Travelling to Bogazkale and Alacahuyuk
Trip Start
Sep 28, 2006
1
18
40
Trip End
Oct 28, 2006
Bogazkale, Turkey
Friday, October 6, 2006
Up promptly to pack, and called the taxi that Feza had arranged at 8:15. Those taxis are phenomenal, I don't know where they keep them but they arrive before you can carry your luggage out to the car-park. We were quite sad to leave Bilkent - it's been a really nice home-from-home for the last four days.
The taxi took us down to ASTI, the vast otogar that must be bigger than most airports. It was another nightmare ride which involved tearing up a half-made road. When we reached the top and were languidly waved back by a couple of officials (poor devils, trying to make a road with jackal taxi-drivers dashing about between the tar-truck's wheels!) we just turned around (and the three cars following us!) and pootled back down again, the driver jumped out and untied a piece of red-and-white tape stopping us from going onto another bit of road, and we all just bustled through there, bumping through a rackety suburb before emerging back onto a busy highway
01 Ankara Otogar
. It's all breathtaking.Feza had given us very clear instructions about what to do: both 37, where we were to buy two tickets to Songurlu (which, of course, we kept calling "Songololo" all morning.) On arrival at the otogar there, which is some way out of the town, we would be put on a servis into the town centre, and would find a dolmuş waiting outside the Post Office. As it is Ramazan, it would wait until it was full, which could be up to an hour, and would then take us the last 40km or so to Boğazkale.
However, before all that, we had almost an hour's wait at ASTI on incredibly uncomfortable chairs made of very slippery steel with bottoms that were much too long to be able to sit comfortably on so visits to the slightly alarming WC became almost attractive by comparison. The bus was extremely comfortable and smart, and despite all our plans for writing diaries and reading up about the Hittites, I looked at the amazing scenery the whole trip and Gray watched the scenery and the bad Turkish comedy on the video. The dolmuşes and taxis and Feza and Orhan all have the radio on all the time and we are very impressed by the fact that Turks of all classes appear to listen to Turkish music - I don't think we've heard any bad American pop since we left Seoul
02 View from the bus
. We are also finding that having the radio (or, in this case, TV) on all the time is helping our Turkish. We're not understanding it yet, but it's no longer sounding like a gabble. We feel that in a week or so, we will surely start understanding it! The TV was especially good because you're got context: the woman standing, arms akimbo, talking to the ex-husband who has just kidnapped their daughter, is certainly saying, "where is my daughter?" and not "why haven't you taken out the garbage yet?" I suspect that something else that helps is accent - I suspect the DJs and TV stars have to use the equivalent of Queen's English! So we rolled happily through this glorious golden land, feeling as if we were crawling across a tumbled-about feather bed, until we got to Songurlu's otogar. After piling out, we were standing about with all the other Ankara passengers waiting for the servis when a taxi tout came and asked us if we were going to Boğazkale, and said he'd take us there for Y35. We probably should have bargained on principle, but it seemed like a good deal to get us right to the hotel's doorstep, so we accepted. He drove like the usual bat out of hell, but we are getting immune to it and don't mind much. It was lovely climbing up into the mountains and having the phone lines and ugly cement factories and things all fall away behind us.
03 View from the bus
Graham
Woke a lot after some disturbing dreams. At 4:30am I didn't think I would sleep again, then I woke after 6am. The packing process is serious and takes some time, so I started after a quick cup of coffee. By the time we had finished packing, showering and eating the rest of the fruit salad for breakfast it was after 8am. We called a taxi and within minutes were on our way to the bus station. Our taxi driver took us on back way, but was turned back by the military and had to make a detour. He asked for our booth, and dropped us outside, pretty much. Two tickets on the bus to Sungurlu, some 200km away set us back 20YTL, the same price as the taxi fare from Bilkent to the Otogar. We were directed to bay 28, and were, of course, nearly an hour early. About 20 minutes before departure time, a huge Mercedes tour bus pulled up. We had our baggage loaded into the hold and took our extremely comfortable seats.
The bus actually departed a couple of minutes early with about 12 passengers, an old driver and a loader. This couldn't be cost effective, and fortunately we stopped to collect additional passengers at various intersections on the ring-road around Ankara.
