GUZELYURT

No, not just a fantastic score in Scrabble but a fairly remote, formerly Greek, now Turkish village in Anatolia which has an "underground city" in which the inhabitants would hide until any dangerous invaders had gone away. A bit like hiding behind the sofa until the Jehovah's Witnesses have gone.

THE VAST ANATOLIAN PLAIN

Not a "Vast Anatolian Plane" but an apparently homemade pickup we spotted at Ipsala on the Turkish/Greek border. Note the elegantly fashioned blend of Scrapyard Couture and Flymo technology.

THE REALLY TRUE STORY OF OUR LIVES (The Really Wheely True Story)

This is Ruth micrseconds before the sack of coal hit her.











ACTUALITY – OR THE REALLY TRUE STORY OF OUR LIFE

We have been giving you a false impression of our life in Laika, - and as I said to John, we have been boring the pants off you with pictures of beautiful historic ruins –
So this is what Wheely Cabin existence is at grass root level, - no beauty or history – just us two less impressive ruins! Here are some photos of what we mostly do!

Washing up – done in cold water - in the dark very often, but by John. He is very possessive about this chore. I can’t think why. It is the worst job of all and I don’t fight him for it. Plastic camper ware is grotty and stains easily. Large swathes of Europe don’t use teapots. We have broken two teapots but pretentiously we don’t use teabags so we now have half a Turkish teapot. We are wearing out the wine glasses but then the quality of wine we drink does dissolve plastic. Our guts do regenerate enough for us to keep going which is more important.

We used to leave the washing up bucket outside the van for the morning but the attentions of stray dogs are a problem. John has only his right Croc left at present as the left was carried off to some creature’s lair. So far only right shoes have washed up on the beach.
There is now an update on this! John decided to follow the camp puppy over the sand dunes and found his Croc a couple of properties further along – chewed but usable. We have also been woken by cats trying to get into the Wheely cabin – we found one tucked up asleep on the mosquito mesh under the roof vent one morning. I was kind to a cat once and then had to get under the van and fight her for our loaf of bread!
Here we are plagued by biting flies – the kind that cause dogs to lose their ears!

Laundry – occasionally done in the Chinese clockwork machine at great length and with maximum labour, usually by me. Washing machines are never in English and are very slow and sometimes don’t wash at all. Ironing is never done but there appear to be no putzi flies (maggot flies to the uninitiated) and I find careful folding of dry linen into our small spaces works pretty well as a press. I also make the bed. It requires agility and good humour and I make sure the sand is on John’s side as he wears shoes in the Wheely Cabin whereas I claim I don’t. Bedding gets washed less often than in Cranfield but it gets aired if the weather allows. Our silk sheets have been great as they dry fast!

Our current loo and shower is in a half-finished block and is cold water only. So I swim a couple of times a day and rinse off under the beach shower. We rigged the solar shower but it isn’t a perfect answer by any means. John shaves, dips less frequently than me in the sea – maybe the next place will have hot showers?

We have a garden as you see but the mould that grows on veggies in the inconstant cold of the fridge is possibly more exciting and possibly would be good for us too.

We have run out of food here at Osay Camping today. The whole area is a tourist resort and the small shops have almost nothing worth eating let alone buying. We will have to visit the nearest town by dolmus tomorrow. Restaurants are more expensive here too – in quite a bit of Turkey it is as cheap to eat out as in which has given me a pleasant break from cooking. For economic and health reasons we have not eaten processed or ready meals. Managing to cook varied meals from similar ingredients has been quite an achievement. John is rather careful about waste to put it mildly and the sparrows have a hard time getting breadcrumbs off our table! We are both quite pleased with ourselves as we enjoy our food, throw almost nothing away and don’t spend too much either.

