Day 6: Egirdir

We had a lazy start the next day; there was a pottery tour at 9.30 am which Toby and I decided to skip in favour of a sleep-in. It was the first full night’s sleep I’d had in days and I felt like a new woman when I woke up. We had been planning to explore some of the caves by ourselves but we ran out of time so we just met the rest of the group at 11 and left by bus to pick up Jen at the hospital, where she had been visiting our fallen comrade who ended up needing to be flown back to Istanbul for surgery. We were very sad to have lost one of our group in such awful circumstances, but I’m sure not as sad as she was. At times like this I think travelling on a tour is such a good idea; Jen was able to help deal with the insurance company and arrange for someone to fly with her, and also for some Istanbul friends to visit her occasionally so she wouldn’t go crazy. From Goreme we drove through rolling farmland until about lunchtime when we hit the Anatolian plateau, and then the landscape was full of flat nothingness. We hate at a roadside restaurant that was super expensive – my own spoonful of rice and salad cost 6 lira, while Toby’s plate of meatballs that half filled him up cost 8. Ouch. There was a little playground outside the restaurant so Toby and I played on the swings and monkey bars; it was nice to be outside in a T shirt and not cold, as up until that point the Turkish weather had not been much better than what we’d left behind in Scotland.

The rest of the drive was boring, although a couple of things caught my eye. One was that occasionally you would see families living in tents by the side of the road; I asked Jen about them who said they are semi-nomadic farm workers. It looked like a tough way to raise kids. The other was a man I saw in a field, kneeling under a tree in a seemingly random direction I assumed was towards Mecca. I loved the simple elegance of his position, and the ritual of it; the idea that in any day, no matter what you are doing, there is time to just stop and think about something bigger than you. But mostly I slept in the bus, until we hit what Jen called the lake district, which was much more interesting. Lake Egirdir, where we stayed, was incredibly beautiful and rather alpine-esque being ringed by mountains, some with snow, although parts of the shore looked very Mediterranean. After we got to our (not very nice) hotel we went straight out for a walk along the water, which looked clean and clear and wasn’t as cold as I expected. Toby skimmed rocks but I just couldn’t get it so I threw them instead. For dinner we were driven out to an ‘island’ on the lake that was mostly inhabited by Greek people until the population exchange in the 1920s. We had drinks on a terrace looking over the water but it got too cold so we moved inside to eat. Most of us got trout (a bargain at 6 lira); we also had dolmades, borek, bread and chips although we had to ask for the latter which didn’t arrive until we’d finished everything else. My stomach handled all the food which I was grateful for; the magic of Di’s pills.