PARENTAL ADVISORY: ALMOST EXPLICIT CONTENT
Terme, the Black Sea, Turkey. I'm sitting with Jeff at a table at a campsite, outside a Turkish family's celebration for their kid's 16th birthday. Steve's back in the tent, ill again. Everyone's in the hall drinking pop and dancing around with their arms out. Out here things are turning seedier.
I've been talking to one of the brothers, Birol (the guy front left) about Turkish girls. Now he's on the phone to one of his female friends. I pick up the fact he's talking about English guys, so I assume he's lining up a night out for me and Jeff at the local discotheque. This would be absolutely brilliant, especially as we'd only pulled up at this place looking for a decent night's sleep. I can hear her voice coming out of the phone, and I start to imagine a night of glory spent impressing the locals by acting like a knob on a weird Turkish dancefloor. Then he turns to me and asks how many acts of oral pleasure I'd like her to give me. Be careful though - it's $100 a pop.
Sometimes I wish I was different.
I'm intrigued as to how he has this girl's number in his phone. He explains that such deeds aren't at all uncommon. Unlike those of most western cultures, Turkish girls don't believe in sex before marriage. Which is an admirable stance. Unless you pay for it. I relay all this later to Steve. 'So they're both extreme marriagephiles,' he says, 'and whores.'
If this isn't already surreal enough, it gets weirder: the conversation with Birol takes place entirely in Japanese. He doesn't speak a word of English, and the only Turkish I know is 'thank you' (which I guess would have been more than sufficient to avoid any gross faux-pas with that Turkish girl), but he tells me he's just come back from five years in Japan, which gives us some linguistic middle ground to play with.
Even before the mention of casual whoring, I was already completely taken with this discussion. It's hard to convey the joy of being on the Black Sea coast talking to a Turkish bloke in Japanese under any circumstances. But when he starts describing such delightfully twisted stuff as the best way to con a girl into acts of fellatio, it only gets better. Here's his tip, chaps: on a night like this, they'll be drunk by now, so all you need to do is pretend that you haven't seen them for ages. They'll be too pissed to realise they've never seen you before in their life, and you're away. For a country that clearly retains a strong moral foundation, Turkey seems brilliant.
This whole episode sums up how ace this trip is. You don't leave a place like Istanbul looking forward to finding a random campsite that night. But you should. Thanks to the warmth and welcome from the family that runs the place, we end up having a far more genuinely amusing and insightful time there than we did in the city.
Not that the city isn't great. It was actually a bit of a pain leaving, especially in the knowledge there's so much more to see there. But we're still only 3,000 miles from the UK. Seven thousand more to go. The Bosphoros beckons, and we realise that driving over the bridge into Asia marks a beautifully significant point in the trip - where things that are essentially simple twists on the familiar make way for the big unknown.
At least we're making that trip together. We bumped into another team in Istanbul, after we saw their car parked outside their hotel. We met up with one of the guys - Beads - that morning, and he told us how all his team had, for various reasons, all had to bail out of the trip along the way. So he's now on his own, and seems fairly upbeat about the prospect of driving the toughest 7,000 miles of the trip solo. He appears a sensible chap, but he's clearly a loon.
We say goodbye to Beads, making loose arrangements to keep him company later on, timings permitting, and then rescue Mr Wazzboobleyoid from her secure parking spot and set off. Steve drives us out through the city and into Asia, with mountains steep to our left flank and ocean to the right. Picture Out Run, for anyone who remembers 1980s arcade games.
I take over later for the best drive of my life, along fast undulating roads cutting through wooded mountains, past fertile lowlands with cattle grazing and vast epic scrubland, the mountains stretching off into the distance. And then Jeff drives on as the sun sets, taking us up to the suburbanised coast road, to the point where all eyes are fixed scanning the blackness for somewhere to pitch up.
Just before we find our spot, we pull into a petrol station. Again, the attendant is unfeasibly friendly, and starts looking at the pictures on the car. He takes particular interest in Lynsey, Steve's wife, and makes a gesture implying she's hot. Steve smiles and points out his wedding ring, and the guy turns hugely apologetic. We laugh, but he keeps displaying his humility. There's nothing like culturally offending yourself.
Luckily we found this place. I have to thank the camp's English speaker, Yusuf, for his hospitality. He could easily have left us to it, but instead insisted we join him for Turkish tea, and then made a point of inviting us to his brother's party. What a nice thing to do. It was all a bit awkward at first - with the complete lack of shared language. But soon Morad, a 40-year-old bloke who looked like a Turkish accountant, was taking us under his wing, leading us outside for beer, and offering to show us around the next day in his boat. Mental. At least their welcome was more impressive than their showers...
We pass a long evening with the guys chatting till about 2am. They bring out the unfeasibly tender lamb at around 1.30. They're all lovely people, even if one is fixated on exploiting loopholes in the Turkish singleton system. We go to bed happy - hopefully this has been a glimpse of what's to come. We're guessing that such acts of hospitality, even the non-oral ones, are only going to increase the more we head east. Just because something is unknown, doesn't mean it isn't going to be brilliant.
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