The Agrinautica

   There's a particular day in English class in ninth grade I've found myself thinking about a lot lately. For whatever reason Ms Lesowitz asked a question that prompted people to express opinions on nazis. Many of my classmates took the opportunity to loudly exclaim their hatred of nazis. And yet. I remember looking around the room, and having this eerie chilling feeling that they weren't exclaiming their hatred for nazis because they thoroughly understood all that they stood for and rejected it on principal -- rather these rightious upper-middle-class American students were patriotically declaring what they knew was right and patriotic to declare, to evince hatred of the group that they knew it was right and patriotic to hate. In short, while hating nazis is the right answer, what they were doing I suddenly saw could very well be coming from a very nazi place, could be evidence of inclinations towards the very thing they were declaring to hate. That was Orange County, a very republican place, its very likely that a significant proportion of those students are in fact now "MAGA."

   Two or three years later I was in another English class, in summer school, making up for classes I'd missed during my year in Sweden. We were asked to write what we would do if we had been in Nazi Germany. I have no doubt most of my classmates wrote about what great partisans they would be. That's a noble thought, but trying to be realistic I wrote that I'd probably do what my actual ancestors did and get the heck out of there as soon as I saw which way the wind was blowing.
   Now I find myself here in Australia while America well and truly seems to be descending into fascism, and I really can't rule out there won't be some big crazy completely avoidable war involving the United States as the aggressor in the next year or two, and it feels like history is repeating itself.

   I just submitted my application for Australian citizenship.

   I don't mean to alarm you, but wasps may have invented alcohol. Sacchromyces cerervisiae, the yeast we depend on for fermentation, cannot spread itself across the environment or survive long without food. So how does it survive from one grape harvest season to another, through the winter and periods with a lack of fruit, to say nothing of getting from one food source to another (somehow 0.05% of immature grapes have S. cerevisiae on them but 25% of ripe damaged grapes do. Birds and various insects could spread it about a bit but the yeast has only been shown to survive a matter of hours in bird guts. However, according to a 2012 study, you know where S. cerevisiae provably survives year round? Wasp guts. Survives the winter in overwintering queen's guts, and is successfully passed on by them to their offspring, and from them to any fruits they visit (they like fruit).
   On top of this, and what actually first caught my attention, was a 2024 study showing that the oriental hornet (Vespa orientalis)(hornets are a subset of wasps) can perfectly well metabolize alcohol up to at least 80% ABV (the highest the researchers tested). Knocked on their back for a few minutes, they were soon flying without impairment. Comparatively, consumption of 1-5% alcohol by honey bees leads to impaired locomotion, cognitive abilities, and aggressiveness. Much higher than that significantly increased mortality. The hornets, btw, didn't even show an inclination to avoid the 80% hooch when given a choice between plain sugar syrup and the rotgut.
   But natural fermentation can't achieve greater than 20% ABV (it requires artificial concentration through distillation to make all your favorite liquors), so why do they even have this ability?? Possibly just a few million years of constantly having fermentation going on in their bellies. Also they apparently have multiple copies of the alcohol metabolizing gene NADP+.
    So there you go. Wasps: heavy drinkers, but you may have them to thank next time you're washing down figs with a delicious oatmeal imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels.

   In last year's year-in-review post, I talked about how the year had been epic, but ended with a fizzle, unemployed after they abruptly demobilized all of us on the varroa-eradication efforts, and with no prospects on the horizon, and with possibly another year until Cristina's visa to come here would be granted we were nearing despair. Indeed, midnight NYE found me standing alone on a dock in Geelong. I was cautiously optimistic though: "There are no particular jobs or projects on the horizon, but assuming this upcoming year will be like last it seems plausible that great things will come along. In the immediate term I'm just going to try to get any decently paying job (maybe the local icecream factory)."

   And indeed, the story of what was to follow is told perhaps most eloquently from the perspective of my bank account balance minus credit card debt:



   There's a free-fall until I did indeed pick up that job at the icecream factory, but it didn't pay enough that I wasn't still trending deeper into debt every week. Then, relatively out-of-nowhere the job as the editor of Australia's beekeeping magazine suddenly fell on my lap. They only pay for 10 hours a week but that was enough that I think my finances were trending slowly positive again. I put in more like 20 hours a week for the magazine but that's okay because I found I really enjoyed the work and found it very fulfilling.
   About the factory in general, I didn't really mind it too much, it was very stress-free. I actually really liked the evening or night shift because I felt like I got a whole bonus day to do my other work during the day -- working a job during normal hours and trying to do a second job in the evening (that requires thinking) I find more difficult these days (than when I was young and for example in university pretty much did all my paper writing in the evening). The weirdest thing I found in the factory was people with no ambition. In beekeeping, where I've worked most of my life now, every worker aspires to have their own beehives and grow it into their own business -- and before that I had worked in law a bit and I don't need to tell you about ambition there. People who voluntarily worked a low paying job they complained about regularly and didn't appear to have any intention to change their situation boggled my mind. Some of them even complained specifically that during night shift they just spent their daytime hours bored waiting to go to work. Really bizarre for me to meet people living literally meaningless lives, but I digress. (and not to offend anyone working there that may read this, there were some lovely people there who absolutely do have hopes and aspirations). Also like 99% of the line workers smoked, which I thought was a weird (self selecting?) thing considering these days only apparently 10.6% of Australians smoke (2022 stats).

   Anyway, and then another dream job did suddenly materialize, as a Varroa Development [Extension] Officer. Actually funny story, I saw the posting, applied, next I heard was the email saying they apologize but I have not been selected for an interview. Normally that would be the end of that, but on this particular occasion I just had to send them an email saying, in essence (but much more diplomaticaly) "excuse me, what?"
   I then got a phone call and it transpired that I learned my phone number had been wrong on my CV. Probably because I had made that CV when I first got to Australia and hadn't at that time known my phone number well. How many missed opportunities have there been because of that wrong number??
   They had already completed their interviews for the position... but hastily made arrangements to interview me remotely and offered me one of the two positions as Senior Varroa Development Officer! I was able to remain the magazine editor, but quickly gave my two weeks notice to the icecream factory, and henceforth financially was well on the road to recovery!

Cristina, Visas
   And meanwhile there was good news very early in the year, with Cristina's visa being granted January 17th. I remember I was sitting on the couch under the heater drinking my morning coffee when my phone made an email notification noise. For the previous two years I've been jumping every time I get an email notification hoping it was notification of her visa approval, and though I was despairing by this point, I still immediately grabbed my phone. It was from our visa agent/lawyer! Good, but still I'd become deeply accustomed to bad news. Anxiously clicked on it and scanned the several paragraphs of text, and fortunately they had put in bold the words that appeared in the second paragraph "visa is approved." With trembling fingers I texted Cristina to ask her if she was free for a call.
   It would be another 7 months until she finally arrived, on August 28th. Probably for the best because winter is cold dark and depressing here. We got married in the Redwoods on November 25th, and are now anxiously awaiting arrival of the official marriage certificate needed as proof, so we can file for her continuation visa before this one runs out on January 17th of this year. It's a bit stressful because the department confirmed they had received the filing from the officiant on Dec 10th, and the processing time is supposed to be 28 days, but that would put it at January 7, just ten days before her current visa ends, but with the holidays falling in the middle of this period it might take much longer. I had called someone at the department and he had initially said "oh don't worry it should be sorted by February" and when I mentioned I really needed it by January 17th he just switched gears to saying "oh don't worry it should be sorted by then." Sooo long story short I'm going to be very stressed until we get that back, the new (type 820) visa filed, and official notification that we are on the bridging visa for that. (and once that visa is finally approved then we still need to file for one more visa, the 801, it's endless I swear).



   This year I didn't actually get out of the country, but that's not for lack of opportunities, there were several projects in south-east Africa (Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar), which I'd have loved to go to but couldn't spare the time off yet at that time from my new extensionist job I had just begun. I hope the organization (which isn't one I've worked for before) will keep me in mind for 2025 projects. And not traveling this year will be very handy because I should apply for Australian citizenship and, while I haven't even gotten so far as to looking into it closely, I am informed one needs to have been in Australia for the previous 12 months. Since most years I like to travel, I better take advantage of this opportunity before I travel again.
   So the travel indicated on the above map is to Tasmania and Perth to attend beekeeping conferences for my editor job, and I've had the opportunity to travel around the state a fair bit with my state government job.

   Parents arrived Nov 13th and departed Dec 9th after nearly a month here. That was lovely. Usually we go on some big trip somewhere with them, but other than dragging them along to some of the places I had to go for work it was enough entertainment putting on the wedding (which was only a small thing, but still involved a surprising amount of running around).


