We spread a kaffiyeh on the grass and ate a great breakfast of cheese, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and bread. After a couple of rounds of tea and polite nods to Mustafa's students who were gathering at the gate of his house, staring at us through the mesh fence, we packed our gear. Mustafa's two sons came out and smiled shyly at us. Three girls from Mustafa's class opened the gate, walked up and tugged my sleeve.
"Hello mister what is your name?" they said.
"My name's Mike. What's yours?" I replied, knowing full well what the answer would be.
The girls giggled amongst themselves for a few seconds and then one of them stepped forward and beamed up at me.
"Hello mister what is your name?" she said proudly, showing off her English to her classmates who watched from the other side of the fence. I smiled at her and they all fell about laughing.
CL and I slung our gear into Mustafa's car and he dropped us back on the highway. We piled our gear and started thumbing for a lift. After about half an hour, a trucker stopped. He was going half the way to Tatvan and would take us.
Hitching with a trucker always makes me feel like an intruder. Even though they have the most comfort and space, we always had to put our gear on the small cot behind the seats. I always felt a bit bad dumping my dusty bag on the humble sleeping quarters of these guys that drive for days and days on end. We settled into our seats and had gone about 40km when a police checkpoint waved over the truck. The guy went pale. CL and I squirmed in our seats as the police looked at the paperwork and ordered the trucker out of the cab. A few seconds later, he motioned for us to get out. The ride was over. His truck was being impounded. We never found out what the problem was, but we didn't see him clear the checkpoint either, so it must have been pretty serious.
CL and I walked about half a kilometre down the road and then started thumbing again. After a few minutes, an old beaten-up yellow truck swerved to a halt.
It was CL's turn to "talk" to the driver. He came running back. We had a ride all the way to Tatvan. Sweet.Our benefactor's name was Genghis. He was a very placid Kurd in traditional baggy, MC Hammer-style trousers with a pencil moustache and a slow, easy grin. He spoke no English but enthusiastically welcomed us into the cramped space of his cab. His truck was at least twenty years old and the top speed was around 45km/h going downhill. It would take us four or five hours to reach Tatvan at that speed. We settled in for a long trip.
Halfway to Tatvan, we pulled over for a tea break. We were in a valley, mountains rising up on either side of us. A restaurant, nestled into one of the crevices at the cliff wall's base, wanted 6 YTL for a plate of chicken. Rice was an extra 3 YTL. CL and I bought some shitty cake for 2 YTL and shared it over some tea. At first, Genghis protested when we insisted on paying, but he got his own back by sneakily paying for the second round. With only sign language, there was a lot of hand grasping, hand-on-heart and smiling going on. CL and I got out the map and started figuring out where we needed to go from Tatvan.
Tatvan is in the east of Turkey, on the western shore of the immense Lake Van. Heading for Iran, the two most popular routes are either around Lake Van and then over the border at Dogubayazit or taking the ferry from Tatvan to Van on the eastern shore and crossing from there. CL and I were headed for the Georgian border. It's impossible to cross into Armenia from Turkey unless you are a Turkish or Armenian national. The border between the two countries is closed to foreigners. The most popular border point from Turkey into Georgia is Sarp, which crosses from northern central Turkey into western Georgia, on the coast of the Black Sea, headed for the town of Batumi. We were headed for the less travelled, almost-invisible-on-the-map border town of Posof. This would put us into central southern Georgia, about 20km from the town of Achalciche (pronounced A-hal-see-heh). From there it was a straight shot to Tbilisi, from which we would head for Yerevan and Nagorno Karabakh.
Genghis watched us tracing our possible route over the face of the map and touched my wrist. He pointed to the town of Agri, another six hours or so north of Tatvan. He pointed to himself and then again at Agri. Then he made the collecting motion with his hands that indicated all of us. He was going to Agri. He could take us all the way there. We were in luck.
