The Mad and the Bad

The crusade to the Holy Lands had ground to a halt in the heat of Damascus. Having been too long away from home, King Michael received word (by email - that’s a first!) of a full-scale revolt by his Queen. In short, he was no longer welcome back in his Hamburg castle. We spent a few more days walking in the shade of the Bazaar and the Old City, and having a quiet beer every evening in the middle of the roundabout at Martyr’s Square (beer is hard to find in Damascus, but there were a couple of small bottle shops in that area) talking about his troubles, but we were just passing time, these things take ages to figure out and we had so little to go on. He was brave, he knew he had to pull himself together if he were to get home, wherever that would be, safe and sound.
We checked out of the Heartbreak Hotel and took a bus north to Palmyra. It’s a busy road with refineries, cement works and other heavy industry along much of the way. I wouldn’t think of cycling it in any season, but (cycling content here…) we found that the road from Homs directly east would be an excellent way to go, across empty roads and hilly desert country, only seeing Palmyra at the last moment after crossing over the hill where the Citadel stands protecting the city of Palmyra. That would be the way to arrive in style, not the shabby bus we rode in on.
Palmyra is one of the world’s greats, a vast site recalling a fantastic and rich city that on several occasions in its history upstaged Rome and revolted against it. I think that much of what we saw is reassembled, as from drawings of a couple of hundred years ago, very little was left standing after the Romans finally sacked it. We could have camped among the ruins, most of which are open to anyone, but this was not the season to do it as nearby hotels are far more convenient (eg, they have water!) and not expensive at all. The nearby town is based around the oasis that was the original reason for Palmyra’s prominence on a trade route to the Middle East, but though it is desert now, it was once the Fertile Crescent. We spent a couple of hours each evening up at the Citadel, where tourists gather to watch the sun setting, its last rays showing up Palmyra to the east in rich colours. The evening air is a fabulous cool desert breeze, after which we rode our bikes in darkness back down the hill into the town to watch motorbikes roaring up and down the main street all night. It’s a grotty tourist town next to the site, but it made me realize that had we only bussed around between the top tourist destinations, we would have had a very different, and more negative experience of the Syrian people. Cycling enabled us to get far off that beaten track and to meet people as yet unjaded by tourists.
Then another long haul up to the Turkish border by bus. It was open for foot traffic and oddballs like us only, and had shut by the time we got there and we spent the night in the entirely Kurdish town of Al-Qamishli on the Syrian side. It was our first Kurdish town as we had exited Turkey for Syria far to the west. People don’t talk politics in Syria, and I had no impression that the Syrian Kurds had any grievances at all. Maybe, maybe not. I was to find it is very different among the Turkish Kurds. Our last night in Syria was a happy one, with a simple dinner of pizzas – Syrian pizzas are tiny but cost about 5p each. One of the guys at the pizza place offered to go and get us beers on his bike while we sat eating and I was pleased when he brought us a lot of change, telling us the beers had been half the price he had expected. We went there for breakfast the next day and someone walked off to bring us coffees and then the manager refused payment for any of it. Wonderful Syria!
Syria had been a marvellous place to visit for all the physical hardships. Not just friendly, but interesting and very communicative people who love to chat and have the widest range of facial expressions and gestures when language fails. Very straightforward to deal with too, and certainly straight with us when it came to money. When it came time to head for the border, one of our friends at the pizza place (income about 100 British pounds a month; his teacher wife makes 60 pounds) escorted us by bike and firmly refused my request for him to ‘look after’ my unused Syrian pounds which would become worthless to me in just a few minutes time.
It was a mildly chaotic border crossing, the Syrian staff having a military look and bearing to them and telling us we would have to wait as the computer system was down and they had to check it before we left. We decided to make ourselves just mildly irritating to encourage them to get the boss to sign off on our departure, which he did after an hour and a half, but they remained courteous despite our awkwardness and offered us tea and let us sit in the top dog’s office while we waited. Turkey seemed very First World after Syria, surprising for a border town, but we soon sensed we were in a very different part of Turkey. A Kurd told us the difference between Turks and Kurds is that Turks drink and Kurds don’t (bad news for thirsty pilgrims!), which is the nub of it. Kurds are the more devout Muslims. We rode up into a wooded valley and camped in trees by a river on a picnic site owned by a Kurdish family and continued up the valley the next day to high rounded hills at about 1500m and no shade for the next few thousand kilometres.

