Magic Bus (8 page)

‘Have you been travelling long?' I ask him as he returns my pen. I hadn't noticed him get on the bus.

‘About forty years,' he replies. ‘Forget that guidebook' – I'd been leafing through the
Blue Guide
– ‘it's no good beyond Konya.'

‘You know all about it,' I say, with an unexpected shiver. Yet I'm pleased to find an English speaker, so I tell him about myself.

‘A travel writer,' he replies, lifting his interest but not his voice. ‘Then we're comrades-in-arms.' He hands me his business card. Tourism Consultant. ‘But I have little time for the sixties. The flower children were as simple as their critics are unpleasant.'

‘In Cappadocia they seem to have opened the door to prosperity,' I tell him, mentioning the stories of Abdullah and Bayram.

‘The hash-and-hepatitis trail did spawn an industry that packaged the world,' he admits, folding his hands in his lap. ‘I should know. I stand near the start of that trail.'

‘How so?'

‘It was me who put Butterfly Valley on the map.'

Butterfly Valley – Kelebek Vad1s1 – was once an isolated beach accessible only by sea; a divine holiday highlight for early, independent travellers.

‘I worked as a guide for tour-company scouts,' he explains. ‘I turned them on to its tourist potential. I went on to invent the
gulet
package holiday,' he gloats with a flash of conceit, ‘enticing Club Med to Foça and convincing Airtours to build the first hotel in Ölüdeniz.'

‘That's…' I search for the right word ‘… impressive.'

Each development marked a turning-point in the growth of Turkish tourism, transforming – in most cases – wild coastline into resort conurbations.

‘I've been a planning officer, a copywriter of brochures. I've advised Kuoni, Thomson, Abercrombie and Kent. As soon as the holiday-makers arrive, with their sun-cream and condoms, I leave the place to them. You've heard of the Arab traveller al-Muqaddasi? In the tenth century, he wrote that cities on the sea are hotbeds of fornication and sodomy. Nothing's changed in a thousand years.'

‘Overdevelopment has changed Turkey.'

‘Tourism is the factory without a chimney,' he insists, again in a unemotional tone. ‘It's good for the economy, and thriving economy improves lives.'

‘So why are you travelling east?' I ask him. As far as I know, the next mainstream tourist stop is Goa, 5,000 miles ahead in India.

‘Let me tell you a story,' says Oscar, ‘about two brothers from Bingöl.'

I unfold my road map.

‘It's a Kurdish town, poor of course, with red clay, lavender honey and so little work that men must look elsewhere for things to do. There are Koranic schools, soldiers on the street and wolves in the mountains. In truth, this is a story about wolves; about running from wolves, fighting with wolves, becoming a wolf.'

Bingöl lies to the south of the overland route in Turkey's impoverished hard-baked south-east, where a vicious guerrilla war raged for sixteen years.

‘These two brothers were brought up alone by their mother for, I'm sorry to say, they had seen their father shot dead.'

‘Shot?' I repeat, because there is no sorrow in his voice. He simply recounts the facts of a tragedy.

‘He was a songwriter and a prominent member of the PKK.'

Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the Kurds have aspired to nationhood. The outlawed PKK – or Kurdistan Workers' Party – led the insurgency throughout the 1990s.

‘But these details aren't important to the story. What is important is that the brothers – so good, so calm – grew up in a kind of isolation, because their mother kept them indoors, fearful that the Nationalists would come next for her boys.'

While western Turkey prospered, Oscar goes on to explain, with rapid economic growth and mass urbanization, the Kurds as a whole were cut adrift, forbidden to teach and broadcast in their own language, isolated because their aspirations threatened Turkish unity. Their guerrilla war unfolded far away from television cameras, claiming over 30,000 lives.

‘The brothers dreamed the dreams that boys do, of becoming pop stars or inter-city bus drivers. But when they grew into young men, the only work available to them, apart from bee-keeping, was heroin-smuggling from Iran. Of course, if you can feed neither yourself nor your sick mother, you feel ashamed, you get angry, you look for someone to blame. Then, in your feeble fury, the wolves come after you.'

Again I'm unsettled by Oscar's cold calm, by his chilling talk of revenge without a trace of emotion.

‘Violence begets violence. No Kurd can sit on the fence. He must decide to run with the wolves or to run away from them.'