Knowing that we were to be slung together for ten or so hours of grindingly slow trucking created a very relaxed, brotherly atmosphere in the cab of Genghis's truck. He would look at us out of the corner of his eye and smile every so often, or watch CL and I talking and laugh when we laughed. Even though the truck was choking and coughing along at a snail's pace, none of us felt impatient or dissatisfied. Genghis would make a show of unplugging the tachometre whenever we cleared a checkpoint and we would all laugh at the small gesture of screwing the authorities. The tachometre measures the distance a trucker travels. Other than that, I have no idea what it does or why it is used. All I know is that unplugging it gave Genghis a great deal of mischievious excitement which CL and I enjoyed sharing with him.
The landscape changed from plains and rolling hills to mountains. On a 10:1 incline, the truck moved at roughly walking pace. We crested the mountains and descended onto the road that skirts Lake Van's western shore. Lake Van is huge, and on the other side, snow-capped mountains rise, blocking the way to Iran, making the idea of that journey incredibly exotic.
We pulled into a truck stop on the shore of Lake Van. CL and I got out to take some pictures and stretch our legs. Genghis headed straight for the tea. The air was clean and cold, the snowy mountains in the distance
reminding me that I was leaving behind the hot climate I had become used to in the past weeks. I put on a sweatshirt. Climbing down from the cab of the truck after getting my sweatshirt, I heard a loud hissing sound. As I walked along the hindquarters of the truck, the sound got louder. It was coming from one of the wheels. I looked closer. There was a tear in one of the tyres approximately the size of my thumb. A large tear. I put my palm up to the hole and felt the air blasting out of it. I called over CL. His eyes went wide when he saw the hole in the tyre. My head filled with images of standing around for hours as Genghis jacked up the truck somehow and changed the tyre. Genghis came out of the tea hut adjusting his Hammer trousers. We waved him over and pointed to the tear in the tyre. He shrugged and grinned. Let's go, he motioned with his hands. I pointed again at the tyre and made a big pantomime of how much air was gushing out of it. Genghis grinned and gave me the "no problem" shrug. CL and I climbed back into the cab of that truck completely convinced that the tyre would blow out or go flat within the hour. Genghis was smiling and started singing. At the time, it felt like I was in the truck with a crazy man, but looking back, I should have realised that a man does not drive a twenty-odd year old truck for a living without figuring out how it works. There was a reason he was smiling and singing. Eventually, when a huge bang followed by fishtailing and death didn't happen, CL and I relaxed.We were now headed north, along the shore of Lake Van and up towards the town of Agri, probably the last town in Turkish Kurdistan before the invisible border is crossed and Turkey becomes fundamentally Turkish again. Genghis was singing, loud and clear, an endless procession of folk songs and what I assume were religious songs. After every few of his, he would motion for us to sing. CL doesn't sing on principle and, like most Westerners, I have no idea of folk or traditional songs from my culture. Apart from "You Fat Bastard" and "99 Bottles of Beer", what traditional songs are there in England? I don't know "Auld Lang Syne", and besides, isn't that Scottish? Genghis made it clear that the singing was a reciprocal deal, so I dredged my skull for a song I could sing. Over the course of the next couple of hours, Genghis shared a treasure trove of traditional Kurdish and Muslim songs with us that were delicate, lilting and beautiful. In return, I serenaded him with "I Wanna Be Like You" from The Jungle Book, "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen, "Angel of Death" by Slayer and a short excerpt from "The Song That Never Ends", a very annoying ditty I picked up as a child from watching Lamb Chop's Play-along. Genghis listened intently to each one of my offerings and then applauded warmly when I concluded or, more commonly, ran out of lyrics that I could recall. I felt like I was cheating him somehow.
Night fell as we approached the limits of Agri. CL and I didn't want to be dropped in the town centre, since that would impinge on our autostopping capabilities come morning. Genghis rolled into a petrol station just outside of the town. He told us that he was going to sleep and would be leaving at 5am. One of us was welcome to sleep in the cab with him but the loser would have to sleep in one of the empty rooms in the petrol station. The rooms in question were fronted by a thin glass window and were still under construction. I had warmer gear so I drew the short straw. The room was very cold. CL snuggled up in the cab of the truck with Genghis. I arranged my sleeping bag and rucksack in such a way as to provide me the most warmth. I wrapped my jacket around my head and lay there, waiting for sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment