ADANA RE-VISITED

Fotos: 1. "Sex" (real name Mehmet), a friend, and Mustafa. 2. Breakfast at Mesut's flat.

As usual, my hosts in Adan, Southern Turkey were the brothers Mustafa and Mesut, from Hospitality Club. When the bus taking me from Kilisi reached Adana it was past midnight, so I decided to call them the following morning and instead put up my tent. It would have been an easy task hadn’t been for the fact that the steep way out of the motorway here and there only met a 2 meters high fence. Felt like in a zoo. Eventually I found a gap and camped on the other side. Next morning Mesut picked me up from the carpet shop where I had been granted breakfast and phone. Already at his house, a royal style breakfast awaited, as usual!

In the two days I spent in Adana, none of the classics were missing. The BBQ in the inhospitable remote place, for example. The brothers seem to enjoy roasting a chicken or a row of fish in some remote location, behind some moutain or lake. The garden is not enough! The meal was quiet, even if some guys turned up ready to test a Magnum rifle recently bought in the black market fo 80 dollars, and started to shoot the birds over the lake. The other starring feature of Mesut and Mustafa is their drunken friends. The one I met this time was nicknamed “sex” (Mustafa says that’s because he is very good)/ After the third glass of raki Sex starts speaking fluid English, much to my surprise. Talking about surprises, another one was the news that Mustafa and his wife are waiting a new son! I finally departed to Anakara to apply for my Iranian. Pakistani and Afghan visas.

THE TRANSIT FROM EGYPT TO TURKEY. CUSTOM TALES AND HERETIC HARBOURS...

In transit from Egypt to Turkey this time it was only the mundane necessity of getting Iranian and Afghan visas that pushed my sails… The faded portraits of Syrian president Bashar Al Assad marked formally my entry in the country. Not too far from there a sign welcomes me in a way that it leaves no doubt about the democratic caliber of the country: “Welcome to Al Assad’s Syria!”. It is a wonderful morning of wet pavement and cars washed by nature. Even the old Syrian taxis Dodge Coronet (imagine a boat) had received that unjustified shine granted by bad weather to cars that left the show room 40 years ago… The custom officers seem to guess I am a kin philatelist and saturate the page of my passport with nine stamps. They partially cover each other and are obliterated by blue seal that seems designed not be read. Privilege of argentineship: visa on the border after, 20 minutes while-u-wait.

A kebab invited on the roadside by a stranger is enough to put in evidence the Syrian trade mark, in he exact moment in which the vendor, having guessed that I am the hungry one, refuses payment. Syrian trademark is Dignity. I made it to Damascus, the oldest city in the world, in the truck of a man who speaks French. That’s why he knows what autostop means… but he has never seen anybody actually hitchhiking, so proud of being able to match his learned words with reality, he sgives me the lift. In Damascus I stayed two days at Ezzat’s place. All visits to Ezzat end in teologic arguments among the smoke of the argilleh, sometimes making a break to play darts with his brother the jihadman. I was hauled out of Damascus by a 1954 De Soto several meters long, a sublime farewell ride from Syria. I thought I was going straight to Aleppo, near the Turkish border, until being given a lift by a veterinary from Tartous in a Dacia Solenza.

To decide that Tartous was worth the detour it was enough to remember that the old port was the last bastion of the Crusaders in the mainland, back in the 12th C, and also the entrance gate to the yerba mate (argentinian tea also extremely popular among Syrians) in the lugagge of repatriated expats in the 50s. Not every harbour can claim to have seen the Templar Knight going out and the yerba mate sailing in.

Thre is something in which Tartous resembles any other port in the world. As al ports, it manages to oversee the rules, attenuate dogmatisms, lighten clothing and mixing religions. Few women near the beach are happy to wear a scarf over their heads when the temperature in summer goes over 40. The same, shall somebody attempt to explain Tartous seamen, who sail the seven seas, that the beer is anti-islamic. In a country where transgression is seldom forgiven, the tolerance to transgression is transgression itself. It was those seamen who spot me wandering the streets in search of a roof and invited me in their place to share some whisky. One of them had worked on board an Hondurian ship and spoke Spanish. Not need to say, they hosted me, and the following morning I was of northwards as fast a control remote toy car. The destination: Adana, in Southern Turkey, distant 630 kms from Tartous. I was quite sure of being in for a two days trip, since I only stepped in the road at 11 am. Nevertheless, half an hour later I had found a family from tartous driving their Corolla to Aleppo, that’s 50 kms from the Turkish border. As the decisive ride can happen in any moment, I follow the procedure, change the remaining Syrian back to dollars, and turn the unchangeable coins into eatable items (loads of cheap flavourless biscuits) including half kilo o yerba mate, which God knows when I am gonna find again on the shelves.

It is already night when I reach the border. When the Syrian custom staff sees me in, they ask me where did I leave my bike. No bike, I explain, I am on foot, and I come from Argentina. It should be written down and archived for posterity that the rankless soldiers in the Turkish-Syrian border prefers “Taragui” yerba to the Amanda one. On the Turkish side the soldiers hold machine guns that at least have triggers, and they gossip about the fun they have when duty allows them to open fire over the heads of Syrian tea and sugar smugglers. As the no one’s land between the two countries they put in a taxi bound for Kilisi, the first Turkish city. Quite predictably. The taxi driver makes his attempt of extortion, and asks for 20 bucks not to let me stranded. In that moment, and corroborating Chomsky’s theories about generative grammar, I discover that my arabic is good enough to say: “Allah is bigger than you” (“Allah is bigger” alone is the phrase which is spit by the minarets of all the world at prayer time, so I just added the final “than you”). The result shows that, unlikely the Egyptians, who can sell their God and their soul for a phone token, the Syrians are ready to loose money in order to preserve their dignity. So the cab driver runs behind me begging me to go back to the car. So the way to Kilisi included this little dramatic play in the middle of the road.