The Year Ahead
   As mentioned, in the immediate future we've got a stressful quick turnaround time for the next visa. Then, we're looking to move into the nearby city of Geelong -- currently we live about 50 minutes out of town and it will be a lot easier for Cristina to get a job and do things without living like a hermit in the forest like I've been happy to do these last nine years.
   We're also applying for a US tourist visa for Cristina. The hope is that will be granted and this upcoming winter (April?) we can travel to California so she can meet more of my relatives and see my homeland, and then she can continue on from there to visit Venezuela, which is a much much closer trip than how she got here (Venezuela to Istanbul to Singapore to here, three days of travel!), and reverso back to here (depending on the conditions they put on her Australian bridging visa we might ALSO need to file yet another visa filing to allow her to leave and re-enter the country).
   And then in September the world beekeeping conference is in Denmark and I really want to go. Maybe just for a week, which surprised my boss when I asked her for that time off (already) but I hope to also, if I can swing it between that and visiting California, also do a project in Africa again! One can't have everything, but all the options are looking good anyway.
   And then this current full time job with the government ends in December 2025. Already vaguely pondering what I'll do after that.. (and aiming to fill the coffers with savings against another period between dream jobs!)

   But yeah, so, right now I have two jobs I find very fulfilling. I can work from home for both. I get to have lunch every day with my beautiful wife. Compared to dragging oneself out the door every day to a job one might barely tolerate I can't believe how lucky I am fervently pray life will ever after be as good as it is now.

July 2nd, 2014, Day 1 - I slowly drift to wakefulness, judging morning on the frequency and enthusiasm of the crowing of the village's roosters. Abdul's wife brings me an omelet and then I sip tea with Baro on the porch as the rain slowly peters and gradually beekeepers begin to gather. There has been no reference to a clock or particular time all morning, this is just the pace of life.

   We set up chairs under an awning and begin with introductions -- it seems of the 20 or so attendees, about 70% have "Mamadou" as a first name, ad about 60% have "Diallo" as either a first, middle or last name. We spend the first morning on introductions and planning for the next two weeks. We finish for the day around 1pm and I explore the countryside around the village -- just outside the low wall around the village its green countryside of grassy meadows and forest. A river runs nearby, where the locals do their washing. Goats wander the meadows beside the village, each with a stick tied to their neck such that it sticks out horizontally, thus making them unable to enter the village through the narrow gates (which are usually kept close anyway but clearly it must be worth this added precaution)
   When I'm in the village the children, who the first day only peered cautiously from afar and ran if spotted, now frequently work up the college to call out "bonjour" to me from a safe distance.
   There's a well with a big hand pump lever in the middle of the village, usually the early-teen children seem to get the duty of pumping the pump when water is needed. The house I've been lodged in has a "western style toilet" (thank god, I'm really not fond of the ole hole in the ground), but because there's no running water line of course, when it needs to be flushed some kids are sent off to pump the pump and bring back water, which makes one rather reluctant to use the toilet unless one quite needs to.

   This and every subsequent evening would be very much like the previous one, with us all trooping over to the local elder's house for evening prayer, and then Baro would slowly make tea over glowing coals. I find he is enthusiastically religious -- not in a boorish or dangerously unhinged way, but in that he seems to genuinely enjoy the strict regimen of ramadan and the wisdom of the ages passed down to him through his lifetime of religious observation seems to fill him with a zen-like stoicism.



July 3rd, Day 2 - After lunch I enthusiastically get my bee suit and equipment ready, because we're going to visit beehives! The trainees look at me with alarm as I come out in the coveralls, saying "there's been a misunderstanding, we're just going to look at the hives, not open them!"
   "But I've got the equipment, let's open them!" I say
   "But no one else brought their suits." ::sigh:: okay we'll go look at the outside of beehives.



July 4th, Day 3 - The batteries on all my electronic devices are nearly all out due to a lack of any electricity for several days now. We still manage to avoid actually doing any beekeeping -- though this is hardly unusual, a seeming institutional reluctance to get stuck into it seems to be a theme of all projects.
   The children are now brave enough to come talk to me, as best they can. I show them pictures from beekeeping magazines I brought. One of the children in particular, Mamadou de Boba seems to have adopted me, spending hours talking to me despite that I can't understand a word he says but the occasional "is that so!" in English seems to be enough encouragement for him.
   I'm told there's a Peace Corps volunteer in the area, as a matter of fact we're a bit further in the bush than where she's based, which, since Peace Corps volunteers are the very definition of being deployed way out bush way, to be further in than one of them really feels like something. Having been dropped from the Peace Corps in 2011, to learn I'm out here further than the nearest PC volunteer feels a bit like, well, I made it out here after all.
   Another peculiar thing is becoming apparent to me. They seem to think it's more desirable to eat indoors. Because houses are literally "home-made" from locally made bricks, the walls don't support large windows and there's never power so it often results in eating alone in the dark while I'd prefer to be out in the light and fresh air but especially with the language barriers its hard to swim upstream against their desire to do me honor by ushering me in to a dark dungeon to take my lunch.

July 5th, Day 4 - we finally get a generator hooked up, which is barely powerful enough to charge some things a bit. AND we finally get to do some beekeeping! The hives as it happens are full of honey and we find we haven't brought out enough buckets to harvest honey into (with topbar hives honey is harvested by cutting it off the topbars into buckets).
   After lunch Mamadou de Boba and I wander around outside the village. I try to instill in him an interest in insects but with a complete language barrier he's prone to interpret me pointing out a cool insect on the ground as an invitation to try to smash it.
   In the evening Baro gets his hands on an avocado. He meticulously peels it almost as if it's some kind of ritual, culminating in removing the big spherical pit, holding it up and admiring it and commenting on where he will plant it, and then reverently eating the soft green flesh. He evidently found a source of avocados because every day he would perform this avocado ritual, including the admiring of the pit and commentary of plans involving it.

July 6th, Day 5 - Baro and I are sitting on the porch in the afternoon when a delegation of three men from the village approach us in a strangely formal manner. Uhoh, am I in trouble for something? Baro smiles knowingly before they even begin to speak.
   "The people of the village want to honor you with a gift of two roosters" he translates "... what do you want to do with them?"
   I'm usually a big softy when it comes to animals but I can't fathom what else I could possibly do with roosters than eat them, so I say "eat them I guess?"
   There's some interchange in the local language -- was this the wrong answer? Should I have had them set free like the pardoned turkeys? their response comes back to me "okay we'll cook the first one for dinner tonight."

   Later in the day we are finally able to spend a good amount of time beekeeping in the hives scattered through the forest surrounding the village.



July 7th, Day 6 - we get a new generator, finally I can charge things! I leave my computer charging while we travel to another village where hives are kept in a veritable jungle. I return to find that my computer had fully charged up, but having been left on, fully ran down to 0% again when the generator was shut off.

   I've been asked to teach about business planning, which at this point I don't have much background in. The expectation makes me a bit anxious, I'm comfortable talking about beekeeping, I know it well, but what know I about business planning that I can teach a bunch of adults most of whom are older than me?
   This first day of dabbling in the subject I'm surprised to learn how fundamentally my ideas of doing business are from theirs. I think of the individual as the "entrepreneurial unit" -- the self motivated executor of plans to make a profit. They have evidentally come from a long history of a more socialist world-view and as a body seem to think of "the co-op" as the essential entrepreneurial unit. The answer to all problems when I ask them to brainstorm is always "strengthening the co-ops!" Strengthening the co-ops is all well and good in my opinion, but the co-ops should exist to support the individual beekeepers, not vice versa.



July 8th, Day 7 -We walk three kilometers through the forest to a neighboring village. The forest is beautiful with lush greenery including tall ferns, no trash or pollution or sign of industrial modernity, just the occasional little homestead of a few cute huts with their own fenced in little crop plots. The beekeepers troop along the forest path carrying their suits, boots, buckets and such on their heads.
   At our destination village we split into two groups to do beekeeping and when we reconvene some women from the other group who had been kind of the the periphery on previous days proudly announce they had worked the bees without gloves, excellent.
   Someone says there's a traditional hive nearby ready to harvest and would I like to see them harvest it? "of course!"
   So we tromp a few hundred yards to where it is. This is the wicker basket style hive, located low in a small tree. They smok the bajeezes out of it and then start tearing it open. It clearly had been going for awhile, has old brood and old hatched out swarm cells. They toss the brood into the bushes, collect the honey, and then put a topbar hive in its place in hopes all the displaced bees will occupy it.

July 9th, Day 8 - We finally got a generator good enough to enable us to do a slide-show assisted presentation -- there's plenty of things which are best conveyed with pictures and diagrams. At one point though the rain outside and on the corrugated roof over our heads is so loud we can't hear each other and have to wait till it dies down.
   In the afternoon I'm out wandering around with my little buddy Mamadou de Boba again. We are joined by another boy of about 9, who shows us a place by the river where there's a bare muddy slope and of course you can take a bucket of water and pour it at the top and watch as it flows down in various channels -- what young boy isn't amused by that?? And very interestingly when you pour water in the right place at the top there seem to be small underground tunnels from which the water spouts out lower down the slope. Neat!
   So this is fun and keeps us entertained for awhile, I try not to get too muddy but at one point I slip on the muddy slope and fall down. Upon returning to the house I was staying in I am slightly mortified to find the beekeeping federation president and his wife, apparently on a sort of formal visit, sitting inside with Bara, all dressed nice, and here I am coming in all muddy. I felt myself like a small boy coming home all muddy to everyone's disappointment.



