So, why did I have so much time? And why was I on a boat, when I was meant to be on the vast planes of Anatolia? Van, that's why. And what is there to say about Van? On the banks of a vast salt water lake 800km east of Cappodocia and only 80km from the Iranian border, I had seen this place and thought, fantastic, sounds great, certainly not Goreme or Istanbul or, god forbid, Bodrum. Better still I was told it was the centre of old Armenian territory and in the heartland of Kurdish Turkey. And yes, the lake was astonishingly beautiful, sitting in the permanent half light haze of winter surrounded by snow cone mountains on all sides, and "Eski Van", the old city, was stuck on a huge promontory overlooking all of this. The castle, the old Mosque and the various remains were eerily beautiful but were destroyed by the Ottomans near the end of World War One as a kind of punishment to the Armenians (who had fought with the opposing Russians). And it's what replaced it that was so dire, with a dearth of... Well just about everything. 
New Van has literally retreated from the gorgeous lakeside setting and is a planned, hastily built new town with all the charisma of Luton. Honestly, I make do, I get on with it, but after I'd wandered to the old town, walked around for a few hours and waited an hour to get a dolmus back in the dark (but only about 5 p.m) I stumbled back to a ghost town. What little had been there during the day was now packed up and it took me about 20 minutes to find somewhere to eat a very mediocre pide and then had to retreat to my dire hotel room (no showers, no heating, one footprint toilet) with a good book. Effectively I had travelled for about 16 hours, just to plan to make my escape as soon as humanely possible.
And that was it. A summarisation: Van, with all it's potential to not be, is ugly and dull, like a Turkish maiden aunt. I planned my escape, I'd take the ferry over the huge lake to Tatvan on opposite side, bed down for another night and escape. I woke up, had read that the ferry left at 12 so zipped out of the city in a taxi (we must allow ourselves some luxuries, it cost 10 lira) only to arrive at a dock in the middle of no where that was missing a ferry. After some scrabbling I found out that the ferry left precisely at 16.12 another four and a half hours of waiting. And am I glad I waited instead of trekking it back to Van to sit in some nondescript çay house, because this was the only redeeming feature of the whole failed venture: the people. As I sat around writing my last blog entry and shivering I was bought a çay, then an old man called over and chucked me two oranges he was loading onto a crate. Eventually I had been installed in the ramshackle café with the dock workers and the little Kurdish waiter, being softly interrogated as a token foreigner: "From where?" "Ingleterre", "Student?" "No, I finished" and, best of all, "What you speak? Turkish, Kurdish, Russian, German, Farsi?" reeled off like bullets... "Arabi?" roars of laughter, "NO!" big belly laughs from all the grizzled guys once this had been translated.
I guess you start to realise how far off the beaten track you truly are when people start to take an interest in you purely because you're foreign. In Van I was a mild curiosity, by the time I'd got to Hasankeyf I was like a dog riding a camel, walking on two legs. And here was the thing, I was officially in Kurd country, the part of Turkey that has been fighting for independence since the 80s, the part that is meant to be dangerous, unstable and backwards. And they were the warmest, most hospitable, most friendly of all the people I'd met. Yes, they are fiercely proud of their heritage, a lot of them are deeply religious, poverty stricken, and so arrest me Turkey, systematically suppressed. In fact, the more you read about it the more it makes my stomach turn. There are no Kurdish language newspapers or TV channels until 2005, it is illegal to speak of Kurdistan and many, many Kurds have been internally displaced and arrested by the Government. And after all of that, they have none of the haughty indifference so many people in Istanbul have, but are genuinely warm and affectionate. So as the hospitality continued as the ferry tugged long Lake Van, I was fed and watered by the elderly Kurdish steward who was stood at one end of room like the captain of the Titanic, rigid in front of the fireplace as the ship flooded, except this one was watching football and desperately trying to explain to me why "Galataseray GOOD" and "Manchester United win, GOOD!".
We arrived into Tatvan at what felt like the middle of night (9 O'Clock but it was pitch black and almost as dead as the desolate, corpsly Van) and I somehow managed to hike up a hill, across some railroad tracks and catch a dolmus by following the instructions of "Follow that light!", of a giant green, illuminated minaret. A quick bed down in my luxurious 3 star hotel (which featured a shower hose over a squat toilet) and off I hopped at eight on (another) bus, this time for Hasankeyf, the jewel stuck on the side of the Tigris. After the previous days rivetting excitement even a vaguely old rock would have been interesting, so heading off to one of the oldest continually inhabited places on earth (so I'm told, all though Byblos in Lebanon says that too...) definitely perked up my spirits. That's all for now, my fingers are sticky from eating Baklava,More soon, Gx
New Van has literally retreated from the gorgeous lakeside setting and is a planned, hastily built new town with all the charisma of Luton. Honestly, I make do, I get on with it, but after I'd wandered to the old town, walked around for a few hours and waited an hour to get a dolmus back in the dark (but only about 5 p.m) I stumbled back to a ghost town. What little had been there during the day was now packed up and it took me about 20 minutes to find somewhere to eat a very mediocre pide and then had to retreat to my dire hotel room (no showers, no heating, one footprint toilet) with a good book. Effectively I had travelled for about 16 hours, just to plan to make my escape as soon as humanely possible.
And that was it. A summarisation: Van, with all it's potential to not be, is ugly and dull, like a Turkish maiden aunt. I planned my escape, I'd take the ferry over the huge lake to Tatvan on opposite side, bed down for another night and escape. I woke up, had read that the ferry left at 12 so zipped out of the city in a taxi (we must allow ourselves some luxuries, it cost 10 lira) only to arrive at a dock in the middle of no where that was missing a ferry. After some scrabbling I found out that the ferry left precisely at 16.12 another four and a half hours of waiting. And am I glad I waited instead of trekking it back to Van to sit in some nondescript çay house, because this was the only redeeming feature of the whole failed venture: the people. As I sat around writing my last blog entry and shivering I was bought a çay, then an old man called over and chucked me two oranges he was loading onto a crate. Eventually I had been installed in the ramshackle café with the dock workers and the little Kurdish waiter, being softly interrogated as a token foreigner: "From where?" "Ingleterre", "Student?" "No, I finished" and, best of all, "What you speak? Turkish, Kurdish, Russian, German, Farsi?" reeled off like bullets... "Arabi?" roars of laughter, "NO!" big belly laughs from all the grizzled guys once this had been translated.
We arrived into Tatvan at what felt like the middle of night (9 O'Clock but it was pitch black and almost as dead as the desolate, corpsly Van) and I somehow managed to hike up a hill, across some railroad tracks and catch a dolmus by following the instructions of "Follow that light!", of a giant green, illuminated minaret. A quick bed down in my luxurious 3 star hotel (which featured a shower hose over a squat toilet) and off I hopped at eight on (another) bus, this time for Hasankeyf, the jewel stuck on the side of the Tigris. After the previous days rivetting excitement even a vaguely old rock would have been interesting, so heading off to one of the oldest continually inhabited places on earth (so I'm told, all though Byblos in Lebanon says that too...) definitely perked up my spirits. That's all for now, my fingers are sticky from eating Baklava,More soon, Gx
