“The Longest Day” (Part 2) – The Iraq to Istanbul Diaries

The first day of this trip we had planned to cross into Turkey from Iraq over land. What transpires is one of the longest and most exhausting days of travel in my life. Lucky for me I had my notebook to record the whole ridiculous charade. (This is the second part of a two-part entry. You can read the first by scrolling down or clicking here)

Chapter 3: Memet the Hero-Swindler

3:15: Ibrahim Khalil Border Crossing

4:15 changes to 3:15 when you cross the border, which we are doing with the help of Hussein, his assistant Memet, and their driver. Hussein is a Turkish salesman who has spent the last 10 years in the confectionary business plying Turkish sweets across the Middle East. The driver is a young guy in a creamy brown-colored leather jacket (“it’s from England”) and seems to be enamored of his appearance and seeming importance (the Biff Loman wasta type, no doubt).

But the real hero of this story is Memet, the classic ‘guy who gets things done.’ Hussein is very proud of him: “I hired him three years ago when I started traveling” he tells us vainly, “and he’s the only assistant I’ve had. He’s very good at what he does.”

And what Memet does is get us places. “He hates waiting…he always tries to take permission,” Hussein tells us in broken English, “At places like this its will vs. skill.” At this point he notices I’m writing in my notebook, “Are you keeping a dairy of this trip?” he pries, “Write that down. Will vs. skill.” Thanks Hussein.

 

Memet the Hero-Swindler, in his element.

 

3:20: Memet grabs Chris and I go with the driver. What’s going on? It seems Memet wants us to convince the passport control office that we are late for a flight from Diyarbakir, a city in southeastern Turkey, and must be allowed to pass through immediately. With our foreigner wasta in full gear, the young border officer eagerly motions for our car to pull through to the front of the line. We pass through the gate. Are we in Turkey yet?

3:35: It seems like we’ve traded one gate for another. But lo! Memet takes me up to the security kiosk and I give this new gatekeeper the same airport shpiel. A young Turkish student asks me in excellent English what time this supposed flight leaves, and I bluster through an answer that makes almost no sense. It doesn’t matter: I’ll be asking the questions around here young man! Despite his well-meaning inquiry, we cut the entire line of about 30 cars and pass through the second gate. Before zooming off this student asks if we can give him a ride: it seems like he actually has a flight to catch. Ah, but we have no room my good man. Onward! The Turkish Republic waits for no one!

3:50: Still waiting at this new disaster of a border crossing. “Has there ever been a place like this in America?” our friend Hussein asks, taking his present perfect tense out for a walk. Um, I’m going to go with a big ‘no’ on that one, Hussein.

The one line Memet couldn’t get us around.

We are sitting in the car under a gate while about 15 men yell at the window, manned by one enormously overworked Turkish customs officer. One of the men waiting in a yellow taxi behind us curses until his voice gives out. We have been next to him for so long, and he has been yelling for so long, that we witness his voice actually give out. Does he do this every day?

Fed up with this nonsense, the cab driver gets into his car and drives it down the sidewalk until he gets near us at the front of the line. The taxi is a large yellow-painted van with extremely small tires that barely seem to handle the impact of his proclivity for curb hopping. Having successfully navigated himself forward about 6 cars in our ‘line,’ the driver switches his car off and proceeds to cough up an entire lung. He cracks open the driver side door and, in the smallest sliver of space between his car and ours, spits out a large, grotesquely shaped piece of yellow-green mucus.

4:10: Rules dictate that each car must declare its cargo and all passengers. I will enter Turkey with what is quite possibly the greatest name ever.

 

If you look closely at what Memet is writing here, you'll see the United States crossed into Turkey on December 16, 2010

4:15: We try the ‘we have a plane to catch’ line on anyone who will hear it in this third gate, but the customs officers seem to be wise to our trick. No foreigner wasta will help us here. It seems we’ve unofficially entered Turkey.

4:36: “Teach me American!” Hussein implores us impetuously, and Chris and I oblige by explaining the meaning of “cock block.” We’ll stop there with that one. Suffice to say we’ve had a little time on our hands.