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From there to Adana it was another 200 kms. At 9 pm, pretty much impossible mission. But then, and even if the Turkish soldiers had warned me about how a hellish place Kilisi was, the first man I ask about the road to Gaziantep is a Kurd who sponsors my bus trip to Gaziantep. A further lucky strike occurs when I discover that the bus goes actually all the way to Ankara via Adana. The driver has no objection with me staying in, ticketless. I made it to Adana past midnight, too late to phone my HC friend Mesut. Some sleepless neighbor may have notice the low blue tent not far from the motorway.

DAMASCUS: A FIVE LEGGED COW. PETRA AND THE BEDOUIN SECRET.

Photos: 1. Petra. 2. Ali and his father, two fighters. 3. My fisrt saudi driver.

Founded by somebody in some moment of the fifth millenium before Christ, Damascus is the world’s oldest continuosly inhabited city. While its origins get lost in myth, history holds certain that Damascus was the capital of the great Umayyad Caliphat, which comprehended the whole Islamic world between india and Spain, a unity never achieved before or since. From that golden age only architechtural treasures remain. In the Big Mosque, for example, the Mausoleums of both Saladin and John the Baptist find place. One, the biggest enemy of Christiandom, the other in charge of baptizing Christ itself…

To Damascus I arrived after a week of playing Tom and Jerry with the Syrian political police in the Kurdish area. Max, Matteo and Silvia, myItalian friends from Hasakeh, were also visiting the city, and with them I shared my fisrt three days, sneaking into their hotel at night, whose porter was the kind of people that finds a five legged cow perfectly normal. I didn’t count how many times we crossed the covered bazaar, which roof still bears the bullet holes of the French plane’s macine guns trying to sofoccate the 1925’s rebelion, eventualy getting lost in the laberynth of alleys, mosques and Chevrolet Impalas that forges the Old Town.

When the Italians headed back to Damascus I betrayed the hotel (A one leg cow world have certainly called the porter’s attention) and knocked Ezzat’s house door, local member of Hospitality Club. Ezzat is a convinced muslim, and as such he enjoys complicated filosophical arguments. At fisrt he aimed a conversion to Islam but, discovering my agnosticism he tried at least to make me a Christian. “If we can see the caml’s excrement that means that the camel is around” – is bedouin proverb, and Ezzat’s best teosophic card. Leaving religion aside I was fascinated by the way Ezzat’s familiy incarnated contemporary Syrian history. His 86 year old father participated, aged 6, in the 1925 Revolt, smuggling guns in his donkey. With such example it’s no wonder that Ali, Ezzat’s brother, was one of the hundreds of Syrians that rushed to Iraq to fight the American invasion, accomplishing his duty of carrying on the jihad or holy war. The CNN would call him a terrorist. I have him in front of me. He is a calm, educated person, father of three who ownes a metallurgic workshop. He ended up in Tikrit, regreting is militia never saw action: when on April 9th Baghdad surrendered the Iraqi regular troops that had trained them were running in underwear through the streets screaming; “The Americans are coming!”. So, oh surprise, the untrained voluntary militias were the ones no trying to convince the Iraqi army of fighting, gun on one hand, Qoran in the other. All in vain, nobody wil risk his life for U$S100 a month…

Before leaving Syria I stil had a mission, wehich I accomplished on Wednesday: being face to face with the fragnebt containing the oldest known alphabet, coined by the Kingdom of Ugarit, in Syria around 1400 BC. Impossible not to shed a tear, remembering the words of Mercedes Sosa: “Thanks to life, that has given me so much (…) and the alphabet, and with it the words, that I think and declare….” She should have said “thanks to Syria..!”

220 kms separate Damascus from Amman, the Jordanian capital. Of the drivers involved in the trip I should remember an Saudi Arabian in a 1980 Chevrolet Caprice who took me to the border and a Palestinian who in his Toyota pick up smuggled me into the capital and payed (I still didn’t have local currency) a taxi for me to Ala’a s house, local member of Hospitality Club. He introduces his country’ the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordania, apparently conceived in the back seat of a Rolls Royce by Winston Churchill, in an attemt (succesful) of creating a “cushion” state to soften regional tensions. (some say puppet state) It is a formidable contrast that, while the current fronteers have been disegned with a ruler and a pencil by UN cartographers, Jordania encompasses a plurality of Biblic sites. Jesus was baptized where the Jordan river meets the Dead Sea, where I was on Monday. A few kms from there is Mount Nebo, where Moses fisrt received SMS from God promising him the…well…the Promised Land, and sparking two millenia of conflicts. More recently, since the cration of the State of Israel, thousands of Palestinians have sought refuge in Jordan, which was the only country to aknowledg them full citizenship. They are now 70% of the total population of 4 millon. Half of this number dwells in the modern capital Amman, the other half is diseminated in the desert that covers 96% of the national territory. With such geographic parameters one understands that richness can only come from prizes (foreign investments) for the alignation with America. Lula’s proposal of cooperation between the Arab block and Latin America remained unattended, blocked more by the government than by the people.

On Tuesday I headed for petra, the rose red city carved in the mountains that was a secret held for 400 years by bedouins. One day of 1812 the revealed the existence of the secret to a Swiss explorer. I continue walking towards Cairo whre I hope to receive 2006…