Arriving home? - Istanbul, Turkey
3 Stars This place was Average visited Sep 12, 2005
Driving towards Istanbul, I am reading the Salman Rushdie article in the book of travel stories i've been carrying for months. He writes about returning to India after more than 12 years away - after the Satanic Verses brouhaha. It's interesting to read something about going home while driving towards what will be my new home. At least for a while! The European Turkish countryside is noticeably different from Bulgaria and Romania. For a start, the roads improved the moment we crossed the border, and we are travelling on a 6 lane engineered marvel - better than we've seen since Hungary, I should think, and more of it too. The landscape consists of gently rolling hills, but the road doesn't go up and down much - instead there are long viaducts built over the valleys - each with a sign at the beginning to tell you the name of the bridge and exactly how many metres long it is. Without these signs I might not have noticed, as the bridges are no different to the roads, and unless you are looking at the side of the road, you don't notice that the tree tops are suddenly at road height! Another major difference is a lack of people. Instad of the road winding through constant villages, we have nothing but the occasional town huddled on a distant hillside. The fields are huge, obviously worked by machine (unlike Romania) and currently burnt to the colour of dust. The heat and dust haze means the sky is almost the same colour. 30 Km from Istanbul, according to the signs, and it feels like we are on the outskirts of a big city. 25 Km from Istanbul, I see a corpse. The traffic stops all of a sudden, an ambulance races past us on the hard shoulder, and everyone is changing into the far inside lane. When we get to the accident, there is a body lying in an unnatural heap with a few sheets of newspaper over the head and shoulders, and a growing bright red pool of blood seeping out from under it. The ambulance is already there, but the paramedics are just standing around. A few metres further on, an old beaten up truck with what looks like a scrape of red paint on one corner has stopped at the end of a long pair of skid marks. Maybe we won't stand on the side of major roads and wave our thumbs at passing traffic in Istanbul...