The long haul

I know people do it all the time, but how amazing is flying? It beats just about anything else I can think of that we do for sheer improbability. One morning you're catching the tram across the Galata bridge in Istanbul, and 20-something hours later you're bedding down at a friend's house in Sydney. Life-changing.

I've just read a BBC Point of View by Adam Gopnik (who usually writes for the New Yorker) which nails this feeling of wonder I have so neatly. Everyone these days is besotted by advances in information technology but they're missing the point, he says. All the big revolutions in modern times have involved transportation more than information. It matters more to shift a human body speedily than to send screeds of tweets, in other words. Couldn't agree more.

Moving along, literally. We've jumped hemispheres, swapped winter for summer, and are chasing food along a kitchen bench as long as our boat is wide. We are parents again, and in a very limited way thus far (as expected), grandparents. Little Louis has more pressing issues than getting to know family. Give him time.

It seems a shame to completely bypass the two days we spent in Istanbul before we got on the plane which brought us safely over the Middle East to the fabled summer city where girls and cockatoos equally are screamers, have an eye for glitter and love a drink by the rooftop pool. So here's a sample of Alex's pictures.

It's unlikely we'll be in Istanbul again, except in transit. I think of it now as one of my favourite cities. I know that Istanbulites (as they call themselves) say everything's changed, that Turkish PM Erdogan and his AKP party have wrecked it with their progress at any cost agenda, and I get their anguish. We changed hotels after the first of our three nights in Karakoy (the neighbourhood on the water, on the Galata Tower side of the Golden Horn) because the monstrous machine knocking down a building about 50 metres from our window didn't stop work until 2.30 am. That's how it goes in Turkey these days. Rush rush rush. Before someone stops you doing what you want to do.

Inside the Rusten Pasha mosque (and below)

However, there is a sublimity in and about Istanbul that I hope is immune to progress in anyone's lifetime. Start with the skyline above Sultanahmet and the glint on the water of the Golden Horn, the endless variations of blue glazed tiles in the mosques (like this one just beside the Grand Bazaar, called in Rustem Pasha mosque) and in the pavilions of Topkapi palace, the black-coated rivers which pour down Istiklal way into the night, the shoulder-to-shoulder fishermen on the Galata bridge, the tea-waiters on the ferry across to Kadikoy on the Asian side, the food at Ciya Sofrasi. Remember, we came from Berlin where (believe it or not) we struggled to find a restaurant selling schnitzel, Alex's favourite. Berlin is so cosmopolitan. Istanbul is not. It is Turkish. Very Turkish. For better, and for worse. 

As a postscript, I'm adding one last ruin (of course).  We did get away again in the week before we left Marmaris, driving with our Canadian friends Dale and Joanne north to Aphrodisias which in many ways is as impressive a site as Ephesus. It's a bit out of the way though, so we had it mostly to ourselves. You can only dream about a day like that at Ephesus.

The Aphrodisias stadium 

....and theatre

...and southern agora, which featured a stupendously long oval "pond"

Aphrodisias lies in a lush basin at 600 m above sea level. Over it looms a mountain which at this time of year is dusted with snow. The city must have been dazzling in its heyday with its huge stadium (which seated 30,000), temple to Aphrodite, theatres, agoras, baths - all the usual accoutrements of a Greek-inspired city which the Romans then took to another level. Aphrodisias was famous in its time for the quality of its marble and produced a lot of sculpture, much of which is still in situ, or at least, in the museum on the site.

I thought of Aphodisias when we were in the Pergamon museum in Berlin. As well as the Grand Altar of Pergamon, the Germans nabbed a massive gate from the city of Miletus which now has very little to show besides one of antiquity's biggest theatres. The Miletus gate has been rebuilt, just as this monumental gate in Aphrodisais was. But what a difference between the two. The Miletus gate is splendid in every way, but it's like great bear behind bars, much diminished by its captivity.

The Miletus gateway at the Pergamon museum in Berlin

Remains of an elaborate one-off structure known as the Sebasteion

The monumental gate at Aphrodisias

What's left of the temple of Aphrodite

The Aphrodisais gate stands in a green field, and in the late afternoon light, against a bright blue and steel-grey sky, its intricately-sculpted columns and friezes turned a luminous buttery yellow. The archeological model of Aphrodisais suggests that this gate, called the tetrapylon, was just a small thing compared to the Temple of Aphrodite to which it provided an entrance. Some of the temple's columns still stand, or have been restored to standing position, and they too turned gold in the sun. Until recently, peasants tilled their fields around these columns, taking their presence in the landscape for granted. And why not? Yet so much has gone which is why you tend to forgive the German looters (and the Brits who were equally opportunistic) for spiriting away Turkey's heritage. Who knows how this story ends, but Kenan Erim, the archeologist who got excavations underway at Aphrodisais in the early 1960s and who is buried in the green field by the tetrapylon, is Turkish. That's progress too.  

