A Reunion in Southeastern Anatolia

It couldn’t have been a more perfect setting for our reunion. Bruno and I were parked at a campsite along the large and calm waters of Lake Van, with snow-capped mountains on the horizon and birch trees standing tall like soldiers at attention. We were in the easternmost tip of Turkey and Bruno had driven for two nonstop weeks through Iran to get here. How romantic is that?

In my last blog, I mentioned that one of the benefits of solo travel is the reunion with one’s loved one(s) that comes at the end of the trip. In French, they call it a “retrouvaille,” which kind of means “to find one another again.” I find this term apt, for that is exactly what Bruno and I did. There was so much news to share, stories to tell, questions to ask. It isn’t often that our experiences aren’t mutual, and even though it was strange not to have been with Bruno in Iran, it was fun to have so much to fill each other in on. We barely had time to leave the camper van!

Get your heads out of the gutter, people! It was cold outside. Cold like I haven’t felt in years. Bruno, unfortunately, had been this cold for over a week. Northern Iran is at altitude, too, and has its fair share of snowy peaks. By the time we met up on Lake Van, Bruno was utterly sick of having to spend all his days and evenings inside the camper van. So even though Lake Van was beautiful and there were things to do and see in the area, we stayed only one night and opted instead to drive onward to better weather the following day.

Being on the road again was fun. Watching the scenery change, passing through isolated villages, discovering nooks of Turkey together – it was good to be back. Over the course of the week, we drove through Southeast Anatolia from end to end, a 1,000km-long chunk of this massive country. “Anatolia,” or “Asia Minor” refers to the part of Turkey that lies in Asia, i.e. all that is east of Istanbul’s Strait of Bosphorus.

Southeastern Anatolia was beautiful. That first day, we drove through snow-capped peaks and dark fuzzy steppe grass rolling into vast and endless hills home to herds of grazing sheep and shepherds. One day, we drove beside the Tigris River and its red-rock cliff; another day we passed through rolling fields of yellow wild flowers and rocky, rugged plateaus. Jaw-dropping scenes appeared around unexpected corners, in unannounced places. In any other country, there’d be a sign, a restaurant, a hotel here, I thought each time we passed another place of unacknowledged beauty. But in Turkey, there’s simply so much beauty that Turks don’t understand the need to make a fuss about it.

We stopped in a place called Hasankeyf. Now a hamlet of a couple thousand inhabitants, it has been a historically important site since the early Byzantine period – one need only look at the size of the Old Bridge to know that (hint: it’s massive). The city is full of pre-Ottoman era mosques, churches, mausoleums, and hamams (Turkish baths). Even more interesting, the sheer rock wall on the edge of the Tigris River houses a castle, palaces, a watchtower, and tons of little cave houses.

Hasankeyf was out of the way for us, but we wanted to make the effort to visit now, before it’s underwater. The Turkish government’s massive giant hydroelectric project (called GAP) will dam the Tigris River near here, flooding thirty-seven surrounding villages, including Hasankeyf. GAP is a highly controversial project, and there is a fair amount of opposition both inside and outside of Turkey, but I don’t think they will manage to halt the project, whose previous dam flooded another historic site in Turkey. We wanted to visit Hasankeyf before it became an underwater treasure chest, like Savaçan.

We woke up in Hasankeyf to spring weather. Bruno and I took our breakfast outside, watching the rabbits and geese wander around the shaded lawn at our campsite. A day of tourism was before us. Things were finally back to normal, I thought. After several months of bush camping in the Middle East and jet-setting halfway across the world, Bruno and I were finally together again, waking up in an actual campsite, and preparing for a day of tourism. Our reunion was feeling blissfully good.

After breakfast, Bruno and I wandered around the village, visiting sites we either stumbled upon or could see from a distance, popping out of the fields. When we reached the citadel – the sites at the top of the cliff – we sadly learned that the site has been closed to visitors since 2012 due to security concerns. We were able to walk through a canyon and up an adjacent hill, however, to get a stunning and interesting panoramic of the cliffside cave houses.

I wouldn’t have to worry too much about not getting to visit Hasankeyf’s citadel, not only because we would visit the even more impressive cave houses of Cappadocia the following week, but because I was quickly learning that Turkey has an abundance of historical sites. In fact, if we stopped at every roadside sign or spot mentioned in the guidebook, we’d need to renew our Turkish visas for an extra three months! I wanted to see a bit of Turkey’s history, but I’d drive Bruno nuts unless I chose my sites wisely.

And so, next I chose Diyarbakir and its 6km-long early-Byzantium city wall – a wall that is second in extent only to the Great Wall of China! Bruno and I spent an afternoon circumnavigating the wall, climbing it (which is allowed) to catch the view of red rooftops below, and wandering around the alleys of the old town, filled with Armenian homes, mosques, and churches. It was drizzling, however, and there was no place for us to sleep in this narrow maze of streets, so we did the fast version of our visit and drove on, finding an excellent bush camp in the middle of verdant farmland.

I strolled around the hills and farms that evening. Pale buds were sprouting on trees, the wildflowers were sending out an absolutely intoxicating smell of spring in blossom, and the sun peeking through white clouds balanced the crisp air. I hadn’t experienced spring in so long. In Africa, there aren’t the same four seasons as I grew up knowing. Their seasons are called things like “short rains,” “dry season,” and “long rains”. There are rough equivalents to spring, but it just doesn’t feel the same. Spring is the reward for making it through a long, harsh winter, and even though I personally hadn’t had to go through winter, I could feel the collective sigh of relief of winter’s passing all around me.

And in any case, one thing I could comprehend was that sun and warmth are things to be appreciated in Turkey. Here, in this four-season country, the sun wasn’t always out, the breeze wasn’t always light and warm. Sometimes it rained. Sometimes it was cold. This was a change. Here, I actually needed to look at the weather forecast. This was not Dubai. When the sun poked out of the clouds for a half-hour, or you awoke to a bright blue sky, you appreciated it.

As if to confirm my musings, the next morning we woke up to drizzle and plummeting temperatures. We were bound for the mountainous Nemrut Dağı National Park, whose peak exhibits statue heads placed there by a narcissistic pre-Roman king. The guide book recommends visiting the summit only from late-May to August because at other times it can be covered with snow. The guide book fails, however, to mention the humid frigidity of the weather in the surrounding area of the park. We were so cold that not only did we decide not to visit the summit (whose road was open, but barely), but we decided not even to spend the night in the surrounding hills. We took a quick tour of some nearby ancient Greek stelae, caves, and statues (another historical site, check!), but tourism isn’t nearly as fun when you’re wet and shivering.

And then, it started to snow. When Bruno first pointed out the freezing rain on our windshields, I giggled. I hadn’t been in snow in four years, and I am still Canadian, after all! This was certainly a change from the regions we’d come from. But, as the snowstorm started in earnest and Bruno worried out loud about not having the right tires and the tracks on the curvy, hillside road disappearing under the mounting snow, the storm stopped being fun and took on an ominous tone. We focused on getting out of these hills and down to lower altitude. There it would be warmer, surely.

But it isn’t. The snow storm may be behind us (for now), but the thermometer is still hovering around freezing. I’m sat on the bed of our camper van hunkering down for the evening. I have four layers on, and I’m under the blankets. I’ve never – I mean, never in my whole life, not even in Canada – been so acutely grateful for having a heater. We’re going to keep it on all night long, bundle ourselves under our five thin blankets, cuddle the crap out of each other, and hope we can start the car tomorrow morning. What a reunion in Southeastern Anatolia it’s turned out to be!