July 10th, Day 9 - We make candles in the morning, which is very successful. But later we have the business development presentation which I'm dreading as I really don't know what to say.
   Bara, however, has been translator for numerous business development presentations before, from people who specialize in the stuff. Baro, this stoical religious Malian, who spends his evening carefully making tea over coals, and is fond of pointing out the medicinal properties of random herbs he finds by the path, was suddenly holding forth on all the latest corporate boardroom buzzwords and making diagrams on page after page of the large eisel of flip-paper I had barely made use of.
   That afternoon he gets his hands on some aloe and sitting there on the porch, after telling me about its numerous medicinal properties, he carefully, lovingly, slices slivers off the tapered blade of aloe and eats them like they're sacred wafers.



July 11th, Day 10 - We make soap and then conclude the training. The landcruiser returns to bring us back to the capital. We spend the next two days driving back to the capital, ominously passing red cross ebola response convoys heading inland.

July 15th. Day 14 - Back in the capital. In the early hours of morning I listen to the patter of rain on the windows and the ululating call to prayer reverberating around the city in the dark pre-dawn hours. My back aches, my nose is running, I have a sore throat, a general feeling of fatigue. What are the initial symptoms of ebola, you might idly wonder? Well they are an achey back, a running nose, a sore throat, a general feeling of fatigue...

   In which our protagonist embarks on another adventure, from which he will not return unscathed, but several plot arcs that will echo ever more significantly in the following years are set into motion

June 26th, 2014 - The aircraft gently jolts into motion, which sensation is mainly transmitted from the seat in front of me through my knees, jammed against it. I peer out the window as the gate pulls away, and wonder why I can't shake this strong feeling I've forgotten something. I had packed for a year in Australia the morning-of, but for some reason for this, a month in the West African country of Guinea, I've had this anxiety for the past week that I'd forget something important. Usually the realization of the forgotten item hits around the time I pull onto the freeway. Sometimes it takes until we are pulling in to the airport. But this time it’s far overdue and it’s freaking me out.
   The crinkling noise of the guy in orange bermuda shorts next to me unfolding a newspaper draws my attention from the window. Wall Street Journal. Headline: "Bomb Blast in Abuja." Big picture front and center of carnage. I peer at the picture trying to see if I recognized any buildings in it. That's where I'd normally be headed!! I think to myself, easily picturing the hot chaotic atmosphere of Abuja. This seems very ominous.
   But I’m not headed to Nigeria this time, I’m headed to the country of Guinea on the western bulge of Africa. This time the danger isn’t religious fanatics with guns and explosives, but deadly unstoppable microbes.

   Several months earlier, a two year old boy named Emile playfully entered a hollow tree in the forests of a southern province of Guinea. Deforestation had driven fruit bats from a different area into this hollow tree, and it seems they carried the Ebola virus. The boy soon died, followed by his immediate family, followed by most of his village, in a rapidly expanding wave of death. Ebola is highly contagious and at the time resulted in horrible death within 21 days for about 80% of those infected. This project had already been postponed on account of the disease, but upon realizing it wasn’t about to blow over they decided to just go ahead with it.

   As the flight accelerates down the runway I ponder why I feel so anxious. It's not like I could be unprepared, I've done five of these projects already. The guy next to me's body odor intrudes upon my thoughts and I lean closer to the window. Tiny houses go by far down below, and cars like toys. We soar up over Saddleback Mountain and leave Orange County behind. Just over our small little mountain from Orange County lies rugged landscape akin to the planet of Tatooine. As I hungrily devour the tiny bag of little pretzels that pass for a meal now (because lord knows there's no meal that falls between 8am and 3pm) I gaze out at the barren landscape below and try to make out Jabba's Palace or perhaps a tuskan raider village, but all I see is a windfarm. I try punching some buttons on the screen in the seat in front of me and find it would cost at least $6 to watch anything, and I'd have to pay for headphones too. I read my book (Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World).



   Boarding my transatlantic flight I narrow my eyes at the entitled bastards in first class as I make my way to my seat, a middle seat in a middle row, ugh. But as they dim the lights and begin backing away from the gate, hark are the angels singing, a mysterious light shining from above upon the seats on either side of me that flying cherubs are indicating are vacant?? I turn off the overhead lights lest everyone be disturbed and the flight attendants chase the cherubs away to prepare for takeoff.
   Hurtling through the night is much more comfortably now that I’m not on a US airline. A little complimentary bottle of mediocre wine comes by, and there’s food, and free headphones and free movies. But I’m still strangely anxious. Still haven't thought of anything I've forgotten, which is unsettling. As I watch The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is about travel and being adventurous, I start to ponder more existential hypotheses -- what if I just felt guilty because I need this project as much as the people being trained? Since returning from Turkey ten months ago it’s just been back to the same old job at “the bee mines,” and the one exciting other job prospect I had had, had hired all four other finalist candidates leaving me wondering what was wrong with me and if I'd ever manage to get a better job.
   Or maybe I just feel anxious about taking so much time off work during the busy season? ...but then again, my boss hadn't even asked when I'd return. "When I was your age," he'd regaled us at work the other day, "I was chasing bees all over the world."

   Many hours later, I’m boarding my final flight from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to Conakry, many brightly robed Africans and I jostle towards the gate in not-quite-a-line. The flight attendant scans my ticket on a machine, which flashes a red light and makes an angry buzz-alert noise. Oh no! The flight attendant frowns at the ticket and punches its number into her computer. Now the machine makes a short peppy R2-D2 noise and dispenses a new ticket for me – I’ve been upgraded to first class!
   I settle into the fully reclining armchair seat and narrow my eyes at the mere mortals shuffling by to the purgatory of coach class. pah, commoners! Once in the air the flight attendant comes by with a towel over his arm, pouring us champagne, a four course meal for lunch involving foie gras (which I dislike but acknowledge that it’s fancy), scallops, and creme brulee, among other things. I doze away like a happy otter, not wanting this supremely comfortable flight to ever end!




   By and by we begin to descend, and Guinea materializes as a landscape seemingly devoid of human development, a maze of curving rivers and damp looking foliage. And this just outside the capitol. There are nearly no buildings in sight, at least out my port-side window, until immediately prior to landing.
   While deplaning I get to talking to a woman from Doctors Without Borders who is here to help fight “the worst ebola outbreak in history,” as she describes it. “It’s completely out of control!” she adds confidentially. Hmmm well great.

   Outside the terminal it's hot and humid, and there are the usual throngs of pushy porters trying to help me (for a fee) and taxi drivers insistent on taking me whereever I needed to go, but I’ve been through this before and plow through the crowd to the two staffmembers from The Organization (identifiable by their hats), a young man and young woman, and load my things into the Organization's landcruiser.
   Conakry seems more like a large village or expansive town than a city. Previous African capitols I've been in (Abuja, Addis Ababa) are at least characterized by paved streets and big buildings, but across the street from the airport there are houses with corrugated metal roofs, and dirt roads with streams of filthy water running through them. Not quite shantytown, more "functional squalor." The Lonely Planet guidebook describes Conakry as "smelling nausious" in general but the misty rain must have been dampening that effect. We wend our way around throngs of children playing soccer. World Cup fever is in full swing.



   Total travel time: 28 hours. Hotel is decent: the AC works, the power hardly ever goes out, and the internet usually works, what more can one ask for? I’ve been provided $414 for the expected up-country expenses, which comes out to 2.8 million guinean francs. I’m a millionaire! But the largest note they have is the 10,000 franc note, worth about $1.48, so I feel more like a druglord with these cumbersome bricks of bills rubber-banded together. And the room doesn't have a safe! I’m carrying a fortune by local standards but there’s no safe! But my gimlet eye alights on a pertinent oddity – there’s no safe, but there’s a lock on the room mini-fridge, with a key in it. So I place my cold hard cash as well as my laptop in the fridge and lock it before trotting down the street for Turkish food.
   Merhaba, merhaba.
   Returning to my room I take my laptop out of the fridge and turn it on. Rather to my surprise my laptop bursts into tears over the indignity of having been stored in the fridge. I realize I had forgotten some basic physics, a cold laptop in an atmosphere at near 100% humidity immediately begins gathering copious amounts of condensation. Fat droplets of water roll down its sleek black sides like tears. Fearing it will fry itself I quickly shut it down and unplug the fridge so it can’t make my computer cry again.



