westward

Konya is a blaring, dusty, sun-baked city. I've probably been further from the sea in my life, but I've never felt it. It was a rude shock after sleepy Goreme, and my comfort was not augmented by the fact that its citizens observe Ramadan more strictly than any other place I've been. I had to buy fruit and crackers in the supermarket and sneak a hasty lunch in my hotel so as not to give offence. The upside was seeing the relish with which everyone broke fast at the end of the day. As soon as the muezzins so much as clear their throats into the minaret microphones, you can hear the chik of a thousand cigarette lighters flaring as one, and in the restaurants people swoop on tables laid out with all kinds of food that they've been staring longingly at for the past ten or fifteen minutes.

I went to Konya looking for the shrine of Celaleddin Rumi, 12th-century sufi mystic, founder of the mevlevi whirling dervish order, and cracking good poet. It was gorgeous beyond my expectation. The calligraphy decorating the walls was of a curious form I hadn't seen before. The image was symmetrical, with the words written both right to left and left to right. It had a stark use of colour and blocky shapes that reminded me of kabuki masks. Maybe the symmetry made it face-like, I don't know. There were no photos allowed so I sketched my favourite piece on the back of a receipt--I only had time to do half, though, so you have to hold it edgewise to a mirror to see it whole.

That night I went to a dervish 'ceremony'. I gather that performers were professional dancers (one of them, a kid of maybe seven or eight years old, I dubbed The Littlest Dervish) rather than actual practicing mevlevi. It was staged in the airport-like Cultural Centre on the edge of town and it was all a bit pomo and strange, but the whirling was beautiful anyway, and the sufi music wild and ardent, music to dissolve in.

Next day I went to Pamukkale, and thanked the ancient Romans for situating a spa town right next to those travertine pools and then letting it fall into picturesque ruin, making for the perfect day out 700 years later. The sun was shining, the cypresses were doing their spiky broody thing, and my camera sucked it all up. I kind of expected balloons and streamers to fall from the sky, and some guy in a lamé jacket to step up and say, 'Congratulations! You have just taken the billionth photograph of this site!'--but it was as pretty as if nobody had ever seen it before me. I swam in the Hierapolis thermal spring too, with columns and marble blocks submerged in the pool for that lost Atlantis feel. The calciferous water felt very soft on my skin, and tiny bubbles rose up through it, settling on my limbs and fizzing at the surface. It was probably the closest I'll ever get to swimming in champagne.

After a few days in the interior all I really wanted to do was dip a toe in the Aegean and look at Samos across the water (so I can say that I've been to ten countries, but I've seen eleven). When I finally arrived at the beach at Pamucak, I found a little holiday village of bungalows and caravans all planted out with eucalyptus. It looked like a dozen family holidays from my childhood, and a thought shot through me, 'Not yet! It's too soon!' So that's how I realised that I am grieving the loss of Europe. In a week's time I'll be back in Australia, and I hadn't really been giving the matter much attention. But it explained why I had been so shirty with the touts in recent days and so keen to avoid the standard polite questions--'where ya from?' 'where ya going?' And when I finally worked out what was happening in my strange, opaque little brain, it was a relief.

Yesterday I had a quick look around Ephesus. I was kind of ruins-ed out, and the crowds were stupefying--my memory of Curates Street is a sensation of trying to swim up a waterfall. But I was walking down streets that St Paul and St John and maybe even Mary herself once walked, and I finally saw the point of the apostles writing those letters to the people of this or that city: I felt like I was in a nerve centre of the ancient world, a place where important things used to happen. I skipped the supposed House of Mary, though, and spent the afternoon in the nearby village of Sirince. As it turns out, the lady is said to have spent her last years here, and if so, she chose well. It's just a little patchwork of Ottoman-style houses and cobbled streets in pretty green hills. A kind of Turkish Orvieto. Jam, fruit wine and olive oil, the products of the orchards that surround the town, are on sale in every second market stall. It was good. Energising. It made me really still, and I hadn't been still for a long time.

And today was the eight-hour bus ride back to Istanbul. I like Turkish buses, because they give you tea and biscuits and towelettes in foil packets, and they stop for a food, fag and facilities break every couple of hours (mmmm. 4 a.m. kebab, anyone?). And when they stop, there's no dithering around. Everybody dashes out, sucks up whatever nutrients or stimulants they have been hanging out for, buys a gift box of sweets for whomever they're going to visit, and bolts for the bus again. If somebody gets back late and finds the bus already gone, which happens quite frequently, they just strike out for the nearest corner where they can intercept it. They wave an arm, the bus slows to a trotting pace, the door is flung open and they jump on. And then you get more tea and towelettes.

The best, best, best surprise was the ferry across the Sea of Marmara tonight. I love car ferries. It always feels kind of fantastical to me, that you can drive a car or a bus onto a boat and just keep going forward as if it were the most normal thing in the world. I slung my elbows over the port side and watched the moon making a trail across the water, with the lights of Istanbul all around. Tomorrow I fly out. It was a nice treat before I left, the boat and the night and the fat full moon.