‘We’ve got to be in Hopa on schedule so we can meet Hari the Austrian and get the bike across the border. Georgia and Azerbaijan are less stable countries than a place like Turkey and you know what those kinds of borders can be like. We could be held up for hours.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We’ll push on as far as we can today and then make a really early start in the morning.’
We were climbing all the time now, higher into mist-shrouded mountains. Coming through one village we saw an old man standing by the roadside, wearing a thin jumper and sports jacket, a flat cap pressed to his scalp.
‘Our first customer, Cenk,’ I said. ‘Get the cologne ready.’ We had cologne now; maybe it was the lack of the full
dolmus
service that had been our undoing yesterday. Or maybe it was the bumbling blond driver that made people nervous.
The old guy got aboard happily enough, Cenk offering him Turkish Delight and cologne. Rinsing his hands he sat back, not bothered by the cameras. He told us he was going to the street market in the next village, just a few miles up the road. He was a lovely old guy, chatting away about his life. He said his village was fine to live in during the summer but not in winter: it was too cold in winter, it was too cold now; it ought to be much warmer. He spent the winters in Istanbul with his daughter. When we reached the next village he wanted to pay his fare, but of course we wouldn’t take any money. Instead he insisted on buying us a cup of tea, so Russ and I sat outside a cafe listening while he told his mates about us.
Back in the bus Cenk told me that we should ask for money; we could hardly say we were really in the
dolmus
business otherwise.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I feel the love, Cenk . . . The love bus, A to B for free.’
‘OK,’ he said, picking up the guitar. ‘It’s up to you. You know the
Dolmus
Blues, Charley?’
‘No.’
‘You sing alternate lines.’
With a twang of the strings he started. ‘
I got the
Dolmus
Blues
.’
‘
And my feet are aching
.’ OK, not great, but I was put on the spot and it was the only line I could think of.
‘
We drive no place, we got lost
.’
‘
And there’s no one to pick up
.’
We climbed further into the mountains, the mist coming down thickly now. The narrow roads had no run off, and there were shale cliffs on the near side.
‘Fuck,’ I said, looking round at Russ. ‘I can’t see anything.’
‘The road would be good, Charley.’
We made it over the top at last and slipped out of the mist once more into rich-looking fields, hillsides dense with pine. An hour or so later we came upon our second customer of the day, a young guy in his twenties, with black hair. He was carrying a shopping bag and he was going our way. His name appeared to be Farti: I apologise for the spelling but that’s how it sounded and Cenk couldn’t enlighten us.
From the moment he sat down and Russ pressed a box of Turkish Delight on him, Farti looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights. He washed his hands self-consciously, sniffed them and sat there fidgeting. Maybe it was the fact that the ride was free or that a mad Englishman was driving and talking about love. Maybe it was Russ on the guitar or the way I overtook a lorry and missed out on a couple of girls hitch-hiking: no card-carrying
dolmus
driver would ever do that. Maybe it was Mungo sticking a fucking great camera in Farti’s face that made him think he’d been kidnapped. Whatever it was, the poor guy couldn’t wait to get out; as soon as we hit the next town he dived for the door.
‘Can I open the door?’ he babbled. ‘I want to open the door.’ We were barely beyond the outskirts and I hadn’t even braked. Pulling over I stopped the bus and he was gone in a flash.
‘Was it something we said?’ Russ wondered.
I felt bad about it, though admittedly not until we’d stopped laughing. Farti, if you read this I apologise, we meant nothing by it; I suppose we just got our wires crossed. I’d hate to be put in a situation where I had no idea what was going on: it must have been terrible, stuck in a
dolmus
with Borat and a couple of camera-wielding Brits.
‘We’re not very good at this are we,’ Russ admitted sadly. ‘The whole point is to meet people and all we do is scare them off.’
‘We should charge,’ Cenk decided. ‘They’ll feel better if we take their money.’
