13 Hours Along the Mediteranean Coast

I think I easily beat my longest bus ride ever: Adana to Antalya along the Mediterranean coast, 600km in 13 hours!

Luck was with me from the beginning. I got a seat on the first row with the best view onboard that allowed me to really appreciate the landscape. Some of my good male friends (you know who you are) would say I could have been even luckier and be seated close to top model but sadly guys, this is not possible in Turkey. A man and a woman are never assigned adjacent seats except if they are traveling together!

We left at 1PM and as soon as we got out of the city, the bus entered a narrow road, tucked in between the sea and the mountains that we would almost never leave for the whole way. It was just great to look up from my guide book (gotta read the stuff right!) and see the blue sea on one side, the green mountains on the other, and the blue sky on top.

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The best time was definitely around 8PM when the view became especially impressive as the sun set and the dusk was coming down. At that point, the darker colors were so vivid and you could clearly see the line of trees on the edge of the mountain.

The landscape was not that great after 9PM. As we got closer to Analya, the view changed completely as package hotels started covering the whole shore and the other side of the road. I had reached the more touristy part of the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.

It became a bit frightening too, as I could see everything that was going on in front of the bus. The curvy road was forcing the bus to make wide turns covering both lanes, while cars and trucks were coming fast on the opposite direction. This worries you a bit during the day, but at night it becomes quite scary. And the guide book mentioning the high rate of bus accidents in Turkey did not help either :).

Given that there was not that much to see any more, I fell asleep around 1AM and we finally reached our destination at 2:30AM. It was a great journey. Meryem had told me it was crazy to take the bus and that I should have flown here instead but I had time and I wanted to enjoy the landscape. It is true the ride was longer than I expected but I did not get bored at all and did enjoy it a lot.

Off Tourist Track

On Sunday I left Syria for Turkey without knowing much about Turkey. I also did not plan beforehand so I have been reading as much as I could in the past few days, especially during the 7-hour bus ride from Beirut. Initially, I had not made up my mind which way to go from Aleppo (Syria). Not wanting to waste my time I just decided to cross the border, go to Antakya (the closest big city formerly known as Antioch) and take advantage of the bus ride to read more and plan the rest of the visit :).

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The border crossing went well. However, there were a lot of trucks crossing the  border so, at one moment, we got stuck in a no-man land in a huge truck-traffic jam until the minibus finally decided to go off-road in order to get through. Visa was not a problem, it is automatic and free for French people.

Once in Antakya, I checked into a hotel but the TV was not broadcasting the World Cup so I decided to go out and find a place to watch the French and the Brasilian teams. This turned out to be not so easy, first because it was Sunday and as I found out, a lot of places in Turkey are closed on Sundays, and second I did not speak any Turkish. I also started realizing that Antakya might not be a place tourists visit much because very few people here speak English and the idea of meeting a French speaker was even more remote.

Yes, leaving Syria and entering Turkey was a bigger event than the other times I have changed countries. Furthermore, the fact that people in Turkey, unlike in Syria and the other countries I visited before, do not speak Arabic and my being comfortable with my limited but very useful Arabic was not of much help in Antakya.

So I had to learn some Turkish. The first thing I learned was “Anlamyorum” (I don’t understand), makes sense, right? :). One advantage of the Turkish language over the Arabic is that Turkish uses the the roman alphabet which they adopted after World War I in place of the Arabic alphabet. So it is easier to learn new words that I see written on the streets, TV, or computers.

What stands out is that people are very friendly and even if they don’t speak English, they are very eager to help. Someone nicely escorted me to a pub after I mentioned “Football”. The owner of the pub received me well and before the game between France and Korea ended, I had befriended the waiter who offered me a map of the region and the city. Watching the games became even more interesting because at the pub I met a few Koreans, who I think might have been the only ones living in that region.

Another word I had to learn early on was “kepati” (which means “closed”) because I arrived in Antakya on a Monday and  I discovered the hard way that, different from the Middle-East, all public monuments are closed on Monday including museums and other points of interest.

Since everything I wanted to visit was kepati, I decided to move West to the city of Adana.  Turkey is a big country and I decided to move West first and am planning on taking the road along the Mediterranean to get closer to Greece where I will be in a week.