We wanted to visit the Syrian Orthodox monasteries in the area, and found one just a few miles off the highway. Built in AD419, there are only three monks now, though two are in hospital and it is hard to imagine them returning. Several women run a boarding school for local village boys from families who still speak Aramaic. The classes and religious services are all in Aramaic, the language of Christ’s time, but in the daytime the boys are bussed to local schools to be taught in Turkish. One of the women told us two of her brothers had been killed during Kurdish uprisings in the 1970s and 80s, when Muslim Kurds had stormed the monastery. They won’t let Muslims stay the night but we were made welcome. It was a delight to have dinner with well-behaved children and we brought what we had to the meal - some baklava and biscuits, which were well received.

Then finally to the small city of Batman, where the two crusaders parted company, Michael heading back west to get his affairs in order, and me eastwards into Iran. My first gas station tea stop was a shocker- the people were friendly enough but there were religious posters and pictures of Mecca everywhere and the manager called it the ‘Islamic Republic of Kurdistan’. Heaven help us, just what the world doesn’t need, another Islamic republic. I stopped at a rough farming town for lunch and was stopped by the police in plain clothes (this is PKK country, uniforms could make them targets). What was I doing there? This was no tourist town, they said in suspicion of my motives. Just a lunch stop, and could they direct me to a good restaurant? With help from twenty or so schoolkids who had followed me around town, their car was push-started and I followed them to the town’s only restaurant. From then on I passed more checkpoints before stopping in a small village to be mobbed by more badly dressed and worse-behaved children. One little swine hit me with a pellet gun in the back, but when I turned round and saw he was only four, I gave him a fierce-sounding bellow and he ran off in terror.

The next morning I sat down for a morning tea with some soldiers at a checkpoint where their dogs were giving me some trouble and I was just loading up my catapult before they called me in for a tea. The officers on duty joined me while their charges stood in line for inspection, but it was clear the officers were liked and respected as well as being tough. Far different from the Syrian army. The young conscripts were all good-natured enough and keen to survive their year or more serving in Kurdish Turkey, but the officers were professionals. From a couple of tea-stops at army checkpoints, all the officers are Turkish, never Kurdish. It was tempting to toady up to them by saying, in some form of mime, that the PKK should all be shot (which is my view), but it was more interesting to try

and draw them out on their views of things. They didn’t talk about the Kurdish problem, nor did I ask, but their views on Islam were clear. ‘Islamic Republic – big problem. Pakistan – problem. Syria – problem. Aleman, France, Ingilterra, Christian – no problem. As for Iran, they gave a little hand wave that suggested ‘crazy’. I saw it more than once in Turkey as their opinion of Iran. Syria too sometimes gets it. Turkey has dodgy neighbours. It’s probably a Turkish army view as they are known to be a conservative force in politics. Music to my ears, though.
A good tailwind pushed me up the valley to Lake Van at 2000m. The scenery was looking more alpine, with patches of snow on the surrounding mountains. I entered the town of Tatvan where I planned to take the ferry across Lake Van and catch up a bit of time, but first I stopped for a ‘tourist information’ sign, which sadly had no English speakers (nor any information) save for one young Kurdish student sitting nearby, who was an excellent, if unpracticed speaker. I sat with him over tea for an hour or more, and asked him to tell me about the Kurds. It elicited a long list of grievances and explanations as to why the Kurds are so poor. No education, can’t join the army as they wouldn’t be allowed to pray five times a day – this guy was a first-class whinger, but I’d invited him to let loose his thoughts. The sense of grievance and victimhood that I found in other devout Muslims seems a part of the culture, and in Shia Iran, it seemed central to their identity as the killing of their ‘martyr’ Ali is still mourned as if it happened yesterday.

My new Muslim friend and his mates wanted to ask me questions. What did I think of the war in Palestine, and whose side was I on? Did I think it was true that Israeli soldiers killed babies? This was going nowhere, so I made my excuses and escaped with my life and without having to perjure myself to the ferry terminal to see when the boats run to Van, the other side of the lake. A few rust buckets sat in the harbour and there was no office, no one to ask at all but the guy running the coffee shop told me to come back around 7am and I definitely wouldn’t miss the ferry, if it ran.

