Shore, river, mountain

This past weekend had a lot more natural beauty than I expected. My past experience with Turkey had been primarily Istanbul, so it was awesome to be able to see a lot more of the natural beauty of the country rather than the city.

Sunset over the Black Sea in Şile, Istanbul district.

This weekend, the program group took a bus to Şile, which is a town on the black sea coast that is part of the Istanbul metropolitan area. I didn't get to take a lot of pictures of Şile, other than one truly incredible sunset over the Black Sea, but it was a fun weekend. I got to climb some rocks, discover nifty coves (well, get shown them by Tommy), play frisbee in the sea (with our friend Deniz catching more shots than we did), visit a lighthouse, try some rakı (which is actually good when mixed with a reasonable amount of water) and see a small-town Ramazan market. We even tried to talk in Turkish most of the time, though it was just us American students. There was a bit of a scare with bedbugs in the hotel, but otherwise it was a blast.

Our friends waving as we depart on a boat.

The day after we arrived, on the way back from Şile, we stopped for a riverboat tour. The river was incredibly green, but since my last experience on a riverboat was in Varanasi on the Ganga, the green seemed a lot more life-affirming than scummy. The river runs right out next to the sea, but apparently runs alongside the coast for a while. When there's a lot of rain and the river floods, it mixes with the Black Sea's water, but most of the time it's freshwater next to a beach. We saw turtles sunning themselves, lovely touristy riverside restaurants where some of us ate gözleme (we had had a big lunch before we left Şile, so I stuck with çay), and then we headed back to Bursa.

Turtles are called kaplumbağa,

On the way there and back our bus took us along mountain roads with incredible green vistas and picturesque small towns with clusters of red-roofed houses gathered around a central cami. (Take standard eastern European town, find/replace religion.) I don't have a lot of good pictures through the bus window, unfortunately.

A small snapshot of the landscape we crossed.

Whenever I don't spend time in altitude-varying places, it can be easy to forget how depth feels. The hills of western Anatolia might be visually beautiful in abstract, but when you're on a bus too big for the road riding along close to the edge of a many-meter drop, the size of the landscape leaves a deeper impression.

Şükrü and Ayberk on the teleferik. Neither are at all fazed by the huge drop or the beautiful vistas.

I had that experience twice this weekend, in fact. On Sunday, the day after we returned from Şile, I went to Uludağ (the giant mountain right outside Bursa) with my language partner Şükrü, my friend Tucker, and his language partner Ayberk (who is besties with Şükrü). To get to the top of the mountain, one takes a cable car (called a teleferik in Turkish) from a base in Bursa up 1500 meters (over 4.5 kilometers, which is a 20 degree average incline) to a landing on top of the mountain.

That big brown blob in the background? That's Bursa. This should give you an idea of the scale of the teleferik.

Which is to say, we were in a mostly glass box dangling a dozen meters above the ground for a good twenty minutes or so. At first, we were able to watch Bursa disappear behind rising forests and rocks, and then we were hovering over a massive trackless forest for a while. Our height above the ground varied somewhat, from more or less even with the treetops to the sort of distance where you just have to trust the cable to hold. According to Tucker, my eyes got really big when the teleferik swung out over one particular instance when a forested valley dropped down beneath us.

It's pretty chilly up on the mountain. More like Seattle in the late fall than a Mediterranean summer.

When we arrived at the top of the mountain, the first thing that we noticed was the weather shift. In Bursa it had been a hot sunny day in the low 30s, but a kilometer and a half up the temperature dropped ten degrees and the humidity approached dew point. When we got moving and hiking it was perfect weather, though.

Friends don't let friends fall into streams. Ayberk and Tucker help Şükrü across river rocks.

Several of our friends were hiking ahead of us, and the four of us spent most of our time following them, even though that meant hiking along a non-path that was where the forest had been cleared for a new teleferik line. We ended up calling Katie, who was in the group ahead of us, half a dozen times to confirm we were going the right direction. Once we even had to follow some electric cables to find our way forward, which was an adventure. We never did meet up the other group, though we did meet Katie as she was returning down the same path, and when we got to the top of the mountain (which was about 3 kilometers away as the crow flies but mostly uphill) we tried to autostop (hitchhike) our way back to the teleferik. We ended up on a dolmuş instead, but that was close enough.

There was a portion where there was no path, but Lauren told us to follow the wires and eventually we found it again!

Overall, this weekend was jampacked with sightseeing excitement. This next week hopefully will be a bit more calm, since I'm planning to stay in Bursa this weekend. I kind of want to return to some of the places I visited during the day over these past couple of weeks, like the Ulu Camii or the Kültürpark. Hadi bakalım!

Note: I was also in Istanbul last week with people from my program. Istanbul is beautiful as always, and we did get to go to pride briefly, though we left before the police violence started. I don't particularly want to talk about it, though.