem if you go with them.
Only when I had perfected this coldness before getting into a car, I found myself consistently 'unharassed' by male drivers, so I think this simple technique is the most important one!

I want to end this article on a good note so I will relate a short, well-remembered hitch-hiking episode from Turkey; it is very hard to pick a favourite hitchhiking memory, but one I have not yet written about is the following: I was putting my thumb out outside of the town Fethiye from where I was going to the airport in Antalya, about 200 kilometres away. It was to be my last day as I was going to buy one of those cheapish charter tickets for as soon as possible and make my way home to Germany. Staring at the empty street I was just about to tell myself that I was in for a long wait when a car stopped with two young guys and a gal in it -apart from families the perfect sort of combination of people with whom I feel entirely comfortable. About the second sentence we exchanged was 'Have you heard of hospitality club?' and from then on I knew I was right in my place. They themselves were on a holiday outing and thought it would be fun to invite me along. In this way I ended up going with them to the absolutely spectacular natural sight of Saklıkent canyon which is too impressive for words to describe. We bathed in its icy waters and afterwards had delicious fish dinner and tea in an amazing setting (a treehouse restaurant) where we led long inspiring conversations.

The day after I hitched along the same road again and got a straight lift to the airport (!). Nine hours later I was on a flight to Berlin, smiling happily to myself about this extra day that had fallen into my lap so unexpectedly. Could I even have dreamed up a more beautiful ending to my trip?
It still remains an outstanding memory.

A Short Turkish Hitchhiking Glossary (pronunciation is straight forward I think):

Nereye gidiyorsunuz? -Where are you going?
Ben o taraf'a gitmiyorum. -I'm not going that way
Ben ...'(y)e gidiyorum. -I am going to...
Türkiye çok güzel, Türkler çok misafirperver! -Turkeyis very beautiful and Turks are very hospitable!
Benim erkek arkadaşım Türk'tür. -My boy-friend is Turkish.
Ben Rus değilim. -I am not Russian.

2008-03-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

I talk too much. I told Murat that pretty much the entire rest of the world calls that part of the world ‘Iraqi Kurdistan’ and that only in Turkey the media flinch at the thought and circumnavigate the issue by calling it ‘North Iraq’, and now he duefully repeats it, telling people I am heading to ‘Kurdistan’. At first I find myself pleased by his quick acceptance , but then things go quicker than you can say Jack Robinson and I think he may have said the word one time too many. Suspicion arises. Might I be one of those pernicious Kurdish sympathizer? Murat’s boss sits me down and even though I decline the first offer he urges me several times to have a coffee so I will sit there for a little longer and we will ‘chat’ –which means of course he is poking about in my innards with a few questions: What exactly am I doing in Sivas? -I think I will go to the turist ofisi and ask for a broşür is my answer. Oh, I love history. Yes, I want to see the historical buildings in this town. Was I appeasingly vague enough? Seems not.

As I enter the tourist information the place is peopled by a couple of superfluous looking guys in suits. That’s how quickly you get to meet the secret service in this place. As I pick up my map of the town, one of the guys tells the office clerk, as if by chance, to take my name and occupation. Not a journalist hopefully? No, a student –what subject? In a slip of the tongue I say politics. I might have done better by steering a bit further away from the truth. Biology would have been a nice innocuous topic I could have shown interest in. Not only has it never happened to met to be asked identification in a Tourist Office, because I can’t possibly find my way around town someone is sent with me. I say it’s ok I’ll be fine but he insists: ‘’No, problem.’’ After we reach Gok Madrassa, the town’s main attraction, I say ‘you surely must get back to work, don’t you?’. ‘Yes’, he says, ‘I’m not as lucky as you; I’m not on a holiday.’ But he stays.
That’s how I get my own private itihbarat agent for the afternoon.

I want to sit down and have a çay between the venerable old walls of this former Islamic school. My personal spy reaches for his wallet and says he’ll pay. ‘You know our formidable Turkish hospitality - as long as you are with us you never have to pay’ he attempts kindness. When our tray comes, I renounce sugar and sip on the bitter red brew watching his strange manner of stirring the sugary dishwater that passes for coffee here; he holds and moves the spoon as if it was some kind of miniature shovel with which he was scraping off the sediment at the bottom of a muddy brown miniature lake. Next to it the angularly lego-like structure of the sugar bowl rises like a snowy mountain. Like a wandering celestial body the red glim of the cigarette rises from ashtray to mouth. Rises like a sun, and sets again.
When our different coloured lakes are slurped empty, the single red sun dies and only the mountain still remains, it’s time to move on.

'Before we visit the museum, let’s buy your ticket out of town', suggests my friend-for-the-day. He wants to make sure I’ll move North West, as I seem to have decided, not to Dersim as I initially stated. At the beginning that was my plan, foolhardily throwing caution about PKK activity in the area to the wind. But if I chance that way now, how sure can I be I will be abducted by Turkish deep state agents wanting to throw a bad light on the guerillas? A little too sure for my taste.

He goes ahead for me asking around what time the busses go. When it comes to the crunch, well remembering his earlier words of largesse I invite him to pay with a dip of the head. His hand twitches hesitatingly as it dives into his jacket pocket, but it seems he figures he can’t go back on his earlier anouncement and dishes out the cash for me (a hundred points for the gold-digger!).

In the meantime I get myself invited to the museum and afterwards to a nargile shop. My private spy for the day is evidently starting to be annnoyed by the wonky walking attempts in the Turkish language I force upon him, but that’s just something he’ll have to sit out. It is in a stoned swagger that I make my way back to the bus station where half an hour later I am duely seen off by the man who spied on me for the afternoon. My bus rumbles West to a town whose name translates as ‘slap in the face’.

But of course, twisted roads also lead South-East.

Train Ride

2007-12-12T01:43:00.000-08:00

The sun hauls itself up as we slide home. Grey hills stick low to the horizon. Long fields stretch out green tinged blue. Streaks of red run through their furrows. Slick-skinned street snakes away from us. Here and there, a tree still on fire among the bony crow feet paralysed. The storm lowers dark and threateningly. Now: The complete annihilation of a tunnel.

Brachialer Absturz

2007-11-24T17:16:00.000-08:00

A small rim of green vegetation is seen on the other side, then: a brute crashing down of white rock, followed by large cascading flushes of red earth. Here and there turrets jut out as if they were sand pies made by a gigantic kid that might come back out to play after sunset. The Grand Canyon is 16 kilometres across and I don't know how many down, at least the same amount of them I should think. A naked open-wide that no trees or or villages inhabit, it is devoid of life, large, impersonal, with a trickle of an unglinting river at its centre.

A big lethargic cloud eats its way across the sky, slowly pushing her shadow over the canyon. The whole thing is so vast, it looks unreal. Like a massive postcard fixed in front of you that you could scrape your fingers up and down.

I don't want to go anywhere, if it's not on the back of a pick-up truck

2007-11-15T22:58:00.000-08:00

"What do you carry?" I ask, since the back of the van as I can see from peeking backwards over my shoulder is empty except for a low stack of loose cardboard. "I sell drugs", shoots the young lad out, showing off. He says he is selling marihuana, but when I note that the stuff that usually makes you the money is cocaine, he admits to be dealing in coke, too. He points out a helicopter circling over the mountains, "they are looking for cannabis fields hidden in the forest".

At San Juanito I get a lift with 3 girls around 19 or 20 on their way to work, collecting leña, firewood. They squeeze in a little tighter for me and so we all sit there with our arms crossed over our laps and smile at each other. After a little while the questions start to trickle forth. "Where are you from? Did you come on a bus from Germany?" When I say I am on my way to Batopilas, the small town at the far end of this out of the way region, the driver takes a second to murmur a prayer, then takes her hands off the steering wheel to cross herself. Soon we wave good-bye. Next thing I know I am off on the back of a pick-up truck with two mariachis who cross themselves at every passing chapel. Drugs is definetely the topic of the day. The white sacks we sit on are fertilizers for the marijuana farm of our driver's parents I am told later on. With the mariachis gone and me promoted to the passenger's seat, I don't feel quite as comfortable anymore though, since that stupid driver keeps asking me inane questions like whether I have a boyfriend and “What do I think of Mexican men, then?". Even though he is going all the way to Batopilas I excuse myself and step out of the car at the next village. Just can't be arsed to put up with him.