   I have a few days in the capital. Pounding rain alternates with steaming sunshine, kids kick soccer balls around on streets potholed with mouldering puddles. I meet another volunteer just finishing a project, as he stumbles back into the hotel after being held by the military/police (gendarmes) for a few hours because he’d taken a picture of the statue in front of the military barracks down the street, and he was only released after he gave in and bribed them $50 to release him. He soon departs to head back home, but I also meet another volunteer who is going up-country at the same time I am, Edie, an older woman who does business development.
   Graphs of ebola deaths keep rising. Ebola is here in the capital but not out in the country where I’m going, which lends a feeling of particular urgency to escape the fetid capital. Finally on Tuesday morning The Organization’s car arrives. They have a new driver, they explain, because the previous driver died on Saturday.

There is a section that takes place between the previous LJI entry and this, The Faraway Land and City of Light (Which was itself an LJI entry in 2014, I'm assuming you all remember every LJI entry from 2014 of course ;) ) but I think if one jumps right in here one can pretty well put it all together

   
I. Through the Night
September 1st, 2013, 8pm: “I need you here beside me” the girl I thought had broken up with me two weeks earlier is texting me. And she’s already bought herself overnight bus tickets from Istanbul to Çanakkale, the city beside Gallipoli.
   “Can you tell me how to get from here to Çanakkale tonight?” I ask the bald man sitting at the front desk at the other end of the rooftop lobby.
   “In the morning I will show you” he grumbles, glaring at me over his reading glasses.
   “No I need to be there by the morning” I emphasize.
   “Sorry I can’t help you till morning,” he says, busying himself with reorganizing the desk. I narrow my eyes in his general direction, suspecting he just wants me to pay for another night.
   I get out my laptop and try to make sense of the bus routes. They are all different companies serving different cities, to plot an immediate overnight multi-city route between two non-major cities is as challenging as escaping the famous Minotaur’s labyrinth.
   I email the travel agent in Istanbul who has inexplicably seemed not to mind continuing to field questions from me even though being a cheapskate I hadn’t actually booked anything more than a bus ticket through them. In this case, despite being way past normal business hours, Ruta from True Blue Travel Agency calls me back within an hour of my email and helps me plot out a hare-brained bus-jumping scheme to get to Gallipoli.
   The sour-looking man behind the hotel desk seems rather sullen as I check out that I had succeeded despite his lack of cooperation.
   Step one: catch a local dolmuş to the city otogar (main bus terminal) where I have to be on a bus departing in an hour (10 pm). This end of town is dark and quiet. Nearby a grocer is wheeling his wares back indoors. I look up hopefully at every passing vehicle. I begin to fret.
   Finally, the distinctive white minivan shape of a dolmuş comes along going the correct direction. I flag it down with my hand and hop on with my seabag. “Autogar?” I ask the driver hopefully, and he nods.
   An uneventful wait at the otogar, and seven hours rolling through the night on a Turkish inter-city bus — like all inter-city Turkish buses, it would put Greyhound to shame. Comfortable seats, working AC, occasional brief stops at nice rest stops (well lit, well stocked with food and snacks), not packed in like sardines. And they roll a tray down the aisle occasionally with complimentary snacks and tea or coffee, you know, like the airlines in America no longer do.
   Arriving in Izmir, ancient Smyrna, at 5 am, what initially felt like a plenty-of-time hour-long layover turns frantic as I run around the enormous terminal, up and down deserted echoing halls and lonely stairs, trying to figure out where and how to buy my ticket for the 6 am bus on Troy Lines to Çanakkale. I find Troy Lines hidden in the basement at 5:40, and he wants to sell me a 9 am ticket. “No, there is a 6 am bus!” I insist. He calls his supervisor. They look at their computer and scratch their chins. They sell me a 6 am ticket.
   I dash up the deserted stairs, and, with less than two minutes to spare, I breathlessly show my ticket and clamber aboard the 6 am bus. Four more hours smoothly whirring along the Turkish countryside as the sky slowly becomes a lighter shade of blue and the morning sun at last spills over the hills to illuminate valleys and villages.
   “I’m just passing ‘Ana çıkış,’” I text Deniz the words on a large sign we pass.
   “That means ‘main exit’ you dork” she laughingly responds.
   The giant replica horse at Troy slips by out the window and I know we are close. Just months earlier Deniz and I had traveled there together. Happy fields of flowering sunflowers had surrounded us as we had made the short bus trip from Çanakkale to the Troy site.
   For centuries the location of Troy had been a matter of speculation and search, its very existence often in dispute. In 1870 German businessman Heinrich Schliemann began excavations on what turned out to be the correct site of Troy, but destroyed much of the site due to his extremely rough methods, using dynamite (!!) and battering rams to quickly remove everything above the layer he thought was the correct one (it wasn’t) primarily just in search of shiny gold artifacts. The most famous Trojan War era layer in fact was one of the layers he blasted through.
   Subsequent archeology has been more careful and in the current site, you can stroll amidst the historic walls and streets of Troy. As a history nerd, I had marveled at being able to put my hand on the actual walls of Troy. There was also, quite naturally, a wooden replica Trojan Horse one could enter, because of course there was.
   But back in the present, my bus is soon pulling into the Çanakkale otogar. I easily recognize it from our earlier trip to Troy. And after the briefest of stops my bus is pulling out of it again, not having given anyone time to even disembark.
   “We’re not stopping here??” I exclaim to my fellow passengers, jumping to my feet in alarm. Looking around all I see is wide brown eyes looking at me in surprise. Finally, a young woman a few rows back speaks up in English.
   “We’re headed into town now”
   “Oh. Thanks.” I said with relief, sitting down a sheepishly.

   I step out of the bus in the center of town, just beside the Hellespont, the Dardanelles, the narrow strait connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea, the gap through which Jason voyaged after the Golden Fleece, a gap which had flummoxed Persian, Roman, and Ottoman armies, staring from their castles across the gap at their enemies. And most famously to the modern consciousness, the Allied ANZAC armies in World War I had valiantly and futilely thrown themselves against it.
   Across the gap today, one sees on the Gallipoli Peninsula an enormous clearing in the forest, onto which has been sculpted a Turkish soldier amid flames, valiantly holding a rifle while gesturing to the words “Dur Yolcu” — “Halt wayfarer!”
“Meet me at the cafe we ate at before” she had said, it’s barely 100 feet from where I disembarke from the bus, and there she is.

   “What do you mean you thought we’d broken up?” she’s soon asking
   “Well I thought your ‘please don’t contact me’” message was pretty clear.
   “I was just getting distracted wondering if you were about to message me is all.” she explains.
   But things aren’t fixed. That evening we sit at a bar in awkward silence, it’s hard to imagine now how the conversation had once flowed so seamlessly.



II. Memoriams.
   The next day Deniz and I take the ferry across the strait and (for 70 lira a person) join a tour group of Aussies to visit the ANZAC memorials. The Turkish guides are respectful, the Aussies quiet and serious. The slopes upon which the ANZACs had fought are rugged and steep. The wind gently rustles amid the pines, and I look out at ANZAC Cove, broad blue and serene, and think “well there’s certainly less beautiful places to fight trench warfare.”

   Just after 4am on April 25th 1915 — the ANZACs approach the dim silhouette of shore in the dark of night. Steamboats had taken them as close as 75 yards from the beach, but the last approach is to be done in small boats each rowed by four Royal Navy sailors. There is silence except the splish splish of the oars and gurgle of water against the hulls. Would there be an uncontested landing or were they about to have to fight for every inch?
   A single gunshot rings out, and a silhouette appears on the ridge, calling something out in a foreign language. Moments later there’s a crackle of gunfire and flashes from the platoon of 70 Turks that have been in position on the ridge for over an hour already. Bullets splash in the water like rain, crack into the sides of the boats. Someone cries out from a hit to the arm, another trooper slumps over dead. Perhaps they wouldn’t be in “Constantinople by nightfall” as promised.

   In the cemeteries, rows upon rows of clean white squares mark the British, Australian, and New Zealand fallen. Deniz is always a few steps ahead of me, moving on like a restless ghost when I come to the sign she’s reading. On a hilltop called “Lone Pine” a large memorial contains a wall with the names of all the ANZAC fallen. It brings to mind the American Vietnam War wall. Looking at all the graves and names, one may well ask why a young man from Brisbane would have to die in Gallipoli. And to a degree, it’s from exactly that question that the modern Australian nation arose (though it was already an independent state since 1901)
   “The sunflowers are all dead.” I observe as the bus winds its way back to the ferry platform.
   “Hm?” Deniz responds absently.
   In the evening we can’t find a comfortable bar. Everywhere is deserted, playing irritating music. We have some raki and call it a night in a state of vague annoyance.



