Turkey Part 1

In Turkey, the word for diesel is "Motorin". I challenge you to pull into a gas station, say that word and not start singing Sister Christian by Night Ranger. It's objectively impossible. 

Turkey - First Impressions: 

Everyone smokes all the time & smiles cost extra. The majority of the men look like Bond villains who have perfected their scowl. Smoke rising from their skinny cigarette in one hand and steam rising from their test tube tea cup in the other hand. Mildly threatening stares on every face. Welcome to the Ottoman Empire!

Then The Pleasantries Began

At our very first restaurant, before we had purchased a SIM card for data, I asked the waiter for the wifi password. No wifi available, but he put his phone on hotspot and after connecting our phones he just handed his to me. That earned some hospitality points in my book. It didn’t stop there. After 3 months in Turkey, I found the people to be very inclusive, helpful and correct. They won’t cross the street to start up a conversation. This isn’t Brazil or Argentina. But they won’t shy away from contact and they have a comfortable enough air about themselves that they’ll engage and contribute. I’m a fan.

Troy

This is such a fantastic story. Stay with me. Don’t quit. You can do this. Instagram will wait for you.

Homer was born in the 8th Century BC. He writes the Iliad about the Mycenaean Greeks who fight the battle of Troy 500 years after the fact. It’s interlaced with Greek ancient mythology, but turns out, it was a real war and there really is a city called Troy. It was known by many names over its 4,000 year existence: Ilion, Wilusa, and today – Hissarlik.

The Trojan war was around 1200 BC which is about the time of the Bronze Age Collapse. The cities there had existed, been destroyed, and rebuilt numerous times since 3000 BC. There are nine layers of it. They just kept building on top of it. This is common around the world. Humans build on the wreckage of previous cities. It's a big mound.

This Englishman named Frank Calvert had a very interesting upbringing traveling all over the Mediterranean with his parents, and as an adult, figures out around 1860 that current day Hissarlik is Troy. Fortunately, his brother already owned the land. This was before Archeology as a science existed. They were called “Antiquarians”, not “Archeologists” and they were more like tomb raiders rather than preservers of history. Frank, for whatever reason – probably because he couldn’t afford the huge undertaking to excavate this enormous multi layered project meets and hands the job over to a German named Heinrich Schliemann, who steals all the credit and glory and the most beautiful of the jewelry and treasures. Calvert gets no credit except by me right here, right now. Thank you Frank Calvert! In 1870 Schliemann illegally excavated using dynamite. You read that correctly – dynamite. He ruined a lot of potential science and scarred the future for what would become the world’s most talked about Archeological site. The strange thing is – he gets caught stealing the treasures and yet he is allowed to work the site legally for the next 20 years. What do you think – corruption?

I took this pic in the Istanbul museum. What you are looking at is Heinrich's wife wearing the jewels they stole surrounded by photos of the other thefts because that's all we have in the Western World. Just photos.

The Iliad

Now let’s go back in time a bit. Xerxes, who was the Persian king, read Homer’s Iliad in 480 BC and made a trip to Troy to sacrifice oxen to the gods. Alexander the Great did the same in 334 BC. Even Hadrian, the Roman Emperor visited sometime in the first century AD to pay tribute to the power of the Iliad. They all read it. Could the Homeric Poem: The Iliad, be the most important written work ever? It’s still taught in schools around the world today and it inspired some of the world’s first tourism - as long ago as the Greek ancient world. Mehmed the Conqueror who sacked Constantinople in 1453 carried a copy of the Iliad and rejoiced that the Asians had avenged their ancestors, the Trojans, against the Westerners referring, of course - to the great Trojan war. That's the power of The Iliad.

Heinrich Schliemann

Let’s get back to this douchebag. He gets busted for stealing antiquities in 1871 and they let him back in to steal more in 1873. He loots until 1890 and Turkey is still trying to get the treasures back. It gets even better - Remember, he was German, and all these stolen treasures that he lifted, he ships back to Berlin where they sit in museums until World War 2. During the war the Nazis hid them… and they mysteriously disappear. The world thought they were lost forever until… It’s discovered that the Soviets stole them while destroying Berlin and even though the world thought they were lost they've been in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg ever since. In 1996 the Russians got caught and finally agreed to exhibit them instead of returning them. 

Nazis, bad Russians, looted ancient gold treasure, the most important literature ever written – This is a fascinating story! Now you want to go to Troy huh?

The Dynamite Trench

Sugarfest 

We spent 11 nights in the same campground. Why would we ever do that? At the end of Ramadan, the Turks go on vacation and this country has a very active caravan culture. We were warned that if we left the campground we were in, we might find it very difficult to find a spot anywhere else for the next week. We took their advice and hunkered in. I think it was good intel. The campsite went from nearly empty to completely packed in 48 hours. The favorable examples of friendly Turks continued to grow. 

Bergama (Ancient Pergamon)

This is now one of my favorite Archeological sites. Why? Because it is 3 sites for the price of driving to 1 location. You get the hilltop Greek city, the ancient Greek healing spa called Asklepieion and the lower Roman mega structure they call the Red Hall (or Red Basilica).