I go on a long, seven kilometre walk with a couple of locals speaking an unknown language which they explain to me is called Raramuri. They are on the way to their home village and each is carrying one of their baby twins -two pairs of stereochrome black and white marble eyes peering out into he world from over bundles of limbs as tiny and fragile as matches. After I bid them farewell I spend a long time idling on a bridge, a hundred cars pass by -at the rate of one every half an hour- and I am slowly regretting that I didn't just take that goddamn ride at the beginning of the day. I'd have arrived at my destination long ago.

But sometimes you have to wait, and then only, magic happens.

I finally am swooped away onto the climbing road on the back of yet another pick-up truck with, as company, two handfuls of indigenos in colourful swathes of clothes blowing about them, the intoxicating feeling of wind in my hair and, unhemmed by dirty windowpanes or coachwork, the best possible views.

And, oh, the views. Breathtaking being the word. The only word.
I mean, I am literally boquiabierta.

The road winds up and away from individual mountains that seem to become larger as they recede, and then comfortably ease into the space reserved for them in the greater labyrinthine arrangement. Zigzagging along the road that has been dynamited into the crest of theses mountains, you feel like you are riding the top of the world.

At nightfall dark blue ink quickly creeps on onto the sky, leaving just that thin stripe of faint rose and yellow tones over the horizon and the light of a few stars to peek through. The temperature drops pretty quickly, a cold wind arises, and I decide to stay in a little hotel by the wayside. I take up quarters in a little room with red walls and mischievous looking rabbits on the counterpane. As I close my eyes hypnogogic images invade me. Mountains begin to rise, and then swirl all around me. Gradually they are being englobed by the mindboggling twirl of canyons that I experience for the second time today. It finally swallows me into sleep.

The first lift I get in the morning is with a car-full of American tourists, helpful, but spurning the fact that I am hitchhiking: "A friend of my mum's got killed when hitchhiking.", says the driver. I am prone to demur, but check myself and just think my own thoughts: 'Well, (fact:) a friend of my mum's got killed when buying a second hand TV, so..."

It is only after a while that realise why I don't enjoy today's ride through the landscape as much as yesterday's: I miss my space outside on the back. Even though it is more comfortable inside here, I miss the wind, the views, and the ever-changing shifts of travel companions you get out there. I get impatient, and I feel like from now on I will regret every minute spent inside a car. Only when we stop for lunch I have the chance to swing myself right up into my old place.

Soon, on the steepest part of the road, we pass two men in lumpy clothes drudging up the incline. Both have charcoal black hair and the younger one has a perfect pageboy style haircut. They wear codpieces and carry walking sticks and both of them look like taken straight out of an Aztec history book. They would make for the most beautiful travel companions I muse, but mostly I feel extremely bad for leaving them in a trail of dust behind us as we race along a road that on foot must take a day until it reaches a village. About an hour later still no settlement is in sight and I sigh and hope for them someone else came along.

Only much later a lean cowboy with a lasso over his shoulder, a pair of penetratingly stark blue eyes, few teeth left in his mouth, and a deeply tanned and furrowed face takes their place. A little while after we have taken off he lifts his hand indicating the crest of the sierra and says: "me he ido la mañana, buscando por ahí". He just spent the whole day looking for his bull. Tomorrow he'll do likewise, and the day after, maybe for the whole week, until he'll track his animal down.

Batopilas is a dusty village that feels like the end of the world. The heat gathered in the alleys during the long hot day sticks it out there till way into the night. Its potholed, narrow streets seem forbidding of that very American pastime of cruising around in oversize cars after sunset, and yet, the guy that has just asked me for a drink does just that: sit me in the car and manoeuvre me around as I gulp down one after the other Negra Modelo he hands me.

The moon light swims and teems like a swarm of silvery little fish on the blackened surface of the nightly river. We stop on its shore. The little bag full of white powder that has just been slipped us underhand with another six pack comes out the pocket of what's-his-name's leather jacket. He rolls it open and dunks his car key into it. A little sniff up the left nostril, another one up the right nostril, and a final little sniff up the left one again then the pack is handed over to me. I do likewise.
But then I kindly ask the boy to drive me back to my hotel, and when he asks whether he can come round later on, I say, sorry, no. I've told him that I was not going to be his girlfriend at the beginning of the night and I am not going to change my mind now, just because I am coked-up and drunk.

On bikes, across Galicja

2007-11-06T14:55:00.001-08:00

We rode up the hill and we rode down the hill and we rode straight into a delicately dying sky.We found large patches of moss as soft as mattresses to sleep on and gazed into the twilight scenery. To the north clouds were towering like snow-capped mountains over the of the fringes of a forest, to the south the Tatras planted their first imposing imprint on the horizon.

That day we'd been looking for raodkill all along the road to take care of our protein needs. The ones we came across though never were in good enough condition -always more road-rug than prospective steak. But when we stopped in a small forest for lunch we found some distant relatives of the fungus we have between our toes that we could cook with our (deliciously unnutritious) spaghetti.

The hostile lands

2007-10-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

Into the belly of the metal monster. Around the globe, against the hours.

At the airport, with all the Arabic visas in my passport, I wonder if they will take me to the little room, put a lamp in my face and ask me a few questions. But no, the lady just perfunctorily stamps my passport and invites me through with a friendly smirk. It's been 10 years since I visited this country, and it is strange to be here again. Doesn't exactly fill me with marvel and wonder... or does it?

In America, if you take the city bus, people treat you like scum. The bossy busdriver orders around the "kids" in the back. Two teenage girls enter the bus, one is gnawing her jar as if she is on XTC. They take a back seat, intertwine their limbs and smile out at the world from their nook like a warped pair of siamese twins. I don't want to be judgemental but except for a couple of pretty normal looking black people the wry faces on this bus actually look like they've been picked right out of a mental home. A sign along the road reads "Omej oinus fork ara oke". A "C" must have fallen off.

Travelling south. When asking my way around at the garage, people glower at me like I am a criminal. Hitchhiking is indeed illegal here. I try to sound as foreign as possible (not a big problem), in perfect "help the cuddly European"-fashion. Only through cloying, revolting, totally exaggerated friendliness I manage to force people to kindness. Using my charm to pester my way into their car, from garage to garage.
"Well, you'll have to arrange yourself with my husband over that", barks this lady from her passenger seat. "I think you should ask my wife about this", remarks her husband rudely. All I have to do is keep going back and forth between the two and pretend that their spouse just agreed. Bingo. Got a lift.
They actually grow on me with a while. I test the water, tell them that last year I went to Iran: "It's beautiful, it actually looks a lot like here!" Driving through the Arizona dessert that is actually true. They want to know how it was. No axis-of-evil brainwash here. Next thing we talk about is global warming. It seems like the country has started recycling since I last was here. They offer me some cookies, tell me all about life in the Mid West where they are from, and I start to genuinely glow. The thought that hitchhiking is great slips through my mind. And I am starting to wonder whether that cheesy Blur song from the 90's wasn't may be based on experience, "Look inside America, she's alright, she's alright..."

A sail down to Spain

2007-10-09T11:47:00.000-07:00

The fourth day, we get into a storm. The luminosity of the setting sun lends the savage scenery a falsely glacial air and an eerie slowness to nature's spectacle. The broken white water that is gushing over us seems to do so in slow motion, like snow falling. It seems like we are sailing down not a fluid valley of breaking waves, but a white gash of snow paralysed in between each bat of the eyelash. It is my first ever storm on sea, and since I am not seasick I actually enjoy this rollercoaster-like ride, blissfully ignorant of all the things that could go wrong. Better not let my grin grow too big though in the presence of our understandably less amused and actually quite worried captain. After a few hours the main sail starts tearing, and the wind, far from taming its furious tongues, resumes even wilder, lashing out at the sea till its entire surface has turned into foaming white whipped cream

Mükus

2007-09-11T05:22:00.000-07:00

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.