Food has not been that simple to acquire. For the first 4 months we had a choice of pork and veal only. John doesn’t eat chicken which is universally available. Fish can be got but in many places it is imported from somewhere far away and is frozen or pickled! In Croatia fish could only be got in restaurants and the Mediterranean is fished out according to a British scuba diving contact.
Romantic notions about living off local produce have proved difficult to fulfil. You don’t just pull Laika over to buy from a roadside stall. There may not be parking and you may not have change. We would use markets but campsites are not accessible except by public transport and no one sane lugs their potatoes and wine round sight-seeing.
Another update - Today we shopped in Manavgat some 10 km away. It was all bazaars of tat for tourists and we walked miles to find fish, meat bread and a small supermarket. When we got back to the bus there was a rioting mob of German tourists (German school half term) trying to get on the dolmus and it took us a while to get home. We had grilled dorada (fish) for supper and then there was the washing up in cold water.

Like all of you we have been smacked hard by the low value of the pound and the crashing banks so our careful financial planning is way off reality. However there is no going back so the trip is just more costly than we hoped. Our biggest problem is the cost of phoning. We thought we had it sorted when we left but 3Skype is a failure. It could work with easy access to internet if we could phone and guarantee speaking to people when we were online. We haven’t made use of local phone cards but again calling from phone boxes would only work if people were home when we called. We are dependent on our mobiles. If darling people would use discount phone lines to call us back occasionally like dear K and B does we should be thrilled. We do know that phones are a big cost for all of us.

Anyhow we are also here to work. John does get stuck into his PhD when we are in one place for a while. He then has a number of agitated discussions with his printer and laptop about their performance that can be heard at a distance. People probably think that he is using that rude word to admonish me. The guitar needs tuning so it has to be kept quiet. I am struggling to put together ideas and concepts for my planned exhibition with K in Cambridge next year. Getting hands-on as I need to is harder in the space with my style of working on 6ft canvases where I throw paint around.

We were foolishly naïve about the impact of the trip on the two of us. Instead of 4 pub nights, Swalocs, work and parties, John just has me. Instead of women friends and family, art and work and book club, I just have John. We are still trucking but it has been close on a number of occasions. We don’t argue over where, why, when or what but John is from Somerset and I’m not, so there is a very loud culture clatter from time to time, and then again. I miss my family very much and John misses his.

We are enjoying this experience a great deal most of the time as you can probably see from our blog. The blog does take up our time though! I spend several hours downloading photos and cropping them etc before putting them on the blog but the biggest problem is the internet. It hasn’t proved expensive like the phones but it sometimes inconvenient and uploading the blog also takes ages. Please if the blog is boring or doesn’t tell you anything you want to know – do tell us. We might change it for you!

John and Ruth Attacked by Berbers!

We all have preconceptions about places, even though we know rationally, that some of them aren’t true. Like, f’rinstance, I “know” that all Australian men come home every day from the six o’clock swill, knock their Sheilas around a bit and then chuck a few sheep on the barbie (or some combination of the words preceding ) before piling into their tucker. Like we all know that a sentence in a Turkish prison is likely to be pretty hellish because we’ve seen or heard about Midnight Express. It may not be like that, at all. The chances are, that in reality, a period in a Turkish gaol could be a civilised, elevating and spirit-lifting experience. I don’t know. However we have found one thing to be true, and that’s that Turkish barbers (or “berbers” in Turkish) do cut your nose hairs as part of the haircut. What I didn’t know, until I had a Turkish haircut – to test the validity of the nose hair theory – was what extreme attention they give to the cutting of hair, and how long it takes. I’d reckon 15 minutes to be long enough in a British hairdresser’s chair, but when I had my hair cut this week, it took 40 minutes. That’s because when you think it’s all over, they bring the mirror for you to look at the back of your head (I always wish they’d leave it there a bit longer, as you don’t get many chances to look at the back of your head) and you say “Evet, lyimyim, teşekkűr ederim” = “Yes, that’s fine, thank you” (like I did, ha! ha!) they grab a new selection of implements and start all over again. Then they give you a shave with a cut-throat razor, carefully scrutinising every imperfect millimetre of your face, and, having done it to more than your satisfaction, do it another couple of times for theirs, just to be sure. Then, if they’re not quite happy with that, they may get a piece of string (sorry, about this, it’s difficult to describe) in a triangular shape, hold a corner in each hand and the third in their mouth (for tensioning) and roll it across your cheeks, pulling out isolated hairs. Then they get a miniature version of one of those burning torch things that street jugglers like to throw around when they have finished doing everything (or nearly everything) imaginable with Indian clubs, the barber sets light to it, waves it around in a very un-Health and Safety at Work Act way and sets fire to any offending hairs in your ears. A strong smell of burnt keratin then drifts around the salon. A bit like those Indian ear candles, without the candles. When that’s all done, they wash your hair, give you a head massage and swab out your ears with cotton wool and pummel your face for a bit, smother you in unguents, give you a good brushing down, reassemble your shirt collar and then ask for a fee of £1,25 for the whole experience. Oh, and a free tulip-glass of sweet tea is thrown in. How do they make a living?

