Bombs Dropping In Damascus

"And then there were two," read Beddor's E-mail.

"Of course I was right about Luke and Alex", read my dad's.

That was a few days ago. This was Beddor's E-mail yesterday:

"And then there was one".

Completely, thouroughly, unarguably defeated.

And just like that, the best laid plans of four wide-eyed and ambitious Minnesota boys have been torn asunder and defecated on; our merry band of wannabe nomads strewn- mind, body, and soul- across oceans and valleys and mental and emotional chasms:

Luke, back at home, safe and secure, in the warm (figuratively) grasp of Minnesota and the comfortable presence of friends and family, after making the sudden, game-altering decision to catch the first flight back home from Israel.

Alex, in limbo as he visits his girlfriend in the States and left to ponder his next move, after catching the second.

Byado, left with the lonesome and unenviable task of carrying the torch across the remains of the route we had all planned together.

Me...

A few days ago, even with Luke and Alex back in the states, I was determined to carry on. I'd spent all day looking for the road out of Damascus southward, to Jordan, trying to find someone to hitchhike with. Finally, I'd found a nice guy driving towards a city south of Damascus, on the road directly to Amman, willing to drop me on the highway out the city where it would probably take mere minutes to catch another ride. I was seated comfortably in his passenger seat. And I was deep in thought.

We approached a fork in the highway- one ramp directed towards the city I'd been trying so hard all day to leave, the other towards the country I'd been planning all along to enter after a week or two in Syria. I'd told Beddor that I would spend a few days in Jordan, maybe a few in Israel, and about a week in Egypt, before meeting up with him in India. The trip was still on.

Meanwhile, I'd been thinking all day about all the interesting people I had met in Damascus: Americans, Brits, and Russians studying Arabic for the semester; Syrians who had offered to personally teach me if I ever returned with any intention of learning their language. I also thought about the city itself- a strange mix of modernity and history, the exotic and the universal. I decided that it would be an amazing thing if, someday, I could return to Damascus, study Arabic, and really immerse myself in this incredibly different, yet in so many ways incredibly comforting and familiar world.

For some reason it wasn't until that moment, as the driver prepared to fork right towards my intended destination, that the revelation struck me. To my driver's surprise, I thanked him for the short ride, got out of the car, walked over to the other ramp, and stuck out my thumb.

There was no reason that today couldn't be that day.

A few hours later, I sent out the E-mail to Beddor and started talking to my Syrian contacts about becoming a student at the University of Damascus.

Looking back, it's hard to believe that I spent so many hours coming up with the route and the budget that would get our crew from Istanbul to Beijing. Every last detail was examined from every possible angle; every possible angle was analyzed down to every last detail. And yet... in the end, it obviously wasn't enough. The plan has turned out to be a failure of epic proportions. As a group, we couldn't even make it through the very first region on our itinerary. Hell, I set the precedent, abandoning the group after five days in Istanbul.

And yet, as much as I miss the homeboys and feel bad for leaving Beddor stranded, somehow I think I'll be okay when I wake up tomorrow in one of the most historic cities in the world, with the opportunity of a lifetime, surrounded by friendly faces. Maybe I should scrap the plan more often.

Some pics in honor of my comrades, both fallen and yet persevering onward:

(Insert your own melodramatic Celine Dion/Enya ballad here)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

America Invades Iraq, Again

And this time, the reds (and some random Turkish dude that we hitched across the border with) are by our side.

Or, as the fat, jolly Turk we rode across the final leg of the border with put it:

"America, Russia! Arkedeš? Holla, holla!!!"

Yes, I did indeed enter the Kurdish part of Iraq today. And yes, I am indeed still alive. Some very limited first impressions...

First of all, the trip across the border was long, boring, and entirely painless. Surprisingly, being tourists from America and Russia respectively allowed us to get through both the Turkish and Iraqi side of the border almost instantly. The only real issue was that we had to have a car to cross, but considering that we had already hitchhiked the entire way from Cappadoccia, it didn't prove to be too much of an issue.