Teleportation

2007-09-11T05:02:00.000-07:00

It took many icy swigs from portable water coolers, fistfuls of fresh pistachio nuts peeled out of their withering yellow-red skins, an equal amount of amaretto nuts cracked open between the teeth, and more watermelon than can possibly be good for you. The landscape, after a thousand kilometres of lush rice fields, gave in, dried out, and then scraggy mountain ridges suddenly shot up from the dessert. In a few days I had transported myself from the barren but breathtaking Turkmeni mountains whose villages are peopled by women in elaborately patterened and exuberantly coloured headdresses, to a dusty red mud lane mountain village in the centre of Iran where the women, in the saddening effort of collective self-effacement, dissappear into themselves under their chadors.

How much tea can one take?

2007-09-05T09:19:00.000-07:00

As soon as I have sat down inside the white minibus, an old man comes to the door and is now offering me tea, which I decline with a cordial “no, thanks” and a wave of the hand. But , him being more enthusiastic than that about his offer (I have the slight feeling there aren’t many travellers coming through here usually), he keeps insisting, believing that I just didn’t understand what he was saying. Seeing that he doesn’t get very far with asking me the one word, one syllable question “cay?”, he decides to start to throw in some brief tea drinking mimes, while I change tactics and now dynamically shake my head. Another bloke comes up and I see the first one turn around and hear him consulting the second one about the “almanca” communication problem. Soon enough the two of them are demonstratively sipping imaginary tea, smiling amicably, eager for me to understand and accept the offer, but I still persist with my “no, thanks”, “hayir, teshekur” business. I have had so much tea these days its appeal just has worn off by now, and I think they can save their lira, and really don’t have to pay me more of the stuff. Thing is, these guys aren’t giving up so easily. Another minute later they are asking around for a third helper who groups himself to them and, him being the sought for linguistic maven able to tackle the situation, can translate the requisite Turkish monosyllable into the corresponding English one. Now he joins the refrain, too, and proceeds to pressingly recite it to me, in the manner of a memorized litany, hoping that ceaseless reiteration will finally make me understand. The other two are quick learners, so now they alternate between the Turkish and the English version of the word. But, after a while they realize, the “Alemanca” probably doesn’t understand “Ingililzica”, that must be the problem. So they have no choice but to resort back to good old pantomime, all three now truly formidably miming the act of tea absorption. The way the three keep repeating the same graceful gesture of heaving the negligible weight of the phantasm of a tea glass to their pursed lips, strangely evokes in me a set of those pink plushed, hyperactive Duracell bunny triplets with their tambourines. “Tea, cay?”, the christmas carol continues, and before I burst out laughing at the sight of these guys, I have to accede “Ah, cay, that’s what you meant.” I feign sudden illumination “Evet, lütfen.” Yes, please, then.

The moon is out, the stars decide

2007-07-04T01:11:00.000-07:00

The hours move on and the traffic fizzles out. For a while I want to have nothing between me and the ground except the soles of my shoes. Later I will to sleep outside and watch the sky revolve, the moon evolve from night to night.
In the light of the full moon I see only spectres of stars that I know soon, when it sets, will fill the sky abright.

"Do other people know about this?"

2007-06-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

The first vehicle that comes along we stop. Too late we notice that the lorry is going at about 5 mph. Since the driver speaks no English John and I complain freely about the speed and wistfully look after all the speeding personal cars that overtake us. Within five minutes we even both have opened a book on our knees and are trying to kill time by reading, despite the letters jumping at each irregularity in the road. “At this speed we will be in Damascus in, like, 8 hours” we mock this big bad bone shaker. At some road side café the driver stops, leaving with a short hand-sign (the first three fingers of the hand pointed up in a little pyramid meaning “wait”). “What’s he doing that long?” “He’s probably pissing”, we grumble to each other.
Or buying us coffee and baklava. The friendly act can be said to have pacified us. From now on we are munching happily on sugar-soaked filo dough and smiling politely and feel quite bad about being so impatient. We only go about 20 minutes longer anyway, then we abandon the big noisy snail, find ourselves on the road again and are trying to stop another car.Try is good actually. The first vehicle coming our way stops again. It is one of those classic Mercedeses from the fifties. Quite a cool, comfortable ride. Our driver keeps crossing himself and we understand he is boastingly letting us know that he is Christian, just like us (more or less). He insist to take a detour to show us an ancient stone church with time-eaten frescoes on a hill from which have a pretty view over large waves of Syrian badlands.
When we make it back to the motorway, he stops at a garage, greets the boy outside with “Merhaba Habibi”, then disappears inside the shop next door. He comes back with ice-cream for us. I pretend it is just the regular hitchhiker’s day, but it is the first time John is travelling this way and he marvels: “Do other people know about this?”

On a hill, Syria

2007-05-30T02:13:00.000-07:00

Along the slopes of the valley, towns lie in clusters and chains of twinkling little lights -green lights where a TV screen is flickering, orange lights where a lamp is lit behind drawn curtains.They resemble strangely shaped toys carelessly left behind by a giant child gone to sleep behind the mountains with sunset.

The story of the 6-fingered Pimp

2007-05-30T02:11:00.000-07:00

So far Immanuel seemed to stick out only as another of those nondescript guys that pick me up, possibly pay lunch for me, and then at some point ask to marry me. OK he had six fingers on his left hand, but that did not mean he was a shady person...

Or that's what I innocently thought before I got to know Bissau better. In that unfortunate place of course it is safe to say that approximately everyone, is shady.

(...)
That night we the approached the floodlit rumble of the boat being unloaded -two dozens of Guineans heaving rice sacks off it, plus the Koreans onboard, plus, dozens of Phillipines hanging around at the side who were caught fishing within Bissau territory without permission.

Immanuel said I had better not talk to anyone, most of all not divulge my intents to anyone, since in case I got found out I would get instantly ousted and never let back again. I should have sensed that this was a filthy trick since today and yesterday the main problem really seemed to be the communication (I just do not speak any crioulo, you see) and people looking at me like an alien, but: looking benevolently, and lethargically, like they are not really caring, not like they were scheming of chucking me out any soon. This being Bissau everyone was just much laxer about any rules. The evening proceeded, me sitting by the side, him dashing off feigning to be trying to be making progress for my situation, ant the end Immanuel said "let's go for a drink with a few of the sailors, maybe we will be able to set you up with them". What he didn't bother to clear up was that "setting me up with them" was going to take on a rather different meaning than the one I had imagined. He'd left them under the impression I was one of his prostitutes.

While we were in the bar outside the port, he bought me many a drink hoping to blur my judgement of situation (he was not counting on my beer-weaned German blood obviously), then as we were walking to the town centre (to frequent more bars I innocently imagined), he suddenly staid in the back with one of them sailours and there was some hard negotiation going on as far as I could tell. When I realized just what they were negotiating about and the Korean that had just slid over the bills to my six-fingered pimp and came laying his arm around the exotic blonde fille de joie asking whether I knew the nearest hotel, it was of course not too late for me to shake him off.

I saved myself back to my place over a quickly improvised rat-run.There, I fell on my bed and analysed the night: For one, it seemed I almost got sold to far East Asia -so much for my trying to get local help involved.

I reckoned I had to change tactics.

(continued one post down)

Rubbing up to Iraq

2007-05-22T05:34:00.000-07:00

I have never been one to be fond of borders. So, if I refer to the various parts of the area as Northern or Eastern parts of Kurdistan it is not because I subscribe to Kurdish nationalism. It is because I try to care as little about borders as I possibly can, and, since you cannot escape classification, I’d rather talk of people according to their linguistic affinities rather than shove them under labels that correspond to areas defined by states.
As I said, I have never been one to be fond of those things. And that is why I will start the story with the relation of an escapade technically on Turkish territory, but close enough to the Iraqi side that it just takes a walk in the night, over the mountains, to arrive in the land where all roads lead to Baghdad.