Anyway, my having gone through the foregoing, Ruth said that she badly needed her hair cutting. Having seen that many barbers also offered "kuaför” (quite a lot of Turkish words are similar to French) to ladies, I suggested that she went to a barber. Here’s what happened:-

“John’s hair was cut extremely well by the local barber. He came back with a face as soft and smooth as a woman’s, looking better groomed than I have ever seen him (apart from the shorts and aged shirt that is). Turkish barbers do cut women’s hair and my hair had grown out rather ragged since my last trim so I thought I would give it a go. Didn’t think it would be styled but it might be tidy and if a disaster I could just employ my head scarf till we leave Turkey.

In Manavgat we found a barber, the young man sat me down, swathed me in an overall and then snipped away – and snipped away. First he gave me a side parting – neat but in 64 years I have never had a tidy parting that stayed one hour. Still I could see that he knew how to cut and he took a long while to do it. He used the mirror to show me my hair cut and I made to get up but - no!

He put my head back on the headrest and brought out a medieval instrument of torture – a long flexible spring that is used to remove small hairs from the face and the upper lip – owwwwh! – and he did just that – thoroughly and several times over – while I moaned and groaned and he laughed at my womanish behaviour. There are benefits to a smooth face – I thought of John’s wondrous smoothness and reckoned it was worth enduring.

Once again I hoped the process over and again my head was put back on the headrest. This time he plucked my eyebrows. I never ever allow this procedure because I can’t stand the pain – I go for an occasional eyebrow wax. He was however, very good and very thorough. It was the least painful eyebrow plucking and the best I have ever endured and the result is great.

Finally my hair was shampooed – the old-fashioned way – head forward into the basin. Communication failure and sign language meant I didn’t the towel in the right place so copious amounts of water splashed down my frontage and the young barber obligingly kept trying to rearrange my frontages with his free hand so they didn’t get wet. Typically at this point John was reading the Turkish weather report in the local paper so it didn’t make him jealous! Anyhow I was sat up again and my T-shirt and frontage were blown dry. Again John appeared not to see as the barber held my shirt away from my body and made effective use of the blow-dryer before he sorted out my hair the same way. My haircut was then smoothed with Egotiste hair gel, my earrings were quickly and easily inserted in my earlobes and I was able to go. I was delighted to go and delighted with the haircut. My parting slipped a bit the next day but the cut holds even when I have had a swim and not combed my hair properly. It is a bit Louise Brooks – have I got that right? – and a bit like the haircut I had at primary school. I am happy with it! Much better value than any other haircut ever. Also older ladies, like me - instead of sighing resignedly over those longer finer face hairs in awkward places – just try an hour’s agony at a Turkish barber and it will all be sorted!”

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR ENTHUSIASTS

Regular readers of this blog, if there are any, will know that Posts appear in sudden and intermittent abundances. This is because we tend to produce them as we travel but can only publish them when we can find suitable internet access. This is why they sometimes appear out of order.

Another thing to say is that quite often the pictures for a particular Post will appear some days or weeks before the accompanying commentary. That’s because we haven’t always got time or need to reflect on what we have seen. So it’s always worth going back over older posts which you have already seen in case anything has been added or corrected.

THE ANATOLIAN LANDSCAPE

IMPERIAL TRAPPINGS

In our wanderings around Europe and its history we have learned of many great historic leaders, such as Peter the Great, Charles the Bold and Suleiman the Magnificent. I have wondered for a long time about the Emperor who figured in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes which, since they did not exist, were invisible. I now know who the Emperor was. Rupert the Bare!