Adana is the 4th largest city in Turkey so I thought it would be a nice stop on my way West.

I started having doubts about going there thought, while reading more in the bus, since I realized it was not well documented. However, I had already made the choice so I decided to stick with it and try to get through without any help from the guide book for once. It actually turned out very well. I even decided to stay one more night in order to visit some of the monuments and get a feel for the place :).

In Adana, while I was walking in the streets with my book in hand trying to make sense of the map, people came towards me and offered to help, especially people speaking a little bit of English that seemed eager to practice.

At a very nice museum in Adana, an employee offered to show me around since the material was only presented in Turkish. She was very nice and thorough. Her English was basic but it was enough to get me through, and she refused any tip or payment at the end! The museum has some really nice statues of Greek and Roman gods as well as a fine example of an Achilleus Sarcophagus (similar to the ones in Beirut).

At the Internet cafe, I was befriended by the owner when I started editing my  pictures. He showed me his digital SLR and we talked a bit about music (Big Ramstein and Metallica fan there. And it was dirt cheap too!).

At the hotel, I met Meryem, a Cyprian-Turk lady living in London, and we hung out for some time talking about our lives of expats and a bit about the condition of women in South-East Turkey. For example, she thought it was a bad idea to go out together so we stayed at the hotel.

In general, people have been getting out of their way to help me in the last few days in Antakya and Adana. I think it might be because they are not used to seeing tourists as often and the novelty factor is still high. And believe me, they are not trying to get you to any souvenir shops :).

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At the same time, being a novelty also had some disadvantages as some people would look at me curiously. This was especially the case when I visited a new huge Mosque that was built 8 years ago. I was welcomed gracefully but I got a lot of stares. I guess this is a normal trade-off. For the record, the staring was more out of curiosity rather than animosity and at no point I felt unsafe.

As a matter of fact, I have not seen any other foreign tourist in the last 3 days. Welcome to the “off tourist track”!

First Time

Yesterday, after a 7-hour bus ride from Beirut to Aleppo, I decided it was time to try the hammam (or Turkish bath) which I have heard so much about. Rod had recommended that I wait and try them in Turkey but since there is an hammam dating back to the XVth century in Aleppo I thought I might as well try them in various countries to see the difference.

Anyway, I really felt like it so I did it :).

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After walking around the old town visiting the souq (market) area and the main mosque, I located the place and entered.

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The cashier pointed out a set of small lockers and not knowing exactly what to do, I confessed to him that this was my first time. “It is OK” he said with a smirk, “Just put all your valuables in the drawer”.

Another man came by with a piece of tissue wrapped around his hips and said “Like this”. I understood I had to undress and wrap with that. After this was done, he gave me some kind of nest and a bar of soap. He pointed at a pair of wooden sleepers that I put on and took me to the Sauna room. It was just like any other sauna I have used before so I just sat there sweating.

It got very hot though, so I decided to get out for a bit and was wondering what I should do next. There was a set of other rooms with water basins close to the sauna, so I wondered if I should wash there or somewhere else. “In case of doubt, don’t do anything” goes a French saying, so I decided to try and re-enter the sauna which by that time was smoking very hard. Maybe I should not have added so much water on the floor!

After 10 more minutes of cooking, I was done and came out again. This time, since nobody seemed to come for me and the French saying did not do me any good, I started to wash at one of the basins but got stopped in my enterprise by another man wrapped with a cloth that told me to follow him to another room. It turned out he was the scrubber masseur and it was time for deep cleansing ;).

He sat on the floor close to a water basin, took the nest thingy and the soap from my hands and told me to sit close to him. He first started with the scrubbing. Right arm…”Man, this is strong!” I thought. Left arm, right leg, left leg… “Watch out for the family jewels!!!”.

At this point, he asked “You are French!?”. Hum, how did he find out? My accent or something else?! Well, I did not dare ask and just answered that he was correct ;).

He finished getting two layers of skin off my body and it was time for the cleansing massage. The nest thingy is used like a sponge and he went ahead and showed me how strong he was. That was some deep tissue massage. The moment he jerked my legs around and I felt a sharp pain at the right knee is when I started missing the sweet soft massage I got last time in the US. With that he was actually done and told me to go back to the sauna.

