ANNUAL NEWSLETTER 1997

THE ROAD TO TURKEY

Barry and Margaret Williamson

The annual newsletter for 1997 describes a second journey to mainland Greece, Crete and overland to Turkey by motorhome, bicycle and motorbike.

Kronia Polla or 'Many Years' - a Greek end-of-year greeting (and newsletter) to you from the monasteries of Meteora. We have now been living and travelling in Rosie our 27 ft, 6 ton motorhome for 32 months, following Barry's early retirement from Huddersfield University and Margaret's resignation from the Technical College. Rosie is about the size and weight and has the temperament of a mature elephant, carrying our 2 selves, Alf our motorbike and 2 bicycles on her broad back, giving us shelter and a total of 12 wheels for our life 'At Home on the Road' (the title of one of our published series of articles).

So far, 20 months of travelling have taken us to Prague, Koblenz, Verdun, the gorges and Cathar castles of southern France, a summer of cycling in the Alps, travels in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Austria, months of happy exploration in the Peloponnese (the southern part of the Greek mainland), Germany, Switzerland and Italy where our last newsletter left us in Pompeii.

1997 has been a year of living and travelling in southern Italy, mainland Greece, Crete and Turkey. We are fascinated by this corner of Europe with its narrow corridor into Asia. Here we have (at last) found our métier, our (mobile) home, our range. Far enough from the orderly but controlling and ultimately strangling authority of northern and western Europe, but still relatively free of the climatic, political, religious and economic extremes of Arabia, the former Soviet block, South Asia, Africa.

It's a good corner for us, lost in the gap between the excesses of late capitalism and decaying feudalism. England now seems a long way away, geographically and psychologically, intruding only for the brief moments when we have to think about Income Tax, tenants for our house, Diana - matters that are brought deliberately and forcibly to our attention. Escapists? You betcha!

Travel has a life of its own. It takes over and commands and directs. It is as if we live with another being, another life force which, ultimately, flows through us. There comes a moment when there is no other point or purpose but to travel. To travel through other people's lives: the workers and the officials in their varied uniforms and disguises, the families, the tourists, the very many actors who populate and maintain the stage on which we live and move. When, rarely, we return to the scene of former travels, it is itself a fascination that familiar actors may still be set in their familiar roles, the plot and script changed or unchanged according to local custom.

The spatial relationships established by travel are greatly deepened and enriched by our growing sense of time and history. Peoples, languages, cultures, religions, armies have moved across the landscapes in which we travel, leaving their bewilderingly complex mark on the present moment. We are left with puzzles of never-ending intricacy, puzzles to be identified and explored, but never solved.

It's hard to summarise this year on the road: there have been so many miles travelled (by motorhome, motorbike, bicycle); mountains and gorges walked; borders crossed; local foods tasted; languages scrambled; markets browsed; maps unfolded; currencies exchanged; ferries boarded; ancient sites explored; people met (deep, intensive meetings); gathered around 85 varied night stops. Here, more or less in chronological order, is a brief account of our travels. We will be more than rewarded for this effort to write, to condense, if you find some of it of interest, if it draws your attention to new places to explore, new journeys to make. If, one day, you sell up, leave home, and set off 'on the road to find out' (to quote the former Cat Stevens), blame us!

From a damp Pompeii, we drove south to the 5th C BC Greek temples at Paestum.

7 years earlier, cycling from Naples to Palermo, Barry laid up here for 3 days with a frozen shoulder after his first and only fall from his bike. Now, safely negotiating the fates who still lurk by the roadside, we continued east to meet the sea at Metaponto on the 'instep' of Italy, en route to Taranto and Brindisi, an old haunt of ours.

Driving confidently onto Brindisi's ancient quay, return ticket to Greece in hand, we soon discovered that our good ship Anna V had been sunk by a bomb and its owner, AK Ventouris, was no longer in business. By the time we had completed our enquiries, Greek farmers had heard of the success of the French lorry blockades and had set up their own tractor blockas. By the time we had clarified the situation on the roads in Greece with the British Consul in Patras, the Greek dockers had joined in and the ferries stopped running. In this way, 3 pleasant weeks went by, in and around Brindisi, until Christmas brought a resolution and an afternoon sailing, landing us in Patras on Christmas Eve morning. It was good to be back in Greece.

We reached Ionion Beach Camping on Christmas Day and were able to take Mick and Flo, resident neighbours on Aginara Beach, their 'presents', the results of the long shopping list they had given us when we left Greece 6 months earlier. We stayed for 2 months, enjoying a mild winter on the beach. Motorhomers Stan and Celia joined Mick, Flo and us to form the 'Glyfa Cycling Club' and many an intrepid trip we made to local street markets and Gyro Pitta stalls. In February, we (the 2 of us, not the club) made a 500 mile, 9-day cycle tour of the southern Peloponnese, including Kalamata, the Mani Peninsula and the mountains between Sparta and Olympia.