The Turkish customs check in particular was probably the most amusingly relaxed one I've ever seen. Once the Turkish soldier saw that we were not Turk or Iraqi, he pulled us aside to a special section to have our luggage immediately inspected. Roman began the arduous task of pulling item after item after item out of his bag, to display to the soldier that he was carrying nothing illegal. After maybe a whole 15 seconds of this, the soldier grew impatient and waved for Roman to stop.

"Gun?" he asked, gesturing to his holster.

Umm... no.

"Cocaine?" 

No.

"Heroine?" 

No.

"Okay."

And he waved us both through. Apparently Turkish government officials aren't staying up late every night devising ways to protect Iraq from drug and arms smugglers.

The scraggle-beard accompanies me across the Iraqi border

(You'll forgive me someday for making you look at that picture, I promise.)

The other interesting thing about the border between Turkey and Iraq, besides the ease with which tourists like us could wander through, was that it seemed to be occupied exclusively by Turkish vehicles; in fact, I think I saw a grand total of one Iraqi license plate the entire time I spent in the area. Granted, we were headed from Turkey to Iraq and not visa-versa, but unless no Iraqi visitor to Turkey ever returns, I have to conclude that very few Iraqis are ever allowed in in the first place.

Pretty much all of the Turkish drivers were headed south for one reason, and as far as I could surmise that reason was cheap oil. Apparantly it can be very lucrative for an enterprising Turk to make the run back and forth between the two countries, buying low in Iraq and selling high in Turkey. And while Iraqi Kurdistan probably makes a lot of money from this arrangement as well, something tells me that a disproportionate amount of the wealth flows into the already richer country.

You'll see about a thousand of these right inside the Iraqi border

Finally, we reached Iraqi Kurdistan proper. I was immediately shocked by only one thing- that I wasn't shocked at all. Iraqi Kurdistan, upon first impressions after only a few hours, looks almost entirely like Turkish Kurdistan. It's a little bit grubbier and of course the signs are all in Arabic and Kurdish (as well as a surprising amount of English), but neither of these things was particularly unexpected. Meanwhile, the standard of living looks to be as high as most of Eastern Turkey, at least after only a few hours.

The only real difference that's jumped out at me so far is the claustrophobic feel of the only city we've been in, the bordertown, Zakho (where we've booked a hotel for the night for $10 apiece). While the cities of Turkish Kurdistan- and eastern Turkey in general- feel very wide open and comfortably populated, Zakho, to me, is defined by narrow boulevards that are absolutely teeming with life. The escalation in population density has been a little bit unnerving so far, but compared to the rampant poverty and anarchy that part of me was expecting and the tribal villages that another part of me envisioned, this is nothing. And really, it's no different than Istanbul; it's just that, unlike Iraqi Kurdistan, I expected Istanbul to be a raging orgy of human activity.

More interestingly, I just finished one of the most eye-opening conversations I've ever had, with a Baghdad resident named Wisam, vacationing with his family in Kurdistan. After letting me know that he preferred my accent to the British one, because the British one was annoying and "too strong", I immediately decided that I liked this guy. And when I found out that he lived in Baghdad and spoke good English, I knew that it was my civil duty to hound him with questions, so that I could relay the truth of the situation to the uninformed masses back home.

First of all, according to the admittedly biased Wisam, about 80% of Iraqis are pro-American; meanwhile, roughly 30% of the country still believes that Saddam Hussein was a good leader. Whether these two figures contradict each other, I'll leave it you to decide, but this is what I was told.

Secondly, while the Arab part of Iraq is getting better and will likely continue to get better- "God willing", Wisam said- terrorism still persists and is a very real problem. Though he considers Baghdad a safe enough place that he is raising his children there, he warned me that, as a Westener, it would be very foolish to even think about setting foot there. That same warning applied to all of Arab Iraq, even though he felt that certain places like ancient Babylon would be "very good for tourism".

The most intriguing thing by far, however, was Wisam's own personal story, which I should have recorded and sold for millions to Fox News, as it might have been the first time I've heard anyone make a convincing emotional argument for neo-conservative foreign policy that didn't amount to:"We're America dammit! Eff you, France!"