Three years ago I had been here, and I remember looking out over very valley, musing about how close Iraq was, in figurative spitting distance, just behind that ragged mountain ridge. Şirnak apparently means “Town of Noah”, or so the Russian guidebook said. As fate has it, I find myself a second time clinging to the streets creeping up its steep slopes. Things have changed, in various ways. Buildings have shot up all over, and it is not as quiet as it used to be. The morning we leave helicopters roar overhead, orbiting the town, just like the evening before. We start on foot, walking out of town. The mountains look tame, like big sleeping animals and fog playfully lingers in the chinks in between the foothills under us. After a while we stop under an almond tree, and playfully start picking off some of its fruit which are still too small to eat, the little oval forms not bigger than a fingernail. Diligently, with index and thumb I split one in two and squeeze out the little translucent kernel.
We are still under the tree when a white VW bus stops. Once we get inside we move so much faster than on foot, it seems miraculous. We serpentine our way up and down a no longer static, but fluidly changing landscape. The trails of cows and goats bedeck the slopes of the mountains sidling up to the road, swinging up and down, creating elegant oval-shapes as if drawn by an artist’s hand. Watching the landscape is like leafing through a pack of postcards. The natural colour palette on show indeed must inspire any painter: Blots and bruises of brown and red daub the hills, different types of earth and stone. In between, suspended, the tentative green of spring grass.
And here and there the first lilacs in clean white bloom as if competing for a washing powder commercial. I feel like I may never tire of these mountains.

It is by the middle of the day that we deviate from the main road. You can almost hear the mountains creak and groan as they shift apart giving free a pass for the road that climbs up between them. Clear and white, writhing its way at the centre of this ravine, gushes forth a stream. At its water-soaked green banks poplars reach out to the sky with their branches almost vertical, parallel to their trunks as if to defy the height of the mountain tops around them. At the end, the far far end of the canyon, Uludere is an enchanted village whose houses have latched onto the carapace of the rock like oysters to the underside of an old boat on anchorage. We stop for lunch here and step outside into the fresh air. The mountains above us jag the sky like natural battlements. It is warm already, but on the top snow still lays, as if out of pure inertia, too damn lazy to transubstantiate into water and trickle away.
When the signs for restaurants have spelling mistakes in Turkish that even a foreigner can see, you know you are in deep deep Kurdistan. We enter the “lukanta”. The man heaping quivering hot rice onto plastic plates for us wears his thick cummerbund (in whose folds, I've been told, tobacco can very conveniently be hidden for smuggling) around that traditional Kurdish suit sewn out of one single piece whose name I still haven’t found out and that I keep calling "rompers" in my mind.
We take our time to savour sucking the meat out from between the hot, drippy cartilage and bony segments of spine that has been topped onto our rice, before heading back out into the day.

Uludere may be one of the most endearing villages I’ll ever see, but in 1991 it was the venue of humanitarian crisis. It was in this and neighbouring village where millions of Iraqi Kurds sought refuge, fleeing the Iraqi troops backlashing after the Kurdish insurrection three weeks earlier. Uludere certainly feels like the end of the world, but we still find an accentless German speaker here who, increduously that we should have come to this of all places exclaims: “You got lost! You should go to Antalya, that is what tourists come to Turkey for!”. And ten minutes later, even an equally accentless French speaker, a policeman who tells us to leave as quick as we have come, alarmedly -and surely with cause- telling me “C’est dangereux ici mademoiselle, c’est dangereux!”. Somewhat naively perhaps I just turn round to my friend Fyodor not bothering to translate, make a sign of the head and say “Let’s get going!”.

Trying to get onto the road again we have to wait for a short while only until we get a lift. The car that takes us on is a family’s car in which we take a seat in the back with the two rambunctious little daughters climbing and crawling over us. From the bottom of my bag I dig out some old strawberry chewing gum for them to suck on and make a mental note to buy some sweets for other prospective kids coming my way. We are behind darkened window panes and rarely have time to glimpse out so we only get to see puzzle pieces of this beautiful stretch of scenery we are curving about in: Gloomy dark shards of rock jutting into the clear blue sky, and in the distance black and white striped mountains, flashes of far away alpine vistas. On so many peaks near and far, the military are ensconced in eyries high above. Underneath them, caves creep into the rock face here and there like empty eye sockets or gaping mouths petrified in mid-scream. The streaks of tar inside the rock paint terrifying black grimaces onto it. At the entrance of villages, crowds of school kids disappear blue in our wake. Our driver tells us that here the frontier goes along the stream. I see children that are collecting sticks for firewood wading through the water and jokingly ask “so these kids are in Iraq right now?”. The couple drop us off at their village and we continue on foot until the next police stop. The military crowds around us and one German speaker tells me we cannot go on: The sun is already low, and after dark the area along the river-slash-border becomes a free fire zone, in other words the militias that are camping on the other side will shoot at anything that moves. Igor and I of course are little keen on staying the night with the military as they offer; “Yeah, and take a picture as a souvenir”, my friend jokes. Swearing we will take a lift before the sun goes down, they let us go. We still have some time and continue to walk on along the river for about half an hour. Indeed in the gravel on the roadside we find a couple of shiny bullets of which Fyodor and I both take one as a lucky charm. We enjoy the walk in the fresh air so much that we let pass a couple of cars and get a lift with the third one coming our way. They stop for us without us having so much as put our thumbs out. Unfortunately the car is too heavy with us and when its engine falters for the second time we decide to be polite and get another lift after we’ve helped pushing. Actually we have to insist quite a bit, because our drivers don’t like to be cheated out of hospitality that easily. Under greying skies we have reason to be worried about the promise we made back at the military check point, but luckily our next lift promptly materialises. We swing ourselves onto the back of a pick-up truck, and for a while will be shaken about uncomfortably, but also enjoying the views while the day's last dregs of light still linger...

The name of the village whose sticks and stones we are presently rumbling over is called Ortaköy, which means “Middle-Village”. Whenever the Turks run out of place names that is the generic one given to the characterless hamlets half-way along the road from here to there. There are at least 15 Ortaköys in Turkey for all I know so why not stop in this one? Our driver, a man with deep cut vertical furrows down his cheeks and long pretty eye-lashes, drops us off. Immediately, a crowd of men gathers around us, asking where we are going from here.:”Hakkari is very far, you will not reach it tonight!” They almost seem to get into an argument who gets to take us home. We are slightly amused as we watch them settle it between themselves. Finally we are led down a muddy, already nightly path to one of the houses further up from the river. We are exhausted from the long day and are happy to ply our legs and sit on the plush carpet in the living room. A little boy comes in and feeds the oven with fire wood. Soon his elder brother, a boy of maybe 13,14, brings in some tea on a silvery metal tray. We could not be more comfortable.

After the hours move on and the dishes with our large, delicious dinner have been carried in and out, the room slowly starts to fill with young men, the clicking of the little chains of prayer beads typically accompanying them, and only gradually also with the sound of their politely muffled chatter. We are obviously going to be the village’s main attraction tonight. For a while we embarassedly try to start a conversation with the snippets of Turkish we know. However, soon the grand design of the evening reveals itself to us: They brought in the village’s English teacher to talk to us. He is a young man of about 30 with halting English that way outperforms our Turkish. An evening’s Kurdish History 101 crash course seems to be planned. Thank goodness Fyodor speaks no English at all and just meets the English teacher’s greetings, exclusively adressed to him, with perfect puzzlement, so I get to usurp the conversation in perfect lady-likeness. I have to translate, it's as simple as that.
“We count ourselves as descended from the Medes. We have been in this area for many thousand years?”, begins the recital.”We know this, we know all this”, Fyodor and I can only keep affirming as our history lesson moves on from ancient times to Atatürk's implicating the Kurds in the Armenian genocide... Yes, the very Armenian genocide that is peddled as common knowledge in Europe but that the average Turk will still vehemently deny. An article of the Turkish constitution reserved for the purpose stipulates that journalists and teachers openly talking about the Armenian genocide in public will go and sit in prison for a while, so who can blame the brainwashed many? Today, in the good old Middle Eastern tradition of “My enemy’s enemy must surely be my friend”, Kurds and Armenians consider each other to be brothers, and each others closest allies in the region, nevermind the fact that, in an alternate not necessarily more beautiful reality where either a greater Armenia would be prying open Iran’s and Turkey’s shared border or a sovereign state of Kurdistan would be pushing those two away from each other, the Kurds and Armenians would be each others greatest enemies, each claiming half of the others’ land.
But we’re not really here to argue, so we keep these thoughts to ourselves and listen.