Leaving Ionion Beach in early March, we drove through Corinth to Athens and its chaotic port of Pireus. In 12 hours the 10,000 ton ferry King Minos carried us south to Crete and a car park just outside the town of Hania. In a week we burned 27 litres of gas as the winds blew, the rains fell and the campsites remained closed. But what followed was wonderful: 4 months' detailed exploration the length (220 miles), breadth (20 miles) and heights (3 mountain ranges rising to 8,000 ft) of the island. Spring came early, the snow on the high peaks retreated, flowers proliferated, birds flocked north out of Africa, tourists descended from the blue skies and campsites re-opened.

We investigated the 'Minoan sites' at Knossos, Zakros, Phaistos, Gournia, Ag Triada and Malia (exploding, for us, the myth of a Minoan civilisation); torch-lit our way through Zeus's caves of Dikteon, Idaian, Kamares and Skotino; wandered both coasts, north and south, from the palm forest of Vai in the east to the Roman city of Falassarna in the west; climbed 4,000 ft up as well as down the Samarian Gorge and the equally challenging gorges of Imbros and Agia Eirini; fell in love with the Venetian ports and fortresses of Hania, Rethimnon and Iraklio.

We took Alf to the volcanic island of Santorini for more Minoan legend and a little smoking sulphur; walked to Europe's most southerly point at the tip of the almost-deserted desert island of Gavdos (Ulysses' island of Calypso, 30 miles south of Crete), saved from dehydration by a goatherd at his well. We remembered the heroic but futile defence of Crete in 1941 at the German cemetery poised above their parachute landing field at Maleme and the Commonwealth cemetery magnificently beached above Souda Bay. We completely immersed ourselves in the life and history of this island!

By the end of June, Germans were filling the swimming pools and it was getting hot enough for us to turn north. The little Golden Ferries boat Maria carried us from the tiny port of Kastelli/Kissamos in western Crete to the diminutive port of Neapolis in the southern Peloponnese. Maria had an unusual but interesting problem: her anchor was very reluctant to come up. So much so that she was 8 hours late arriving in Crete and unnerving to watch as we weaved and manoeuvred to get away from ports of call on the islands of Kithera and Antikithera. In a rising wind, it took nearly an hour to back onto the narrow jetty in Neapolis. Were we relieved when Rosie made her elephantine way backwards off the boat and safely onto terra firma? Yes.

During July and August we wandered slowly north through mainland Greece, pausing in Sparta to fulfil a long-held ambition to climb to the 8,000 ft summit of the Taigetos range, the highest point in the Peloponnese. We inadvertently chose the hottest day of the year, 110°F in the shade (of which there was none), but we had learnt from our experience in Gavdos and carried enough water to see us through. A few days later we left the Peloponnese, crossing the Gulf of Corinth into northern Greece, on the landing-craft ferry between Rion and Antirion, just east of Patras.

Northern Greece was new to us and we drove in a great arc to the Turkish border (1,000 miles and 6 weeks), getting to know: Arta; Preveza (with a visit to the island of Lefkada); Actium (where Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra); Ioanina on the lake surrounded by the Pindos mountains; the highest road in Greece to Kalambaka and the Meteora monasteries; Mount Olympos, home of the gods; the ancient Macedonian tombs around Vergina including that of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great; Thessalonika and the peninsulas of the Halkidiki; Kavala (with Alf to the island of Thassos); nearby Philippi and Drama; the bird sanctuary lakes around Fanari with colonies of pelicans, flamingos and herons; Alexandroupoli, the last town before the border and ferry port for a visit to the island of Samothrace.

On 6 September, the BBC World Service talked us through Diana's final journey as we crossed into Turkey near Edirne, where Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria meet. This border crossing is as a border crossing should be: open for only 2 hours at weekends, lots of paperwork, visas to buy, stamps to be stamped, vehicles to be inspected, a no-man's land to cross, dramatic changes of culture, language, religion, uniforms (the Greek soldiers wear white skirts on Sundays). It was good. We felt we knew Edirne well from our previous visit in 1989, cycling to Istanbul from England. But with Rosie parked on the edge of town at Camping FiFi and time to spare, we found much more to excite and challenge us among the mosques, minarets, bazaars, caravanserais, hamams, bedestens and fountains of this Islamic former capital of Ottoman Turkey.

