It's the Journey

Blue Mosque

Blue Mosque

Hagia Sophia

Topkapi Palace Park

Ancient wall within park and old architectural artifacts

Kitties are everywhere!

Wow - what an adventure it's been so far since I left KAF!  Currently in Istanbul and am absolutely loving it.  My hotel is in the old section and walking distance from the Blue Mosque, bazaar, spice market and tons of outdoor cafes and street markets.  I have currently been awake for about 40 hours straight due to my travels, but will hopefully sleep like a rock tonight. 

There's a huge park - Topkapi Park- down the street from where I am staying.  Within the park are many museums and the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque are on the edges of the park - absolutely beautiful and interesting to see.  Maybe I can write off my trip as "research" for park planning in another Muslim country - hmmm...  Just been walking and walking today, listening to the prayer chants over speakers while enjoying the sites - totally unreal!  Tonight I am headed down the street - which is pedestrian only by my hotel - to enjoy a Hookah bar and some more Turkish food which I'm loving.  Tomorrow will be the spice market, cisterns and Grand Bazaar and then off to Athens for a few days.  This is really becoming the trip of a lifetime.  After Athens, I head to London to visit one of my old friends, then Bruge, Amsterdam, Munich and back to Dubai before I return to KAF to begin my new job.

OK, now for the awful start to my trip - which will soon become humorous, but not quite yet as it's too fresh of an experience. I flew out of KAF on a C-17 without much incident - still happy and footloose!  Get to Manas AB that evening, go through in-processing and then discover that they did not load my luggage on the plane.  They promise to do the next day, but don't and I wait until 4 hours before my flight out of there before it finally arrives on the last flight of the day.  During this time of no showers, I am issued linens and sent to a huge clam shell tent to sleep on a bunk bed with another 100 or so women AND the lights never go off.  The added bonus is that the latrines right across from the tent are overflowing and backed up - did find much better ones the next day.  This begins my stretch of no sleep.  I did meet a ton of fun people at the bar/hangout on base to enjoy the two beers a day you were allowed to consume.  That was a plus!  I also had an $8 dollar manicure and an $11 haircut at the salon on base.  It looks like an $11 haircut too, but anything was in improvement.  I had my second hair salon experience with a stylist I was barely able to communicate with because of language barriers.  This became readily apparent while she was washing my hair and I noticed a spider crawling in hers - I tell her (also because I'm scared to death it will drop on me) and she replies with a smile..."yes, yes" and then the water temp is changed from warm to scalding, leading me to believe she does not have the slightest clue what I have said - and it certainly wasn't "please burn my scalp off with the water temperature".  Finally, one of her co-workers tells her because she did overhear me and the poor gal almost had a heart attack - which is the appropriate response to one being informed there is a spider in your hair.  All in all, nice ladies and an interesting mix of the typical Kyrgyzstan citizen - either Asian or Russian -  and all Russian speaking.


So I leave for the Bishkek airport at 1am on Monday morning to fly to Istanbul.  Am dropped off at the loading dock in the back of a truly dilapidated, Soviet era airport building and escorted through the basement (that had so much mold everyone was coughing their guts outs when we finally got out of there) to the check-in.  I'm with one other military guy who is flying home.  Make it through the ticket processing and my bag is checked for the flight.  Then I go through passport control.  This is where it gets really *&!#$@ stressful.  This other guy and I are the only Americans and nobody speaks English except for maybe a few other passengers - it's still not that fluent.  They split me off from the military guy and let him go through - I am then detained and held in a holding area because of "passport issues" - which was either the only English term they knew or the only term they wanted my to know they knew.  It is basically communicated to me that i am not boarding my flight or allowed to leave because of my passport issue.  My bag - which I've only had in my possession for a few hours - is on it's way to Turkey without me.  They stand around, won't let me stand up, approach the desk or basically move/interact with anyone for about 2 hours.  Every time I do one of these things - which I continued to do frequently - the military police would run over to subdue me to keep me seated.  No explanation, no idea what's happening, no longer have my passport because they took it - sense a really bad situation.  Needless to say, I am privately freaking out, have nobody to call because now I'm off base, am fighting back tears of rage and frustration.  I'm also exhausted and trying to keep the Irish temper at bay so that I don't make a bad situation worse and end up in jail - I can only imagine what that would be like considering the condition of everything else there.  Finally, about 15 minutes before my plane leaves, they bring some guy over to translate their demands which was basically about $100 in a cash "fee" (bribe where you and I are from) for them to approve my passport.  I couldn't cough up that money fast enough.  So basically, they held me and my bag hostage until right before the plane took off to get money from me - and as the gentlemen who translated informed me... "not to make issue of it".  I had 2 hours of the most intense stress on top of being sleep deprived, filthy and contained in a shit hole. I will not return to Bishkek anytime soon.  Being tossed out in front of the Afghan airport - outside the wire - when I returned to KAF from Thailand was much more preferable than this experience.  Maybe the message here is to avoid traveling in any country that includes a "-stan" in its name.

However, all is good now and I'm finally beginning to relax!  It's all part of the adventure and will be an interesting story to tell in a bar at some point in the future.  Certainly taking adventures on your own in foreign countries has its challenges, but still worth the experience!  I have excellent internet now too so I plan to post on the blog much more frequently while on my travels.  Hope you all have an excellent start to your week!

Drink of the day/night - wine, Turkish tea, wine, Turkish coffee, wine ... you get it...