(Not that making an argument for any particular American foreign policy was what he was trying to do; he insisted he was indifferent to both Bush and Obama.)

Long story short, Wisam is an Iraqi who spent very little of his life in Iraq. This is because, when Wisam was a child, Saddam Hussein usurped all of his family's belongings- along with those of many other of the wealthier families living in Baghdad- and exiled his family. He's grown up and spent most of his life in Iran, though he still views himself as Iraqi.

When Iran is your safehaven, you know you've had it rough.

Which, of course, explains why this man was a lot more friendly towards me than anyone else I met on my first day in Iraq; it's hard to not love America when they gave you back your home. Plus, we really do have a better accent than Brits.

Now, Wisam is only one man with a very particular story and I'm sure that there are plenty of other stories for me to encounter in the days ahead which will assuredly illuminate the situation from whole 'nother perspectives.

But it's interesting no? Maybe I didn't come here, just for a really cool stamp.

Urban Camping in Adana

Another day; another adventure. After I woke up, feasted on a delicious Russian breakfast, feasted on some of the most jaw-dropping vistas I'll ever be lucky enough to witness (check out the previous post and watch your mind explode), and wrote yesterday's blog entry, Roman and I started our day in earnest by hitchhiking the 15 or so kilometers to Ihlara Valley. The Valley is one of Cappadoccia's big draws, and in the back of the truck of a friendly apple salesman who was even nice enough to offer the poor foreigners a taste of his wares, we knew that we were in for a good day.

Ihlara Valley is like a pint-sized Grand Canyon, only instead of a rocky, desolate brown, at the pit of the gorge we found a lush green forest with a creek trickling it's way through. That so much beautiful and beautifully diverse scenery could be packed into a single small Turkish region- Cappadoccia- is something I was left continuously in awe of.

Like so many of the great things in Cappadoccia, however, the Valley is polluted with tourists and the fiends that make their living praying on said tourists, and so once again, rather than pay the entry fee of 5 liras, Roman and I took action; or rather Roman took action and I followed his lead. When no one was looking we leaped the fence, crouched in wait of a quiet moment, and then disappeared into the crowd anonymously, identifiable from paying visitors only for the smug grins on our faces.

Unfortunately, as with Goreme Open Air Museum, the best part about the whole thing was getting in; the Valley was essentially a big, handsome picnic area for tourists who wanted to take pictures of the old monasteries dotted around the bottom of the Valley- more of the defaced and lifeless Cappadoccian monasteries that I'd seen enough of the previous day to last a lifetime. It was unfortunate too that the most incredible views were those we saw for free as we approached the place, looking down from our God-like perch; everything we witnessed below paled in comparison.

Finally, after a pleasant enough walk around the area, a few dead monasteries, a quick snack of wild grapes, and a spill into the creek that I only pretended was an accident (okay, so it was), we decided it was time to wave goodbye to Cappadoccia, a place that, unlike Istanbul, had no unescapable hold over me. It was time to embark on our true mission, which would require us to first hitchhike from Ihlara to Nigde, still in Cappadoccia, to Adana, a bustling Southern industry and university city, to Osmaniye, near Adana, and to Gaziantepe, near the Syrian border.

Well, though we'd made it about a third of our route by last night, thigns didn't go exactly as planned. That's because our drivers, two college-aged Turks who stopped almost immediately and by coincidence happened to be driving directly to our second planned stop, Adana- meaning we could bypass the chore of hailing another car in Nigde- proved to be too friendly and interesting to simply use and then leave behind forever.

Like something straight out of a nightmare; no way that black sheep could be anything but the physical manifestation of pure evil

And they spoke English! Nobody in this area seems to speak English except for university students and soul sucking tourism exploiters. Luckily, these were the former and not at all the latter. One, Ahmet, had actually lived all of his life in Switzerland, though he had Turkish ethnic roots, citizenship, and friends and family. The other, Enes, by some bizarre coincidence, lived in the same out-of-the-way Istanbul neighborhood as my CS hosts Onur and Ugur- Bachelevler. They were headed to Adana to visit Enes' girlfriend, who lived there.