Bingöl was a divided town, he tells me, a stronghold of both the PKK and a shadowy Sunni group called Hizbullah; same name, same mentality, but separate from the Lebanese Hezbollah. Together, the PKK and Hizbullah shared a hatred of the Nationalists.

‘The first boy ran to the west, away from his beloved younger brother. He changed his family name. He sold himself, and Turkey. Every month he sent home money.'

‘And the other brother?' I ask.

‘He fell in with the wolves, running east with them, along the same road as you are heading, as a matter of fact. Nothing was heard from him for years. Until last week. I received a call that he had come home.'

The persecution of the Kurds shames Turkey's recent history. The restoration of minority rights has begun to redress the balance, but many of the country's 12 million Kurds – like some of Istanbul's inward-looking
da
ğ
li
– remain embittered by both their exclusion from progress and by the frightening speed of it.

Oscar polishes his fingernails. ‘In Kurdish, we say, “One hand clapping does not make a sound.” Kurds do all as family. When I say I love my brother, I mean I will do anything for him,' he assures me in a flat tone. I notice that his pebble-smooth features are broken by the rough edges of three cracked teeth.

Five hundred miles east of Ankara, Erzincan cowers in a narrow corridor flanked by the rumpled bodies of fallen giants. Nut-brown
fields reach over their long, wrinkled limbs as if to tether them to the earth. In 1939, these giants stirred and the entire city was razed by an earthquake. The sense of loss still pervades the evening air.

Oscar has a ride arranged to carry him across the mountains to Bingöl. He asks me to join him. ‘A favourable mention in your book will bring visitors and stimulate the local economy,' he says.

I turn down his invitation, even though my bus is going no further tonight.

‘Another time then, my friend.' He smiles but his eyes remain empty. Then he takes my hand and adds, ‘Remember, if you want to be sexy, you must drink Pepsi.'

In my concrete-and-cockroach hotel room I turn the lock and jam a chair under the door handle.

Along the hippie trail, beyond the ubiquitous crescent-and-star flags and assertions of ethnic integrity, Turkey unfolds as an elaborate, fluid mosaic; an Anatolian imbroglio of history and ideas over which great armies and ardent idealists have trampled and trespassed. In 334 BC, Alexander began his drive towards India from central Konya, the ancient city which the great Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah passed through on his
haj
to Mecca in 1331. St Paul was thirty-five years old when he walked this way. Crusaders and Islam's horsemen galloped across this same lion-coloured plain, though heading in opposite directions. A thousand years later, the Intrepids were propelled east by their dream of a better world. In 1999, after the cessation of the insurgency, hundreds of radical Kurds chased in their footsteps, escaping over the border into Iran and northern Iraq.

The next morning, my bus follows them too, squeezing out of the canyon, over the giants' outstretched limbs, beside the fast, frothy Euphrates. Boulders roll down gravel arms. Meltwater churns wild and white over outsized fingers. I'm dwarfed by the pathos of human endeavour and the precipitous, primeval mountains shot through with bone and iron. At Tercan, the driver spills hot tea on his lap and almost crashes into a gorge.

I spare only a day for grey, grim Erzurum. Women wash earthy wool in a public fountain, drawing veils across their faces as I pass. Policemen relax in the shade of the Citadel, singing soft songs to each other, gazing along the arrow-straight trading route as did Roman centurions, Danish freaks and all the travellers between them. In a broken backstreet a cracked old man seizes my hand and shakes it, crying out, ‘
Sie sind zurückgekommen
.' You've come back. Since the Iranians closed the trail in 1979, few Westerners have had cause to visit the city. Istanbul feels a continent away.

I push on across divided, diverse eastern Turkey, numbed by distance and busted springs, each bus slower, older and hotter than its predecessor. The Meteor Turizm coach has broken instruments and a cracked windscreen. The Do
ğ
ubeyazit Express, a fiery metal coffin on wheels, rides low on its tail and stops every hundred metres whether passengers are waiting or not. An aged farmer hobbles down the aisle, hands reaching out to steady him. A baby is passed from passenger to passenger, held and kissed by strangers. The driver and conductor count and recount their takings, whispering in hushed tones, debating – as the bus isn't full – whether to make the journey at all. Every hundred kilometres, armed traffic
jandarma
shoulder Kalashnikovs to check my identification. The burnt-out hulk of a Kars Comet smoulders among the birches far below at the foot of a rocky valley.