I have taken a liking to the red-faced, big-eared girl who has been sitting next to the wood stove while the room was empty, and who has now replaced the boy in serving us tea. She is prettier than I make her sound, really. In fact we are all perfectly red in the face in here; they have heated up the room to sauna temperatures after all. As the evening moves on, I cast a smile over to the girl from time to time to acknowledge that she is following our conversation. She is the only girl or woman in the room apart from me and I appreciate the female companionship. I am actually even fearful if we stop drinking tea she?ll be made to leave and so I gulp down glass after piping hot glass of tea, more tea than can possibly be good for you. I really want her to be able to stay.

Bored by the heated conversation in English I am having, Igor leafs through his travel book. The Russian guide book pisses me off infinitely in that it calls all Kurds terrorists. It actually ends its section on South-Eastern Anatolia with the line “And no one can say that terrorism does not have nationality?”.

Apart from jumping to conclusions of calling several Million Kurds terrorists from the fact alone that there is a certain percentage among them who engage in such acts, I also want to let Fyodor know why their resistance may be justified. All I have to do is tell Igor one anecdote, the story of how my friend Özel, a Kurdish democracy activist from Diyarbakir who found political asylum in France. It freezes the blood in my veins just to re-tell the end of the story: The moment that Özel walked into that police station, straight into the gaze of his brother’s blood-shot eyes. The boy was lifeless, pale as a sheet, tied to a chair, blood streaking his face and T-Shirt. He could not have died longer than a few minutes earlier from the heavy torturing. And yet he was only 16 years old and had done nothing. But the day the police had come to arrest Özel at his house, he himself was gone, so they took the younger sibling instead.

We have been asked what we think of the Chechen war. I tell them that I believe the second Chechen war was nothing but a war machine that was kept going because the Russian government was making money out of it, whereas the Chechnyans just wanted it to stop. I also added that Chechnyan terrorists are of a whole different calibre than their Kurdish pendants, the Chechnyans being fully worthy of the qualifier: the PKK only kill military these days, the Chechenians don’t think twice about putting civilians on a theatre visit at danger, or a school full of kids. Fyodor’s opinion is of the more predictable kind, I think. But what the people in this room are surprised to learn is that Russia has 160 nationalities. The implications for any independence movement in Russia of this are obvious. So I hope that they start to see the Chechen independence war in a new context.
I ask them back whether they have heard of Ngorno Karabakh. I am less curious about what they might think of it (because of course they would side with the Armenians), but if they have actually heard of it, that war just out over the limits of their radius. My suspicion seems to be confirmed: it seems like they haven’t. Our English teacher just mumbles something incomprehensible and seems to expect the next question. I am all too eager to tell them about the Ossetians, their linguistic brethren after all, but they seem not very interested. So instead I ask them how they will vote in the up coming elections. They shake their heads and explain themselves in an unexpected manner: “Barzani is a good man, we are happy with him as our president.” Indeed, the infrastructures are still so bad that even a hike across mountains included, it probably takes longer to reach Ankara than Arbil from here. They say they feel part of Iraqi Kurdistan rather than any other country. “It’s only over there”, they point with the finger out the darkened window where the moonlit sky delicately draws out the silhouettes of the paws of those big sleeping animals that are the mountains. One man named Lezgin asserts that he will make the journey tonight, smuggling fuel and cigarettes. I take my map out and ask him to show me where he will go. My map is rather crude unfortunately and the nearest village that is seen in Iraq is a place called Kani Masi. He puts his finger on it and says “Yeah, Kani Masi, I know that place very well!”. I secretely decide to visit that village once I will be on the other side. In fact Lezgin invites us to go there right now: “It is no problem, really. We take some good lamps and in a few hours we will be drinking tea with the Iraqi border guards! Don’t worry about a thing!” “Are you sure we won’t get into trouble if soldiers come our way?” ”No problem! I know the soldiers there, they won’t say anything, believe me!”
I look over to Fyodor and I can see that he, like me, has started to excitedly bob his head up and down, impatient to tread on Iraqi soil himself. But as Lezgin continues to ramble on how perfectly safe it is we understand that he is really just inviting us to come along in order to tell a story. Maybe, after all, that nice midnight walk through waist-deep snow all the while ducking from PKK stray bullets would turn out to be just out of my comfort zone, I decide for myself, a little disappointed nonetheless.
Soon after, we fall to sleep in the luxurious velvet beds they have made for us.

Breakfast on the veranda in the morning with the backdrop of snowy mountains feels like a cut out from an Alpine holiday prospectus. And as we walk out of the village we greet the man with the deep furrows down his cheeks and the pretty eye-lashes from last night.
We end up spending the whole morning walking. The few cars that pass us are either full to the brim or decide they don’t want to stop for us. Afoot, we wind up the road inching forward, the cleared away snow piling up several metres high at its sides impressing its cool glow on us.
The beauty of the vista when we reach the sign reading “altitude 4833 metres”, and pass around a bend that allows us to see into the valley swept open on the other side is not quite possible to capture with a camera. There is an element to this beauty that no picture can capture which is exactly what makes this view so impressive: SPACE. Standing up here with this incredible valley at our feet is the feeling of hovering over an abyss, a vast inverse snowstorm globe at the brim of which you stand. At the centre of our view creeps the long serrated spine of a long, petrified, snake-like bodied dragon that seems to have died with its head in the ground. I later hear that the locals call this kind of rock formation a “fish back” which surely is the most fitting description. This one is a particularly impressive exemplary of the typical anticlines that dip towards the Iraqi border here -in Southern Kurdistan the mountains are said to curve the other way.
The mountains that rim the view at the other end of the spectrum are overborne by the only thing that towers higher than them: snow white cumulus clouds. We have another long day of hitching in front of us. Here and there the military stop us and look through our bags. Some of the soldiers are flirty and cute, offer us biscuits and ask me for my e-mail adress. They really must be too young to have participated in the lootings and gang-rapes of villagers of the nineties, I tell myself and smile back.

At the end of the afternoon, as we curve the last mile up to Hakkari, landscape and cloudscape blend to an early night, and the skies celebrate the end of our day grey and glorious in an outburst of lashing rain. I fete the familiar snow capped mountains around here with some Ülker chocolate, even though I can only surmise them right now behind the impenetrable drapery of storm and night.
In our hotel the lights get dimmer when we take our showers, and brighter again when the tab is turned off. The TV throws blue flickering reflections on our faces.

______________________
Back to the Middle Eastern Tales

The Voyage to the Limits of Esculence

2007-05-22T05:18:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt of how, when travelling in Africa when I was twenty, I hitched a lift on a cargo boat from Guinea Bissau to Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and subsequently became the ship cook for the crew... despite not actually knowing how to cook ;)

The whole story can be read here.

Hoewer, the splendid voyage to the Cap Verde, those rocks thrusting upwards amid turquoise waters, was soon be outshined by the voyage to the limits of esculence I would be taking the sailors on. After one of my meals back in Dakar, the owner of the boat who had chanced in to check out the results of the dry dock, tersely remarked that he would have certainly fired me after three days at most. Thankfully for me it had of course been the captain's right and (ir)responsibility to keep me in my job for the whole month.