It took about an hour to get out of town, and then the haze cleared and we passed through some pretty dramatic scenery
04 Zinnias and moth in the courtyard
. Arrived an Sungurlu at about 1pm, and were approached by a taxi offering to take us to Bogazcale. At first we considered taking the shuttle into the town and the Dolmush, but when the taxi driver came around again and offered to do the trip for 35YTL we agreed. Compared to the bus driver who drove slowly and carefully, this guy drove like an absolute maniac and we were grateful to make it to Bogazkale alive. The Hotel Baikal was right on the square and within walking distance of Hattusas which is great. We unpacked and then went out into a lovely flower surrounded courtyard to eat some lunch.Mandi
Mustafa was waiting at the front door to come out and greet us and he and his son of about 10 helped lug our stuff into a small but clean room slightly above ground level and overlooking a sunny courtyard packed with late zinnias and fancy hovering moths. He is a rather diffident man who had to be pressed to accept our passports. It appears that, inevitably, his brother owns a carpet shop next door (in fact, its back door opens onto the sunny courtyard) but is away having his stomach fixed in some way, so he promised he'd show us after dinner. We ate some of the cheese and biscuits and drank the pomegranate juice left over from last night that we had lugged the whole way from Ankara for our lunch in the courtyard.
We had planned to spend the afternoon exploring the town but we arrived so much earlier than expected that Mustafa suggested we go to Alacahüyük instead, leaving the whole of tomorrow for Hattuşa, which is 500m away. So he summonsed Adam, the local taxi-driver, and his little son Yusuf, to drive us there.
05 Graham finds his correct label at last!
Alacahüyük is about 35 km from Boğazkale, again through glorious golden, rolling countryside with the occasional charming little Turkish village clustered around its mosque on the opposite hillside. The road gets smaller and smaller until it's like something in the backwoods of NSW - you can't believe that you're approaching one of the world's major archaeological sites. There's a little village clustered around the site - one has to wonder whether the inhabitants have lived there since the Hittites - are they Hittites themselves, descended from the peasants who must have clustered around the gates even then, or just some recent blow-ins who've only been there for a couple of thousand years?
There's a little museum on site, just a couple of rooms and of course everything is either very second-grade or a reproduction, with all the good stuff having gone to Ankara which is certainly the right decision in terms of both the quality of the care and preservation the artefacts will get as well as accessibility to more people, but still a bit sad for Alacahüyük. There are trees and lovely flowers - more zinnias and roses - planted around. The Turks do good public spaces - we think because the men spend so much time sitting in the parks, so they'd better be pretty.
You enter the site itself through the famous sphinx gate - a reproduction, too, but a good one. First impressions are disappointing as the walls are all the same height, only about knee-height, made of very loose-packed drystone and we assumed they were entirely modern, just marking out the position of the originals. But later we decided that they probably are mostly the originals, and they've just been excavated like that
06 Jars in the museum garden
. The site looks much better from higher up, so the more time you spend there, the better you like it. Best "find" was a tunnel - we suppose a gate into the complex - some distance from the main area. We also had a look at the area currently being studied (obviously not right now - too late in the season) and were amazed to see great piles of potsherds just spilling out of the ground. One piece looked like about a third of an amphora - awfully tempting!!! There are actually potsherds all over the place - it's an amazing feeling to pick up something like that and run your fingers over the thumbprint of a potter from 6,000 years ago.Graham
We then went to chat to the proprietor, Mustapha about sight seeing. He suggested that we go out to Alacahoyuk today and then walk around Bogazkale tomorrow. He called a taxi and we negotiated 50YTL for today, and then a further 50YTL to take us to Yozgat from which we will take the 1pm bus (there is only one) to Nevsehir. The driver, Adam, and his young son took us back out the way we had come, before turning off onto a smaller road, and finally onto a narrow strip of tar for the last 11km of a 32km journey through lovely farming countryside. Alacahoyuk contains the ruins surrounded by a small village. The museum is small and quaint, unfortunately most of the good stuff has been taken off to the museum in Ankara, there is some nice pottery, but mostly stuff that has been reassembled
07 Frieze at the entrance to Alacahuyuk
. There was very little Hittite bronze on display. When we went out to the site, we were initially a little disappointed, mostly because it was difficult to know what was original and what had been reconstructed. It was also all covered with weeds like those Australian farms that have used too much roundup. But as we explored further, we found a tunnel with a dog leg bend which would have provided an easily defendable entrance. Part of the roof contained a rock with a 300mm diameter hole which could have been part of the defence. We also investigated a new section of dig which confirmed that the walls were probably genuine. There was also so much pottery laying about that it is difficult not to pick any up. As one walks about it becomes easier to imagine life in this town 5000 years ago. One can start to picture the stone masons fitting the great blocks together, and the ordinary people going about their business. The taxi took us back to Bogazkale where we stopped at the local museum. It, too is rather quaint and contains a wide variety of artefacts ranging from early bronze age Hittite stuff to Byzantine carvings.
