29 Apr 2015

Safranbolü

I’m not convinced this stop on my journey really deserves an article of its own. Largely, because I felt like I wasted two days of my life there. Then again, I’m sitting in a hotel room right now and I don’t have more pressing things to do. It’s one of those days where you might stuff your face with a load of chicken nuggets and then wash that down with a beer or two while watching an entire season of 30 Rock. Oh wait, that’s exactly what I just did!

So here is how it came to be: I got bored in Istanbul and decided to head further eastwards. Some research on wikivoyage.org (the open-source successor of wikitravel, which apparently is a commerical platform now) brought up a few options along Turkey’s Black Sea coast. One of them was a village called Safranbolü, around 6 hours from Istanbul. The direction was right and apparently the town is UNESCO World Heritage because they have original Ottoman houses (and Turkey’s 4th biggest cave!).

The place also looked pretty on Google Image search, so I packed my bag in the late afternoon. Then I headed to the coach station (Otogar Baglanti Yolu) in the western part of Istanbul. I bought a ticket and spent two hours waiting in a departure lounge. Long waiting times have been pretty common for me. Making the best of delays is a valuable skill on a trip like this. Then again, I’m not in a rush, which helps.

That waiting-skill became useful during the trip as well, since the first 90 minutes were spent in Istanbul rush-hour traffic. Had I been smarter, I would have taken the tram to one of the eastern coach stations and saved myself some of the slowest stop-and-go I have ever seen. On the plus side, taking a tour through the Asian side of Istanbul was impressive: Everything is built up, and yet they keep building more skyscapers!

After we exited the city, darkness fell quickly so I won’t be able to provide a description of the landscape. My guess would be gently swooping hills though!

On our journey we passed the city of Izmit (not to be confused with Izmir), of which I only saw a huge raffinery, lit up like a christmas tree and belching out burning gas from several chimneys (I really hope that was by design…).

I spent the next five hours on the bus listening to music and napping. In the end, we arrived around 01:00h at night. I grabbed a shuttle bus to town (which didn’t look terribly interesting) and then a short cab ride to the old town (which looked interesting enough). Initially I had considered saving the cab fare and walking instead. That would have been an unfortunate choice, since the distance turned out a lot longer than anticipated. Mostly, because half of the drive took us down a spiraling path into the centre of a dark, pit-like valley.

The owner of an inn showed me to my room in one of the original Ottoman houses. A building built with lots of wood and carpets. Almost every surface was carpeted, which made the place feel very cozy. After a quick tour of the facilities, I went to bed and slept like a stone.

The next morning I asked my host to show me the shower. He revealed quite an interesting setup: You know those squatting toilets? Hole-in-the-ground model? The ones we just don’t do in The West?

(This picture was actually taken at a restaurant, but you get the idea)

So the shower was this, plus a shower head. A small room of 1.5 x 1.5m, the showerhead, the hole-in-the-ground and no window. After overcoming my initial confusion, I managed to take a shower of sorts and also flooded the entire room.

Now I understand that the UNESCO award probably discourages architectural innovations in Safranbolü. Fair enough. Yet I have seen the same setup in several newer buildings since. That just leads me to ask: WHY? Is it some sentimental attachment to the oh-so-quaint past? Mindless conservatism in sanitary engineering? We moved past this! Past the hole-in-the-ground, past flooding the entire bathroom by taking a shower. We moved past it, because it was rubbish. Get with the program, Turkey!

Next, I went out to take a look at the city and get breakfast. The town was…old. That much was clear. The good parts around the centre were old and nice. Two- and three-storey houses built from dark wood and whitewashed stone walls. Some restaurants and many stores. Safranbolü was, in its day, an important trading post, where Saffron was grown and traded. Consequently, everything you can buy there is Saffron-this or Saffron-that. You name it, somebody found a way of putting Saffron in it. I will give them credit for Saffron-flavoured Turkish Delight though, that stuff is delicious!

Now, the less-good parts of town were old and crap. Decrepit, dilapidated buildings. Broken windows, wonky doors. Rusting carcasses of cars left on the roadside, from where they would never move again on their own (I hope). Garbage strewn about the neighbourhood. I quickly made my way through this area and out into the countryside surrounding the village.

As the sun broke through the cloud cover, I began to enjoy myself. My walk led me to a tall fence at the foot of a hill. A gate in the fence stood open. I followed the path to a sign advertising a cafe, and then onwards from there. Suddenly I noticed that the ground to the left of the path dropped away into nothingness. Confused, I walked over and found myself looking down into a deep gorge, with water running along the bottom. The further I followed the gorge, the deeper and wider it became, until I saw the very cafe I was looking for nestled deep down in the canyon.

And that’s how I ended up having breakfast in a canyon! After taking a look around the gorge, I strode back into town and did some shopping. Later that day I walked up to one of the hills surrounding the old town and had a look at the historical clocktower there. No pictures, you know what that means.

Since it was going to get dark soon, I opted to forego a visit to Turkey’s 4th largest cave. Instead, I chose to take a look around some of the historic homes in town. To my disappointment, they looked almost exactly like the inn I was staying at.

The next morning I slept in. It didn’t help that the room I was staying in had no window, so I couldn’t get out of bed until 10:00h. Still somewhat drowsy I grabbed all my belongings and squeezed them into my backpack. Then I sat on it until I the zippers on the compartments would close. I shambled to the old town centre and got on a minibus to the coach station.

I had decided to try my luck in Amasya next, a scenic little town on a river. Unfortunately, there were only two coaches on that route on any given day (“Amasya? No. No. Morning Amasya, no. Evening Amasya, yes.”). I had missed the first coach by around an hour and wasn’t too keen to wait until the evening for the next one.

The friendly attendant suggested I could also take a coach to Ankara, the much-maligned capital, and then continue from there. That coach was about to leave in ten minutes though. So I looked back and forth between the map and the idling coach standing in the parking lot. In the end, I said “Yeah, why not?”, shouldered my bag and got on the bus. And you won’t believe what happened next!

So there, I just wrote around 1300 words on a city I didn’t want to bring up in the first place. Amazing, what you can accomplish with boredom and beer!

Until next time,
Arne