The van passed me without slowing down. In fact, it might have sped up and I reflexively took a step further off the road. I turned to look for any hint of brake lights, but the vehicle whipped around the corner and skirted out of view. The car noise traveled up the vale and I resumed my pacing to the soundtrack of nearby bubbling water.
Two choices hung in the air and I passed through them like puffs of smoke. I had come so far to be at this spot, my sweet goal tantalizingly close, but was this how the journey would end? Cast off as a crazed tramp on the side of a road in a foreign hinterland? This wasn't far from the truth and a realization hit me: if any of my friends and family were questioned as to my whereabouts, the most informed answer they could give would be Eastern Turkey. I only had enough money for one night in a cheap hotel and a bus ticket back to Istanbul, which was over six hundred miles away.
There seemed to be only one logical answer: to accept defeat and retreat. But, by this point, I had relinquished most logic and was driven by something even I couldn't understand. The river next to me tumbled over rocks and splashed towards the sea. It had its goal and I had mine. I hoisted my heavy backpack higher on my shoulders and tuned my ears for the echo of a car coming up the valley, ready to stick out my thumb at any sign of movement.
ΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘ
The day I arrived in Istanbul, Turkey, my friend showed me an article in the newspaper which, approximately translated, said this:
“On the Anzer Plateau in the district of Rize, it was announced at the Honey, Culture and Tourism Festival that the price of the famous Anzer honey is 550 Turkish lira per kilogram this year. Last year the honey sold at 500 Turkish lira per kilogram. This season the harvest began on August 15th and if the weather conditions are suitable they expect to have 700 pounds of Anzer honey this season.”
550 lira per kilo? At first I thought my Turkish friend had made a mistake in translation, or that my jet-lagged brain had not nailed down the currency exchange. I found a pencil and a piece of paper. With 1.5 Turkish lira to a dollar, this Anzer honey sold at about 366 US dollars a kilo, or 166 dollars a pound. A pound of honey for 166 dollars. I made her read it again and did the math once more. There was no mistake. A pound of honey for 166 dollars.
This article set my imagination aflame. Firstly, I work as a beekeeper, and though I claim to know my honeys, I had never heard of Anzer honey or its outrageous price. While a rare variety can fetch a higher sum, a typical pound of honey in a US store will cost under ten dollars. For those prices, beekeeping is not the most lucrative profession, with keepers often just scraping by under the constant dread of the bank, diseases and weather. But this honey, this Anzer, was practically worth its weight in gold. Questions raced through my head. What flower creates this honey? How could they possibly charge that much? What sort of medical properties does it boast? And who would spend that much on honey?
Secondly, when I travel I often like to have a goal. This goal can be big, small or strange, but, like aiming for the peak of a mountain, a goal can give a sense of purpose to the trip. While I enjoy visiting the international cities of renown, and setting my eyes on the wonders of the world, merely staying on the hostel-tourist route – from city to city, or tourist hub to tourist hub, while seeing the typical sites, eating in places only open to feed you and meeting only other tourists – seems to me a sterile way to travel. To step off this path, I've undertaken quests such as finding the Ukrainian village where my great-grandmother lived, surprising a friend on a far-flung Pacific island, or buying a friend of a friend of friend a beer in a small town in Argentina.
If I didn't have a personal connection to a place, I often created a goal, say, searching for the highest/smallest/tastiest waterfall, book store or falafel in any number of places. With each of these adventures, and they often do turn into adventures, I have traveled to places that I (and others) wouldn't normally go to – there are no famous sights, tourist distractions, or even natural beauty – but on these journeys I have experienced an unfiltered side of the country and culture; the machinery of every day life, cafes with simple, delicious food, people who are as interested in me as I am in them.
I had two weeks to travel in Turkey and after reading this article I knew where I would go. I would travel to Eastern Turkey to see the fields that produced this Anzer honey, meet the local beekeepers and find out what a twenty dollar scoop of honey tasted like. I looked at a map of Turkey and found the city of Rize sitting on the Black Sea coast. Later that day I bought a one-way ticket to Kars, a city in a region known for its honey, and began to plan my trip.
ΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘ
A few days later I arrived at the Istanbul airport, ready and excited. Anzer here we come. Then everything went wrong.