Mandi
Home to Boğazkale again, where we had Adam drop us off at the tiny Museum where we looked at some more second-grade artefacts (it's sad that the Museum of Ancient Civilizations has so spoiled us - a week ago, we'd have been agog to see these things) and then went for a walk to see the town
07 The gate from the museum
. It consists of a mosque, two very short "business" streets and the hotel. But there is a PTT so perhaps tomorrow we'll finally post our postcards, a bank with an ATM that gave us some money, and even an Internet café. We met some kids who asked for their photo to be taken. I have been a bit reticent about taking photos as I thought observant Muslims might still have a ban on graven images, but these kids kept calling their siblings and friends and even mothers and posing earnestly. One of the three bigger girls wrote what we think is a list of all their names, and an address, in the back of our dictionary, and we are to send them copies. We think we will probably rather send them to Mustafa to pass on; it'll probably be more reliable.The kids are sweet - we have been approached by several little boys, in particular, who just want to talk. Our suspicious Western minds expect them to beg and certainly some of them have tried "Hello! Money?" but it's not serious and any of them with more English than that really just want a conversation. It's always an exchange of names and then they ask where you are from. One little lad later this evening had quite a lot of English, and told us some long story about an "arbeiter" - we think he was possibly telling us about his Dad - maybe a guest worker in Germany?
We spent an hour in the hotel courtyard until Mustafa told us it was time for dinner, which had been cooked by his mother and carried through the courtyard by two giggling boys, one of them Musafa's son. We think this was possibly the first genuine Ramazan dinner we have had. Mustafa's mother had cooked soup sort of like minestrone, and green beans with a slightly chilli sauce and a few scraps of chicken. In addition to those, there was salad and a selection of about 8 meze - mixed veggies, fried brinjal, battered and fried pumpkin, hummus, the pasta thingy we had with Orhan and Feza the first night, "Turkish rice" which was actually couscous, and so on
08 From inside the tunnel
. With a basket of the most wonderful bread and followed by a cup of elma cay, it was a perfectly decent meal, and somehow much more suitable to a time of fasting that the gigantic feasts we've been tucking away. I can imagine that you'd actually feel pretty good and healthy after a month of fasting all day and eating that sort of meal at night.After dinner, Mustafa Bey took us into his brother's carpet shop next door (and actually opening into the pretty zinnia-filled courtyard.) Of course there is nothing like the selection we saw in either Istanbul or Ankara, but the place and the atmosphere were all so much more conducive to buying that we went in there WANTING to buy something. He had only about six or eight sumacs, none of them as nice in either colour or workmanship as the Istanbul ones, but we pulled out three or four to look at tomorrow in the light, and then looked at his kelims from this village or the neighbourhood. Also lovely stuff, so we have put aside about four of those, plus some cushion covers, to look at tomorrow.
Graham
We stopped off at the hotel before taking a stroll through the village. We were first accosted by a couple of kids saying 'hello money'. We then met a boy and girl who wanted to have their picture taken, then called all their mates as well so we took lots of pictures and one little girl wrote their names and address in the back of our dictionary. We went back to our peaceful hotel courtyard for some fruit juice and time to do a diary entry. As supper was ready before 7pm we ate early. A strange little meal. Soup to start followed by the standard bits of egg plant etc and then stewed green beans in a spicy sauce. This was eaten with an excellent Turksh bread baked in the village.
As we were finishing our dinner the only other guest in the hotel, a young Japanese woman, came in to eat. We went for a short walk and when we came back Mustapha showed us some carpets. These were much nicer than the ones we saw in Ankara. There was a large variety of Sumaks, and most were not particularly well made though we did find three or four good ones that we set aside to see in the morning. There were also a few that were woven in the village about 30 years ago that were very pretty. We were told that no one weaves here any more.