Our driver, having a blast.

5:02: Ibrahim Khalil Duty Free Shop

Memet tells me he needs me and that I should follow him. Do I have another flight to catch? No. This time we run to the Ibrahim Khalil Duty Free Shop to buy cigarettes. I think of our old traveling buddy Murat as Memet uses our passports to buy cartons of Parliaments.

5:05: Ibrahim Khalil Customs Office

We have packed over 15 cartons of cigarettes in Hussein’s silver Renault station wagon. They go in the seats, behind the cushions, in secret places underneath the glove compartment. Everywhere. Hussein’s confectionary business seems less and less legitimate by the hour. I don’t care what his card says…

5:15: Turkey.

Free at last, free at last. Thank god almighty we’re free at last. We are on what seems like an abandoned highway, and for that we have our old friend Ibrahim Khalil to thank. Our brown leather-jacketed driver puts the pedal down and we hurtle toward Silopi, where we can get a bus or taxi to Mardin, tonight’s final destination.

5:33: Silopi

The Silopi taxi mafia has decreed that taxis do not leave at night, and we’ve missed the last bus from there to Mardin, so Memet agrees to take us to Cizre, the next town further north. We try asking for a ride all the way to Mardin, but it seems they aren’t taking that ‘way’ to Diyarbakir. Hussein actually has a flight to catch there – that part wasn’t a lie. It’s just that his flight is tomorrow.

5:57: Cizre

It turns out Memet’s father owns a transportation company. No surprise there. He books us two seats on the last bus leaving Cizre, a busier connecting city on the main highway north of Silopi. Hussein and Mr. Leather Jacket get out at their favorite restaurant in Cizre and Memet agrees to take us down the road to the bus station so we can catch the 6 o’clock to Mardin.

6:11: Cizre Bus Station

We have injured the hero Memet’s honor in Cizre. Waiting for the bus to take us to Mardin and the final destination for the day.

It seems like goodwill vanishes upon entering Turkey. We were under the impression that Hussein offered us a free ride to across the border at the Ibrahim Khalil passport office. It cost him nothing extra to do this, and in fact we spent valuable foreigner wasta karma points expediting the trip for him and his crew.

Yet at our journey’s end Memet the Hero-Swindler had expected to charge us for the trip all along. My refusal to pay hurt his honor; I had to call Hussein to verify that we actually owed Memet money for this favor/service. Apparently we did, and it seemed to upset Memet greatly that I would even consider checking with his boss about this. “The problem?” He snarled, ”There is no problem!” It was the same furious rage that snuck us past checkpoint after checkpoint in Ibrahim Khalil. “The problem is you, you Ali Baba!” He exclaimed, snatching my 50-lira note and storming straight to his car without looking back. And that would be the last we’d ever see of Memet the Hero-Swindler.

6:17: Cizre Bus Station

So much for Turkish efficiency. We’re still waiting outside for the 6 o’clock bus to Mardin and are absolutely surrounded by kids. But when we walk into the bus station office to sit down they only follow us to the door. It’s amazing: they stand there in the frame staring at us but refuse to come in like zombies scared of daylight. It’s as if their obnoxious little-kid powers melt away if they walk into the bus station office. I’ll take it though, because I need a respite from the final showdown with Memet the Hero Swindler.

6:40: Mar-tur Bus

We finally leave Cizre for Mardin. The ride is about two and a half hours and Chris and I settle in for a respite from the day’s ridiculous activity.

 

Chapter 4: “How much for this tablet of your bronchitis?”

9:11: Mardin

Mardin! We made it, miraculously, to our day’s destination. Luckily I had been to this city before in 2008 when I was traveling over land from Damascus to Istanbul, so I knew the bus station was close to the main street. Still, it was worth asking a local in order to get oriented. What follows is one of the most compelling reasons for NOT asking people for directions (I’d always been looking for one…)

9:20: We meet Nematullah, a seemingly harmless Mardinian just buying some late-night groceries. Surely he lives in the neighborhood and must know where our hotel is. Right?

