MonoMay 11

Uncertainties

It’s May 2021. We haven’t been out of the UK since March 2020 (a record for us). And there is quite a high degree of uncertainty around if and/or when, or if, we will be able to be off on our travels again. The pandemic under which we now exist, I can’t say live because it only feels like ‘mere’ existence, is having a profound effect on many people’s mental health. While  we have been fortunate enough to avoid its worst effects, we find  the most depressing thing has been not being able to travel and not being able to plan travel. This is because of ‘pandemic uncertainty’, a blight on the future? Dwelling on this issue led me to reflect on travel uncertainty, of which there has been a bit over years. Eventually my mind lighted on the occasion of our trip to Istanbul in 2016.

J, my partner, is an academic, and she committed to attending a conference in Istanbul scheduled to be held in July 2016. She suggested we went together, made a week of it, and then thought about where we might travel the following week to top off our summer holiday. Quite early on in the process, uncertainty reared its ugly head. We had booked our flights and the hotel, and then the conference was relocated by the organisers to somewhere in Poland. The funny thing about that was that one of the people calling for the relocation, due to increased danger in Istanbul after some terrorist incidents, was based in São Paulo, which is probably one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Because we had already booked, we decided to stick with Istanbul despite the alleged danger, and J kicked her conference participation into touch. So now it was going to be pure holiday. And then, a week to the day before we were due to travel, there was an attempted coup in Turkey. Or so it seemed, because there was a lot of uncertainty about what had actually happened. Consequently, we had some discussion about whether or not we should go. In the end, and after checking the Foreign Office travel advice, we decided that it should be fine and that it would be potentially interesting. Oh, it was interesting, for sure, but not always in the ways that we had expected.

The 2016 trip was my third visit to Istanbul. Previous visits were in 2011 and 2014. There was a degree of apprehension around my first trip, as I thought that visiting Istanbul might be outside my comfort zone. Within twenty-four hours of arrival, I had fallen in love with this wonderful chaotic city. Where I had expected a more traditional outlook, gathered from reading a little about modern Turkish politics, it surprised me to find a more secular society than I expected, still reflecting the Turkish history of secularism. It also came as something of a surprise to see many young women adopting a more ‘western’ dress code, as opposed to adherence to a stricter Muslim code of dress. However, in a large diverse city like Istanbul, there were many grey areas between the two extremes. My second trip was quite different. When we travelled we were already aware of the aftermath of the 2013 Gezi Park protests and we saw the last vestiges of them when we visited that part of the city - around Taksim Square. It became quite obvious that Erdoğan used these protests as an excuse to clamp down on protests, restricting freedom of the press in order to entrench his autocratic rule. Our final trip in 2016 was quite different. Five years on from that, it is interesting to look back at that final visit to this very beautiful city, taking into account changes since 2011 and 2014.

Landing in Istanbul, the first potential stress came with passport control. When we arrived in 2014, it took us two hours to get through. J had bad knees at the time, so she was feeling a little apprehensive about how long it is going to take. What we had forgotten is that the coup inevitably meant fewer tourists arriving, and that equalled non-existent queues. We were swiftly through immigration and baggage collection, into a taxi, and heading for our hotel. It is quite a long trip from the airport to the Hotel La Maison, above Beşiktaş, and as ever we were not wholly convinced our taxi driver took us the most direct way. We chose the hotel on the basis that we had stayed therein 2014, and we had loved the views over the Bosphorus. However, it is hardly close to Ataturk airport living plenty of scope for the dodgy taxi driver to take advantage of the naïve tourists. We got there eventually, checked in, and had time to head out for food and the requisite Turkish beers, which are made in accordance with the German beer purity laws (possibly something that not many people know). We were already realising that there were far fewer tourists than we had encountered on previous trips. As we were checking in to the hotel, it crossed my mind that the place seemed relatively empty, but I didn’t give it that much thought. It also quickly became apparent that the staff in bars and restaurants seemed a little more reserved than I had noticed on previous trips, even though they also appeared to be pleased to see tourists. It had been quite a long day, so I didn’t pay too much attention to those first impressions.

It was at breakfast the next morning that it became quite obvious how empty the hotel was. We saw only one other couple and they were preparing to leave. After a leisurely breakfast we decided to walk down to Beşiktaş and take a ferry across the Bosphorus to Üsküdar and have a poke around before finding lunch via a minibus to Çengelköy. This was when the scarcity of tourists became starkly obvious. While there appeared to be plenty of local people around, this hardly compensated for the absence of the usual July tourist rush.

By now I was also getting a different vibe from the city than on previous trips. It seemed to me that the people were, for whatever reason, a little more conformist than I had previously noticed. This may, or may not, have been in response to Erdoğan’s autocratic attempts to move towards a less secular society than had previously been the case. It’s hard to tell, and I certainly wasn’t collecting data in a systematic way, but I definitely gained that impression. It is also possible that all the uncertainties about whether or not the trip would even happen contributed to my noticing things that had been there all along and had not changed, but seemed changed to me. For example, I started noticing far more flags than on previous trips. I know that Turkish people love their flags, but I thought there was an increase in numbers. Talking to her five years on, J disagrees and thinks I was just a little more sensitive to such things. Memory is a fickle thing and has a tendency to play tricks. It is possible that I am just conflating different things I picked up across several visits but which now, with the benefit of hindsight, appear to play an important part in my sense of this being a time of uncertainty and high tension.

