August 2, 2004

Sunrise on Ararat.  The little clouds lit up, drawing first an eagle or a bat, then everything from camels and swans and turtles to snowmobiles and Elvis and satyrs.  The moment when the mountain itself lit up was magical.  Only the top, for a while.  It was still night below and the peak was almost translucent.  We were enthralled for an hour.

I took a short walk before breakfast.  As I walked out along the track past the hotel restaurant, I passed a dog sitting in front of some houses.  As I walked back to the hotel, there were 5 or 6 dogs and they were NOT going to let me pass.  They did not bite, but they nipped and jumped up to hold me back.  The army came to my rescue – a couple of trucks full of gendarmes.  It is very nice and reassuring that tensions have relaxed so much in the East that we have not had to deal with checkpoints and could take pictures of Armenia, but this demonstrated to me that the army is still around and vigilant.  I was very grateful.

Noah’s Arc.  According to Meli it is a metaphor for a retreat from corruption.  Ararat is so close to God/heaven.  We switched to a minibus to go up there.  On the way there was a woman drying apricots in front of her grove of trees – her cattle among them – all in front of Ararat.  Up by the small Noah’s Arc National Park Center there is a peace pole, like Nancie’s at home.   For peace pole information consult peacepole.org.  The Arc is a clear formation in the rocks on the side of the hill.  We visited the home of Hassan, the keeper of the Arc.  He looks like he could be Noah.  He has 4 children and 44 or 45 grandchildren  Some of his grandchildren were there and the oldest granddaughter made us tea.   In this Kurdish home, a large Turkish flag held a place of prominence in the living room.  The family has been here at least since the 1500’s.  Hassan went on duty at the park center and we went back down to read about the Arc, buy postcards, and take more pictures.  We watched men scything and gathering hay and saw an angora goat leading a flock of sheep along the road.  Two soldiers hitched a ride down the mountain with us; one of them had an M-16.
As we were driving from Ararat to the Iranian border and the Post Office, a wasp got into the bus.  Meli left the bus.  Hussein killed the wasp.  Meli came back on the bus.
We rode past many trucks and vans in line to cross into Iran and reached the furthest East Post Office in Turkey at Gurbulak Gate.  We bought beautiful stamps and mailed our post cards, but only after the postal official gave us a cold drink.  We then visited a meteor crater, the third largest in the world that is right on the Iranian border.  We all took pictures of Iran with the meteor crater and/or with a soldier and his dog doing duty keeping people from coming across.

On the way back to the hotel, we were stopped by the police who checked our tachometer.  Hussein had driven more than 8 hours once, and gone over the speed limit 47 times, but they forgave him.  Every professional vehicle must have a tachometer.  We couldn’t imagine that we could have been speeding at all, but decided it must have been before we joined the bus, when Hussein was driving out from Cappadocia to meet us.

 This was the day and place we were to deliver a small bag of gold to Meli’s sister’s tiler’s wife who lives in a village on the Iranian border very near Ararat.  We were told that people from the village had been appearing at the hotel all morning.  When we got back to the hotel for soup and salad (we know they were baking bread for us at the village), the wife’s brother was waiting to guide us to the village.  Before we went to the village we stopped to see the Ishak Pasha Palace and the Urartu fortress across from it, but alas the keeper of the palace was at a funeral and it was closed.  It turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the village turned out to be an amazing experience and we needed the extra time there.  On the way to the village we saw an Iranian bus.  Iranians come to visit and to shop.

The Kurdish village of Kizil Kaya (no dots on the i’s) or Red Rock (or as the road sign said Kizilkaya 7km) was started for the smuggling of animals.  It is up an impossibly bad road and it in the no man’s land between Iran and Turkey (but in Turkey).  As we drove to it, our guide told us that before the PKK years, the village had 80 cows, but now has 80 sheep – a huge economic hit.  They had to get rid of their cows or they would have been attacked.  The villagers had to live in the cities for a while.  When our guide did his military service, he had to be taken to his posting under heavy protection like a criminal or he would have been killed by the PKK for serving in the Turkish army.  The PKK were there relatives, but only a small minority of Kurds.  It really hurt the Kurds.

The first thing we did in the village was go to the home of the wife and deliver the bag of gold and have tea.  The wife and her 4 small children live alone in the house.  The husband had to go to the west to make money and had been gone for four months.  As seems to be usual, the brightest and most self-assured 12/13 year old boys talked with us.  We found out that in this village only two of the current crop of children were going past fifth grade.  Our informant was in seventh grade and wanted to be a computer engineer.  After fifth grade they have to go to boarding school in dogubeyazit.  This far East education is a problem because the villages want the labor.

This was the first time the children of this village had seen outsiders, much less Americans.  A visit of a bus load of strangers to this village was so unusual that the gendarmes came to investigate – the guard in the border watchtower had called them. 

The women were baking bread in a hole in the ground.  They slaughtered an animal (or three) and we watched  them cook it.  It must have been the freshest meal any of us had ever eaten, everything (wheat, bread, lamb, vegetables, Ayden) completely produced in the village (except the Coke and Fanta).  We dined al fresco with a magnificent view of Ararat.  The total hospitality was overwealming.

Meli said it might be the poorest village in Turkey.

It was an eventful day, but tied together by Ararat.  From 4:30 to 5:30 when I had my last sight of Ararat from the bus on the way to Van, wherever we were, Ararat was there.

For our potty bread on the way to Van, we crossed a suspension bridge by a beautiful waterfall just above Muradiye.  Only dire necessity got some of us across that bridge.

Sunset over Lake Van with wildflowers.