Karin told me I drove like a Turkish driver, maybe after I had just passed a slow truck on a curve. She may have meant it as criticism, but I took it as a compliment.
A blonde Australian woman that I chatted with in Göreme in Cappadocia was amazed that I was driving my own car. Lonely Planet, which was her and her husband's holy writ, said not to. As I drove along, I composed a letter in my mind to Lonely Planet. ``You need to grow up with your readers. The people who when they were young were not afraid to take buses with the natives on days-long desert tracks will not be afraid to drive themselves now that they are old and rich enough to afford it."
I came up with some principles for driving in a place like Turkey.
I had a couple of close calls. In some town along the Black Sea coast, a minivan did a U-turn into full moving traffic in my lane and missed me by centimeters. I was sure I had been hit, until I didn't hear the crunch.
A little later a boy threw a stone at the truck in front of me and it bounced onto my windshield. But no chink was detectable.
On my way out of Amasya at 5:30 in the morning, the streets were almost empty. Almost. As I accelerated after a stop sign, I almost hit a minivan that materialized out of nowhere.
Those were my only near accidents, but there were other problems. Turkey was riddled with construction zones, which had to be negotiated by alternating between new road, the potholed asphalt of old road, and packed or puddled stretches of mud. Once I passed the construction zone, I always seemed to find myself behind a slow dump truck carrying a huge boulder, or a pile of dirt that shook out with every bump in the road.
My car was never broken into, but when my Kurdish guide and I parked at the hotel on the shore of Lake Van, he warned me to be sure to lock my car. It was unnecessary; I was always very scrupulous about this. When we returned, I checked my trunk to make sure my stuff was still there, as I always did when returning to my car. There was a plastic card sticking out of it. It fell to the ground as I opened the trunk, and my guide picked it up and said, ``Turkish phone card," as though that explained its presence in my trunk. He threw it in the dirt. I checked my suitcase. It had not been tampered with.
My guess: They tried to open my trunk with various cards and forgot about that one. My guide was covering up for them.
The joy of driving in Turkey was that I could go where no tour would take me. The day I drove down to the Black Sea was spectacular. Leaving Kars near the Armenian border, I avoided the short route to the town of Artvin. The road I took went across high yellow grassland and low hills for an hour or so, to about 20 kilometers past Ardahan. Then I entered a long spectacular downward drive that lasted the rest of the day. It was gloomy and overcast, and from time to time I had encountered a light fog. Now I entered thick fog and could only see about 20 meters in front of me. I found myself going downhill rather steeply and around hairpin curves, and I finally realized I must be going down some sort of escarpment or canyon. There was little other traffic. When I finally got below the clouds, the countryside looked like Switzerland--green grass, pine forests, steep slopes of mountains, and Swiss-style farmhouses. I came to the town of Savsat, which looked like it could become a ski resort, if it were only more accessible. Small villages were scattered over mountains and valleys.
The road continued to descend, down a green canyon all the way to where it joined the main road to Artvin, about 20 kilometers before the town. Here I encountered a massive road-building project. The road rose and then descended into Artvin, a city spread the shape of a badge on the steep side of a mountain, a citadel at its craggy peak, above the road at the canyon bottom.
About 10 kilometers outside Artvin, the road was blocked. It was 11:20 and the truck driver in front of me said it would be open at noon. I didn't understand his gesture of explanation until twenty minutes later when there was the loud nearby explosion of dynamite. I sat under a roadside shelter with the truck driver and had two cups of tea that he insisted on paying for.
At noon the road opened, and the cars raced ahead of the trucks and jockeyed for position. The road was under construction for the next 10 kilometers or so. It continued to descend through a steep canyon, and then it looped downward over green hills, finally reaching the shore of the blue waters of the Black Sea.
I rented my car from Budget in downtown Ankara. The Turkish man in the office was very friendly and spoke excellent English. He took me down to the garage, and showed me a Ford Golf for $300 a week and a Ford Fiesta for $450 a week, their only two cars in stock. I lusted after the Ford Fiesta, but frugality made me choose the Ford Golf. But he noticed the side mirror was torn off the Ford Golf, so he offered me the Ford Fiesta for $350 a week instead. I snatched it up. He told me it was completely insured. If I had an accident, I should file a police report. If it was something small, like a rock cracking the windshield, I didn't need to. I could just write it up when I returned.
I had two problems, both of which seemed insignificant at the time.
The last ten miles up to Nemrud Dag was on a steep road of basalt block cobblestone and felt like it was jarring the bolts out of the car. Perhaps I drove it too fast. Going up I was worried about getting there before sunset, and going down I was worried about finding a pansyon for the night. In any case, the next morning I noticed that a piece of the radio had fallen off, the piece that held buttons 2 through 5, and now the radio wouldn't play at all. I searched the floor of the car for it, everywhere, but it was nowhere to be found. All I could imagine was that it had fallen onto my pants or my camera case, and when I got out at Nemrud Dag, it fell outside. I didn't worry about it. It seemed like a small mishap.
Two days later I was driving east through the city of Diyarbakir when I encountered a police stop. I gave a policeman the car's registration packet; he removed a card from it and sent me on to the next station where other policemen were conducting emission tests. A policeman checked my car and gave me the thumbs up. I had to pay 10,000,000 lira ($7.00), but I kept the receipt, confident I could get reimbursed by Budget. I was given another card for my registration packet, which I figured was the replacement for the one that was taken.
When I got back to Ankara, I returned the car to the Budget office. The same nice man who spoke excellent English was there again, except now he wasn't so nice. He looked in my registration packet. It seems that two cards are necessary, and I only had one. I asked him if this car had had an emissions card before. He said no, that's only for eastern Turkey. So apparently the card the policeman took in Diyarbakir was not the car's original emissions card, but the second required registration card. The Budget man was quite upset that it was missing. He said it would cost 50 million lira ($30) to replace. ``What can I do if the police take it away from me?" I said. He bought that argument, and I had to remind myself not to pitch through the sale.
Then there was the matter of the little piece that fell off the radio. I argued that the car was completely insured, and that it was like a rock cracking the windshield. He said the windshield was covered, but not the radio. He said because I had lost the part, it was a matter of my negligence. We argued back and forth for a long time, with all sorts of analogies. He invested so much emotion in this that I suspected he intended to use the car for a date tonight and a working radio was a pretty essential part of his plans. I asked how much the part would be. He made a phone call. 117 million lira (about $80). We were getting nowhere in our arguments, so finally we agreed that he would fill out a charge slip for the car only that I would sign, and he would submit a separate, unsigned charge for the radio part. I could protest that if I wanted to.
When I got home a month later, there was an extra charge of $96 on my Visa bill. I protested to Budget. They replied with a barely coherent letter saying something about claims and foreign law. The charge remained.