Standing in front of ATM, I was counting the bills to see that I received the correct sum. People bustled to and fro. I was sleepy. The ATM beeped at me. The bills were stuck together. My debit card sat in the slot, waiting for me to pick it up. As I came to the correct tally, out of the corner of my eye I saw the debit card shrinking, sucked up like a piece of pasta and *poof* gone. Nothing. It had eaten my card. I pressed buttons, slapped the side of the ATM and even yelled, but to no avail. The cold, soulless machine merely played its welcoming screen, waiting for the next victim. My flight was in thirty minutes. I found the bank's office and I complained to the authorities, but they were even less helpful than the ATM. There was no possible way I was going to get my card back before the flight, even that day. I had no traveler’s checks or credit card, and only had the money I had just taken out of the machine. Luckily I had extracted a fair amount, but if I boarded the plane, that cash was going to have to keep me afloat for the overland journey back to Istanbul, where I could get another small piece of plastic which verified I had money somewhere in the world.
It was a strange situation, and a frightening reminder of the power and fragility of that modern lifeline. Without the card, it would only take one pickpocket or bag thief to put me in a fix. While Eastern Turkey was not overly expensive, very few people spoke English and I would be scraping by on the few Turkish words I knew: bal (honey), arı (bee) and arıcı (beekeeper). Retreat, while eating the cost of the plane ticket, seemed to be the safe option, but he anger and frustration of the moment could not dampen my curiosity. I took a walk through the ticket area to settle my mind. Then I went through security and boarded the plane.
By the time we landed in Kars, I had calmed down. I realized that this setback was just an added layer of difficulty to my concept of 'goal travel.' I counted my money and, after shoving enough money for bus fare to Istanbul in the very bottom of my pack, I created a daily budget for a room, food and travel that would last me about a week. If I stuck to it, and had luck on my side, I would make it to Anzer, taste the honey, and then zoom back to Istanbul.
The modern form of Kars was built by the Russians a few centuries back. Set in what looked like barren Wyoming, the city had a frontier feeling to it. Pasty, stone buildings held a jaded look, like they had faced their share of severe, high-plains weather and there was no hope for it getting any better. The city lay below a castle-topped hill and spilled out to the flat before ending abruptly, giving way to a vast yellow plain of scrub grass and prickly plants, mountains rising in the distance. From the taxi window I watched the shapeless gray clouds stretch to the horizon and the combination of this with the sea of yellow made for a sickly color scheme.
Though the terrain looked dry, this region produced vast amounts of delicious honey. Beehives dotted the hillsides above town, tucked among the rocks. When I approached them, I found the black Caucasian bees undeterred by the threatening weather and they continued to zip in and out of the hive searching for the fall nectar flow. Shops in downtown Kars prominently displayed the products of these hives; I counted over twenty shops dedicated solely to honey and cheese, another local specialty. In each shop I would make the international taste-testing sign (pointing at the jars of honey and then touching the tip of my tongue). The shopkeeper would dip a small wooden stick in the honey and I would go through a barrage of little sensory rituals (lip-smacking, tongue-waggling and breathing in through my mouth) while absorbing the the taste on my tongue. After licking the stick clean, and trying a piece of cheese, I would thank the shopkeep ('Teşekkürler' was another word I could summon about half of the time) but hold out on a purchase until I did the full circuit and found the best honey in Kars.
While the cheese and honey lulled me into a state of food ecstasy, I was still aware of every purchase. I bought a large hunk of cheese to eat with fresh bread for meals, and a small jar of honey from the friendliest shop in town (they all pretty much tasted the same.) No bus ran to Artvin the first day, so I spent another day exploring Kars. While hiking on the hill near the castle I ran into a group of four mustachioed men cooking over a fire. Though we had a language barrier, they sat me down and fed me sausages, tomatoes and orange soda – a true feast – for no reason other than I was a foreigner walking by. We communicated through gestures and after an embarrassing series of pronunciations, they finally understood I was a beekeeper. This excited the men and one of them offered to take me to visit his (or maybe his families? his friends?) bees in a few days time. I thanked him, but declined. With time ticking and money flowing, I had to keep moving. After another night in Kars, I packed my bags and boarded the bus to Artvin.
Outside the Kars city limits we drove through empty, rolling fields. Shepherds stood near their flocks of sheep and cattle and watched the bus speed by. Every twenty or thirty minutes we passed through a village of stone houses dotted with people, dogs, chickens, sheep and beehives. After a few hours of driving, the road dropped off the plains and descended into a river valley. I watched the landscape evolve into craggy, rugged box canyons made of reddish rock with scrub brush and pine trees clinging in the crevasses of the lower valleys. For the remaining five hours, nearly every turn greeted us with a picturesque view of dry, majestic mountains. Somehow, for about three of those hours, I had the song “Do you know the Muffin Man” stuck in my head, sometimes alternating with “The Wheels on the Bus” and found myself chanting the lyrics under my breath. By the end of the ride, the mental deterioration caused by these songs started to detract from the visual beauty.