In general mealtimes unfurled along the lines of the following ceremony: As soon as I put my cookery on the table -usually some tomato sauce into which I had mistakenly, by force of too enthusiastic a hand-movement, dumped the better half of either the pepper or the chilly pot, to go with a kilo of half-uncooked, overly salted rice that I hadn't managed to finish in time because the original portion of rice I intended to make had had too much fluid and had thickened into a white watery mass of gelatine consistency which I had had to throw away. As soon as these two main constituents of the meal (tomatoes and rice, remember ;) ) were on the table, approximately set with plates and cutlery for the requisite number of sailours, I would make a bolt for the backroom of the kitchen. There I'd be hiding out (sometimes behind the freezer) in order not to have to listen to the comedy that regularly unfolded in the dining room. Everyone went to great lengths of deriding my loving efforts to keep them nourished by mockingly, oh painfully mockingly, retrieving the entire gamut of aliment-appreciative vocabulary -"delicious", "scrumptious","hmmmm...".

Well, you know, I cannot cook and never will learn how to cook now matter how hard I try, but three cheers for a captain who gave me the chance of a lifetime to prove it with a vengeance.

Segou Festival

2007-05-18T02:28:00.000-07:00

One of the ironies about hitchhiking in Africa is that, as a pretty unbendable rule, the less developed the country you travel in is, the nicer the cars you get lifts in will be. This is because in the more developed countries a larger share of the population in general can afford to buy a vehicle -even though clearly most of the time it will be some sputtering jalopy more resembling a kicked about tin can threatening to fall apart every other kilometre or so than the neat alpha romeos people drive in the West. In the poorest countries like Mali, BurkinaFaso or Niger, however, the only people who can afford their own four-wheeled motorized transport will be the ultra-rich layer and therefore the only lifts you'll ever get will be in the fastest, newest European importations -most of the time immaculately polished 4-by-4's or Mercedess.

And so, the next morning, we got a lift in a rich gentleman's black elegant 4-by-4, and were presently speeding down the only tarred road of Mali at 150 km/h, slowing down not to run over any donkey carts or women carrying water from time to time, but still transporting us in a mere six hours to our destination: the Segou festival.

We found a family's rooftop to sleep on and for our first evening managed to enter for free by foraging around a bit and finding a wall to climb over and slip a minimum amount of money to the guards behind. I can't say whether it was a good concert, cause I was actually drunk enough not to be able to tell the difference between even the middle and the end of any song, but the crowd was wild and I sang along till my voice left me, hugged the girls around me and got entangled in several lose turbans snogging the guys. For the encore guys in the first row jumped into the waist-deep water in front of the stage till the security fished them backout.

We got to bed at about 6 hoping to sleep into the day, but in the morning already, the radio was bleating in the courtyard. And while I still for a while tried to reach out for the silence beyond the noise and to dive into some more of that sweet unconsciousness, sleep proved elusive and reluctant and wakefulness seeped into my being like electrostatic charge. Then Kati opened the door and with the daylight let the commencing heat of the day, heavy and stifling, flood in and with it, sweep out the last dregs of my dream of rest. I knew my tiredness and my hangover would stick in my bones like thick clumps for the rest of the day, but I supposed I had no choice and had better get up and out already.

I wander the festival for a few short minutes only, follow the sound check on the main stage then I decide I have to collapse in the shade for a bit. When a boy comes and sits down next to me, I only moan to myself that yet another tourist guide has to bother me and only after he has been trying to talk to me for a few minutes I lift my head from between my arms crossed over my ears and listen to what he is saying; "Do you want a drink? Hey can I get you anything?" "No, don't worry, just leave me alone" "just out of bed and already another unasked for suitor I think to myself. Then, as he keeps insisting I think why not take advantage of him a little bit, he could fetch me a bag of water after all, next time he repeats his question I'll send him off. Yet, unexpectedly; the next phrasehe utters is "Don't you recognize me?" and I diplomatically decide not to answer truthfully but instead with fake indignation mutter "of course I do" - hoping he doesn't see me checking him out more intently for once, out of the corner of my eye. I still don't recognize him, but employing my sense of logic I have to deduct that there is really no other possibility than that the old saying of alcohol making members of the other seks more appealing than they would be soberly seems to bear a great deal of truth here, and that he must be one of the boys I was making out with last night. When he comes back with a bottle of beer instead of the coveted drink of water this assumption is corroborated. After all wasn't I extra-avid last night of scoring free alcohol on all sides? It'll make me feel better about my hangover I reckon so I overcome my initial reluctance and take a big gulp. Not much later on I meet Kat at a tea stand. "I talked to the guy you were dancing with last night" "oh, I just met one of them, which one did you catch?" "the one with the turban" "there were about 5 of them!" "well, the one you were shoving your tongue down" "umm -which one? There were 3 or 4 of them if I remember right" "Well the one you were shoving your tongue down while you were slow dancing with the little boy with the baggy pants" "Oh that one, Boubacar" I pretend to remember his name."

That would have been one hell of a roadtrip

2007-05-18T02:14:00.000-07:00

Stayed with a family in a Kurdish village in what I call the ''border area'' last night. I had my shower in a smokefilled backyard shed, throwing sticks under the big pot of water warmed over open fire.

This morning the oldest son of the family tried to elope with me. He was cute enough you know and if I spoke a little more Turkish it would have been fun, but that way I did have to tell the darling to kindly leave me to my own devices after he hitched the first 60 kilometres with me.

That sure would have been one hell of a roadtrip.

Sometimes it is good just to be yourself

2007-04-30T23:05:00.001-07:00

This morning Darra, a friend of my helpful contact Sheikh Friyad ( I just recently noticed that people are calling him "Sheikh") came to pick me up with his car and drive me around for the day. He’s a youngish guy with a shifting posh and working class but nonetheless distinctly British accent who has lived in Manchester for 17 years and claimed that the only thing he resisted of adopting of the English culture was not having taken to spoiling the taste of his tea with milk. As far as I could judge after so short a time, that claim may well be true. I simply had a blast with him.

God, it’s good sometimes to just be yourself. We exchanged drinking stories, discussed the horror of meeting your so-to-speak mothers in law, and made jokes about all sorts of unsavoury topics: Walking down the street when we turned past an open sewer he remarked „I think I just farted" - "Congratulations", I answered. Discussing career options I dropped that "I heard you can make a lot of money here with male prostitution" and got as an answer "Yeah, I was thinking about trying it". A little later on down a small lane in the centre of town he said "You really want to know what that little girl just say to you don’t you?" and I suggested as a possibility "I want to fuck you in the ass?", and then we both laughed.

In pursuance of research for my PhD ("Alcoholism in Muslim Countries"), we went to the German Biergarten that night. Entering it, my initial reaction was one of repulsive shock and the urge to walk out backwards to where I’d come from right there and then. But telling myself it was all for my doctorate I mustered up courage and we sat down to have delicious indeed Hefeweizen, despite the worst-of-the-worst German folk-pop thumping from the boxes and the girls wheeling between the tables in those garish dirndles.
After the second Hefeweizen I got rather alegre, and my CFD (Compulsive Flirting Disorder), inappropriate as ever, surreptiously started to steal into my demeanour. The object of my pining glances was the sturdy man with the stout thighs showing under the lederhosen who, with the dodgy German accent and the feather bobbing at his hat, had assigned us our table on walking in. I braced myself and so on the beermat that I was waving coyly and nervously as I approached him with the request, I got the first autograph I ever made anyone sign in my life, from this REAL GERMAN, accent and all.
Exciting.