III. The Other Side
   Deniz and I once again take the ferry across the strait and (for 7 lira a person) join a Turkish tour to visit the other side of the trenches, the Turkish side. The guide proudly tells us tales of heroism: of the Turkish soldier who lifted 250-pound shells by himself to fire his cannon after the rest of his gun crew had been killed; how commander Ataturk had ordered a unit to make a suicidal stand until re-enforcements could arrive (“Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place.”) and they did.
   We stand by a statue of a Turkish soldier carrying a wounded ANZAC back to his lines, based on another story from the war. The reconstructed trenches wind along the top of the bluff, off to our left and right, and below the turquoise waters of yet another bay the British landed in gleam. It’s easy to picture the men sitting in these battlements, staring down at that same bay down below, as strange men from half the world away swarmed their beaches.
   Another famous quote from Ataturk inscribed on a monument at Gallipoli exemplifies the almost-strange lack of lingering animosity between the Turks and Anzacs:

“The heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives on this country’s soil! You are in the soil of a friendly country now. Therefore rest in peace. You are side by side with the little Mehmets. The mothers who send their sons to the war! Wipe your tears away. Your sons are in our bosom, are in peace and will be sleeping in peace comfortably. From now on, they have become our sons since they have lost their lives on this land.”

   We ride the bus together back to Istanbul, silently side by side, looking out the window. I miss the she she used to be. Did that person ever exist, or had I made her out in my mind to be someone other than who she was. For that matter, how different was I than the person she had perhaps made me in her mind, during the years of long distance communications before we’d ever met? Could I ever have been that person? Would I have wanted to?
   At the airport she kisses me goodbye, just quickly but I'm surprised to receive it at all. I turn and go through security. One last glimpse of her from the other side, she’s small amongst the crowd and is soon lost from view.

   In August 2013 after a fight (in which for poetical sake we may say she breathed fire) my Turkish girlfriend cast me adrift to wander Turkey alone. That should be all the context you need for the rest of this to make sense but if you're curious: this is the immediately prior installment.



The Chimaera
August 24th, 1233 BC – Fethi blinks the salt spray from his eyes and leans over the heaving gunwale to peer into the dark ahead. Between the sparkling starry canopy of the sky and the inky blackness of the sea the mountains of the coast can be discerned more as a negative space, except .. there seems to be a flickering orange glow near the top of one of them just coming in to view.
   He scampers back along the edge of the small boat, for the middle is heaped with cargo, to where the rotund first mate is holding the tiller.
“Sir, sir, what is that??” he asks the mate, pointing.
   “Ah that, that’s the Chimaera” the man answers with an aura of mystery and a chuckle. Above them in the darkness the sail billows and the lines creak.
   “What’s the chimaera?” asks the boy.
   “It’s a terrible monster.” says the man trying to sound Very Serious, “with the head of a lion, its tail is a snake, and on it’s back it has… um … the head of a goat!”
   “Really?”
   “Yes and it breaths fire, as you can see.”
   “Wow”
   The mate struggles not to laugh at the gullibility of the youngest member of his crew. But really the the perpetual fire there is an important landmark. They wouldn’t normally be sailing at night but the pirates are rumored to be operating in the area and in addition to their regular cargo they need to bring this passenger Bellerophon to the city of Telmessos up the coast. The mate glances back at Bellerophon, who is also still up, gazing at the glow of fire on the hill.



August 24th, 2013 – Up ahead in the darkness, the sharp sinister yellow glow of fire flickers beyond the silhouetted trees dancing in the wavering light. “The Chimaera!” someone whispers, as we pause on the dark path up the mountain. “According to Greek mythology, it was a creature with the head of a lion, a fire-breathing goat’s head coming out of its back, and a snake's head on its tail” our guide explains. I try to picture it. A fire-breathing goat’s head on its back!
   It’s a long walk up the mountain path through the forest by night, lit along by flashlights. I haven’t met anyone else on the tour and the darkness doesn’t lend itself to making friends. Despite being surrounded by other groups of tourists I am alone in the dark forest. We emerge from the trees into a stoney clearing, fire licks up from a dozen different places in the rock. Apparently, it is a natural vent of methane from the ground that has been continuously on fire for all of known history.
   “Hot dogs! Marshmallows! Hot dogs!” a Turkish man strolls among the tourists who have scrambled up the mountain trail in the dark, pitching his wares. They come with free use of his roasting poles. For just a few lira you too can roast a hot dog in Chimaera’s breath!


   “Hey … hey!” I realize someone in the group of people drinking is trying to get my attention, as I make my way through the open area of the hostel after returning from the Chimaera. The hostel, in the valley of Olympos just below Mt Chimaera, consists of a bunch of glorified sheds (“tree houses”) spread about among the trees, lights hung festively between them and the trees, spreading a cheery lighting among the area of couches, hammocks and picnic tables. Several groups have been cheerfully drinking all evening. I’m aiming to head to bed and depart in the morning.
   “Did you just come from Chimaera?” this guy with an Australian accent asks me.
   “Yeah”
   “How was it?”
   I approach the group, they appear to be all in their 20s (Turkey is not a first trip abroad kind of place), from all over the world, having just met here at this impromptu gathering. My friendly interlocutor is Stephen, from Melbourne, Australia. I’m drawn into the group and we play drinking games for an hour or two before walking a short distance up the road past several similar hostels to the one nightclub in the valley, where not even the bartender speaks Turkish (he appears to be from Jamaica). In the early hours of the morning, the sky already becoming pale, we all stumble back down the road arms around eachother trying not to collectively crash.

   The next morning I was planning on moving on. But as I make my way to the front desk, my planned escape is interrupted by my new friends lounging about on the divans.
   “Don’t leave already, come to the beach with us!”
   Well, okay what’s the hurry. I ask the hostel manager if it would be at all possible to extend my stay, he vaguely waves me away with    “just tell me when you’re leaving.” Continual postponements of departure are apparently common in this valley of the lotus eaters. Stephen has already postponed several times from his original intended departure date
   We spend most of the day lounging on the pebbly beach, swimming, and playing card games. Soon growing impatient with that I wander along among the ancient ruins overgrown with foliage just inland from the beach. In places, the walls are intact above head height and one can walk along the cobbled narrow streets and imagine it as it had once been. It had been a pirate haven in ancient times, but the ancient Greek hero Bellerophon killed all of a band of pirates in the area before going on to face the Chimaera, and in 78 BC a Roman expedition including a 22-year-old Julius Caeser once and for all quelled the pirates living there (and the pirate king, Zenicetus, set fire to his own house and perished, according to the Greek historian Strabo, which I feel like is a vague hint at a more interesting story).

   In the afternoon I find a Turk sitting in a plastic chair by the trail to the beach, with a sign for Alaturka Cruises, and decide to set up my next move. He tells me to come back at 7 pm to talk to his boss.
   I return at 7:00 to be informed his boss had passed out drunk, but it’s no matter, I should come at 7 am for pickup.
That night we all go out again, and at 2am I’m feeling the warm summer night air whipping past my face as with newfound friends I’m heading back down the curvy mountain road in someone’s swanky convertible.



The Turquoise Coast
   As a sailor myself I generally disdain “cruises,” but I had been convinced that this would be worthwhile by the simple math that $200 for four days, would be cheaper than accommodation and food would be otherwise anyway, and this would be the most practical way to see a number of places on the rugged coast. And it would be a small sailboat with just about a dozen passengers. Okay, sign me up.

   When the dolmuş (passenger minivan, from the Turkish word for “stuffed” that also gives rise to the stuffed grapeleaf dish of “dolmas”) arrives to pick me up the next morning, one of my new friends, an Australian from Melbourne makes an instant snap decision to come along as well — this is how you live the backpacker life properly!

   “We’re here to pick up…” the driver pauses to look at his list “Michelle Robertson?” the driver asks at the next hostel.
   “Oh, um, she just got in a different dolmuş”
   “What do you mean a different dolmuş?”
   “There was another here a moment ago she must have thought it was you and she got in”
   “Where was that one going?”
   A helpless shrug greets this. What unhappy fate has Michelle from Brisbane been whisked off to? Will she be fed to the Chimaera?
Well, there’s nothing for it but to continue on our way without her. As we wend up the curvy mountain road through the pine forest suddenly around a corner a lone girl on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere is waving us down – it’s our missing passenger! Apparently realizing her mistake she had immediately disembarked the dolmuş even though it was in the middle of nowhere.
   Half an hour later we arrive at the little coastal town of Demre, where the 65-foot traditional “gulet” schooner Eleutheria is one of the few vessels tied up to the dock in the broad shallow bay.
   Our crew consists of a cheerful suntanned weather-beaten captain; his rotund jovial father-in-law as first mate, who doesn’t speak any English but always has a sly conspiratorial grin on his face and laughing eyes; and the cook, a slight man who always seems to be out of sight but can whip up amazing Turkish meals in the little galley..
   As for passengers, from the dolmuş we have myself, my friend Stephen from Melbourne, Nick from Canada, two more guys from Melbourne who will spend the entire time fairly intoxicated, and the girl from Brisbane whom we’d nearly lost; on the boat itself we find two cute Spanish girls, a middle-aged Spanish couple (both journalists), and the last addition to join us on deck, via the captain diving in and pulling her back from where she was slowly drifting away on a pool noodle, another girl from Melbourne. We are soon underway and being served the first of many delicious meals.