The town of Artvin clung to a mountainside steep enough to be a ski slope. The road hairpin-turned nine times to climb from the river to the center of town: a two block area in a small bowl before the mountain walls rose up again, apartment buildings hanging by their foundations to stay upright. After finding a hotel I walked out of the city, buying water and bread from a shopkeeper who smiled at my lingual fumbling and asked where I was from, and found a picnic spot on a cement block that overlooked the giant valley. A couple of kids walked by and, after building up enough courage, decided to try out their English words. They introduced themselves, named a few cities, basketball players and professional wrestlers, then we all shared a smile and a thumbs up before they moved on. These were simple interactions, ones that satisfy the curiosity of both parties, and I felt buoyant eating my meal of bread, cheese and tomatoes.
The next morning I woke to a partly-sunny, temperature-confusing morning. After a few glasses of tea, I found a bus to Rize, which I figured to be the jumping point to Anzer. The bus descended to the Black Sea and traveled along the coast for a few hours. On one side I watched dolphins splash in the waters and on the other workers harvested tea leaves from the steep hills. After arriving in Rize, I spent nearly an hour wandering around with my heavy pack, first to see what the city had to offer and second to try to figure out how to get to Anzer. I soon discovered that Anzer was not a popular destination, or even a known one. Even though it was only fifty or sixty miles away at the top end of a valley road, some people looked at me like I was asking how to get to the moon.
Instead of a bus station, the minibuses lined up on a long road, each with a different number and destination written on the front. My strategy was to ask friendly-looking people “Anzer?” sometimes showing them the map and and indicated the the buses. Each person seemed to point in a different direction, and I walked in circles until someone pointed to a nearby minibus and motioned for me to board. The bus sign didn't say Anzer, but the mounting frustration made me climb in and sit down. When every seat in the minibus filled, the driver started the vehicle and drove west. After leaving city we turned inland and my gyroscope told me that we were heading in the right direction. The man to my right gave me a pretzel and spoke to me in fragmented English. He told me the bus did not go to Anzer, only to Ikizdere, which was about halfway. I couldn't decipher if he meant just this bus, or no buses at all went to Anzer. My money supply was dwindling, but I had enough left for another two days. It was getting close.
The minibus followed a windy road along a river for forty-five minutes. Along the side of the road I spotted beehives and small stands selling dark honey. We came to a town and I crawled out of the minibus with everyone else, blinking at the harsh light and assuming I had arrived in Ikizdere. I had taken the pretzel-friend's pronouncement lightly at first, but standing on the small, one-street town of Ikizdere, I could tell there would be no bus to Anzer today. My pretzel-friend indicated that I should follow him and, for lack of a better idea, I did. Walking through Ikizdere I did not feel uncomfortable, but it seemed a tall foreigner hauling a backpack was not a common sight in this town.
The man brought me to a modern four story building on a side road off the main street. We entered and walked up three flights of stairs to a room which held three people drinking tea. One of them looked official and sat behind a desk, talking on the phone. I had no idea why I was in this place, but I sat down in a nearby chair. As soon as the man hung up the phone, my pretzel-friend addressed everyone in Turkish. Suddenly they all turned their attention to me. It was hot in the room and I could feel the sweat gathering in my pores.
“Umm... Bus... Autobus to Anzer?” I asked. “No bus” the man behind the desk replied and pointed at another man in the room, “Taxi” he said and then pointed at the desk “Hotel.” This was the extent of his English, clearing things up slightly, but also cutting the ground underneath me. No buses traveled to Anzer. I tried to process this information, to figure out my next move, but everyone in the office began speaking in Turkish. The hotel man wrote down a number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me: the price of a room. The taxi driver made a similar offer to drive me to Anzer, but then another taxi driver appeared and made a better offer. They argued while I kept shaking my head, unable to explain anything more than that. Others poked their heads in the office and joined the translation game. I could see them reaching back to their English lessons from school to try to communicate. The final bid from one of the taxi drivers was 110 Turkish lira, more the twice my daily spending limit. The man behind the desk gestured for me to look at the computer screen. Five people stood in the office now, all animatedly discussing my future in Turkish. The man behind the desk had Google Translate on the screen and had translated the word “bargain.” He pointed from the screen to the piece of paper with the number on it. He then clicked the speaker button and the computer said “bargain” in a female-robotic voice. When I didn't reply he clicked it again and again: “Bargain... bargain... bargain.” Did he want me to bargain with him or was his offer a bargain? I didn't know what to say. The air wasn't reaching my lungs and waves of heat pulsed through my body. “I don't... I want...” I said, but I didn't know what I wanted. The man switched Google Translate to 'English to Turkish' and motioned for me to type.