Down with another great aitchless race

2007-04-30T23:02:00.000-07:00

After a few hours of hanging out in a library, amused enough to twist my head round cyrillic titles and authors' names (amidst the predictable Gogols and Turgyenyevs, the annoyingly unavoidably numerous Dostoyevskies and absolutely necessary Nabokovs, I also (delightedly) find a certain "Genry Miller" and some chance "Germann Gesse"-type (absent-mindedly)) I decide to spend the remainder of the morning sitting in the park, pulling the usual stunt of rolling a rollie. Less to actually smoke it, than to be maybe offered some of what here aitch-avoidingly is termed "gashish", which, by the same token, I don't have an actual craving for, but which serves as a cheap intermediary to try and make some sleazy, shady, drug-dealing friends, I suppose (everyone's favourite people!). Today it actually works. A lean young man indeed ambles over and offers me some very weak gashish (which in a moment of drunkenly misplaced generosity I will roll into a joint for himself in his apartment later on).
Despite one incisor missing, he doesn't actually seem that sleazy, so, what the hell, when he asks me to go for a drink with him I tag along to his regular bar (that sort of was my plan in the first place, meeting people, wasn't it? -I remind myself).
The drink turns into a couple more, sidelining an embarrassingly dictionary-oriented conversation -my dictionary is really a better friend than any human being could be at this point, making communication beyond the exchanging of memorised formulas of politeness possible at all. Really, I don't much mind talking ungrammatical insignificant shit, as I'm still very much in the early stage of the language learning process and I don't yet suffer from what I have come to term the "self-mutilation syndrome".
Afflicted by this, the language learning individual undergoes stages of utterly frustrating, though blatantly self-inflicted (for having put oneself into the situation in the first place) sensations of severe speech impediment, not far from ensuing complete desparation. Basically, forcing oneself to speak in foreign tongues can have the same effect as having ones actually tangible tongue cut out altogether: these drastic restraints on one's communication skills come with a horrible feeling of inadequacy for ones psychological need for commensurate expression of one's oh so animated inner world (alas, without the physically painful and bloody bit!).
Anyway, so we continue our random palaver -mine staccato, his frighteningly cataract-like- till his friends come round. The three drinks so far turn into another few and at the end of the afternoon in that backstreet bar, everyone -me very much included- is by this time in much of a state. The plan seems to be that we all go out together later on, so in my advanced hammered condition it only seems natural I go back to my gashish dealing new acquaintance's house, not to miss the appointment-and, I muse to myself, it must be save, it's only six o'clock- you never get raped at that time of day, surely.

So now, home with Misha, sipping more of that canned gin and tonic which seems to be their REAL national drink, not that spurned vodka, keeping up an hour and a half of more stilted, painfully bilateral conversation. Even alcohol doesn't necessarily loosen my tongue.And finally I only have enough vocabulary for so long before it will relievingly be drained to its last drop and I can abandon myself to being passively showered in rapids of relentless Russian, from which after another hour -in which I am under the vague impression he might or might not be going on about some Ukrainian pop-star his little brother might or might not be in love with-, I finally glean that he is approaching the usual core issues now, as I believe to grasp that a) -nothing new to me -he wants to have sex with me (these russians have ways of NEVER making physical advances, but always more or less politely trying to TALK (out of all possibilities!) you into it (much in contrast to that other great aitchless race, the French, whose general approach seems to be to just get you and themselves drunk and then throw themselves into your bed completely unasked for), even the "bad boy" ones (or those who would like to see themselves as "bad boy"-types like this one)
b) he offers me 2000 dollars if I have sex with him
c) he is a professional and very succesful pimp and 2000 dollars are nothing to him.
I, of course, am not naive enough to believe any of the above propositions-except the first one evidently ( all too evidently! ->and at this point I contentedly check my make up-slanting my face into profile, eyes a-clack for my hand mirror). Being a pimp is just any young Russian lads idea of being cool and succesful or something.
The best tactic I decide, will be affecting ignorance of what he is talking about -always a good way out of sticky situations- and just continue a sometimes vague, sometimes vigorous nod, as if I was assuming he was talking about rising plum pudding prices.
His endless babble -obviously quite impossibly leading anywhere- is given an abrupt end with the striking of the midnight hour, which is promptly noticed, despite its only soundlessly manifesting itself by the morphing of reticent digital ciphers on the ubiquitous mobile phone(from the sahara to siberia, whether they work or not, they're there before you are)) -and which means we have to drive out for our appointment with the other guys.

So half an hour later, there we are in the Russian variation of the familiar situation of five people crammed into the back of a van, smoking many a joint, with me having to beg them to please, speak "bolshe medlyennoye" (slower, pashaulsta!) everytime I am directly adressed and at all other times just assume a knowing facial expression, -which turns out to be a rather dumb constant smile, as thus facilitated by all the alcohol- rather than actually try to follow the conversation.
Our little excursion takes us seemingly deep into the woods, down a road which is more bumps than path, which actually likens the experience to that of some desultory funfair ride -everyone's bursts of laughter included.We pass people next to orange campfires and when we finally get out of the vehicle, airs of distant house music are carried over to us, probably coming from a boom box. As the girls start peeling out of their clothes and the guys do alike, the plan and purpose of this whole undertaking, now somewhat belatedly, but still in time, takes an abrupt unfolding before the eyes of my mind. I'm stoned remember, every thought seems to weigh a ton. I, too, strip down to my underwear, and tip toe my way over the pine-needle covered ground to the softly dropping, earthy riverbank with the water lapping warmly up to our feet.
With Pasha, the blond guy with the beret, having already abandoned to the splashing medium (the beret in return being abandoned amidst the pile of cast off jeans and T-shirt for the occasion), and Misha (hesitating to call him "my Misha" for the distinction), the other Misha -the driver-, and Alex affectedly finishing their cigarettes, the two girls perform their squeamish girly ritual of taking step after step all too slowly, probably affirming the water's disagreable coldness in these squealing bursts of ever-incomprehensible Russian to each other.
Finally we are all in it, and in between dipping my head in the fresh black depths softly tingling on my stoner's skin, I take notice of the prettiness of the trees on both sides of the riverbank, outlined in stark silhouettes before the blue not black and only scarcely starred northern late night sky, and the moon rolling out its straight but fuzzy edged yellow carpet as on all waters.While rubbing dry in the van, preparing for our way back, everyone, druggedly, melts into a couple of minutes of jellylike mirth at a certain remark I- as is absolutely needless to reiterate but here it goes: did not understand. I suppose, I'm having fun anyway, though.

Much later on I came to see that evening of midnight bathing as a baptism of sorts. I was my first night ever in Russia, the country I was going to come to feel so close to. And it was on this same trip that I later went to Kurdistan for the first time, too.

Ainkawa

2007-04-29T18:59:00.000-07:00

It's six a.m. in Ainkawa, the Christian district of Hewler, and its richest, too. In the 90's it was the place where Saddam's CIA financed resistance used to be located. I have been put up here for a few days only. At my own behest I am regularly taken to the PKK-sponsoring "Turkish" restaurants round the corner (they serve spicy adana kebab and sprinkle your hands with lemon kolonyasi when you leave).
Insomnia here is less of a bitch since at least there is a generator providing round the clock electricity. After a sleepless night listening to the silence outside, suddenly the sparrows and starlings have become very chatty. It is the first time I actually hear the bell of that castle-like Chaldean Church down the street.

2007-04-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

"When faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power -choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she’s twenty-six and she still doesn’t own a car. ...

You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?" -George Monbiot

(I think it should become a moral imperative that there be more Ninas who'll never own a car.)

Into Iraq

2007-04-10T07:47:00.000-07:00

The road curves left and right like a mountain stream, my driver drives like a madman, and I am glad I am not prone to motion sickness. The landscape makes me feel like I am on a little boat rocking in an ocean of heaving and sinking green slopes, shook about by the hills.
The Kurdish landscape continues as beautifully as on the Turkish side, but the hills swing on a different rhythm here. They rise heavy with vegetation, build up like green, lush waves, and then abruptly tumble and crash in steep cascades of rock. When the landscape finally sinks down into a valley the last row of hills stands proud like pyramids.

Damascus. Old Town.

2007-03-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Narrow, devious alleys of squalid houses bowing their decrepit wooden balconies toward each other. Their blackened facades sit sunk in their own shadow under the mercilessly glaring sun, reflecting nothing but my own inenubilable mood.

