February 26, 2014
Oh dear, this isn't going well!: The kindness of jandarmas
The next morning the rain was gone but it was cold and the uphill continued, and Hanna appeared to be struggling. And by 'appeared to be' I mean 'definitely was' and by 'struggling' I mean 'puking her guts up at the side of the road.' We made slow progress with lots of breaks, with me trying to get her to eat something and her not wanting to, until we saw a village a little way from the highway. I suggested that we go to it and find a tea-house or something and take the morning off. As we cycled into the village I stopped a man on a tractor to ask where we could find chai but he couldn't help and neither could the next man we asked, and so we concluded that this was the only village in Turkey without a tea-house and sat on a bench in the cold instead.
Sitting outside in the cold might not have been the best thing for a sick person to be doing, but it was at least quite entertaining watching the people of the village. Mostly it was men wandering around, but one old woman with a red headscarf was doing her laundry using the water from a public spring. Then another woman, head covered by a green headscarf, came along pushing an extremely heavy wheelbarrow and stopped just in front of us and said something to us. We couldn't understand it of course, but the implication was that she was impressed and/or astonished by our fully-loaded bikes. I was similarly impressed and/or astonished by her fully-loaded wheelbarrow. She kept talking and red-headscarf came over to join her, their wrinkly faces peering at us and asking us questions we could not answer. After a while they grew tired of us and the first went back to her washing and the second continued pushing her overloaded wheelbarrow, which I would have offered to push for her if only I'd felt I could have lifted it. As she walked off past chickens and a scraggly looking dog she was joined by an elderly man in a flat cap and suit jacket that was much too big for him, the sleeves coming down so far they hid his hands.
These were just a few of the people we saw, many of the other men also waved and said hello. In fact I seemed to be getting a lot more attention from men since the cute blonde girl joined me. Anyway, after a while we were getting cold and decided that we had better try to continue. But before we could get anywhere up the hill out of town a man shouted at us from a second floor window. "Chai? Chai?" he said, waving us up.
We were led up some steps into a room filled with tables and chairs, a small bar area, a picture of Ataturk on the wall, several solemn old men sitting around, and a big stove in the middle with three kettles on top. We had found the tea-house! The owner, Hasan, spoke a very few words of English ("My English, fifty-fifty") and poured us each an extra-large glass with four sugar cubes on the side. Naturally I put all four in and should have rather liked to have taken the one Hanna had left, but Hasan had kindly given us a packet of biscuits as well so my sweet tooth was well and truly satisfied as I looked around at the men of the tea-house. Most of them were old, almost all of them had moustaches and wore flat caps and stared vacantly, one of them looked exactly like Pete Postlethwaite.
Although it would have been nice to sit by the warm stove drinking hot tea all day we decided to try continuing. We were able to follow a small road out of the village and up a steep hill until it almost joined up again with the highway, and, although the small road was technically closed here, I could see that it was possible for us to get around where the road was blocked and onto the highway. But before we made it all the way to the top of the hill to do this Hanna stopped again and was crouched down at the side of the road. I went back and looked at her and saw that she was clearly too unwell to continue cycling any further. It was only just past midday but I suggested to her that we either roll back down the hill to the village and try to find somewhere to stay, or put up the tent here so that she could rest.
I scouted the area for somewhere to put the tent but there was nowhere good so I went back to Hanna and laid out some sleeping bags in the road and told her to sleep. As the road was closed it clearly wasn't going to be used by anyone and so I figured it may as well be used by someone as a bed. Hanna went to sleep and I used the time to repaint my front fork and clean out one of my panniers while I tried to think of a plan. As we had been there a couple of hours without anybody coming by I thought I would just put the tent up at the side of the road and we could stay there until Hanna was better, as I could easily cycle back into the village to get food and water. This plan seemed like a great idea, until I saw the police car parked up on the highway with the two officers shouting down at me.
Where we had been resting was just about within view of the highway but I hadn't thought anyone would notice us as they zoomed past, but evidently someone had and was probably quite shocked at the sight of two bicycles lying in the road, one with its wheel removed, and a pale faced woman lying in some sort of body bag in the road with a man sat near her stuffing his face with pizza crackers. Whether it had been the police that had seen us, or somebody else who had called them, I did not know, but either way I had some explaining to do. "Get up Hanna!" I shouted, "and act less dead please!" as I left her and ran over to them.