After 5 more minutes in the sauna, I was really well done and got out to cool off. I then went back to the entrance where a man wrapped me in towels from head to toe and enjoined me to seat in front of a glass of tea. I rested there for some time, dressed back in my clothes, got my valuables back, paid, and got out.

I actually felt quite good and maybe the cleanest I have been in months so I guess this hammam thing worked. To finish the evening off nicely, I had a nice Lebanese dinner in a very beautiful old Ottoman house transformed into a restaurant. The perfect cure after that 7-hour bus ride :).

Beirut Wrap-Up

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I have been enjoying Beirut and its surrounding area for the last 3 days.

When I was not walking around town looking for streets that do not exist anymore, trying to take service taxis to get me somewhere for the regular 1000LL ($1 = 1500LL) or waiting for the 10PM bus ;), I visited some places of interest.

Without any doubts, the highlights have been the National Museum and the Jeita Grotto.  

National Museum

The National Museum of Beirut is one of the best museum I have seen so far in the Middle-East. It has been fully restored after the war ended and amazingly, most of its collections and important items have been preserved thanks to ingenious systems and hard work of the museum staff. The whole story of how the collections were protected during the war and how the museum was restored and reopened are actually presented in a very nice 15 minutes movie. 

The museum is very well organized and documented (in Arabic, French and English). The pieces that attracted me the most were the two sarcophagus of Achilles from the Roman period, the mosaic of the seven wise men, the young boys statues and the collection recovered from the two Phoenician kings in Byblos that are just mind boggling.

Also to be noted is the mosaic of Byzantine period with the inscription “Envy is an evil. It has beauty however. It eats out the heart and the eyes of the jealous”

For an overview of the collections, you can look at their website that is very well done too! 

Jeita Grotto

I visited the Jeita Grotto (Caves of Jeita) yesterday. It is very close to Beirut so you can visit it as a half-day trip from there. The only bad thing about them is that the company that exploits them is actually trying to create some sort of an attraction park there and as a consequence, it is quite expensive to get in.

But once you get into the caves you forget about it as the caves are just amazing. I have visited a lot of the caves of the South-West of France when I was 10 y/o and I only remember the Gouffre de Padirac to be that impressive. There are two caves; The superior cave is the most impressive in my opinion with very large open spaces and great looking stalagmite and stalactite formations. This is highly recommended.

Both the museum and the caves did not allow taking pictures so you will have to check the respective websites to get an idea of what it looks like. 

I am now in Aleppo (Helab) back to Syria after a 7-hour bus ride. No incidents except for avery nice Syrian border immigration agent that was not happy with the performance of the French football team! He still let me through without any hassle though, Ouf :).

Super Night Club

Wednesday night 9:50PM.

The next football game is about to start in 10 minutes and I did not have dinner yet. I had made my way to that sandwich place close by to get some take-out food. I am just waiting for the skewers to cook and the clerk to fix my sandwiches. It is a quite hot inside so I am waiting outside when the strangest, most surprising and unexpected, and the wickedest thing in this whole trip happened.

A bitten down old bus parks in front of me. The front and back doors open and from there spill out women of all shapes and sizes wearing the most outrageous “club” outfits preferably 2 sizes too small. There are not just one or two, but more than 20 women, mostly white, that make their way down a small alley to a place called the “Excellence Super Night Club”, ignoring all the guys hanging out in front of the sandwich shop.

I had read about super night clubs in the guide book and the section on night clubs in Beirut or Jounieh (party town close to Beirut) spells it clearly: Stay away from super night club as they are not really night clubs but strip joints.

I knew that there were 2 or 3 of these clubs in the street but I could not believe what was happening there. I was so astonished seeing them arrive all together in this bus, of seeing them so out of place that I did not even think about taking a picture! Thinking about it, it might have saved my camera and myself some hard bitch-slapping as some of these girls were definitely bigger, stronger and meaner than me ;).

Weird experience!

P.S.: The owner of the Italian restaurant nearby told me it was happening every night at 10PM so if you are ever in Beirut, plan your dinner accordingly ;).

[06/17/2006: Edited after constructive comments from my Editor In Chief :)]