Getting around Istanbul is quite an experience. Istanbul has a fairly decent bus and tram system, and even a metro, and the Bosphorus ferries are quite regular and cover pretty much everywhere. We were quite amazed to find that all public transport was free while we were there. Was this one of the sweeties handed out by Erdoğan to placate the public? We made very good use of the ferries, but again the dearth of tourists was plain as, apart from local people, the ferries were virtually empty. Even so, some ferries were always full, such as the regular connection between Beşiktaş and Üsküdar which continually discharges large numbers on both sides. But public transport cannot get you everywhere, and we did use taxies occasionally, or tried to use them. The hotel is at the top of a steep hill, and J’s knees were making it hard for her to deal with walking down and back up the hill potentially several times a day. But as what we were often looking at was just a short trip, many taxi drivers refused to take us, because it just wasn’t profitable enough. This sometimes left a sour taste.

At one point we met up with J’s colleague A, along with his partner, P. Thinking back, I am still not quite sure what my impressions were, especially as it is often a little awkward meeting someone new. P was based in Istanbul, and I got the feeling that she was experiencing real fear about the future direction that Turkey would be taking, and what that would mean for her, her family and her relationship with A. But I still can’t be quite sure whether or not that was a projection of my own thoughts.

We were a little reluctant to be in places where there were likely to be large groups of people, but when we were, the fear and apprehension presented themselves starkly on the faces of the people around us. We noticed armed policemen stalking the ferries. In one café, as we entered I saw four men sitting at a table. It was obvious to me, but not to J, that they were ‘tooled up’. She only realised this when they stood up to leave. She found that whole experience quite intimidating. Although they were not in uniform, it was quite obvious to me that these men were police or military from the way that they had been observing the scene around them and listening to conversations. There was another occasion in a small square on the Beşiktaş waterfront when an elderly lady told us that this was not a good place to be taking photographs.

Such encounters made us more than happy to return to the hotel and sit on the balcony, or rooftop, with a view of the Bosphorus watching the comings and goings of the ferries and ships. It is a very busy stretch of water. But the hotel was not entirely free of entertainment (and even annoyance). As I mentioned, the hotel was pretty much empty. We saw very few people apart from staff. This begged the question as to why the hotel decided to put a newly arrived couple in the room next to ours. Not that we minded. Well not at first. I think it was mid-afternoon, and quite a hot day, so we were chilling out, reading and watching the Bosphorus ferries. Then it became quite obvious to us what was going on in the next room. Yes, you got it in one - an obviously energetic sexual encounter! Not that we have any problem with such things. Hey, that’s life, isn’t it? But she was loud. Very loud. The term ‘screamer’ springs to mind. After a while, I began to wonder if they were making their own porn movie. It went on, and on, and on, and on. Eventually we went out for beers and food, and at least this gave us a break from the noisy fornication. Unsurprisingly, they were still at it when we got back later in the evening. Eventually things went quiet. Or so I thought. I was awoken around three AM by them singing on their balcony. I went out on our balcony and poked my head around the corner, requesting a little silence. Thankfully they heeded my request. That was the only time I actually saw them as they did not appear at breakfast. We said something to the hotel management and they either moved them somewhere else, or perhaps it was just an energetic one night stand.

On our last evening we pushed the boat out a bit in terms of our choice of restaurant. While it was a lovely place, it was on the cusp of needing we feared we might need a surgeon to to pay the bill in body parts. Yes, very expensive! As it was in a different part of the city, we needed to take a taxi both there and back. Ah, taxis again. This time it wasn’t so much the drivers causing us aggravation, as circumstances beyond their control. In both directions, it seemed that every road the drivers tried was blocked by armed guards and barricades. One driver mentioned that Erdoğan might be holed up in the Yıldız Palace which was just above our hotel. Given the number of police/military personnel around, the cynic in me tended to think that this was probably the one place that Erdoğan was not to be found.

So, we reached the final morning of our stay in Istanbul, and it has to be said that we are not feeling at all relaxed despite a week in a fantastic world city. By now we were more than ready to exchange the political uncertainty of Istanbul for the certainty of having dinner with friends in Barcelona. But we have one more taxi ride to negotiate - the one to the airport. Perhaps because she is feeling increasingly tense, J managed to make an error in her head by reading the time of our flight as 4pm, not 2pm. She somehow translated 14:00 into 4pm. As a result, we left the hotel a little too late, and expected to miss the flight. We did, although not by that much. J delved into her piggy bank and booked us new flights. This just highlights the fact that even seasoned travellers are only one misread timetable away from travel disaster. As we sat and waited, I came to the conclusion that the taxi driver had to take the majority of the blame, not J. Why? I hear you ask. Well, my impression of Istanbul taxi drivers is that they are mostly surly rip-off merchants. Had our driver taken the most sensible route to the airport, directly through the city, we would not have missed out flight. It would have been tight on time, but we would have just made it. But no, this guy decided to take the long way round, going out to the motorway that serves as a sort of ring road. On that particular day it was acting as a giant car park. Quite frankly, I could have walked faster than we were travelling. This driver was very definitely attempting to rip us off, trying to maximise his income.

So we missed our flight, and missed our dinner with friends, arriving at our Barcelona hotel at midnight. We did meet up with our friends for breakfast the next morning which was good. Not what had been planned, but good to meet and have a chat just the same. We spent a few hours with them catching up before heading for the train and our next destination - Perpignan.