I rode into town to find a hotel and stopped at the first one that had easy ground floor access for my bike. I was pleased to find the receptionist spoke good English, and sat down to chat with them as tea was brought. As he spoke, I noticed his English improving far beyond the little he claimed to know. He soon wandered onto politics via another favourite theme of the devout, that large families are good. Why they never realise that large families go hand in hand with poverty and poor education and a host of other troubles I don’t know. He thought it was Europe’s big mistake not to grow their population. I think there’s a bigger plot, a plan to dominate the world by sheer numbers. Look at Bangladesh, I said, isn’t that the result of these huge families? This only got him onto his favourite topics, such as the Great Satan. I was starting to feel a vague unease and dismay that I had allowed this conversation to go this way when he said
“Osama made a big mistake. He should have used a nuclear bomb”.
I froze for half a second and without thought or any explanation got up and said slowly “I am going” and walked out leaving the tea on the table. I was mortified at the sheer evil of this remark and though I felt no personal danger, wanted to get well away from a man who thought that way. The PKK has many supporters in Kurdistan. But a few minutes later I had found a peaceful and friendly place where tea and polite conversation was the order of the day. I found a nice spot for dinner and was welcomed by even the long-beards in the corner. It’s a great relief that the truly devout have little interest in politics or nationality, and from that springs true hospitality.
The ferry left around 10 the next morning. It carries trains across the lake and the ferries are designed with low sterns to take the carriages directly onto the boat. The problem comes when the weight of the boat is altered by train carriages coming on or off, and I saw the other ferry rise about a foot above the dock where its connection to the dock had slipped. The trains run to Iran, sometimes carrying passengers, mostly Iranians working in Turkey. It was a wonderful day as the only passenger on the boat, no kids to bother me, music to listen to and clouds and mountains up to 4000m to watch. Van was a bit more in touch with life than Tatvan and I had a last beer in a back alley to steel myself for Iran. I made a few phone calls from a phone booth place and the guy at the desk let me call for free both times. I write this partly to remind myself how many great Kurds there are. It’s never a matter of money with these guys, they know you’ve got more than they have, it’s pure hospitality and friendliness towards a foreign visitor.
My last day in Turkey was the best riding, few cars heading east to the Iranian border, wide pasture meadows and tufty clouds sauntering past me, a lunch in the only non-smoking restaurant I’ve come across in Turkey, then a visit to the student house of some young Kurdish lads who all seemed to be dreadfully serious about religion. I think I preferred hanging out with the bad lads across the road waiting for the electric power to come back on in the internet cafe, but I couldn’t refuse the offer of a tea. You need a good reason to refuse Middle Eastern hospitality. Eight students living together, all male of course, and several keen beard-growers among them. Far too courteous to grill me on my country’s role in the world, though Israel’s always fair game to them. I could tell the West is a decadent place in their minds. So lacking in any experience of adult life, their minds were full of dangerous certainties. Islam, the victim religion, so peaceful, so harmless. I began to see them as the enemy – I was sitting having tea with the enemy. Not my personal enemy, not my country’s enemy, but the enemy of freedom, the arts and all cultured life, of women, of pop music and everything we hold dear in the West and all the rubbish we put up with too as the price of freedom. All this would go if the young bearded ones had their way.

I rode on, again enjoying the freedom my bike gave me to choose my own escape route, down an unpaved road that ran straight to the border. It was riding that cyclists would give their eye teeth for, more wide meadows, skylarks soaring, singing at the top of their climb and then falling back to earth, flocks of sheep, led by pushy goats and friendly sheepdogs and young shepherds, all with the wind at my back. I rejoined the road and rolled down a fairly steep valley for the last few kilometres to stop abruptly at the border, which looked closed for good. I’d chosen a little used border, not the busy one to the north at Dog Biscuit (no traveller can pronounce the Turkish name). A shepherd appeared from nowhere and explained to me with a lot of hand waves that this border was closed to all but trains, but that a train ran at midnight – the one coming off the ferry. We walked back to the small station and he stopped to have a snack and share his food with me, sitting on the unused road and gave me the rest of his cheese that he’d taken to Iran (a little harmless smuggling taking the high route) to sell. The station welcomed me as their only piece of business in a long time and the young and very switched-on customs guy took me under his wing. Husseyn is from the West, ie not a Kurd, but all the other staff are. His spot is so isolated he has to climb a 500m mountainside every evening to call his fiance. He offered me his flat to have a nap if I wanted, or take a shower and use the internet. Perfect, and when he was calling his girl, I sat with the station’s post office manager and had tea with him and listened to Turkish music. At 10pm, Husseyn had finished his long nightly phone call and took me to his friends’ flat for dinner. It was one of the best meals I had in Turkey, stuffed peppers and aubergines, plenty of bread to mop it up, all served on the carpet with newspaper spread out as a tablecloth. At midnight the train pulled in and the guys helped me through Immigration and Customs – I’d met all those guys beforehand and had tea with a few, then introduced me to the Iranian train crew and got my bike on the train. All fabulous, and the perfect way to leave Turkey on a good note and stop dwelling on the few duds I’d met.