As I got closer I saw that they were not police but 'jandarmas.' In Turkey the police patrol the cities and these jandarmas, part of the army, look after the countryside. The men stumbled down the muddy bank towards me as I asked if they spoke English. One of them spoke a little and to my great relief he seemed extremely friendly as he handed me a stick of chewing gum and listened to my story. He instructed his colleague to bring the car around through the village to where we were as he walked with me back to my stricken companion. They seemed so friendly and keen to help that I was a little concerned they would try and insist on giving us a lift somewhere, but instead when the car arrived he jumped in and told us that they would be back in a minute. I quickly packed up my things, screwing in my rack and reattaching my wheel, before folding up the sleeping bags and preparing Hanna to move on. The jafndarmas returned with a man who spoke better English, and he told us that they had organised a place for us to stay in the village, with the manager of the the village no less, and so we followed their car back down the hill. They introduced as to a kind-faced man at a shop and we were left in his charge, saying profuse thank-you's to all our helpers as they left. Such kind law enforcement officers.
The shop owner appeared to be in his fifties and was a little overweight, with a neat moustache, flat cap, and spectacles that sat at the end of his nose. He had a face that seemed somehow very friendly and yet angry all at the same time. Before the jandarmas left they had described him as the 'mukhtar.' "Do you remember what mukhtar means?" Hanna asked me, as we once again sat by a stove waiting for tea.
"Yeah it means big dog. This guy is the big dog of the village."
"It means mayor. This guy is the boss of the village."
"Exactly, the big dog. So, what shall we call him? Mukhtar Three?"
Although this was a great name, it seemed better suited to a dog, so I decided to ask the man himself.
"What is your name?"
"My name is Kazim," replied Mukhtar Three.
After more tea Mukhtar Three showed us to a house just up the hill from the shop. By now Hanna was feeling so weak that I had to cycle my bike up and then run back and get hers too. The house was completely empty, it seemed to be Mukhtar Three's old home and stood near to a modern new house which we assumed was where he lived now. There was a sofa lying outside which he decided that we should bring inside to brighten the place up a bit, so him and I grabbed an end each and I backed up towards the open door. The sofa really wasn't going to fit easily through the door frame, it really needed to be angled just right, which was difficult to achieve with the two of us shouting "tilt it this way" and "a little to the right" and "pivot" in languages that the other could not understand. It was such a disaster that at one point my leg became trapped between the sofa and the door frame and Mukhtar Three kept pushing the sofa towards me, crushing my leg and he wouldn't even cease when I screamed "stop" and I had to push the sofa back towards him to get my leg free. After all this, and scraping half the paint off the frame, we did finally get the thing inside and our kind host left us to it. I told Hanna to sit down while I brought the bikes and the bags inside. As I did this I saw her sitting on the cold floor. "What are you doing? Why aren't you sitting on the sofa?" I asked.
"It's wet" she replied. I felt it. It was completely sodden.
I gave Hanna the warmest sleeping bags and she fell asleep on the floor. I then had another fun episode procuring some hot soup from Mukhtar Three for her to eat. He understood that I wanted to buy a packet of soup from his shop, and also that I wanted some hot water from his kettle, but it took several minutes for him to make the connection that it would be very useful if he could mix them together for me, given that I was staying in his unfurnished house with a very poorly girl who wanted soup. I gave Hanna the soup and then left her to sleep as I sat on the porch of our new home and looked out over the village of orange-tiled roofs, the white minaret at the heart of it all and the golden yellow grassy hills that loomed over everything. It was truly a beautiful scene. I could hear the sound of a herd of sheep baa-ing and dogs barking, only interrupted when the call of prayer rang out from the mosque, bouncing off the hills and echoing through the valley. At that moment I felt very happy to be in Turkey, warmed by the kindness of strangers and hoping desperately that Hanna would soon be feeling better.
Today's ride: 10 km (6 miles)
Total: 13,742 km (8,534 miles)
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