   Our first destination is a cave on the coast. The captain practically puts the boat’s nose right into. A banner above the cave advertises a pirate bar, which I feel rather diminishes the atmosphere.



   Our next destination is a cute little village just off the coast. With no road access to the mainland, the streets are just two or three people wide between the beautiful little cottages. All three crewmembers apparently live here. The rocky hilltop above the village is crowned with the ruins of a fortress built to fight pirates. From the walls of the fortress ruin, more foundations and old paths are visible in shallow water beside the village where either the land had subsided or the water level has risen.

   In the evening, anchored off some unknown cove, we passengers linger over another delicious meal (the things they can do with eggplant!), without cell phones or television or video games no one is in a hurry to do anything other than enjoy the conversation. Until we cast off from the flimsy Demre dock I had been neurotically checking my phone for any signs of rapprochement from Her, but with no signal and my phone long dead, there’s nothing for it but to put it out of mind. After dinner, we play backgammon or swam lazily about the boat, cans of Efes in one hand and a pool noodle in the other. It is so pleasant and warm that even coming out of the water dripping at 2 am I don’t feel cold, we all sleep on deck.



   The next day we stop in at the coastal town of Kaş (pronounced cash), another town of authentically beautiful Turkish architecture draped in purple bougainvilleas on the steep Lycian coast. Just outside of town, a large ancient amphitheater still stands facing the sea, one can easily imagine what a nice place it would have been to see any kind of show, in fact it’s in such good condition surely they must still have shows here.

   At anchor in another cove that night we once again while away the hours after the delicious dinner playing backgammon and chatting. I wish I could more often force a group of friendly strangers to forgo electronic entertainments and connections, though sadly as they make electronic devices ever better to connect from anywhere this dream just becomes ever more chimerical.

   The beach of Oludeniz is our next stop. This beautiful beach features in most Turkish tourism montages, as a peninsula and sandbar give the beach a distinct semicircular shape. Somehow all the promotional pictures get it looking pristine and empty (of course), but after I swim to shore I find myself carefully picking my way through a thriving rookery of pale, pasty, bulgey Russian walruses in speedoes, packing every square foot of the gravelly strand. High above, paragliders circle in the updraft, having launched from the steep slopes surrounding the beach. Strolling on shore I find the road lined with “British Fish and Chips!” shops.

   We continue to “Santa Claus Island.” St Nicholas Island is a small island just off the coast covered with the ruins of an ancient monastery where Saint Nicholas, yes, that one, Santa Claus himself, had presided. Interesting fact, the actual Saint Nicholas famously punched a priest he disagreed with in the face over a disagreement about the formulation of the Nicene Creed — so be wary of his naughty list!
   We while away the afternoon with our usual rounds of swimming, backgammon, delicious meals, and meandering conversations. At first backgammon, a national pastime of Turks, had looked to me like a very simple game, but the more I play it the more I realize it’s akin to some sort of linear chess. Turks such as the captain patiently explain strategy to us while doing their best to hold back and not beat the rest of us too badly.
   A Turkish husband and wife come along in a small wooden boat propelled only by the husband at the oars, while the wife makes fresh crepes on a stove in the boat and sells them to us and other boats in the area.
   Our usually-wise captain recommended we visit the ruins at sunset to enjoy the view but on this advice, I’m going to disagree with him — the sun set behind a hill anyway and we just found ourselves squinting in the fading light trying to read the informational signs. I never even found where Rudolf had been disallowed from playing in reindeer games!
   Back aboard the Eleutheria we are treated to the grandest most delicious dinner of them all, as the cook magically brings dish after dish from the galley. At one end of the table the Australians tell stories of drunken adventure while at the other end the journalists and others discuss current events, until it all melds together. The boat’s beer supply actually runs out and the captain breaks into his personal supply. I wistfully reflect what a nice distraction this has been – the next day the journey will end and I’ll have to find out if She has been trying to email me or has been happily ambivalent – not having any way to know has been nice but it can’t last forever. But such thoughts are quickly swept away by the engaging conversations around me. The moon slowly rises, a big red crescent, low over the eastern point we had sailed around to get here.



And this, conveniently, brings us right up to immediately prior to the beginning of an LJ entry I had written for the 2014 season of LJ Idol: The Faraway Land and City of Light

   In the popular imagination, I imagine, "honeycomb" is a gooey dripping amber chunk of honey with, somewhere inside it the hexagonal framework of the beeswax supporting it. In actual fact it rarely looks like this.
   When first built wax comb is a crisp bone-white, one often sees it like this where bees have nested briefly out in the open on a branch. Sometimes they've only been there 48 hours before finding a new home but they've already build a few bright white blades of comb. Older comb that has been used to store honey is a creamy yellow and when full up of honey they seal the honey in with a snow-white layer of capping.
   Bees use comb for two distinct purposes (mainly), there, the honey storage, but there's also "brood comb" where they raise new bees. Here in the core of the hive they ley eggs, which develop from little pieces of rice into larvae, which look like grubs, only cutely -- they do not creep around though but stay snug in their cell like you in a sleeping bag in a tent on a cold night. And then after six days the nurse bees put a cap over the cell and the young bee pupates in its cell, spinning a silk cocoon around itself (you don't think of bees making cocoons around themselves now do you). This brood comb is distinct from the honey comb, the cappings over the brood is not snowy white like the honey but a pleasing light brown in the youngest brood. Shortly it becomes a cinnomen red-brown and eventually, after a few years, a dark mohagony brown of dark chocolate. Along with this chocolatey color it is by this point no longer crisp and angular but thick with rounded edges. If you were to try to cut it with a knife you'd find it is also thick but yielding, again like chocolate, but also filled with the cellophane-like crinkling remnants of bee silk. And it's delicious like chocolate -- no not to you or I but to the "small hive beetle" (which looks like the lady bug's evil alter ego, all black), and the wax moth, whom we'll come back around to so stick a pin in it.

   Where does beeswax come from, I hear you crying out into the void on many a dark night (in your tent). Young bees extrude it from four glands on the underside of their abdomen, they then detach these and mold them into the wax comb they is being built. Interestingly, it does not begin with the famous hexagons but begins with circles that then become hexagons through I suppose the morphological pressures pushing and pulling their walls.

   Beeswax mainly consists of esters and saturated and unsaturated fatty acids -- WAIT WAIT I see your eyes glazing over, and let me tell you right now I haven't the faintest idea what an ester is either, but what I can tell you is beeswax readily absorbs most chemicals it comes in contact with, especially oils. As a result of this, old dark comb is full of all kinds of chemical build up from things the bees have brought into the hive. Debris including from the bees own cute little dirty feet as they come in from outside, gets absorbed into the beeswax (leading to a build up of a high amount of "proteinacious material" (read, delicious to moths and beetles, they be licking their lips just reading this), as well as the silk cocoon lining (silk is almost entirely protein). As a result of this build up, especially the latter one, the actual size of the inside of the cell gets progressively smaller, which causes the bees developing in the cells to be smaller, in one experiment bees emerging from 7 year old comb were only 55% as big as bees developing in fresh comb, and many other experiments how smaller bees are less productive. Ii imagine if they could talk they'd have really high pitched voices they'd be extremely self conscious about.
   But let's get back to those wax moths for a moment, that find this old comb so delicious. Galleria of the galleriini They generally aren't present when there's a lot of bees, but if a hive has become empty of bees or nearly so is when they run riot. Their fat white grubs will burrow through that chocolatey old comb, rendering it into the sticky cobwebbing like the devil's cotton candy. Then the grumbs spin clusters of cocoons that have the consistency of styrofoam. Finally the emerge as drab and dim-witting moths that flutter about ineffectually but somehow find their way into more hives eventually. Many a beginning beekeeper has opened a hive to find its just been reduced to grey webbing and packing peanuts (would that be the peanut galleria). Experienced beekeepers learn this fate is easily avoided but still generally harbor a vindictive grudge against wax moths (I told you to stick a pin in them didn't I?)
   We tend to lose track of the Old Ways, of how things were Before Us. What happens when people aren't manually rotating out old combs after all? Well, before we were keeping bees in boxes they tended to live in tree hollows. Established feral (naturally occurring) hives only live about six years (probably not a coincidence that that's about the point at which the comb becomes particularly too old), then the hive fails. The population dwindles away. A greater or lesser wax moth flutters drunkenly in for better or worse, and lays its nigh microscopic eggs all over, which soon become dozens and dozens of fat squirming grubs turning the wax into so much unsettlingly-sticky fluff, which they leave behind when they themselves go fluttering out to find more mischief. Now there's a cavity space full of fluff, which some mice or squirrels find make a snug home, until their activities have used up all the cursed cotton and left an empty cavity space ... perfect for reoccupation by a new swarm of bees. The natural cycle.
   The man-managed cycle, meanwhile, requires that these old frames be painstakingly cleaned of the old comb. The old wax is either cut, melted or blasted with a pressure washer, to remove the comb from the wooden frame. This old wax weighs 5 times as much as new comb, precisely because it is now 80% stuff other than beeswax ("slumgum" its called), so even melting it down can feel unrewarding considering one is mostly getting this waste material. And then one needs to rewire the frames and put now straight pieces of "foundation" wax in them to guide the bees. Bees can obviously build on their own but with no guides they might not necessarily build straight enough on the frames.
   So we know what we need to do, what we should do, as a good beekeeper, right? Change out those frames. But a few years ago I came up with a rather unorthodox solution. I do rotate those old frames out of the brood area to the honey boxes wherefrom they will be removed from the hive at harvest. But then, as they're sitting empty in storage in the shed waiting for the hives to be ready to receive them, ripe for nibbling my wax moths ...I, well, I don't mean to scandalize you but, well, I let them. Just a nibble. Going through them about once a month is frequent enough to catch the wax moth larvae having turned just a few square inches of the comb into hell-floof, which I remove. And those squirming grubs I pluck them out and toss them to the waiting magpies who come with heart shapes in their eyes. Repeated every so often until the whole core of the comb has been removed, I'm left with a frame with just a border of old comb, empty in the middle, not needing to be rewired. I haven't wasted any time mucking around but now have a frame I can put into a hive, and the bees will use the remaining edges as a guide to build the requisite straight comb.
   The resultant comb will have swirls of dark chocolate brown whirled with the golden french vanilla coloured brand new comb like an ice cream of buzzing bees, or, perhaps, as I gaze fondly at it, I might say like a purring calico cat.