The walls plastered with Nasrullah, smiling avuncularly.

That in Aleppo, once...

2007-03-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

We decide to take a walk round the Souk. Approaching the place, from around the corner the wheezing sound of a brutally lashed whip cuts through the air. "Oh-oh", I think, "-someone's wife didn't wash her husbands briefs white enough". But no, it was just a textile maker cleaning a pile of fleeces fresh from the sheep. Inside the market place we then have a glass of fresh orange juice each, and looking around the place, being handed our glasses by a stressed ten-year-old, are happy to constate that child exploitation at least still is in full swing in Syria.

III - Azelma, Marriage, and Women's Rights in the Caucasus

2005-05-07T08:17:00.000-07:00

This day Azelma and I leave Chachia to the kindergarden, so Azelma and I have some time to ourselves for a walk around town. It is a hot sunny day and we indulge in typical women’s conversations: "I don't want to marry because in the West I see so many people marry, and not stay together; everyone always divorces in the end", I give my standard response to satisfy her curiosity. Wiping our foreheads and stopping from time to time, we make our way up to the imposing, spanking new church of the Holy Trinity, Tbilisi's pride, which on any aerial view dominates the expanse of the city. “I saw the plans for this area in the town house. They are planning to even build a five star hotel on that hill next to it. In ten years this will be the most beautiful spot in Tbilisi", Azelma explains to me, "That is, if everything will be plain sailing from now on. But Russian wants war very much…”. The square around the church is already a regular hang-out for Tbilisi’s dressed up youth trying to pick up prospective spouses. It is ornamented by neatly kempt gardens with fountains and beds of flowers in the form of the Georgian cross. The flowers are usually red and white lilies symbolizing the colours of the new flag adopted after the Rose Revolution. Even children's playgrounds are constructed exclusively in these colours these days.

At the feet of the church, we sit down on a bench overlooking the gardens."I know many couples who met each other around here. If you yourself are deeply religious, and most of Georgia’s youth are, of course you wish your partner to also be this way."

Shako and her, for sure, haven't met in a church. Shako was a radio DJ when Azelma came to pick up a prize she won. And what a prize! Shako was, before he gained weight, arguably the cuter one of the pair. While Azelma's strongest physical asset may be her knock-out smile, on their black and white wedding pictures Shako resembles a meticulously groomed 50's movie star.

Shakos wedding proposal was equally extraordinary: a laxly thrown in question when they were talking on the phone while he was at work. Azelma made the moment memorable when she asked to be put on air for her answer and subsequently announced to a whole nation (of teenage electronic music fans) that yes, she was going to marry him!

A short while after this, however, customs were obeyed and the traditional phone-call from the groom's family to the bride's family was made: "Would you please be so kind and give us your daughter in marriage? We will care for her well." "Will you pay the bride's price?", Azelma's mother asked coldly, according to the old convention. "Of course we will, one has to, doesn't one?", they answered. In the end of course they did not pay a cent, and the married couple even moved in with Azelma's mother for the first few weeks, not, as is usual, with the family of the groom. That's how ridiculous traditions get lost. But I do see a negative aspect to this: Because as long as the men still expect to be the peremptory patriarchs within the newly established family, these changes all seem to happen to the disadvantage of women: In the end who ended up paying for the couple's car and appartment, as well as for the wedding, was Azelma's mum.

Anyway, at Shakro's and Azelma's wedding no duduk and nagara played, but Dilinja and Unkle remixes.
A few months later Chachia arrived.

So, as you see, for Georgians the two of them are clearly pretty progressive, as it seems at first sight, but obviously, the old patriarchal structures within the family are still well in place. Sitting on that bench, donning our sun glasses against the blaze of heat, we continue our prattle:
"At first Shako did not want to let me work at all. So instead I continued to study. I would have preferred to work, but this way I kept on studying for six years at business school. After that time I graduated with honours. As you see, though, I haven't been able to get a job. I sent out applications for two years, but they all want you to have proof of three years work experience and so on... " The desperation I read on her face is also a familiar scenario in the West. "I would be happy just to work as a secretary somewhere, but Shako won't allow it."
There is a reason why any husband would not like his wife to take up any simple job such as as a secretary's. In Georgian society, where unemployment is high, if you want to get a job, it either works via extended family-connections, or, as a woman, you have to sleep with someone, Azelma explains to me. Even if you are initially offered the job, it will finally come down to exactly the same: “I have a lot of friends who lost their jobs, because they refused to sleep with their bosses”. I may be somewhat naïve to be shocked by this, but it really seems we have come a long way in the West.

The way her husband bosses her around at home for a cup of tea or dinner, already had left me somewhat uneasy; not to speak of the day she jokingly-not-jokingly had said "He's going to beat me today" when she was posing for me in the short new dress she had just bought.

And I remember the day when I had to explain myself in front of Shako, because I had a book lying around entitled something like “Islamic Fundamentalism and Feminism”. It was clear I was not a Muslim Fundamentalist, so was I, …was I… a FEMINIST?? I tried to break it to him the softest way possible, choosing a topic on which I thought it is easiest to agree. I explained that in those Muslim countries in which I travel so much, feminism to me simply means to fight for women who undergo domestic violence. “There are even women who think it is right their husbands beat them! That’s awful, isn’t it?”, I said. He agreed, but I cannot forget the short flicker of hesitation that traversed his face before he answered.

However, Azelma later tells me things differently: when visiting Shakro's grand-parents in a mountain village near-by, they apparently took her by the side and asked her if she was happy in her marriage. At the time there were many problems in their relationship, she confides in me, so she despondently refused to say much. But the grand-parents next question simply was: "So, does he hit you?", and when she vigorously negated, they just shook their heads and said "well, what problems can there be then?".

Azelma told me in detail of the problems they had in their relationship. When they first got married and lived together, Shakro invited his friends over every night for the elaborate guzzling and munching carousals Georgians are famous for. It were hard times for Azelma, because in Georgian culture, women don’t join the men, so there she was, with a little baby on her arm, sitting alone in another room, serving the feasters like a waitress. “I am from Azerbaijan, no one drinks there. I just thought it was normal to drink that much, so that's why I never stomped my foot down!” Rumours spread in the building that Shakro was an alcoholic and it was better not to talk to Azelma. But Azelma is quite a character. So one day she stepped up to one of the neighbourhood girls she suspected of talking behind her back and said "I know what rumours go around. My husband is not an alcoholic. He just likes to party. And you know what? I drink with him!" After that the girls let the tittle-tattle be and began to talk to Azelma and befriend her step by step. Life became better.
But still today when Azelma speaks about this time now she says “It was as if I sat in prison for the first five years of my marriage.”

Actually, Azelma and Shakro’s relationship is a little bit like a modern Ali and Nino in reverse, since Azelma is from Azerbaijan. Her mother, who raised her daughter without her father, is an Azerbaijanian beauty with a strict teacher's glasses and facial features, but silk-like angel skin, who dyes her hair the same fiery colours as Azelma. She moved to Georgia when her child was twelve.

When, at twenty, Azelma, went back to Baku for the first time, her old friends peppered her with questions:
"So how is it in Georgia? Did you eat pork?" –She didn't say "Yes, and it's very tasty!", as she might have; she just nodded and mumbled "Yes, once or twice".
"So how is Tbilisi? Did you see any Armenians?" -She did not, as she might have, say "Yes, most of my best friends are Armenian, because everyone at my school was Armenian!", she just hummed something vague "hm-mm" and left it at that. (Azerbaijanis and Armenians are at war over Ngorno Karabakh for those not in the know.)

When she was twenty Azelma wanted to find out who and where her father was. It took her over a year; even a private detective was hired, but he threw in the towel after a few months. When she finally got her hands on the adress and contact details of her father by a cruel twist of fate, he had died only two months earlier. But finding all her cousins and half-brothers and -sisters over there in Baku was a near-miraculous experience: "It was like a Brazilian Telenovela! Everyone crying their eyes out!"