I hardly know where to start. This past week has been a blur
of food, walking, sweets, tea, more sweets, and some beer thrown in for good
measure. It all started about two
months ago when one of my fellow teacher trainers, Peter, and I decided to head
to Azerbaijan over the Easter weekend. Somehow, Trabzon, Turkey was also thrown
into the mix, and then a week before leaving I was woken up by a midnight text
asking me if I wouldn’t like to go to Istanbul for a few days as well.
Of
course I agreed and our itinerary was set.
Fast forward to last Saturday. As soon as 3pm rolled around
and I was finished with work, I was out the door making my way to meet Peter in
Kutaisi, a town about 2.5 hours west of Gori. From there, he and I would hop on
the bus heading to Trabzon. I had made arrangements for two of my trainees to
accompany me out to the highway to catch a westbound marshrutka (the ubiquitous
minivans that serve as public transportation for Georgia). I ended up in a
black Toyota Sequoia with three men who didn’t speak any English speeding along
at 180 kmph. A trip I thought would take around 3 hours took only 90 minutes
and before I knew it, I was dropped off at the McDonald’s in Kutaisi to wait
for Peter.
We hung out for a bit then struck out to find dinner, ending
up at a locals place to gorge ourselves on khinkali (aka, the Georgian
dumpling) and politely try to decline the offer of a vase of Georgian white
wine from another diner. We managed to drink only a small amount of the wine
but left with bellies full of good Georgian food and ready to start our
vacation.
The bus left Kutaisi at 11pm and arrived at the
Georgian-Turkish border (at the Sarpi-Hopa crossing) around 1:30am. For Americans
going into Turkey, it’s necessary to have a visa, which can be purchased at the
border. However, we got to passport control before seeing any place to buy one.
As it turned out, the visas were for sale in a little office tucked away in a
building on the other side of passport control, so we had to go buy our visas
then backtrack to have our passports stamped. The bus hung out in Hopa until
about 3am when a small family boarded and then we were off.
We were scheduled to arrive in Trabzon at 6am and we got
there exactly on time. Sleeping in a bus seat is only slightly more comfortable
than trying to sleep on an airplane, and I was glad to have a leg stretch, but
a pre-dawn 6am disembarkation is a really early time to arrive anywhere. We
grabbed a taxi (who, thankfully, only charged us 20 lira even though the meter
read 29 because that was all the Turkish money I had on me) and headed straight
to our hotel. Without any fuss or extra charges, the hotel let us check-in at
6:30 am and I fell into a deep, deep sleep for a few hours.
Prior to leaving for Trabzon, I had cast out a few feelers
to try to gather up whatever information I could about the area. The nuggets I
collected indicated that I should expect a poor attitude towards foreign women
and that I should consider covering my head. In the end, Trabzon had nothing
but love to give.
After napping for a few hours, Peter and I were up and at
‘em. We wandered, wandered, wandered. For lunch, we stopped off at the best-named restaurant ever:
Git Git. It’s a chicken döner place in the center of
Trabzon, but, I have to say, the döner was
pretty disappointing: chicken, pickles, fries, lettuce, and a thin tomato sauce
all wrapped up in flat bread. I skipped the mayonnaise (maybe that was the
key?), but what the döner really needed was a spicy
kick. However, the good folk of Git Git gave us free magnets and the name has
provided me with endless enjoyment and entertainment. We more than made up for
the döner, anyways, by eating sweets after
sweets after sweets. I have a sweet tooth a mile wide and I shamelessly
indulged it again and again and again.
Later in the afternoon we found ourselves down by the water
at a little outdoor café. It had
started to rain, so we were glad to have a little shelter, but once the winds
kicked up a bit we couldn’t sit without getting wet and since no one had come
to take our order, we opted to strike out in the rain for a walk along the
promenade. The rain didn’t last too long, so we strolled until we were mostly
dry and then went back to the little cafe for some Efes.
Eventually we headed back to the center of Trabzon for
dinner at a place Peter chose because it had a little balcony that overlooked
the main square. The food was quite good (although I can’t remember what I ate)
and we capped the whole thing off with kadayif and tea.
The next morning I wanted to head out to the Sümela Monastery, which is nestled into a cliff in the mountains
south of Trabzon near the town of Maçka. The guy at the hotel told me that to get
there we needed to take a bus to Maçka and then another bus on up to the
monastery. After a bit of wandering around and asking, we found the right bus
to Maçka. Once we got there, we overshot where we needed to get off, but the
driver turned around and dropped us off at the right spot. A taxi driver
approached us immediately and when we said we wanted to take a bus or dolmuş, he indicated that the busses weren’t running yet because it wasn’t
quite the time for tourists. He offered to take us up for 50 lira; Peter talked
him down to 40 ($22) and we were off.
The drive up to the monastery was lovely. We followed a small river
through a gorge most of the way then climbed a dirt road for a bit before being
dropped off at the entrance to the compound. As soon as we started walking up
the path leading up to the monastery, we agreed we should go ahead and pay the
driver the 50 lira he initially asked for. The drive was longer than we thought
it would be and it seemed like the seemly thing to do.
The cost to enter the monastery site was 8 lira each ($5) and worth every
bit. I spent a long time ogling and taking photos of the frescos on the outer
walls of the rock church. The frescoes are pretty badly damaged and it
is clear that the site has not been well looked after in the past. However, the
monastery is definitely a trip highlight (one of many) and I’m glad we went.
After returning to Trabzon, I hit a department store in search
of a bathroom and Peter went off to purchase a mélange of sweets and then we
decided to strike out for the castle. We walked up to the top of the
residential hill that the ruins sit atop and were looking for an entrance when
an old man sitting on a bench called out to us and pointed at the castle.
“Allemande?” he asked as he approached us.
“American,” we replied.
He shrugged and indicated that we should follow him. He led
us through a door and into a small courtyard flanked by two little pink houses.
At first, I didn’t quite understand what was happening, but what he was doing was taking us within the castle walls. The entire site is inhabited by Trabzon residents and full of little houses; we would
not have been able to access the ruins had he not invited us in. Peter and I
scrambled on top of one of the outer walls to take in the fantastic view over
the town and towards the water. We hung out a bit and marveled at how nice it
was for the old man to let us in. Then we made our way back out and slowly
wound our way back to the seaside café we’d been at the night before for more
Efes, stopping on the way to look at some ducks and buy a few strawberries, of
course.
Eventually, we ate dinner at the same place we had the night
before although this time we needed umbrella action out on the balcony because
it was raining. Finally, and after a post-dinner ice cream, we headed back to
the hotel to catch some zzzz’s before embarking on part 2 of our little
journey: Istanbul.
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