The theatre on the acropolis of Pergamon

The exterior walls and their fresh water source below

The Asklepieion was built as early as the 4th century B.C. It was named after the healing god Asclepius, and was a unique blend of a medical facility and a spa. The healing process included diet therapies, massages, mud baths, minor surgeries, and herbal remedies. It was also the world’s first psychiatric hospital. They had a really good record of successfully treating psychosomatic illnesses because in that era, their remedial medicine didn’t have much of a chance at anything more challenging. Here’s the real kicker – they had a very strict policy of only allowing admission to those that were nowhere near death. That’s the best way to keep your cure rate high. Even emperors like Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, and Caracalla visited this renowned center of pseudoscience.  

Pergamon on the top of the hill taken from the Asklepieion below

The Red Hall or Red Basilica

Izmir (Ancient Smyrna)

The single ruin is worthy of your time but that’s all. There isn’t any reason to go to this enormous dirty third world city other than the ancient ruin. Budget a ½ day.

Selcuk (Ancient Ephesus)

We were the first ones into the site and had it all to ourselves for 40 minutes. Once it started to get crowded we pushed off trail into an overgrown area and found some unique structures that weren't part of the tour

This is the part of the experience that gives me the Indiana Jones feeling

Then we got caught and were told to exit on the marvelous path that was off limits. Double bonus

The level of detail that you can still see today sparks the imagination of how glorious it must have been back then

There are many ancient Greek ruins in Turkey. There is a simple reason for this: All of this was ancient Greece. Turkey is a modern construct. After the Greeks lost their hold on the Mediterranean the Romans took over. Ephesus started as a Greek city but grew in fame as a Roman city. In fact, it was the second most important city in the Roman empire after Rome itself, prior to the founding of Constantinople. You need to see this place. 

This is an AI recreation of the Temple Of Artemis - one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world. 

This is the Temple Of Artemis today. Almost nothing remains. There's a lesson here.

Pamukkale

Talk about a combo package – this place is a fantastic 2 for 1. You can actually swim in the thermal baths amongst the collapsed columns of antiquity. (It's believed Cleopatra and Marc Anthony immersed themselves here) and hot air balloon over a wonderful freak of nature. 

You can see the few remaining pools here. Most have dried up. There was an earthquake and the water source shut off. It's still worth seeing but it's not what is was 30 years ago. The tourist brochures you see online are fraud.

An added bonus is the ancient ruin of Hierapolis adjacent to the travertine pools.  

These aerial photos I took from the early morning balloon.

Ancient Roman grave headed toward the edge

Pamukkale means "cotton castle"

You can see, on a miniature level, how these travertine pools form over the millennia

This is the hot water pool Cleopatra and Marc Anthony enjoyed 2000 years ago. The columns were still standing then.

Oludeniz

I have my own ancient history. In 1991 I was backpacking around Europe and took a series of trains to Istanbul. It was cold and rainy and I was freezing in a dingy hostel. I was 23. There was a rumor going around that there was a beach in the south called Oludeniz, and that if you got there you could camp for free and maybe, just maybe a man named Ahmet would come visit and ask for rolling papers. (This was 1991 and apparently you could do time in jail for rolling papers). If you gave him the rolling papers, he would take you to this paradise beach that could only be arrived at by boat. It sounded like complete bullshit. We went anyway. A 12-hour bus ride later we are camping on Oludeniz Beach telling stories around the camp fire when a man and his boy come out of the shadows. “Excuse me – do you maybe have rolling papers?” “Oh My God! It’s Happening!” He promised the next day he would come collect us and take us to a cove called Butterfly Valley. He did and we stayed for 5 nights. It was paradise and he wouldn’t accept any money. We hid it in the pillows anyway. Well – after all these years I thought I had dreamed it. Nah – it’s real. 

Long lost friends who made the trip south together

Departing Butterfly Valley 1991. The line handler was later stabbed to death

Ahmet and Polly. She's from NZ and it turns out she just wanted to speak English and  would send him out to find conversationalists

Can you find me ? I'd love to find the other guys again.

Your man on point,

Capt Bobby

Georgia

Crossing the Border

The Georgian immigration lady literally put a diamond loupe on my driver's license and passport and went over every square millimeter trying to decide if they were frauds or not. Once satisfied she demanded that I buy insurance. “I already have”. I showed her the contract on my phone that I had bought the day before. She stared at the phone and then transferred her deadeye look to me. Realizing she had no screws to turn, she took a very long pause and after a sad inhale announced; “your paperwork is in order” It felt very Soviet.

Kobuleti

Driving in Batumi was stressful and our first camping spot didn’t work out. We aborted the plan (this would become a recurring event) and headed to a campsite just north of Kobuleti on the beach. Every License plate in the campground had “RUS” on it. That’s the first time I’d ever seen a Russian Plate. We immediately befriended a Russian family who used the word “escape” in reference to their exodus from Russia multiple times. Tatiana, Adgin, Ivan and Igor - I introduced myself as Bob. They loved that. The 13-year-old kid said “you look so American!”, I guess we were all living up to our stereotypes. The father would later explain to us that after 2 years out of Mother Russia that going back for him meant “War or prison. Can’t go back until Putin is dead.”

