The Canakkale Trip (Cha NAK kal lay)

So Canakkale is a little further from Ankara than Mery and I had thought....by like about five hours. Much as I like bus rides, it's always a bummer to get to your city acfter dark- makes it harder to navigate, get one's bearings and get a sense for the liveliness of the places, since much of it is already shut down.

First, a note of tour buses (I omit the word "luxury" here only because there is no bathroom on most of the Turkish ones). That these have not become more widely used in the US is surely an indication of the degree to which individual vehicles are regarded as status symbols, because in addition to their economic and ecological advantages, public transport via these babies is incontrovertibly more luxurious. The fact that their use in the US is restricted to those too young, old or poor to drive themselves seems a phenomenon giving manifestation to the beatitudes. For example, the Concord Trailways buses that go from Portland to Boston (one of my fondest discoveries during college not involving the words 'hefeweizen' or 'P2P') is a cheaper, less ecologically-impactful method of transport that provides huge windows and seats orthy of a La-Z-Boy showroom. And in terms of safety, would you rather get rammed by a Hummer in your petite Peugeot or one of these mammoths? We can and should have a much stronger rail system in the US, but as long as we've arterialized our purple mountains and amber waves of grain with highways we should use that system in a more efficient, less stressful way by relying as much on fleets of these puppies for inter-city transport as countries like Turkey, China and Panama do.

The landscape as you leave Ankara in any direction is a a welcome mixture of agriculture and desert. While it might be called the Anatolian PLATEAU, the area before the coastal regions is actually moderately hilly, providing for an interesting variety in the topography and uncultivated flora you to look at. Both times that I have descended onto the coastal regions of the Black Sea and Marmara it has come as a welcome change in geography. The much-higher rainfall makes for greatly increased plant life both on lowland farms and tree-covered hillsides.

It was three hours before we took our first stop, but thereafter they occurred at least every hour to gain and dispatch shorter-distance riders and get lunch. Hence the 11-hour bus ride. At least the bus didn't break down...except on the ride back.

Canakkale itself is neatly aligned along the main streets Cummurhiyet (Republic) Bulvari and Ataturk Caddesi, to the great benefit of travelers arriving late and without maps. The hostel we wanted from the Lonely Planet guide was cheap, easy to find and well-located, but we moved the second night because there was a place nearby with breakfast and our own bathroom for only a little more. After dinner the first night we got in, we strolled along the waterfront, avoiding the casts of fishermen as we made our way to the big Trojan horse statue. On a patch of cement lowered slightly from the rest of the waterfront walkway there was a basketball cout with kids playing both nights we saw it, despite the cold and wind. The waterfront was pretty and nautically-oriented, without feeling fancy and inaccessible. It was well-lit and there were small fishing boats tied up along most of its distance.

The first day in Canakkale we wandered to the Naval Museum, then back to town through some less-touristy back streets (unless those roosters were tourists too), and to a tea salon. We waited for an unsuccessful half-hour at a bus stop to go to Guzelyali, a neighboring town purported to to have some actual beaches, and then stuck out for the archaeological museum at the southern end of Ataturk Caddesi. After passing a bunch of shoe and clothing stores, a bridge with the local bus depot underneath, more apparel stores, some schools and houses, and yet another set of manicans sporting the latest in cheap, Eastern European fashion. There were some ruinous-looking pillars and tablets visible through the fence, but since it was the bayram (holiay), the museum was closed. On the way back to town, we saw a bus labelled "Guzelyali"- unfortunately we got on in the wrong direction and the driver just dropped us in the middle of town again. Then we waited about another ten minutes at that stop, just for the hell of it, and were this time rewarded with another bus coming the other way to take us in the right direction.

Guzelyali is a small town with lots of modern-looking (but not fancy) apartments, a couple cafes and a mile or two of sandy beaches with clear Aegean water. It reminded me a little of Punta Chame in Panama, but with more development. The hotel staff that morning, who had obviously never been to Winslow Park in Freeport in April for a dip off the Harb Cottage dock, warned that we wouldn't be able to swim for the cold. I found it invigorating and enchanting. It was great to be reminded that you don't have to spring for an expensive resort in order to find someplace really nice to swim.

Dinner that evening warrants mention thanks to the mussel salad. It only had vinegar, olive oil, pickles, onions and mussels, but it redefined my horizons in terms of culinary possibilities for things with the word 'salad' in the title. Ne lezzetli!

Sunday we intended to visit Troy (Troia/Truva), but it was even colder and wetter than the day before, so we stopped to get a new coat and spend time in a simit bakery and drink coffee. Gotta survive in the wild somehow. the weather made me feel nostalgic for Maine more than I have been in Ankara because there was a true rawness to it and there were actual puddles threatening to remind me what frozen extremities are like. The bus terminal was another setback, because the guy at TRUVA BUSLINES said that no buses go to Troy, just taxis. Driven by his brother-in-law. Very cheap. Special price for you. Okay, I'm making those last three sentences up, but I didn't entirely believe him. A couple other people tried to tell us how to get there, but it didn't work out until someone at one of the other buslines knew the word for 'bridge', because we needed to go back to the local depot we had passed Saturday. Who knew.

The Troy archaeological sites provided ruins from the last four thousand years, many accompanied by apoligist plaques explaining the early (and damaging) excavations of Heinrich Schleimann. Apparently numbnuts there decided to dig straight through to the ruins of Homer's era, the rest of the strata be damned. Which is a bummer, because there are nice strata. These were caused by the fact that each time the city was abandoned, the new occupants had to knock down the old buildings made of crude brick and erect their own out of...crude brick. So only the rock walls and such were left standing. Meredith was the perfect person to visit the site with, because of her depth of knowledge and appreciation for the lore surrounding it. As we examined the millennia-old repmples and columns and walls, she gleefully recounted the literary fate of each of the Iliad's characters. The weather and parts of the scenery were still making me happily homesick, so all in all it was quite a splendid afternoon.