A most beautiful thing happened to us last night. We turned off the Isparta-Konya road down a little side road and pulled in at a place where we could spend the night beside a grove of walnut trees. A car passed, slowing down when it saw us, and 10 minutes later we heard voices outside and saw faces peering in through the offside front window, which doesn’t have a curtain. Somewhat alarmed I got out of the van to see 8-10 men and three cars but the alarm passed when I saw the sweet smiles on their faces. One man showed me a map on his phone, indicating where we were and where he wanted us to go. So we drove in a convoy for 2 kms to the village of Alikoy and parked outside a cafe full of men drinking tea and playing dominoes.
We were ushered to places at a table and Mehmet (owner of the cafe), Masoud (a lively jolly man) and Irfan (a serious but kindly man who is the Headman of the village) joined us and Mehmet brought us two Turkish coffees. We tried to make conversation, showing them pics of the Sulimaniyah mosque in Istanbul, the ruins at Ephesus and Beshiktas football stadium which proved particularly interesting to them. Then Khalid, a doctor in Antalya who was visiting his parents in the village arrived and he was able to translate for us – who we were, what we were doing in Alikoy, where we were going etc. He had studied medicine in Kiev for 10 years and spoke perfect English and Russian.
He told us that Mehmet had phoned his wife to ask if we could come back to his house and spend the night there. Which we did, and met his beautiful charming wife Zhulia and their lovely boy Khalid who was asleep at the time but had asked to be woken when we came so that he could meet us. He is 8 years old and is teaching himself English from the internet. He can count one to ten, knows the names of most of the colours and animals and can greet us with a perfect accent.
Zhulia made us a delicious meal of pasta and home-grown spinach with an egg, got the shower going for us and made the spare bed up. We had a excellent nights sleep.
In the morning, we were astonished to see the beautiful breakfast she made for us. We sampled some of their 5-year-old home-made wine from their own vine trees and were given a bottle plus a bag of walnuts from their orchard. Their house adjoins a neighbours who has several cows. We also met Mehmet’s grandmother, dressed in traditional Turkish costume, who was extremely friendly, and it seems that the extended family live in a compact block of homes.
Mehmet put a simultaneous translation app on our phones and we could hold quite a good conversation. We talked about birthdays and by an incredible coincidence he was born on 22nd November 1985, when Jennifer’s daughter Kaffa was born. Their hospitality and generosity were overwhelming. I told them we would remember it for the rest of our lives and we will.
This morning, from the sublime to the ridiculous, we drove to the small town of Gelendost to buy stamps at the post office. We parked the van, walked to the post office, and then spent three hours looking for the van. A man took me round the streets on his motor bike looking for it, then another took me on his motor bike to the police station where a policeman, who appears to cover a huge area of several towns and villages, couldn’t help because he was there on his own. The owner of a shop which Jennifer had visited met us in the street and took her back to the shop where he shared his dinner with her while I made a systematic sweep of the town, looking for our van. I had been up a particular road several times, stopping at a park and mosque which I was convinced we hadn’t passed on our way to the post office. To make my map of the town complete, I passed the mosque, turned a slight bend, and there was our van!!!!! I drove back to the shop where Jennifer was talking to a lady in French.
In the afternoon, we were stopped at a police checkpoint and given to understand that I had been flashed at 103 kms/hr in a 90 kms/hr zone. The two very courteous policemen tried to explain that they couldn’t not charge me and I was given a 235 lira ticket, reduced to 120 if I paid within 5 days. We stopped at the medium-sized town at Beysehir to pay the fine at the tax office where a crowd of 10-12 officials spent half an hour trying to register the payment and finally told me I would have to go to Konya to do it because they had never caught a foreigner before.
