Kitten Titties 2012

One more - probably the last - video from Turkey, just to show you the eastern part of the country...

We had great fun with our Kurdish friends and their music at the feet of the biblical Mount Ararat. At the backseat are our friend Zoli, Judit and I. In the front, of course, the Kurds :)

We're fine, we're over the "dangerous" part of Pakistan which in reality is pretty calm. Pakistanis are really nice and hospitable people who have a very strange accent in English. Now we are in Eastern Pakistan, our visa expires in two days, so we're leaving for India. Here the Internet is much faster than in Iran and I suppose in India it's even better. So probably we're stopping for a day or two somewhere and write some posts about Iran and Pakistan :)

We spent our last days with Zoli, whose place we slept at earlier in Istanbul.

At first we hitched, the three of us. Our best lift were the three Kurdish guys, who constantly kept asking us about our religion (to avoid further conflicts, Zoli later learned the sentence "I believe in one God but I don't belong to any religion." in Turkish) and they made us listen to loud Kurdish music. We took a cool video of the party, but our current circumstances don't let me to upload it somewhere, so you'll have to wait a bit for it. :)

Then we arrived to a camping near to the city of Doğubayazit. It lies next to Mt. Ararat which is 5100 meters high and according to the Bible Noah moored his ark on its top. By the way the ark hasn't been found since then, but it costs a lot of money to be allowed to climb up there (do they have a secret?), so we had to pass up the chance to do it. In return we climbed up to a nearer, smaller mountain, where stands an old palace where the adventures of One Thousand and One Nights happened, as locals say. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and such:

From that point things got fast: we hitchhiked to lake Van, which is a beautiful and huge salty lake, and in the southern part of it there is a litte island. On the island there is an old temple which was recently renewed. We ate a lot for dinner and we drank our last beers (in Iran it's forbidden to drink alcohol), after that we camped on the lakeside and slept. The next day Zoli went to the island to see the temple, but we didn't feel like to go because the ferry went rarely and it was just all so complicated, so we started hitching again around the lake Van. We went back to Doğubayazit, from where the Iranian border lies just 40 kilometers. We took a lift to the border, there Judit hid in a toilet and changed her clothes to the obligatory ones in Iran (long sleeves and scarf) then we headed to the border...

(Translated by K. Attila - thanks mate!)

I recently uploaded an album of pictures of Cappadocia, so I only want to add a few words on what we did in Cappadocia. We rented a motorcycle in a village called Ürgüp and drove around the area (170 kms in 6 hours with a 150 ccm scooter), we slept in a park in our tent, woke up at dawn because of the stray dogs in the park and stuff like these. Though Ürgüp itself is nothing interesting, I highly recommend a motorcycle trip around Cappadocia for everyone, it's a beautiful area and this scooter was the perfect kind of vehicle to see it all.

From there we went on to Sivas and had the worst day of hitch-hiking. We had two incidents with people making moves on Judit so we had to escape both times. This was by the way the only day we had any problems at all while hitch-hiking. Otherwise everyone was really nice and helpful.

Sivas in nothing fancy so we just skip writing about it. We don't recommend anyone to go there, we weren't advised to do so either, things just turned out this way that we had to cross it.

From there we went to Kars, which is also a dirty and boring place - anyway, apologies for the locals but we didn't find any beauty in it. But at least it's close to the Iranian border already. and there is a mountain at the edge of the city on which there is a nice castle, where we could shoot our enemies:

Judit made big efforts to fight her being afraid of heights:

Then we met Zoli from Istanbul, with whom we visited much nicer places. We'll write about them our the next post.

Konya is a city in central Turkey with a population of 800,000, famous for its Dervish dances. Which is some dance danced by Dervishes. Now, we didn't see this thing because it's only for a lot of money OR on Saturdays, and we didn't have money and left the city on Friday. Such is life.