Horasan is a mud-brick hamlet of motor grease and black sheep equidistant from the borders of Georgia, Armenia and Iran. Travellers waiting by its bus stop carry sacks rather than suitcases. I see no women in its tin-roof cafés, on the dirt street, at the plough-maker's shop. Along its alleyways, discs of animal dung dry for cooking fuel. At its market, a barefoot boy offers me home-made
pide
, a thin gloss of tomato on bread. When I buy him a piece instead, he wolfs it down as if he hasn't eaten all day. Beyond him, in a razor-wire BTC oil camp, men work on the world's newest export pipeline, pumping Caspian crude a thousand miles west alongside the ancient road.

In Do
ğ
ubeyazit – called Doggy Biscuit by sixties overlanders – the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy avoided rape at the hand of
a six-foot, scantily clad Kurd by firing her .25 automatic at the bedroom ceiling. A decade later, and 2,305 years after Alexander, the unarmed founders of
Lonely Planet
guides, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, drove their Austin Minivan through this cheerless border town. Marco Polo paused here to look for Noah's Ark in the summer of 1270. He didn't find it but became instead the first European to witness a practical use for petroleum. Near here, he wrote, ‘there is a fountain of oil which discharges so great a quantity as to load a thousand camels. It is not used for food but as fuel for lamps.'

Do
ğ
ubeyazit is a place of transition, within the borders of secular Turkey yet infused with Islamic fervour. On its cramped main street, waiters, with coins jingling in their pockets, carry meal platters to the bustling
medrese
school. Outside the mosque, a cripple with brush-thick eyebrows sells paper cups of seed, sustaining the practice of feeding the pigeons which fed Solomon. At the
otogar
, I watch a public parting. A young man and woman stand an arm's length apart, shaking hands. Unexpectedly, their fingers knit together. She squeezes his thumb, then releases it. He draws his flat palm slowly, firmly, across her open hand. She places her hand on his waist, dips her head and he kisses her forehead. At that moment, a tall, white-robed
imam
emerges from the terminal, steps up to the couple and wrenches them apart. I'll not see a man and woman touch again for the next four thousand miles.

At dawn, the swallows rise up, circling the empty streets, connecting in their sweeping flights the mundane and mystical, the contiguous and the transient, the intolerant and the liberal. I walk alone beneath the flanks of soaring, wide-mouthed Mount Ararat. A
dolmu
ş
carries me across a flat, parched land like a desiccated estuary: desolate, biblical, lodged deep in the souls of men yet of no practical value. My last, treeless stretch of Turkish road is the same that carried Oscar's brother back to the west, to Erzincan and then Istanbul, where he would drive the ‘car of death' into the British Consulate. He, like two other of Turkey's first four suicide bombers, came from angry, hopeless, nihilistic Bingöl.

At the Iranian border, all but on the threshold of Arabia, I cross the first great frontier of the trail, between the Turkish and Persian worlds. In the blue distance, the mountains rise up like hands clasped in prayer.

‘I hate my feelings,' says Laleh, looking past me at the mirror. ‘I hate my weakness.' She tilts her head, easing on the black hood of her
chador
. ‘Most of all, I hate my nose.'

Babak turns up ‘Like a Virgin'. Around him, young women flaunt spangly frocks and Lancôme eyes. The men sport designer jeans and long, swept-back hair. Two out of three Iranians are under thirty and at least half of them seem to be in this room.

‘I'm going into the garden,' Laleh says to me.

She crosses the floor, twisting away between the dancers, music in her walk. The irises of her eyes are auburn rimmed by darkest chocolate. I'm uneasy at being attracted to an Iranian woman, wary of its consequences. A German businessman has just been imprisoned for sleeping with a consenting Tehrani. Here in Tabriz, two toyshop owners were flogged for selling Barbie dolls. Any moment now, the morals police may break down the front door and take me away.

At the border, I jumped the queue. Hundreds of returning labourers mobbed the first checkpoint. I pushed through the red-eyed crowd, my passport clearing a path, and was whisked into a concrete no-man's-land. Three hundred yards ahead, two dozen returning Iranian tourists scuffled around a broad, elaborate, iron gate. Half an hour earlier, on the Turkish side, I'd watched the women transform themselves, removing make-up, donning headscarves, drawing the
hejab
curtain around their bodies. ‘Dear Ladies,' read the only English sign in the customs house, ‘
hejab
is like an oyster shell with woman as pearl inside.' One by one, the pearls and I elbowed through the gate into what is arguably the modern world's only theocracy.