I came to Ayvalik, Turkey, for a photo. A photo, more specifically, of the incredible beach with its coloured umbrellas and food and mountainous Greek isles on the horizon. This is the image on the cover of my guidebook, and I’m clearly poaching their idea.
Back in Selcuk, a working-class town devoid of much decoration or fanfare, I await my next bus while taking photos of kids playing in the streets. After a quick meal at a neighborhood eatery, my next stop is Pamukkale.
I am no fan of organized bus tours, led by the half-interested guide,with too-brief stops at too few places. So in the face of a thousand brochures for package tour operators, I set out on my own on regular bus service to Selcuk. Stashing my backpack at the bus depot, I set out to walk the 3 km back to my intended destination: Ephesus.
Geographically speaking, that is. The aquatic edition of Planes, Trains and Automobiles has brought me to the third continent of my trip. From Santorini, Greece, I spent 18 hours sailing eastward to Asia. Well, I’m in Turkey, but technically it’s still Asia.
Santorini was meant to be a one-night stand: a quick reunion with an island I loved my last time in Greece, while en route to the uncharted territory of Crete and Rhodes. My first visit to Santorini sold me on a place with fabulous volcanic beaches (take your pick of red, black or white sand).
Winning the prize for Most Stunningly Modern and Attractive Metro System is Athens, an achievement that would normally be fabulous. Except in Athens, it is a subway system designed to deliver passengers around a disgustingly rancid hellholeish cesspool of a city.
Death was imminent. I was sure of it. It was so humid that the word “air” could be used only sparingly. And it was so hot that there may as well have been an onion on my head and a tomato in my mouth: I was being roasted alive. The thermometer pegged the temperature at 72oC (162oF).
The first bombs fell about 10 pm. Their arrival was no surprise — journalists left the city two days prior. Residents gathered in Cold War-era shelters as the air raid sirens wailed and radio reports warned of the need for gas masks. The state-run television station blinked out. Explosions erupted around the city and the lights went black.
Set on an emerald blue lake, surrounded by the gentle mountains that mark the beginning of the Julian Alps, Bled has been a tourist favourite for decades. About a hundred decades, in fact, as the resort town of 5000 people is celebrating its thousandth year.
My visit to Italy lasts less than five hours. The lines long, the hostels full, the breakfast expensive (but still exquisitely delicious), I’m out of Venice in under 45 minutes, moving eastward again to Trieste, where a bus takes me across the border to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Its beauty is classic.
Welcome to Cannes, where the idle rich luxuriate and vaporize large sums of their money, all in shocking disregard for struggling backpackers. While beach chairs and umbrellas rent for €30 outside the Cannes Inter-Continental (€400 and above per night), the sand on the free slice of beach, with the backpacking, pasta-and-sauce eating, tap-water-drinking proletariat, is every bit as nice.
From Barcelona, Samy and I head to Perpignan, France, to stay with his aunt and their family. It is an exciting three nights of cultural immersion, culminating in the highly enriching experience of an elegant night of fine French cinema at its intellectual best: The Punisher (in French).
In Barcelona, things turned ugly. Well, ugly if you happen to be my liver. My big bottle of Smirnoff Vodka, in my bag since the Moroccan duty-free extravaganza, took one for the team. In a single night. The team, of course, comprising myself and Samy.
Ping… ping… The abstract geometric graphics swirl and twist on the massive overhead screens, as if a deranged architect is directing a computer-generated war between multicoloured polygons. Lights pivot and twirl, hurling coordinated blasts of photons around the basketball arena-sized room.
Morocco has been officially rocked. Aboard the ferry to Spain, I spent my last Dirhams on insanely cheap Smirnoff and candy bars. It was quite a way to go out.
The temperature has risen considerably in the past few days, both across the country as a whole and especially as we have moved northward, leaving us to regret not having taken the time for a trip to Merzouga for a camel trek across the sand dunes of the Sahara.
From our base in Meknes, a comfortable hostel with a walled compound and apricot trees in an affluent part of town, a day trip to Fes has only one target: the leather tanneries. Leather goods are ubiquitous in Morocco, with bags and clothes and shoes in a vast spectrum of colours. And most of them are crafted with leather produced in Fes.
Set against the crashing waves of the Atlantic, the walled city of Essaouira is a fascinating look at a fishing and hashish (need there be more?), but we arrive just ahead of the international jazz festival.
Having acquired some kind of cold in Marrakech, I’ve started to cough. I hoped that good food and the warm air would snuff it out before it (and I) became a nuisance. No such luck. I awake today to begin a two-day mountain trek with a full-blown hacking cough.
After the insanity of Marrakech, our first stop is the village of Imlil. Because, when in a hot, desert country, what better a thing to do than climb a mountain without any of the appropriate equipment?