Another thing they had in common Onur and Ugur, and almost everyone in Turkey in fact, was their exceptional generosity. I'd chalk it up to them being good Muslims- which they were seeing as how they fasted during Ramazan and never drank- but Onur was emphatically not Muslim, so Turkish generosity must be more complex than a simple religious mandate. Regardless, as if it weren't enough that they had driven us the four hours from Cappadoccia to Adana for free, they insisted that we come out with them and their friends so that they could buy us an Adana Kebab, famed throughout Turkey (or so they said).

My Adana Kebab guru

And so we did, and they proceeded to give us a whirlwind tour of the city, punctuated by Adana Kebab (actually an entirely seperate menu item from it's- in my mind- superior Donor counterpart), an amazing traditional Turkish desert that was like a combination between a giant cheesecurd and a pancake (yeah, I know, it sounds horrific, but trust me on this one- it wasn't) and a neighborhood football ("soccer") match that we attended, that ended in one of the most boisterous victory chants I'd ever seen, despite the fact that our hosts told us that the game in actuality had no importance beyond a casual scrimmage between friends.

The city of Adana, meanwhile, though it didn't have the style or substance of it's big brother Istanbul, is a lot nicer than I expected. It's basically a pretty typical modern city, with all upside and downside that such a tag carries. For a clear juxtoposition between Adana and Istanbul, all I had to do was compare each city's most famous mosque. Istanbul has the thousand year old Ottoman-era Blue; Adana has the equally grand Sabanci Mosque, built only 10 years ago, and the biggest in Turkey.

(Interestingly, the financer of this new mosque, Mr. Sabanci himself, had the gaul to both name the mosque after himself and to build it with 6 minarettes, a feature that I think only the Blue Mosque and the one in Mecca can match. Ballsy dude.)

It wasn't easy convincing Roman to take the Turks up on their offer and spend the evening in Adana. At first, Roman- characteristically seeing the value of common sense where I could not- was hesitant, afraid of getting stuck within the city limtis for the night, where our options would be limited and it would become very difficult to use his tent for a free night's stay. I, on the other hand, was not about to turn down a free meal and a good time just to do the practical thing. Finally, recklessness and naivete won out over my Russian friend's common sense and good judgement, and we joined the Turks for a night on the town.

Four or five hours later, after a night to remember, our hosts for the day stopped their car at the foot of a highway ramp only a few kilometers from the center of the city, where we realized we were expected to get out.

"Please, a little further out the city?", Roman pleaded in broken English. "This place not so good for make camp."

Ahmet explained that if they got onto the highway at all they would be forced to drive for a very long time. And we knew we were screwed.

Even so, I couldn't say that I really regretted taking our drivers up on their offer, my belly and mind both gloriously sated. Roman certainly did however, and as he spewed venom all over the side of the busy highway, I decided to keep my mouth shut.

My face as the realization slowly sunk in that, while taking 900 photos in front of the Sabanci Mosque is cool, it didn't quite make up for the fact that I was going to be sleeping on the side of the road in an hour


Night was well upon us by then, and we had no idea how to find a hotel or the desire to pay for one. So we did the only sensible thing- march a few 100 meters down the highway, climb the small fence, wade through an onslaught of sharp, cruel shrubs and branches that we hoped would protect us from invaders in the night, and set up camp with the highway in clear view.

For a proper US analogy, imagine camping along highway 94 within the Minneapolis city limits, as trucks and sedans blaze past literally every second, about 50 feet away. And then take into account that Adana is a city with a population of about 2.75 million people.

Well we survived. It wasn't even really that bad. Unlike the night before, I didn't nearly freeze to death. Meanwhile, no one chose to fight their way through our army of evil shrubs just to disturb our sleep. In the morning, even Roman admitted that all had turned out okay, over another exceptionally good Russian breakfast of rice, bread, and selcuk (sausage).