Floating home

The sweet vanilla-and-fruit smell of cake just out of the oven fills the cabin. This morning I felt the urge to bake. It's been a while, but we're home now, our bags stowed, clothes back in their lockers, and books, trinkets and cheaper-from-America boat paraphernalia filed. There's fruit on the table and Diana Krall sings to me live from Paris - Alex woke early and spent a couple of hours transferring new music onto our iTunes library (thanks Bridget and Tony).

Outside a fresh south-easterly wind blusters and rain is falling in fits and starts, but down below we're snug and content. Friends who have spent the entire winter in Turkey and Europe are weary of damp cold and sun-less skies, and who can blame them, but late March is very early spring and we think it will be another month before we're out of here.

Others are sniffing the air, anxious to be gone. They'll take a chance with the April firtana (storms) predicted in Turkish annual storm table. Kevin and Mei, our Melbourne friends on Whisper HR, have a pick-up in Rhodes mid-April. Mei has been cooking for the freezer. The yard has a buzz about it. People are doing those boat jobs they've been talking about doing since November, and firming up on their cruising plans. Ed and Sue have Angel Louise out of the water, getting her ready for the long haul back to their beloved St Katherine's dock in London. They too have decided to delay their Atlantic crossing by a year. What's the hurry to get home? they asked themselves and decided there was none after all. It's a familiar story.

So many tulips to admire

The garden path leading to Topkapi palace

Fresco in the Chora church, Istanbul

Istanbul, with its heavenly tulip plantings and forests of minarets, heaving crowds and sleepless streets seems far away now. There's only a month before the first wave of holidaymakers from the north dumps on Marmaris and the town still looks like the backwater it is out of season. The main shopping street is a shambles, impassable by car. At every corner there's a road being pulled up.

The state of chandlery street

But this is a town which leans towards the water, and when the skies clear and the wind drops, as it did on the day we came back, there are a lot of Turks and ex-pats who will tell you that you can keep your Golden Horn and your glittery Byzantine mosaics. They'd rather be living on Marmaris Bay.

Chora church mosaics 

Change of season

The faith I spoke of, you know my line about giving our children the freedom to get on with their lives without us for a bit, well, that took a hammering as we took our leave from Sydney. It probably didn't help that I'd planned our departure for just after my birthday which we celebrated, without irony, at a Turkish restaurant. Feel the love, as they say. I did, and I do. As does Alex.

The  goodbyes are something you just have to get through in the belief that life is long, that it has its seasons and that for us, there will come a season when staying put while others come and go is a given. Now is our time to go.

Besides, how often can a person expect to be in Istanbul in the spring? Two months ago, in the cold half light of late January, we watched teams of men carefully digging tulip bulbs into garden beds in the parkland surrounding the Topkaki palace and I was excited for our return. Paris has its chestnut blossom, and London its daffodils but Istanbul's spring motif is the tulip.

But tulips in March? My mother (my gardening guru) wasn't hopeful. So when I saw shadowy thickets of buds on the side of the road on our way in from Ataturk airport to Cihangir, I was ecstatic. "The tulips are up!"

 

Yesterday we walked across the Galata bridge, where the fish must no longer be running becasue the crowds on the railings have thinned, and up to the glory which is the Suleymaniye mosque. Up the steep winding streets and past the sagging wooden Ottoman houses.

We walked past the tin merchants, the washing strung across the road between houses, past young men shovelling coal and toting trays, past old men shouldering and pushing great unwieldy loads - work is so visible in Turkey - and through the gate and into the tranquillity of the great mosque, the one less visited, and for that reason alone, the best to visit in Istanbul.

In that vast space, sitting on fine carpet, and looking up into the huge dome's salmon pink interior, painted with flowers, for the first time I felt at ease in a mosque. Perhaps it was the stained glass windows, which are unusual in a mosque and which reminded me of other places of worship, those I know better.

Then, because we could, we crossed the Bosphorous to Kadikoy for lunch at Ciya Sofrasi. In between the traffic and the parking lots, there they were again. Tulips. Squat red ones with saw-toothed petals, white ones on long stems. The early bloomers.

While we've been lolling in the summer sun on the other side of the world, they've have pushed their way through the hard earth, towards the light and the warmth. Not only tulips, but daffodils and hyacyinths, and grape hyacinths painting intense purple borders around the tulip beds. And irises amongst the gravestones in the locked cemetery at Suleymaniye mosque where Suleyman the Magnifcent and his wife Roxelanne are buried. Ataturk wanted modern Turks to forget the Ottomans, but their flowers come up every spring.