But the great thing was that we met a lot of cool people! First, there was this guy, Osman:

Out short story with Osman perfectly demonstrates Turkish hospitality, and more: What happened was that coming back from Olympos Osman took us with his car, brought us to Antalya, then all the way through the city in the traffic jams and put us to the other side of the city at a perfect hitchhiking spot. We told them it's great, it'll be pretty easy for us now to go to Manavgat to see the waterfalls which are said to be very beautiful and they are just on our way to Konya, our destination for the day. (We still have our map here.) Got out of the car, had a minute rest and bought some water, then in 2 minutes the same car stopped again with Osman in it, telling us "Okay guys, as a matter of face I have time, I'll take you to Manavgat." (which is like 40 kilometers from Antalya) Or at least we'd have said something like that, but as he only spoke Turkish, we just figured he said that. We were shocked but said well okay, of course, thank you a lot man :) Got in the car again, and on the way he bought us some cooked corn and two silly cowboy hats as a gift. We don't seem to have any pictures of them but they were really cool. :) He took us to the waterfalls, paid for our entrance, came in with us, waited patiently while we took our photos and stuff and chill, then took us to the way to Konya to a gas station and finally apologised (!!) that now he'd really have to go back to Antalya, left us. So this is how Turkish hospitality is.

Anyway, back to Konya. We arrived pretty quickly, thanks to Osman and a truck driver who also didn't speak any English but took us directly there, even bought some teas for us on the way etc. We spent the first night in a dirty little hotel, where there was a quarrel and shouthing in the night, then car tyres squeeking and everything, and police came too. But we survived, apparently :), and the next day we met Burakkal and Gülşah, who are a marred couple and whom we met on CouchSurfing. They live in a cool flat in the center of Konya and we stayed with them for a night. Alas, not for more because the next day they left to Antalya for work and fun :) So this is how these guys are:

Gülşah cooked us some nice dinner (Judit helped her for which they were both very happy), then, as they both have a strict schedule for working out to maintain their shapes, we drove (!) to a park to have a half-hour walk :) Well, in the end it was only like 15 minutes and had a 30 minute tea-break, with lots of sugar of course :)

The next day they went to work, we got up later, geeked a bit as finally we had some Internet, and then we went to meet our old friend Osman professor who we met the previous afternoon while walking on the street. Note that this Osman is a different Osman from the guy who drove us to Manavgat: that was a salesman but this one is a Turkology professor. He promised the day before that if he has time to meet us the next day he'd bring his wife and drive us to some cool place. He was so nice to us because

1. he's Turkish
2. he visited Hungary recently and he had a very nice time there. He attended some Turkology conference, that's why he went. He's a cool guy, a little bit fond of Turks: he explained to us that every single nation (maybe even the monkeys) are derived from the Turks, and well, anyhow, the Turks are the coolest guys ever. He wasn't paying too much attention to us if we agreed with the ideas or not, when it comes to communication he's a bit of a write-only kind of person. But anyway, he's a great man and his wife it a great woman any they showed and told us lots of cool things about Turkey!

Osman tool us to the fruit market:

and showed us the puddle on one of the main squares of the city, which was built two years ago and noone understands what it tries to resemble/mean or in general, what sense does it make. It doesn't look good for sure. Maybe they just wanted to give the locals something to wonder about.

Then he and his wife took us a couple of kilometers out from the city to see a temple carved in limestone (and another one which was closed) and a nice lake. Here's Osman and his wife

We had an interesting dinner called "Ekmek" or something, a Konyan speciality, prepared using a strange method:

1. We went to the supermarket for ingredients
2. We gave the ingredients to a place with two cooks and a huge oven:
3. We went to buy some dessert
4. We returned to the strange place with the oven where the food was already prepared
5. We took the food (resembling some pizza or something) and ate it:

We Skyped a little with the son of Osman who just finished his studies in England in the day before - of course our dear hosts tried to get him and Judit together - then we slept at their place and left in the morning. Thank you Osman and the whole family for taking such a good care of us! :)

After this terrrrible incident we had in Antalya we hitch-hiked a little bit to the west to a village called Olympos, where the main funky thing is to live in these cool treetop houses. Well, these "treetop" houses turned out not to be that "treetop" as I imagined but it was really cool to stay in one :) We told the local guys we were on a tight budget and cannot afford a treehouse, so in the end we got a discounted price for house No. 111:

We put our stuff inside real quick then we took the 10 minutes walk to the beach. Now the unbelievable thing that happened was that on the path to the beach the were collecting an entrance fee! Not much, but like one Euro per person. We told them for sure we're not paying for a f*****g beach, the sea is for everyone etc. They wouldn't have let as through anyway, they said there were some ancient ruins and stuff, they're collecting the fee for that, the sea just happens to be that way too. So we took another way 50 meters away from there in a riverbed mostly dried out:

At the coast there was coolness, nice beach, nice water, nice people. Some of them making silly hats in their free time:

Some swimming in the sea, then some food (we got unlimited dinner for the treehouse, yess :), then at dusk we left to see the seemingly most interesting place in the area: the Chimeras, which are fires coming from underneath some stones. We walked for like 2 hours by the sea, then up to a mountain (where they collect an entrance fee for these stupid fires, and we couldn't ever avoid all the guys and dogs working there) and after a 20-minute climb we glanced the Thing. I'm gonna try to cut a video of it but for now, here is a pic with Judit:

 

The fires really do come from under some rocks, having a cool sweet smell (no shit, they really had a smell like some candy :) I really recommend for everyone to see these things as the sight and atmosphere mixing with the smell is not possible to show on videos.

The thing making the fires is some gas which in theory immediately buns when contacting with air, so it's not possible to blow it away. Well, we tested, it is possible. So we needed to light one up again with a lighter. Honestly, we got really scared for a moment that we ruined one of the fires. :)

And finally, a broccoli as a present for our friend Jimmi:

Helllo ya'll!

The thing is, we're in the middle of the things now, and after almost 2 months of travel we probably consider some things normal which are not normal for you at all. Our purpose now is to show you how Iran is, what can you do here, what you cannot, how it feels for us to be a tourist here or for the Persians to live here.

We have plenty of ideas what to write about but for sure we'd forget about a lot of things. So if you feel like, write your questions about Iran or our trip in comments for this article and soon we gather the questions and reply to all of them, and of course, add our own thoughts too.

Thanks for contributing for everyone who contributes :)

After Amanda had left, we wanted to move forward from Antalya, but in the morning we realized the sad fact that during the night somebody had stolen my phone (HTC Desire, expensive stuff, also hosting our GPS device and all our maps) and a bunch of money from Judit.

We notified the hotel reception immediately, the police came, then we went to the police station to report the theft

and with some local help (as none of the policemen spoke a word in English) I wrote the report:

I only had the long face to make the policemen take me serious, otherwise I'd already accepted the fact that even if they find the phone and send it back to me, it won't be up to me.

So we wandered around in the city to look for a new phone and some interesting stuff to see. We bumped into a bunch of old men playing with strange plastic dominoes, according to the rules of rummy, which we play with cards at home. They invited us to sit wdown with them for a tea:

Be back tomorrow for more :)

And if there is, it's restricted. blog.hu is for sure, and that's why we couldn't write in the past days. cnn.com too. Facebook too. CouchSurfing works, GMail too, but YouTube is restricted, probably for porn (!?). Security hole: pina.hu (a Hungarian porn site) does work :)

Thanks to my friends HatásDani and Ádám for starting a proxy server at home for us. The public proxies we found are not really working. Of course I couldn't have found a proxy in the first place, as many Google searches are restricted, too, e.g. the ones containing the word "proxy"... Catch 22...

So during our stay in Iran now is the first time we managed to find Internet with everything working allright, so I quickly uploaded a couple of articles about Turkey. Not to overwhelm You all, one is scheduled to come each day. The first one is arriving tomorrow :)

Our enthusiasm is unbroken, our creativity is endless. We are back with another video!

This time you can join us for a fast-motion journey on a ferry taking us from the European side of Istanbul to the Asian side, the first time in our life. Special thanks for the music to our friend edward. :)

Tip: For a perfect visual and audial experience watch it in max resolution, full screen, completely stoned.