I've once again been too crazy busy to post the next installment of this even though it was already written. My intention had been to post all of the chapter in weekly sections in the hope that the reader here might have at least some semblance of context-within-the-chapter. Ah well. Most recent distraction on top of my other things was teaching an advanced beekeeping class in Ghana via (zoom) (google equivalent but I like to use zoom as the generic because Microsoft "teams" and google "meet" really don't clearly convey the concept). I don't think I ever thought to appreciate that putting together a top of the line teaching curriculum is for the teacher even more involved than simply having to write a paper as a student. Not only do I need to double check and flesh out the background information on every fact I intend to cover I also need to find appropriate visual aids and strategize the delivery all out. Anyway I digress. Here is the next section, including a few paragraphs that I posted last time but I'm including them again because I think they're important to the context of the whole, I'll indicate where the new material begins if one wants to skip to it.

   I always wanted to go to Cappadocia in the center of Turkey, so I decide to head there. I catch a small bus on a nearby corner, and it winds through the narrow streets of the old city collecting passengers from various stops. Eventually, the main terminal looms ahead, a vast windowless tomb-like edifice, that swallows us as we drive down a ramp right into its dark gullet. Stepping out from the shuttlebus I find myself in a cavernous parking garage with whole freestanding ticket offices whose roofs don’t touch the dripping concrete ceiling above. Buses lumber out of the darkness like mythical beasts. Crowds of people wait in the eternal night, like some dystopian underground city. The people here are almost entirely Turks — this isn’t how tourists get around. Kebab carts vent greasy smoke into the black abyss, surrounded by plastic chairs and tables, as if on a grassy lawn rather than underground oily pavement. I ping-pong through with a few well-placed questions to people who look like they know their way around — “Pegasus? Pegasus?” I ask, and they point off into the darkness. I splash through puddles in the gloom and find the office and buses of the Pegasus line.
   I climb the steps into the bus and enter a bubble of light and civilization in the gritty darkness. Soon we roll out of the catacombs, back into the gathering twilight of summer evening. Onto the highway, and soon we are rumbling through the purpling dusk, from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Bridge, with sweeping suspension spans like the Golden Gate.
   We fly down the highway through the night, and I’m mostly able to sleep on this comfortable bus, interrupted twice by rest stops during which most of the passengers exit to stand about in the cold night air gasping out acrid cigarette smoke — not quite the fire breathing chimera Bellerophon sought when he rode the original Pegasus in legend. The sun rises over undulating hills and occasional blocky villages of small apartment buildings.
   Suddenly, around a bend, a town comes into view that looks like it was hewn right out of the face of the hill — stone houses project from the cliff face, but the windows continue up the rockface itself! Rock spires rear up above the buildings, dwarfing the man-made minarets. We are in Cappadocia!

[this is where last installment ended]



   I step out into the fresh morning air of what vaguely resembles a quiet modern hippodrome – the bus turnaround is an oblong oval cobblestone loop with the glass sided bus shelter in middle. Surrounding it rising upward on the slopes like the semi-circular seating of an amphitheatre rise the stone buildings, minarets and spires of Goreme. The bus trundles off with a puff of black exhaust smoke leaving me alone in the crisp morning light.
   I check into one of the many cave hotels, choosing a ten bed hostel-style cave room, in hopes of making some friends but there’s just two Scottish girls packing their stuff to leave. The room had been carved into the soft sandstone of the cliffs. Thick Turkish rugs carpet the floor, like dark-red warm soft squishy moss.
   Next on the agenda: breakfast. I find a restaurant with nice rooftop seating and order menemen, a delicious dish Deniz’s dad had made, a stewy mix of tomatoes and peppers and a few fried eggs. But the dish the restaurant makes is a pale limpid comparison to her dad’s cooking – less the sumptuous flavorful dish he had made and more a plate of flaccid stewed tomato. I gaze off at the Dr Seussian rock pinnacles -- at least Turkish coffee is dependable.
   Normally when it appears one has been broken up with, one tries not to dwell on it. One goes to work, absorbs oneself in the mundane day to day. But normally one hasn’t found oneself marooned halfway around the world as a result of the fight. It’s hard to ignore that as a result of the disagreement, one is now living in a cave in central Turkey. It's always hardest laying in bed at night, thinking about how you used to run your hand through Her hair – dark chestnut brown that falls in curls like a turbulent current, that glows fiery red when the light hits it just right.



   I generally avoid package tours but it’s the only practical way to see the main thing I’d wanted to see: one of Cappadocia’s underground cities. I sign up for one and the next day a small van picks me and a dozen other tourists up from various cave hotels. The guide explains that the name “Cappadocia” comes from the wild white horses that used to live here “but today there aren’t any any more” of course. We go on a short hike through a nearby canyon, it’s deep and twisting with ample foliage in its narrow base. Dovecots have been carved into the cliff wall, and around a corner we find a vendor selling cold drinks out of a cave. At the end there is an abandoned town of stone houses hewn out of the sandstone slope, an old Greek town whose residents had been resettled in Greece after the Turkish revolution in 1923.
   For lunch we are taken to a tourist canteen in the nearby town of Üçhisar, dominated by a castle-like rock of sandstone pitted with windows. The canteen is full of the sad ghosts of the real Turkish cuisine I had enjoyed with Deniz. Köfte that aren’t the delicious giant juicy meatballs I’m used to, but dry and flavorless; dolma that has just been haphazardly thrown together –memories of Deniz in her mom’s kitchen, only half-lit by the light from the refrigerator, explaining that the grape leaves need to be sprinkled with lemon-juice and put in the refrigerator overnight; mantı that is just cheap ravioli in cheaper yogurt, no garlic, no meat – memories of having a delicious bowl of mantı with Deniz at an open air restaurant at the seaside near Bursa, her eyes shining, while nearby children launched candle paper-bag lantern-balloons into the air to the accompaniment of the gentle sound of the surf lapping against stone. To the metallic clatter of a hundred tourist’s silverware I pick at the food which is now my lot.
   The underground city itself, is as impressive as I had hoped. We go to Kaymaklı, the second largest of around 200 ancient underground cities in the area. This one has four underground floors open to tourists, though it has at least eight, the deepest at a depth of 85 meters. In its heyday it housed 3,000 residents, living underground for the stable cool temperatures and safety. A lifelong fan of the Tolkien books, the narrow labyrinthine tunnels remind me of a goblin city.