9:21: He sure does. Offers to take us right there. Walks us all the way there, in fact.

9:30: We arrive at our hotel, the Artuklu Kervansarai, and are greeting by the tallest man in Turkey. This man was literally a giant.

9:31: We check in and it turns out they have one room left. There is a conference in town and we are lucky, we’re told, to have even this room free for the night. Seemingly making up for the lack of hospitality at the front desk, Nematullah wants to take us out for dinner. Lucky for him the hotel restaurant is closed and we set back out into town. He seems insistent on telling us something.

 

Artuklu Kervansarayi, our hotel for the night.

9:40: On the way to a restaurant that is open this late we just happen to stumble on an internet café. Nematullah insists that he needs help explaining something on Google translate, and naively we think it has to do with an email or something he’s read online. Little did we know he’s got a special little artifact to sell us. Below is a rough sketch of my first conversation on google translate.

– “This very old. What I found.” [he shows us a photo of a brown rectangle on his mobile phone]. “It is related to this” [he shows us a shabby-looking ring with Syriac inscriptions on his right ring finger].

– “Turkish Government offered me 3,000 lira ($2000) for it, but I said no. It is worth more.”

[Nematullah then looks at us seriously. A salesman about to deliver his closing line].

– “How much for this tablet of your bronchitis?”

What? I was exhausted and frustrated by this inconvenience. Chris, however, was deliberating the old man’s fine offer: “Well we should probably start with 8,000 Lira ($5,400),” he said, quite seriously and out loud.  It was hard to stay straight-looking and honest knowing our friend/amateur archeologist Nematullah was studying our faces intently for context clues. Could he squeeze a few thousand liras from these two exhausted foreigners for a tablet of their bronchitis?

No, he could not, because as it turns out it was not a tablet of our bronchitis he was selling, but instead just a boring tablet of bronze. Miffed more by the poor sell than the product, we say thank you, no, and proceed to walk out.

Nematullah follows us. ‘Ok no problem’ He pantomimes with a shoulder shrug and half-frown.  We expected to leave him but Nematullah at least wants us to pay for his dinner. His brief tenure as our guide in Mardin was a strange combination of self-aggrandizement heavily tinted with the hope of a sale. Worried that there was something more sinister in his interest in taking us around town after dark, I did a double take at a car of bored-looking policemen, who immediately sped over and demanded our papers.

10:45: Nematullah checked out without a record (after learning we were American they didn’t even bother checking us (foreigner wasta, and yes that’s a double-parenthesis)). As a way of saying goodnight, I asked where Nematullah lived so as to hint at our interest in his departure. “Ba’eed” he replied. Far. I wondered what he was doing in the center of town then, near the bus station, buying groceries. We bade goodnight and parted ways.

11:05: Meanwhile, back at the Caravanserai, it seems like our giant found some company in the form of five Turkish academics in town for a conference. The theme of the conference was “Old and New Intellectuals,” with the idea being, explained one of the participants (presumably a ‘New’ intellectual) that they were discussing the future of Turkish academics. 

In the presence of these formidable minds (some new but mostly old), our giant had made a complete literal and figurative 180.  He substituted his austerity for hospitality bordering on the doting, and compromised his imposing size with a crouch that would make most big league catchers jealous. The academics sat around a wrought-iron brazier aflame in the center of the lobby, and the giant was quick to hop about in serving them coffee admirably prepared in the Bedouin style. Chris and I, shorn of Nematullah, stood in front of the group and chatted politely for a while. Soon, though, I had had enough of the small talk, and went to bed hoping to dull a toothache with some whiskey I had the foresight to buy at the duty free while Memet the Hero-Swindler was busy piling up cartons of cigarettes. Chris was out talking to a new intellectual while I dosed off to sleep, buried deep in one of the Caravanserai’s cave-like rooms.

 

 

In the main hall of the Caravanserai, our giant is on the right looking good in his old man hat.