My new friend helps me seal a window

Our drink of choice

They do have a nice boardwalk and coastline

A Little History

We found a great restaurant and never ate at another for our whole stay in Kobuleti. Delicious and inexpensive. I learned a lot from the Russian owner who had also fled his homeland a couple years before. This war has affected everyone. Did you know that before Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022, he invaded Georgia? In 2008 he launched a war against this country and is currently occupying 20%. 

 Do you see the shaded areas? That’s Russian occupied and came with the deaths of about 850 people, 2000 wounded and 100,000 displaced. The guy who passed out maps at the tourist office told me to be very careful when driving close to the occupied zones that I don’t take a wrong turn or else the Russian soldiers would kidnap me. I asked what would happen. His pensive heavily lidded gaze was broken only when he mumbled “Mild torture and ransom”

Aleja made this video as we were driving by it at our closest point

When we drove the E-60 to Tbilisi we were under a kilometer from the Russian line. 

You can be sure I was wideawake and driving my best.

The Roads Of Georgia

Cows in the street, dogs in the street, & people in the street. All living things seem to congregate in the streets of Georgia. Dogs and cows – ok, they are sleepy animals who have never read Newton, but the humans of Georgia… very odd. There doesn’t seem to be any understanding of the laws of physics. They don't close their doors and they stand there blocking traffic without flinching. The Soviets were first in putting a man into space – they obviously know the mechanics of motion. What is this cultural anomaly? 

They’ve Taken The Crown

I drove the entire length of Peru and it’s not a small country. The Peruvians held the crown for the world’s worst drivers until I went to Albania. What the Peruvians had going for them was absolute abject poverty and the audacity to “go for it” on a blind mountain curve with a jalopy running on a weed wacker engine. The Albanians had the horse power to make stupid decisions - since they were all driving stolen Mercedes from Europe – and they did, every chance they could. They won on simple incompetence of not having enough experience with combustion engines since they had only recently moved from horse and buggy.  What won first place for the Georgians was something new. It was a combination of Slavic machismo, poverty, drunkenness, and hardened malice. They drive with a mean streak. They will make you pay for their small desperate lives. You will feel their frustration and fear (no one has insurance). They will visit it upon you through the medium of transport. You will learn. They will teach you. 

Driving psychosis will eventually affect a whole country. It just becomes the culture. 

When you learn cruel driving techniques from your defeated dad and his vinegary brothers the problem stands little chance of being eradicated before it falls upon your children. Your friends drive like you do and that’s that. It is what it is and it’s accepted. It won’t get better unless it's actively controlled and these people are making no attempt. 

What Did You Expect?

I’m a man who lives in a vehicle and my world is centered around driving. Why would you be surprised that I spent 400 words on transport?

Kutaisi

We found a great restaurant. I’m beginning to think that’s the best thing one can say about this country.

Then we found a bar. There are 2 things you should know about me: 1) I'm losing my hair. 2) Almost no one can do more pushups than me. I love winning bets off body builders

Tbilisi

We drove all the way there. Pouring rain and multiple near misses. When the spot we had been promised turned out to be fraud (someone’s tiny backyard instead of a campground) we aborted the plan and drove back to where we woke up in some farmers field. 5 hours of danger driving and I was emotionally spent and in the same place. 

This was indicative of the approach to most of our campsites

What’s With All The Smoking?

Is there a corollary between desperation and smoking rates? Everybody in Georgia smokes, which means they’re continually sick, and when you are continually sick you stay poor, which means you stay sick. It’s really easy to break the cycle – quit smoking. That’s about as likely as driving with a smile. 

This kid was 9, and a very accomplished smoker.
Now he's dead and this is the photo his loved ones chose for his tombstone

The Language & Alphabet

Sure they have their own language, that's not unique, but they have their own alphabet. And are you ready for this.....Here's what it looks like:

And this is Laotian.....

What the hell is going on ?

Georgia - The Country

I didn’t hate Georgia. I obviously didn’t love it either. I rate it a very low C, and that’s me being very generous. There aren’t any marquee attractions and the infrastructure isn’t quite ready for prime time. When the board of tourism lists picnics and bird watching as high value events it’s not an easy country to market. If you have a 4-wheel drive death proof Unimog and love getting out in the green mountains then this might be your calling but I’m older now and my moxy is on the downswing. I want a bit more comfort and safety than I did 20 years ago. 

Georgia for us, was just a dining destination and a chance to rub elbows with Russians. I will say that their data plan was the best we’ve ever found. It was super cheap for unlimited gigabytes. I suppose if you are a digital nomad who loves dumplings this is the place for you. The Georgian food is wonderful and the people were nice enough. I’ll focus on that during my reminisces. Would I go back? Not a chance. Not worth the miles when Turkey is so good. 

Your man on point,

Blacktop Bobby

Great looking castle in Gori. Stalin's home town