We ended the day a long way short of where we intended to be, but we’d had a lot of fun on the way, including a brilliant lunch eating a strange soup with cheese and rice, that tasted like pizza. We’d skirted the Black Sea and I’d been glad we were driving rather than bobbing along, seeing some of the country instead. By the time we found a hotel (my room way up on the top floor and facing the back) we’d been on the road for twelve hours. We would start early tomorrow so we could hook up with Hari the Austrian, who was bringing us the motorbike and sidecar we’d be riding through Georgia.
Our last morning in Turkey, we sat down to breakfast and discussed the route in detail. We did this every couple of days: we had so much ground to cover, so many borders to cross and so many different forms of transport we had to stay on top of it all.
‘We have to really push on today,’ Russ stated. ‘Make up some ground.’
I nodded. ‘I’ve loved Turkey, though, haven’t you?’
‘Oh yeah, it’s been great. The
dolmus
was a brilliant idea. And Cenk’s hilarious.’
I sat back for a moment. ‘I really missed Olly last night. That’s the one problem with this trip: being away from home for so long. The enormity of it all really hit me, you know: how far we have to go.’
‘It’s a long way,’ Russ nodded. ‘But we’ve made it this far OK. So long as we get to Hopa today we’ll be on time. Now everything depends on Dubai. Miss that container ship and we have to wait a week. We can’t afford that: a week lost and everything else we’ve set up could fall to pieces.’
I sighed. ‘And we’ve still got to find a way of getting in to China.’
‘Never mind China - there’s Iran to think about first, then the dhow across to Dubai.’
‘Dhows get attacked by pirates,’ I said. ‘Some of them
are
pirates. That’d be nice, sailing out for half a day only for some guy to put a knife to your throat, rob you blind and toss you over the side.’
Behind us the TV was showing last night’s news: there had been a football match between rival clubs in Istanbul and the images showed riot police with tear gas and batons trying to break up the fights.
‘Bizarre,’ Mungo said, joining us. ‘The last two cities we’ve left - Belgrade and Istanbul - a day later they’re rioting in the streets.’ He shook his head. ‘If this carries on no country will let us in.’
We placed a new sign in the
dolmus
window: Ordu, Trabzon, and our final destination - Hopa.
Russ had been picking away at Cenk’s guitar and he’d come up with a song. ‘Are you going to sing it then?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah, why not? It’s called “By Any Means”.’ He cleared his throat, hit the chord and started singing:
By any means of transport we’re rolling down the road
By any means of transport we will go
By car and boat and truck and train, down under Sydney is our aim
By any means of transport we will go.
You probably had to be there.
Tipping a bottle of water down my neck I swallowed too much and gagged. Mungo was sitting beside me and found it particularly funny. ‘Don’t you ever get that?’ I asked him. ‘Drowning when you’re drinking water? It wouldn’t happen with a beer. Was it Hemingway who said he doesn’t drink water because fish fuck in it?’
We picked up another passenger and this time we were determined he wouldn’t suffer the same fate as Farti. His name was Amin and he was just fifteen. As he took his seat I looked round anxiously.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘Is he all right, Cenk? Is he relaxed? I want him to be relaxed.’
Cenk had dispensed with the Turkish Delight and the cologne: he spoke to Amin in Turkish.
‘He was a bit scared when he saw you, Charley,’ he joked. ‘But he’s all right now.’
Amin was a religious student studying the Koran: he told us that one day he hoped to be an imam - what Cenk called a
hodja
.
‘Your mother must be very proud,’ I told him. We’d heard the call to prayers throughout the country, five times a day, the first before sunrise and the last after the sun had set. It was particularly atmospheric hearing the calls ring out in the darkness.
We got to where Amin was going and wished him well. He got out and that was it, only four passengers in three days all the way to Hopa.
Hari, a tall Austrian guy with cropped hair, was waiting for us on the sea front, dressed in a denim jacket. Square apartment blocks overlooked a two-lane carriageway with a grassy median between: beyond it was a stony beach. Now we were close enough we could see that the Black Sea was patchy with oil. Hari was from Ural, the Russian company that had been making fantastic motorcycle/sidecar combinations since the 1940s. They were incredibly sturdy - so good, in fact, that the invading Germans made their own version of them.
