Dubai (October 31-November 1, 2011)

We scheduled an extended layover in Dubai en route from Istanbul to Kathmandu, spending just 31 hours in this sprawling, glitzy, sandy city on the Persian Gulf. This proved to be enough time for us to see the cultural highlights and get our fix of western shopping and eating, and was about all the time our budget could afford in this land of luxury.

We arrived on the red-eye from Istanbul, spending just long enough in our hotel for breakfast and a shower before setting out on our whirlwind tour. We began in Old Dubai, walking along Dubai Creek with its modern buildings juxtaposed against the colorful, weighed-down “dhows” on the creek, which take goods up the gulf to Iran. We walked around the Deira souks (markets), the most famous of which is the gold souk, where every shop window is full of gold jewelry, from simple bangles to over-the-top necklaces and tiaras. After six weeks in Turkey, touring Roman ruins and 10,000 year old archaeological sites, the fifty-year old “Old Dubai” felt pretty modern.

“New Dubai” is all about being over the top: the tallest, the biggest, the fanciest. It consists of a relatively narrow strip sprawling along the Gulf Coast for more than 25 kilometers, and it is full of modern architectural marvels. We began our exploration of this area by taking the metro out to “The Walk,” an outdoor shopping and dining strip facing the beach where we stopped for iced Starbucks (our first non-nescafe coffee in a month), and walked along Jumeirah beach with its wide sandy beach full of (foreign) sunbathers, dipping our toes in the warm Gulf waters. Next, we headed to the infamous “Palm,” the manmade community built on a palm tree-shaped landfill jutting out into the Gulf. There, we walked around the extravagant Atlantis Hotel located at the tip of the palm – with a Vegas-like over-the-top gaudiness, and where even entering the main lobby of the hotel has an extra charge (we snuck in).

We spent our evening checking out the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building at 828 meters (and over 160 floors). In its shadow is the Dubai Fountain, which has a nightly show set to music with the water surging as high as 150m. Of course, our trip to Dubai wouldn’t have been complete with visiting some of its famous malls (we managed to visit two). The more impressive of the two, the Dubai Mall, is the world’s largest mall and is situated next to the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Fountain. Ferraris, Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and other luxury cars lined the valet parking area at the main entrance, and with over 1200 shops, an ice rink, indoor waterfalls, and a huge aquarium, you could walk around this mall for hours without ever retracing your steps. It was, in its way, beautiful and impressive, but we could have been anywhere in the world, with the chain stores making it feel more like Los Angeles than the Middle East.

Our quick trip was fascinating, and we did take advantage of the chain restaurants offering familiar foods, but 31 hours was definitely enough time for us in this Middle Eastern metropolis. In the morning we headed back to the airport and boarded our flight where we would again be transported to a completely different world: Kathmandu.

Click on the photo below to view our Dubai photo album:

Mardin and Diyarbakir (October 23-October 28, 2011)

We planned to finish our time in eastern Turkey with quick stops in Mardin and Diyarbakir before heading to the mountainous Lake Van area. When we arrived in Mardin, however, we learned that a 7.2-magnitude earthquake had struck Van, claiming the lives of over 600 people, injuring more than 4,000, and devastating the region’s infrastructure. Instead of continuing east, therefore, we extended our stay in Diyarbakir and then flew back to Istanbul early to spend our last few days in Turkey.

Mardin, where we spent just one night, lies 20 miles from the Syrian border and 100 miles from Iraq. The old part of town is sunbaked and dusty, with several pretty mosques and a large bazaar. There is definitely more of a Middle Eastern feel here than elsewhere in Turkey, no doubt due to its geography. Sitting on a high promontory overlooking the plains of Mesopotamia, it was a great spot from which to admire the vast expanse of the “fertile crescent.”

