In less than 48 hours we travelled 400 miles, experienced 12,000 years of history, drove 120 kilometers an hour as cows grazed on the median, ate in a seaside resort and in a weed filled garden and passed through cities, industrial sites, resorts, villages and a rural no mans land. It was an exhausting marathon of sensory overload.
We left Saturday morning, for Amasra, a Black Sea outpost situated on a spit of land that juts out into a small protected harbor on Turkey's northeast coast. We drove for more than four hours, the first two of which were a straight shot on the highway. Relying solely on our TOM-TOM navigator, once off the exit, we found ourselves deep inside a village, surrounded by geese and at a dead end in from of barn. After u-turning and finding our way back to a paved road, we stopped a Turkish farmer who spoke no English, but who somehow got us back on track. For the next two hours we proceeded on faith, relying on our trusty computer friend who had already let us down and arguing about the usefulness of a Turkish map and whether it could have helped us avert our anxiety. Arguments like these are a common occurrence. Apparently my job is to insure that nothing goes wrong in our foreign adventures and am poorly suited to it. In fact, I expect things to go wrong!
The scenery changed drastically and by the time we neared Amasra, we were surrounded by the majesty of mountains, pines and boulder faced cliffs. The glitz of Ankara and it's dry arid plateau seemed like another country.
Occupied for more than 12000 years dating back to the pre-Hittite, Amasra rests at the foot of seaside cliffs cloaked in fir trees overlooking the endless reach of the Black Sea ( which is actually a brilliant deep blue, and not black at all)! Once a resort destination for Istanbulites, the town was awash in Romanian tourists and locals enjoying the brilliant sun and uncharacteristically warm sea temperatures. The focal point of the town is a decaying castle that has slowly incorporated the village, and now encases more modern dwellings in various states of disrepair. While charming, the whole town could have benefitted from a good scrubbing and some masonry work. And like the rest of Turkey, almost everywhere, buildings were in various states of construction, renovation or demolition. Nothing is done, but everyone is being done!
We walked through the old town and castle remnants, watched the locals dive off an old stone platform into the sea, toured the bazaar and then headed to the waterfront for lunch. We sat on a balcony overlooking the fishermen scooping the catch of the day right out of the water, and then waited for the chef to grill our selection. We sucked the last bit of meat from the bones as we surveyed men cleaning the fish, boys raking the stones and the local feline population feasting on the spoils. The air was salty and smelled of sea and fish. The owner chatted with us about life in Turkey and his experience in the United States. "Everything in the US is about money," he said, " but in Turkey, you don't need much to live...here we have everything and we don't have to work all the time ...we can live with more ease.". At that moment, he seemed to make perfect sense!
Before leaving we toured the museum, walked along the waterfront and then decided to try to find our way to a local site to tour the 4th largest cave in the world. MISTAKE!
We spent the next 45 minutes trying to wind through the mountains looking for the cave entrance. The Turks have a infuriating habit of posting directional signs haphazardly and forgetting that is is important to continue marking the trail until someone has arrived the destination. Despite a helpful tour bus driver who lead us through part of the trail and mapped the rest, we never arrived. In part, we blamed it on highway construction , which we think obscured the turn off. The other blame rested with our navigator who is proving leas reliable than we had hoped. Of course, our failed attempt to reach the cave triggered another round of bickering about maps and their importance, but I insisted that dirt roads would not likely be well marked on a county map overview.
The argument continued, but being prudent, we decided we should head south to Sanfranbolu, our next destination, because we wanted to avoid driving at night. We programmed our trusty TOM-TOM and headed south into the unknown. At first, we were wary as the road seemed like a secondary road at best. The deeper we went, the less dependable our navigator seemed. The pock-marked macadam turned to gravel, then dirt, and finally we found ourselves on a trampled grass path with dirt ruts made by the occasional tractor. Cows would periodically meander across the path, as we wound around the mountains, through farms and small villages propped up by fallen timbers and abandoned cars.
Our navigator kept insisting on the righteousness of the route, but our confidence was leaking and the further away we got from civilization, the more we argued about maps. We spent more than hour on treacherous mountain village roads, easing past barbed wire fields, and hanging onto to our sanity as we rounded hairpin turns overlooking cliff side ravines. The sun as disappearing but we had no choice but to continue through the woods. We has to trust. And then finally , we saw black top and the promise of a main road. We ignored the computer and took a flyer to follow a truck, which eventually steed us to a highway. Thankfully, from there it was a straight shot to our destination.
We spent the balance of the drive revealing the depth of our paranoia and laughing at each signpost that had deepened our anxiety. And of course, we argued about the maps......
With ample daylight left for the two hour drive, we programmed our trusty TOM-TOM and headed off for the next leg of the adventure.
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