And so we turned our attention to the coming days, in which we'll be heading through the land of Turkey's least favorite sons and daughters- the Kurdish people. Though they had never been to Kurdistan, Ahmet and Enes- like all good Turks- felt it their national duty to mention repeatedly that the Kurds were "bad people" and that we would need to keep our guard up at all times if we didn't want to be gutted or mugged at gun point.

Though they certainly meant well, their warnings only make me that much more anxious to get to Kurdistan and witness the Turk-Kurd soap opera from the other side of the table. I have a feeling that the reality of the situation will prove to be a little bit more gray and a little bit less black and white than our new Turkish friends would prefer to believe.

A lil' more Selime

Turkish Hospitality

It started with a lot of begging and an awkward phone call.

That's how I got in touch with Onur Salman, my CouchSurfing host for 7 nights- by pestering and pleading to various people in a Turkish mall in an upscale Turkish neighborhood to let me use their phones and then by dialing the number that I had been given on the CouchSurfing website to reach my host, who when I did finally get a hold of him sounded like he had no idea who the hell I was. Probably because he didn't.

For little beknownst to Onur, his friend Murat, mischief maker extraordinaire and in control of Onur's CS profile, had agreed to let two Americans named Berken and Chris stay on his couch. All the more amazing then, that after meeting us at the subway 40 minutes after recieving that call and finding out that we existed, Onur and his roommate Ugur proceeded to provide the best possible CouchSurfing experience an American estranged from home could ever hope for.

They cooked for us. They cleaned after us. They introduced us to their friends and to their favorite local cafe. They introduced us to Turkish customs and played along happily when we introduced them to some of ours (read: high stakes). They entertained us and washed our clothes for us and drank with us. Onur even let one of his guests sleep in his bed on multiple occasions.

There were definitely some instances of culture shock involved. Most surprising was how they wore proudly, as if it were a badge of honor, that dirtiest of all American words, "communist"; it was kind of incredible to see the college-educated, best and brightest of Istanbul- students our age, living a modern life with all the Westernized luxories that come with it- speaking out so vehemently against the evils of greed-and-inequality producing capitalism. Even Turkey's founder/messiah, Ataturk, who I had previously thought infallible among Turks, met a good skewering  in the midst their anti-Westernization rants.

I decided to meet them halfway and admit that capitalism does leave a significant portion of people behind, funneling most of the wealth to the few rather than the many. My worry I told them was that by eliminating capitalism in favor of communism and therefore eliminating any incentive for taking individual initiative, the whole system would collapse and we would all be left to pay the price. They argued in return that the idea that we must all be individually rewarded for our individual successes was a result of a capitalist mindset; if the entire world were to embrace communism, then the culture would be different and each individual would happily accept community-wide rewards, rather than individual rewards, in exchange for their labor and innovations.

I know some conservatives whose heads would probably explode talking to these guys. But regardless of where my allegiances lay (not to communism), I can say for certain that it was an eye opening conversation.

At one point, while walking towards a market, Onur and I saw a tiny ball of fur scuttle across a street in the rain. Naming it Hošef, he and Ugur adopted it, fed it, built it a shelter out of a box, and generally made it feel taken care of. Realizing that the parallels between that cat and I were eerie, I knew it was about time for me to move on.

Finally, a few mornings ago, after seven nights spent easing into Turkish culture under the generous care of my CouchSurfing hosts, I managed to tear myself away. Immediately afterward, as I walked down the street towards the metro station, backpack strapped tightly to my back, I realized that, somehow, the sensation of turning my back on the familiarity and comfort that my hosts offered felt oddly familiar, as if I had only recently walked that same walk, the same emotions coursing through my mind. Some might even call it deja vu.

Never mind that in this latest farewell, my mom, dad, and sister had been replaced by two bearded, 20-something Turkish dudes; never mind that I was half a planet away from everything I had known just a week and a half ago; never mind that even my one vestige of the life that used to be mine- my friends Luke, Alex, and Byado- were miles away as well, in Cappadocia, which may as well have been on another planet; none of these things seemed particularly relevant at that moment.

Instead, I was struck by the fact that, for the second time in 11 days, I was saying goodbye to a place that, however briefly, had become home.