I looked at the keyboard. How do I explain this situation? How do I tell these people that I came across the country with no money and only a few facts to get to this small village where they produced a dreadfully expensive honey and put a few drops on my tongue? The absurdity of the journey lumped down on me as I stared at the blinking cursor. All the eyes in the room watched me and I could feel the sweat beading on my arms. I typed the first thing that popped into my head and stood up. The hotel-man read the screen and looked at me in confusion. “I am the muffin man.” I said out loud to the room. After a pause they all began talking at once. I walked around the desk, picked up my bag, and waved goodbye as I left the room.
I will receive no awards for improving international relations on this trip, I thought as I stood outside the building and took deep breaths. This fresh air immediately improved my mental standing and I felt ready for action. My first thought sent me walking north, towards Anzer. At the edge of Ikizdere I found a small market along the road. Vendors gathered with wooden tables and umbrellas selling anything from whisks to onions to shoelaces. A couple of plastic jugs of dark honey sat on milk crates with a woman crouched in the shade of a building ten feet away. All of the bees in the neighborhood could smell the honey and piled on top of each other near the caps. “Anzer?” I asked and she shook her head. I asked price of the jug, which looked like a kilo, and the woman held up all of her fingers: 10 lira, or six dollars. I thanked her and kept walking out of town.
In the hour I stood on the side of the road, perhaps eight cars passed me, none with any suggestion of picking me up. Though I still had an hour or two before dusk, the sun slowly crashed into the steep valley wall leaving me in shadow. When I stepped out of the hotel-office, I had a daydream that someone would pick me up on the outskirts of town and ferry me to Anzer. They would also speak perfect English, give me a tour, host me for the night and treat me to a taste of the infamous honey. But this dream crumbled away with every passing minute. One more car, I thought to myself with a sigh, then I retreat.
As I waited, I noticed a few purple flowers rooted by the road. Bees floated from blossom to blossom in a meditative foraging bliss, dipping their proboscises into the nectaries and sucking up the sweet sustaining liquid. Watching these workers tumble in the flowers and fly heavily back to their hives, I couldn't help but smile. The newspaper article about Anzer allowed me to see these bees, this beautiful river valley, and to taste the food and drink of the land. Later on that evening I would go to a bar and play backgammon with someone who didn't speak English, then watch a soccer match and root for the local team with everyone else. That tidbit of information and its remarkable timing had sent me here, through beauty and tribulation, to this strange, life-affirming spot on the side of the road in Eastern Turkey, a soul thankful for every step and each moment in between. Where would I be if I hadn't seen that article on Anzer? Probably somewhere else strange and exciting, I thought. The adventure outweighs the goal. With that thought stamped, I turned back towards Ikizdere, wondering if those ladies were still selling that dark honey.
ΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘΘ
After a long, overnight bus ride, I arrived in Istanbul and found a shiny new debit card awaiting me. I celebrated with a meal from a restaurant, happy to be eating food that hadn't been smashed in my pack. A few mornings later I walked through a busy neighborhood and stopped short when across the street I saw a shop named “Bal Dünyasi & Şarküteri,” or Honey World and Deli. Inside was a honey-lovers dream: jars upon jars of sweet gold lining the walls, different colors and flavors from all over Turkey. The man and the woman shopkeepers did not speak English, but I talked to them like they did in a free associative ramble. The woman shadowed me around the store with a large calculator, punching in price numbers and speaking to me in loud, clear words, as if I might be able understand Turkish if she enunciated.
“Anzer honey, do you have Anzer honey?” I asked. All four of their eyebrows raised. I pointed to my tongue. The woman said something and left the store while the man reached under the counter and brought out an oddly-shaped, tinfoil-covered jar labeled “ANZER.” I began to laugh. The fabled honey that I had gone through such travels and ordeals to find was a mere few minutes from where I started. The woman returned to the store with a bottle of water in her hand, for me. After seeing the tinfoil and the water, I expected the man to put on heavy duty rubber gloves and laboratory goggles, but instead he carefully unwrapped the tinfoil and uncapped the jar. He gave me a small wooden stick and I dipped it into the Anzer honey. It was a dark, reddish liquid and I held it up to the light. The woman uncapped the bottle of water and held it ready. Smacking my lips and clearing my mouth of all other tastes, I tried to envision the fields of flowers this came from and all the work the bees put into this one drop. Then I stuck the honey in my mouth and pressed it directly on my tongue.
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