Hari had towed one on the back of a trailer all the way from Austria. It was painted camouflage green and looked very functional, with a chunky front wheel and fender; oversize fuel tank and two individual seats on the bike; the rear one with an oval handgrip for the pillion. There was a kick start on the left and a two-wheel-drive facility for rough roads. The side car carried a jerrican; the seat was covered with a faded leather tarp and there was a luggage rack on top of the spare tyre. This was it, our transport for Georgia and maybe Azerbaijan as well.
As I took a tour round the bike, Russ took a couple of phone calls. When he came off, he look perturbed.
‘What’s up?’ I asked him.
‘Two problems. First off, we can’t get Iranian visas in London. We thought we could but we can’t. We have to try and get them in Georgia, but I’m told there’s no guarantee.’
‘So what do we do?’
He shrugged. ‘If it comes to it, we dump the camera gear and try to go in as tourists: get our passports stamped at the border and hop on a train. Hopefully it won’t come to that, but have to plan for it, just in case.’
The second problem was easier to solve. Apparently we couldn’t buy crash helmets in Georgia: we’d have to buy some here in Hopa. Helmets sorted, and still mulling over the visa problem, we headed for the mountains and the tea plantation we’d promised ourselves we’d see before we crossed the border.
It was quite a trek, the road a switchback and narrow as hell as it climbed into the mountains. This was very pretty country, very lush; there was lots of water here. The tea was grown by individual owners on little plots of beautifully green terracing. They sold collectively as Caykur but it was a tough living. Pulling over beside a humpback bridge, we were introduced to one of the growers. The bridge, which spanned a shallow, boulder-strewn river, was like something from
The Lord of the Rings
- there were steps up to it, steps along it and down the other side and it was overgrown and slippery with ivy.
The grower told us that the tea-growing season in Turkey lasts only six months in comparison to the full twelve that planters get in Kenya, India and Sri Lanka. With only half the harvest, they were only able to produce three crops a year. They cut just two leaves and the bud off each plant using a special tool that hoiked the leaves into the bag at the same time. It was very labour-intensive, and the only advantage they had over their twelve-month competitors was that they were able to grow organic tea economically because the insects that needed pesticides were killed by either snow or beetles. The big problem had been getting the bags of picked tea down the sharply sloping mountain to the road. Someone had come up with the ingenious idea of running a cable from the road to each of the houses; the bags of tea were hooked onto it and slid down to trucks waiting below.
I could see entire families working the terraces and I don’t think the growers made much money, but their houses, half hidden in rich, dark foliage, looked beautifully kept, with white walls and tiled roofs. I’d never given much thought to the tea we buy at home but now I vowed it would be Fair Trade or a similar cooperative from this point on.
Back in Hopa, Russ took another phone call from London. Apparently we should wait until we got to Azerbaijan to try and get the visas. We were certain to get them in Baku apparently. I wasn’t convinced, but there was nothing we could do about it. We would just have to wait and see.
7
Born to Ride
The following morning we were up at six-thirty. It was 29 April - we had left Wicklow eighteen days ago. It felt like a lot longer. We said our reluctant goodbyes to Cenk - he had been great fun and his idea for the
dolmus
had been inspired. Meanwhile Hari the Austrian had gone ahead with the Ural yesterday and was waiting for us on the Georgian side.
We arrived at the border at eight-forty only to find it already backed up with trucks waiting to cross. The officials ushered us away. They couldn’t deal with us yet, they said: we had to come back later.
‘No way,’ Russ muttered. ‘We’ve had experience of these kinds of crossings before: we’ll stand our ground and wait.’
We stayed where we were, sitting in a queue of cars that didn’t move for hours. Finally things began to happen and we made it through around midday. There was a mass of vehicles all bunched up and when they started to move there was no order, no queue, drivers just piled in from all over. At the checkpoint we waited our turn with everyone else but were barged out of the way by five women who ignored the queue completely and pushed their way to the front. The officials seemed to know them and they were dealt with first: I assumed they must cross every day.