150 miles of motorway took us to Istanbul for 8 days on the European bank of the Bosphorus, just a few miles from the Golden Horn, Galata Bridge, Sea of Marmara, Black Sea, Blue Mosque, Agia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, Hippodrome and the covered warrens of the Grand Bazaar with Asia beckoning. Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul is all this and it is also a frenetic city of over 10 million recently nomadic souls, restlessly circling their ancient and polluting wheels on American-style motorways, underpasses and flyovers, bridging Asia and Europe. As motor-cyclists we were on our own; as walkers we became exhausted; as cyclists we would be dead.

Istanbul is a point of convergence for travellers passing through and spreading out into Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Travelling east, Georgia, Iran, Iraq and Syria present forbidding borders and barriers of steel and unreason but it is still just possible to drive to India. Sandra and Bernard from Welwyn Garden City were going to Calcutta in their steel-plated, ex-German Army, 3-gearbox, 4-wheel-drive, differential-locking, lorry-wheeled Mercedes Unimog. Taking it more easily, Duco and Eveline had cycled from Friesland and were flying 'Gulf Air' to Delhi on their way round the world. We envied them all.

For 380 miles our road ran east across the high rolling emptiness of the Anatolian Plateau to Ankara, the crowded capital of 4 million which failed to hold us. But another 170 miles of steppe led us to a different world which did hold us captivated: the rock churches, fairy chimneys and underground cities of Cappadocia. In the high clear air, we thought we should never leave; better by far to stay and live for ever!

South and downhill from Cappadocia, we reached the Mediterranean coast near its eastern end at Tarsus, the birthplace of St Paul. There followed the most enjoyable and challenging 5 weeks of our travels, following the coast of the Mediterranean and (after Marmaris) the Aegean, all the 1,200 miles back to the Greek border.

We explored: Silifke and the Roman mausoleums cut into gorges many miles inland; Ta sucu where we failed to get a ferry to nearby Northern Cyprus; Anamur and the ruined Byzantine city of Anamurium; Side with its brash modern holiday resort built inside an extensive Roman town; the Köprülü Canyon where Alf split an inner-tube and no-one had a pump in a medieval village 5,000 ft up in the mountains; the almost complete Roman theatre at Aspendos; ancient Olympos (another one) and the nearby perpetual flame at Chimera; the ancient rock tombs and theatre of Myra; Demre and the Byzantine church of 4th century Bishop, later Saint, Nicholas, the original Father Christmas (Noel Baba) who dropped coins down the chimneys of virgins who could not afford a dowry; Bodrum, home to the package tour; the wonderful ancient sites of Didyma, Miletus and Priene, the latter 2 straddling the eponymous River Meander; Kusadasi for 8 days as Rosie waited for a new tyre, joining the Brits on holiday for Roast Beef Sunday Lunch, Fish 'n' Chips, All-Day Full English Breakfast and (best of all) a genuine Indian meal with Chicken Tikka Masala (did we really want the tyre to come?); nearby Ephesus (wonderfully restored); Selçuk (where St John wrote his gospel, died and was buried) and the nearby Virgin Mary's house; Bergama and the splendid ruins of ancient Pergamum, where parchment was invented; as we neared the Dardanelles and the sight of distant Europe, the many-layered ruins of Troy, home of ancient legend and our home alone for a misty night (Motor-Homers?)

Throughout this journey, the road climbed, fell, twisted and turned alongside the ever-changing sea, mostly in sunshine but with one storm that brought down a nearby tree and split Rosie's tyre when she hit a rock in a landslide. We passed crops of bananas, figs, grapes, tobacco, pomegranates, quinces, oranges and lemons. Cotton was being picked by the hands of women covered from head to foot by Islamic decree and living in the fields they worked until the harvest was gathered in. Most intrepid of all the travellers we met on the coast road were John and Kevin from Preston on a tandem donated by Dawes, pulling a trailer, sleeping rough and on their way round the world in a year. We gave them both tea and envy!

We crossed back into Greece at Ipsala on 4 November after a few days exploring and remembering on the battlefields of the Gallipoli peninsula where, in 1917, 36,000 Commonwealth soldiers (many from Australia and New Zealand) were killed in a futile attempt to gain a foothold on Turkish territory. On our final day, the low cost of living in Turkey had left us with 27 million T.L. to spend: a full tank of diesel (200 litres at 32 pence per litre) used half of it; a large lunch and visits to 3 markets took care of the rest. Anyone want a piece of Turkish Delight?

After 2,100 miles and 60 days in Turkey, we are back home in Greece, enjoying time in Kalambaka to revisit the monasteries, shop, write, ride in the nearby mountains and prepare for a visit to the museums and ancient sites of Athens. Over the horizon lies the possibility of a New Year in Sicily but that will be another newsletter!