From Mardin we moved on to Diyarbakir, the heart of Kurdish Turkey. Though there are an estimated 15 million Kurdish people living in Turkey, their cultural and linguistic identities have been basically denied by the Turkish government and, understandably, there is tension between the Kurdish people and the Turkish government. Diyarbakir has a somewhat bad reputation around Turkey because people associate the city with the actions of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), a frequently violent organization tied to the Kurdish separatist movement Aware of this history and reputation, we were somewhat wary of the city at first, but ultimately didn’t think it was all that different from other Turkish cities that we visited. It may have been poorer than anywhere else we visited in Turkey, it lacked the Ataturk statues that sat ubiquitously at every street corner and square in other cities, and fewer people spoke English, but the people were as friendly and open as anywhere else (though they were quick to identify as Kurdish and point out they were not Turkish).  

During our longer-than-expected stay in Diyarbakir we explored the city walls (supposedly second most extensive in the world after the Great Wall of China), mosques, churches and bazaars. We were glad to get to visit this Kurdish center and are thankful to our friend Sozdar, a native of Diyarbakir, who helped inspire our visit and recommended some lovely restaurants for us to try during our stay!

Click on the photo below to view our Mardin and Diyarbakir photo album.

Urfa (October 20-October 23, 2011)

As we headed east, our next stop was Sanliurfa. The prefix “Sanli” was added to “Urfa” in 1984, meaning “Glorious Urfa”, but most still refer to it as Urfa. For us, the city offered a base from which to explore two archaeological sites, Nemrut Dagi and Gobekli Tepe, but the city itself also had something to offer:  it claims to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham and there is a complex of monuments and mosques dedicated to him that are a destination for Muslim pilgrims.

Nemrut Dagi is a 2150-meter mountain, whose artificial summit – a 50-meter high pyramid of small rocks – was commissioned by a pre-Roman local king, Antiochus I Epiphanes, in the first century BC. On two sides of the pyramid, facing east and west, he built temples and had them adorned with large statues of gods, including Apollo and Zeus, and himself. Now, more than 2,000 years later, the two-meter tall heads of the statues have been toppled by earthquakes and the elements, and add a surreal quality to the site as they stare out from the summit in front of their still seated bodies.

The other site we visited, Gobekli Tepe, wasn’t really discovered until the mid-1990s. The site consists of a series of tall, t-shaped limestone pillars, carved with human and animal reliefs, arranged in circles around a central pillar. Four of these circles have been excavated so far, but there are an estimated 16 more, as yet to be unearthed. They are believed to have been used for religious rituals, and the earliest of these structures has been dated to the 10^th century BC, (7,000 years before Stonehenge), making this the oldest known religious site in the world. The site is important, archaeologically speaking, not just because of its age (hunter-gatherers of this time were not thought to have the capacity to build such a site), but because it suggests that a desire to worship or practice sacred rituals, and not environmental reasons, may have led hunter-gatherers to transition into the stationary, agricultural societies that made up the earliest civilizations. A great National Geographic article describes the site and its importance better than we can. The site itself is still being actively excavated. In fact, the team of archaeologists was onsite during our visit, with several members looking very much like Indiana Jones in khakis, leather boots, and suspenders.

Nemrut Dagi and Gobekli Tepe aren’t the easiest places to get to without joining a large tour group or having your own means of transportation. In Urfa, we found a local guide to take us to the sites (and some others along the way). Yusuf, a short, 60-something, energetic man who walked with a cane, was a complete character. He was constantly joking, singing, and sharing anecdotes, and in time he had us singing along to his silly songs and speaking his own made up words (Gugugaloo!). About fifty percent of what he had to say about any particular place or site was dubious at best, but his heart was always in the right place. He took us to great restaurants that we would have never chosen, gave us hand-rolled cigarettes with raw Turkish tobacco, made us try a dish that he had told us would make us sick only moments earlier, and stopped at a roadside fruit vendor to buy us a huge melon (and proceeded to cut it for us and make us eat the whole thing). In short, he made our trips to these sites a lot more fun.

Back in Urfa, we were glad to have some extra time to explore the city. We visited the ruins of Urfa Castle, situated atop the tallest hill in town with wonderful views over the city, and the complex of mosques and monuments at the base of the hill, including the Pool of Sacred Fish (Balıklı Göl), where legend has it God saved Abraham after he was ordered to be burned by the local king, Nimrod, by turning the fire into water (and the coals into fish).

Click on the photo below to view our Urfa photo album.