July 15th, 2013 – The gravelly slope gives way beneath my feet — a cascade of sand, a hiss like waves running back to the sea, scrabbling fruitlessly for traction I fall slithering down into the canyon. The slope curves into a hump like a ski jump halfway down. Sliding helplessly towards this unintentional launch, I desperately spread my arms and legs, flattening myself against the rough slope in a frantic attempt to maximize friction and avoid being launched into the airy void. Pebbles continue to skitter past as I come to a stop. Standing up, I wipe sweat from my brow, and look across the rugged canyon: manila colored sandstone — more sand than stone, the sides a sheer drop in most places. Thick tower-like rock formations rise above the jumbled slopes, jutting into the blue cloudless sky. The sun reflects mercilessly off the buttresses of rock, and I gaze longingly down into the bottom of the canyon, green with waves of tufty grass and scraggly shrubs. I look back up the slope I just slipped down and realize there’ll be no getting back up. Below me, the steep slope is a tumult of boulders and crevices. There’s only one way to go now, down there, somehow.
That morning, in a quest for more authentic food I had gone to the corner of town where there seemed to be the highest concentration of locals. Old men sat at tables under shade trees playing backgammon, ah this is classic Turkey. After having a much more authentic meal I asked the young man working at the little café where a good place to go hiking was and he drew me a rough map on the back of a piece of scrap paper, indicating the way to “Love Valley.” “You can’t miss it!” he exhorted.
   Well, I missed it, Finding myself on a sunbaked ridge looking down into a narrow valley full of lush foliage, bounded by rugged slopes and punctuated with more of those surreal pinnacles. Down there was where I wanted to be, not up here on the shadeless heights surrounded by chasms. I bet there’s another cave selling beverages down there I thought to myself. I thought I’d venture down just a bit of a slope to see if there was a path down the rugged sandy side here. Just as I was concluding there was not, I had involuntarily commenced this slide.
   It’s not any kind of route I’d have taken if I had any other option, but I don’t, so I carefully descend through a series of narrow chutes in the soft sandstone, sometimes essentially rock-climbing down the crumbly surface. I imagine if I fall and seriously injure myself, no one knows I’m here and might not find me in this obscure corner until I’m nothing but bleached bones. With great relief I finally reach the level ground and tall bushes of the valley floor.
   I wander along the dry wash in the center of the valley floor, up towards the back end of the valley because I have an idea the trail should be that way. But there’s no trail, and no friendly Turk selling fresh orange juice from a cave. I’ve long since finished my bottle of water. Sweat runs down my forehead and my throat feels very very dry. I begin to contemplate the possibility of my untimely demise again.
   But wait, is that movement up ahead? People? I excitedly round the next corner only to startle a white horse, who looks at me and darts quickly into the shrubbery. Damn. But on the plus side here’s a wild grapevine draped over a low scrubby tree like a heavy cloak, thick bundles of plump grapes hang down from its branches. I grab grapes by the handful and stuff them in my mouth without bothering to dust them off. They are delicious and refreshing. I eat as many as I can stomach and then take a large sprig of them with me as I continue up the gorge.
   The valley narrows, but, fortunately, the sides are also more traversable at the deep back end, the slippery gravel held together with coarse grass. I’m able to ascend the back slope on a steep narrow goat path. I finally emerge over the rim of the valley, dusty and tired, to see the great rock of Üçhisar close in front of me, surrounded by its haphazard brood of houses, hotels, and cafes. Some Italian tourists are standing near a turquoise jewelry shop I happen to emerge beside, they stare wide-eyed as I climb from the canyon rim, and with surprise I realize I had met them in the tour group the day before.
   “Where’d you come from??” they ask.
   “Um, I don’t even know.” exhausted, I gesture vaguely.
   And then I wander into Üçhisar to search for authentic food among the fantastical tooth-like rocks.

July 12th, 2013 - I find myself standing in the serene vastness of the Hagia Sophia, the basilica turned cathedral turned mosque turned museum that for a thousand years was the largest building in the world. High above on the lofty ceiling gilded quotes from the Qur’an in Arabic seem to glow golden in the dim light, and above that, the inside of the great dome itself is elegantly covered with painted scenes from the Bible in soft pastels. On an upper balcony I find the Viking graffiti the Norse-men the Byzantine emperors had employed as guards had left. Bored and far from home, did “Halvdan” lean against that parapet, some warm July evening, looking out with jade green eyes on the same sea, thinking wistfully of his home a world away? As a cool sea breeze rustled his rust-red beard, did he contemplate impermanence and set to carving his name with his axe-blade? Or was he thinking about some far distant Erika with braided hair whom he’d last seen years previous as his boat pushed off from the banks of the river Göta? Did he dream of seeing her again and wonder why he couldn’t just settle for the convenient local girls? Or was he thinking about nothing nearly so interesting, just extremely bored with a monotonous shift at work?
   From the Hagia Sophia I continue on to the nearby palace of the Ottoman Sultan. Deep amid the geometric architecture and grassy courtyards I come to the tiled pools and baths of the legendary harem of the Sultan. For centuries this cloistered place titillated Western imaginations – dark haired circassian beauties luxuriating by the pool, nubile odalisques plucking exotic string instruments, coy looks in large brown eyes, fleshy curves, tender caresses…
   The voices of tourists echo harshly off the elegant tiles. A fresh salty breeze clears the steam of one’s imagination -- from this corner of the palace hill the open air pool looks out across the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. A small black-hulled tanker leaves a wake like a snail-trail as it makes its way into the narrow strait known as the Bosporus, which leads to the Black Sea. The days of tender caresses are over.
   Later I stand outside the ancient Land Walls of Constantinople, still huge and imposing, though now a highway pierces through them. It is said that when the crumbling Byzantine Empire was in its very last gasps, and the Ottoman Turks finally got one of the gates open, the last Roman emperor tossed aside his purple robes, unsheathed his sword, and personally ran into the breach, disappearing forever into the melee. For a thousand years before that the city had defied all invaders. Not only were the walls impregnable, the city could hold out forever, reprovisioned by the sea. No hope waiting for her to give in. I decide it’s time to move on.


"The Terrace of the Seraglio" by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1866 (He apparently managed to see the actual harem pool at Topkapi Palace because this is it, note the same star-rail as appears in the below picture!)



Into the Underworld
   I always wanted to go to Cappadocia in the center of Turkey, so I decide to head there. I catch a small bus on a nearby corner, and it winds through the narrow streets of the old city collecting passengers from various stops. Eventually, the main terminal looms ahead, a vast windowless tomb-like edifice, that swallows us as we drive down a ramp right into its dark gullet. Stepping out from the shuttlebus I find myself in a cavernous parking garage with whole freestanding ticket offices whose roofs don’t touch the dripping concrete ceiling above. Buses lumber out of the darkness like mythical beasts. Crowds of people wait in the eternal night, like some dystopian underground city. The people here are almost entirely Turks — this isn’t how tourists get around. Kebab carts vent greasy smoke into the black abyss, surrounded by plastic chairs and tables, as if on a grassy lawn rather than underground oily pavement. I ping-pong through with a few well-placed questions to people who look like they know their way around — “Pegasus? Pegasus?” I ask, and they point off into the darkness. I splash through puddles in the gloom and find the office and buses of the Pegasus line.
I climb the steps into the bus and enter a bubble of light and civilization in the gritty darkness. Soon we roll out of the catacombs, back into the gathering twilight of summer evening. Onto the highway, and soon we are rumbling through the purpling dusk, from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Bridge, with sweeping suspension spans like the Golden Gate.
   We fly down the highway through the night, and I’m mostly able to sleep on this comfortable bus, interrupted twice by rest stops during which most of the passengers exit to stand about in the cold night air gasping out acrid cigarette smoke — not quite the fire breathing chimera Bellerophon sought when he rode the original Pegasus in legend. The sun rises over undulating hills and occasional blocky villages of small apartment buildings.
   Suddenly, around a bend, a town comes into view that looks like it was hewn right out of the face of the hill — stone houses project from the cliff face, but the windows continue up the rockface itself! Rock spires rear up above the buildings, dwarfing the man-made minarets. We are in Cappadocia!



###

Notes
I have never actually succeeded in finding the Viking graffiti but it is well attested and allegedly find-able. Only "Halvdan" is legible. I plan to directly parallel the imagined scene of Halvdan on the river Gota with his Erika in a later chapter when I'm in Goteborg, on the river Gota, on a boat, with a Swedish girl I'll rename Erika. ;) Also, though I still haven't worked in a physical description of the protagonist, the rust red beard and jade green eyes could well apply.

I'm assuming when I originally wrote in the black hulled tanker (parts of this are from a piece I wrote many years ago), I suspect I was intentionally homaging the argonaut, commonly referred to as "the black hulled argonaut" throughout the Argonautica, which had sailed through the Bosporus in the eponymous work.

"Not only were the walls impregnable, the city could hold out forever, reprovisioned by the sea. No hope waiting for her to give in. I decide it’s time to move on." by now you've probably gathered I absolutely love hidden meanings even if no one else will ever get it. Recall from previous sections I'd gotten in a fight with my Turkish girlfriend "Deniz" and was now traveling on my own -- the cause of the fight being that she wanted to get married immediately, and an unstated dimension was that she was dead set on not having children as it would hinder her career as a seafarer, so you can see how this sentence very subtly alludes to that.

I like the contrast between the soaring beauty of the Hagia Sophia and underworldly depths of the bus terminal in this section.

Pegasus as I recall was the actual name of the bus-line, fortuitous for the allusions I am inclined towards! Recall also several chapters ago I was on a ship named Pegasus (renamed from the actual Unicorn, though not a stretch, we called the Unicorn's smallboat Pegasus). Splashing through puddles was accurate to events but also serves as yet another overly-deeply-obscure reference to Pegasus being an offspring of Poseidon.



While looking for art representative of "tittilated western imaginations" I came across the art of Robert Walsh and I adore it. It's all in the public domain so maybe I'd use elements of it to illustrate the Turkish chapter: