Monday, December 21, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Ankara
By the time I woke up, Andy and Will were already on a Turkish Air flight to Istanbul. All the doctors were gone and I was by myself in a non-English speaking town in central Turkey. Instead of having someone grab my bag, I bungied my duffle from my footplate to the handle on my seat cushion. I’ve got two little posts on my chair that serve as mini luggage racks and keep most of the weight off my feet. As long as I don’t have any big hills and I can get on the sidewalks, I roll fairly freely.
I didn’t roll long before I flagged a cab not far from the hotel. The cabbie took me to the train station and lifted me the two steps to the ticket office. While I was bungying my bag back to my legs, my cabbie was at the ticket window buying my ticket. I was on my way to Ankara to check out a wheelchair factory run by a friend of one of the doctors from the conference. I found a card phone and called the doctor in Ankara while my cabbie bought my ticket for me. In some cities this would be a setup for a ripoff, but I was told at the hotel that Kayseri cabbies were honest. This wasn't New York City and my cabbie had an honest concern for my welfare. When he came back, he had my ticket, my itenerary and my change. I offered him the change, but he refused it.
The Kayseri train station was a combination of industrial, military and passenger rails. The platform was a 200-meter uncovered concrete slab only a foot above the rails. When the train came I was going to need a lift to get up to my car. The train was an hour late, so I had plenty of time to gather a posse. I found a room with a crew of uniformed train workers and showed them my itinerary. They weren't sure what to think of me but then they then signaled they would take care of the situation. When the train finally pulled into the station, five workers
grabbed the handles of my chair and lifted me up the four steps to the car. There was plenty of room inside the car so I took the first chair from the door and settled in. The train workers disassembled my chair and stored it in the luggage rack above me. In Western Europe the train workers are rabid about making sure people sit in the proper seat. In Turkey they are rabid about comfort and common sense.
The train pulled out and rolled painfully slowly toward Ankara 350 km. northwest of Kayseri. I was sitting in a family car with a bunch of kids and some very tired mothers, looking to catch some sleep. While there eyes were shut, my eyes were glued to the rugged Anatolian farmscape. Behind me were a pair of 12,000 ft. volcanoes and far off in the distance were the highlands that surround Ankara.
While the parents were sleeping, I goofed off with their kids, making faces and noises. They were asking questions and laughed uncontrollably when I responded with, “Tomatoes are actually a fruit,” or “Grand Funk Railroad was misunderstood.” But I’m pretty sure there favorite answer was, “Zeke Bratkowski.”
The train was an hour late taking off and lost two hours on the way to Ankara.
We crossed one mountain pass and slithered through three deep river canyons, stopping in each one to let a train pass in the opposite direction. Every ten to fifteen miles we passed a hamlet with two or three mosques and the requisite prayer minarets. You’ve got to think that in a town of 2000 you would need only one mosque, but apparently that’s not the case. I wonder if they take turns on the daily prayer sirens.
I was hoping to get into Ankara in daylight so I could catch my bearings, but the three-hour delay got me to the train station just as the sun dropped over Ankara’s West hills. It took almost an hour to get from the outskirts of town to the city center, but that gave me time to pick out a guest house near the station. There was a city map in the Lonely Planet Turkey guide that Andy and Will left me, but those maps are typically lame. They don't mark hills and they tend to leave out non-major streets. In a city with poorly marked streets like Ankara, it’s easy to get lost.
But orientation and housing were problems I could only attack once I got out on the street – something I couldn’t do because the conductors had forgotten me on the train. I assumed someone would help me after the train got to the station, but as the passengers filed out with no conductors were in sight, I needed to ask my friends for help before the train pulled out of the station. I tugged on one of the parent’s coats and pointed to my chair stashed neatly in the rack above my seat. The guy looked kind of surprised. While I was playing with his kids he had no idea I was a para. He started speaking to me in Turkish, but I shrugged my shoulders and poked at my dead legs letting him know it was my chair. He motioned he had to get his wife and kids off the train, but just seconds later he was back with two other helpers. They plucked my chair off the rack, we assembled it and the three of them lifted me down three tight steps to the platform. Seconds later, my bag followed. I pulled out my luggage racks and bungy chords, showed the Turks my system, and thanked them in one of the few Turkish words I’d picked up, ‘Tesekkür ederim' or ‘Thanks broham!’
Once loose in the station, I bought my ticket to Istanbul, found a card phone and called one of the guest houses. I scored an English speaker on my first attempt. The concierge at the Hotel Spor in the middle of the town center or ‘Ulus’, ended up being the only English speaker I ran into the entire weekend in Ankara. He had a $50 room he thought might work, but told me he’d help me find a room if it didn’t. Had there been daylight I would have navigated my way with my bag bungied to my feet, but at night it’s always best to find a home before exploring. I had no idea what the curb cut situation was, and with a heavy bag on my feet, I needed a cab.
The concierge at the Hotel Spor was a blond Turk who had spent years abroad as a truck driver in Germany and England. He had short hair and tight cheekbones and was a spitting image of Lance Armstrong. When I said he looked like Lance, he said I should call him that so I wouldn’t forget his name. Lance had a room for me on the 6th floor and was worried I wouldn’t get into the elevator. I unstrapped my bag and, with it balancing lengthwise on my lap, was able to close the door. I made it to my room but couldn’t get past the first of two small beds. I called downstairs and Lance came up to figure out the situation. He lifted the first bed on its headboard and leaned it against the wall. I was short one closet, but I wasn’t going to use it anyway.
The biggest issue was getting through the tiny bathroom door. I asked Lance if he could pop the door off the hinge, but he said the owner would kill him if he messed up the paint. Instead he suggested I use the restaurant bathroom on the first floor. It was potentially a pain in the arse, but since I was leaving on the midnight train the next night and I’d only be staying for one night, we were square. We settled the difference over a few Effes beers (best beer in all of Ephesia!) and I was out to discover the nightlife of Ankara.
Whereas Kayseri had no drinking and no nightlife, Ankara had a bustling, if not seedy, night life. There were plenty of bars in Ulus; basically open-air restaurants that stopped selling food after dinner. Most of them had TV’s tuned to horse races or Turkish MTV. The tables were full of men, but no women patrons were in sight. The only women around were overly made up barmaids who, although sitting behind the bar, were not carrying out any drinks. It didn’t take a Mensa to figure out what they were doing.
I discovered the same beers I was paying 4 TL for at the bar were available at the convenience store for half the price. Since I wasn’t chatting it up, there wasn’t any live music and I wasn’t in need of a hooker, I got a six pack and rolled to the room. Lance told me they had ESPN on the tube and plenty of international channels. The Turkish version of ESPN was showing archery (no sport could ever be more TV unfriendly) and none of the international channels were in English or French so I flipped off the tube, popped open an Effes and watched the streets of Ankara go to sleep from my 6th floor window. There was a 15-storey building under construction across the street from my window and the construction workers slept on sight instead of going home. The hookers and the construction company were doing ‘bang-up’ business. It wasn’t a pretty night.
##
The air-conditioning unit in my room gave off more heat than relief so I woke up with sweaty sheets and catheters sticking out of the two Effes bottles I’d stored because I couldn't get into the bathroom. Although my chair couldn’t breach the bathroom door, I was able to reach the sink to empty my bottles and wash my hands. I couldn’t see leaving the bottles of Effes full of piss for Lance to clean up.
I made it downstairs and found Lance off duty, replaced by a non-English speaking Turk. He didn’t get the idea that I was checking out but wanted to leave my bag. And then he freaked out when I headed for the restaurant bathroom with a towel and my shaving kit. His 20-word English vocabulary and my five words of Turkish wouldn’t do the trick, so I left my bag and went in to clean up.
The whole reason for my side trip to Ankara was that I’d met an American doctor at the Kayseri conference who told me he had an American friend in Ankara who builds wheelchairs. I told the doctor that I’d love to check out the workshop and he said when I get to Ankara, I should call. Evidently the guy thought there’s no way I would take a seven-hour train by myself so it shocked the hell out of him when I called saying I was in town. The doc fumbled for words then told me he would call his chair welder to see if he could meet me. Since my Verizon cell phone was useless (get a T-mobile phone if you plan on spending any time in Europe) I left him with the hotel phone number and started out on a nice reconnaissance mission through the center of Ankara.
Ankara, like many Middle Eastern capitols, is a series of steep hills with thousands of apartment buildings saturating the landscape. There’s been people living there for 3200 years, but until Ataturk moved the capitol from Istanbul in 1923, the population never amounted to more than 35,000 people. Now, there are more than 4 million Turks creating a no-nonsense business, government and academic climate. Whereas the folks in Istanbul like to get loose and party, the people of Ankara tend to buckle down and work.
Just 100 meters outside of my hotel, I realized my decision to take a cab from the train station instead of rolling the streets with my bungied bag was the best decision I’d made since leaving Portland. The curbs were preventatively high and although there were some curb cuts, most of them were ridiculously conceived and poorly maintained. Beyond that, the hills of Ankara can be viciously steep, turning a mile on the flat Lonely Planet map into an insurmountable wall for someone in a chair. The main streets of Ankara are divided by foot-high boulevards that an able-bodied person can step over, but a person in a chair may have to detour more than a mile to get to the opposite side of the street.
I didn’t roll long before I flagged a cab not far from the hotel. The cabbie took me to the train station and lifted me the two steps to the ticket office. While I was bungying my bag back to my legs, my cabbie was at the ticket window buying my ticket. I was on my way to Ankara to check out a wheelchair factory run by a friend of one of the doctors from the conference. I found a card phone and called the doctor in Ankara while my cabbie bought my ticket for me. In some cities this would be a setup for a ripoff, but I was told at the hotel that Kayseri cabbies were honest. This wasn't New York City and my cabbie had an honest concern for my welfare. When he came back, he had my ticket, my itenerary and my change. I offered him the change, but he refused it.
The Kayseri train station was a combination of industrial, military and passenger rails. The platform was a 200-meter uncovered concrete slab only a foot above the rails. When the train came I was going to need a lift to get up to my car. The train was an hour late, so I had plenty of time to gather a posse. I found a room with a crew of uniformed train workers and showed them my itinerary. They weren't sure what to think of me but then they then signaled they would take care of the situation. When the train finally pulled into the station, five workers
grabbed the handles of my chair and lifted me up the four steps to the car. There was plenty of room inside the car so I took the first chair from the door and settled in. The train workers disassembled my chair and stored it in the luggage rack above me. In Western Europe the train workers are rabid about making sure people sit in the proper seat. In Turkey they are rabid about comfort and common sense. The train pulled out and rolled painfully slowly toward Ankara 350 km. northwest of Kayseri. I was sitting in a family car with a bunch of kids and some very tired mothers, looking to catch some sleep. While there eyes were shut, my eyes were glued to the rugged Anatolian farmscape. Behind me were a pair of 12,000 ft. volcanoes and far off in the distance were the highlands that surround Ankara.
While the parents were sleeping, I goofed off with their kids, making faces and noises. They were asking questions and laughed uncontrollably when I responded with, “Tomatoes are actually a fruit,” or “Grand Funk Railroad was misunderstood.” But I’m pretty sure there favorite answer was, “Zeke Bratkowski.”The train was an hour late taking off and lost two hours on the way to Ankara.
We crossed one mountain pass and slithered through three deep river canyons, stopping in each one to let a train pass in the opposite direction. Every ten to fifteen miles we passed a hamlet with two or three mosques and the requisite prayer minarets. You’ve got to think that in a town of 2000 you would need only one mosque, but apparently that’s not the case. I wonder if they take turns on the daily prayer sirens.I was hoping to get into Ankara in daylight so I could catch my bearings, but the three-hour delay got me to the train station just as the sun dropped over Ankara’s West hills. It took almost an hour to get from the outskirts of town to the city center, but that gave me time to pick out a guest house near the station. There was a city map in the Lonely Planet Turkey guide that Andy and Will left me, but those maps are typically lame. They don't mark hills and they tend to leave out non-major streets. In a city with poorly marked streets like Ankara, it’s easy to get lost.
But orientation and housing were problems I could only attack once I got out on the street – something I couldn’t do because the conductors had forgotten me on the train. I assumed someone would help me after the train got to the station, but as the passengers filed out with no conductors were in sight, I needed to ask my friends for help before the train pulled out of the station. I tugged on one of the parent’s coats and pointed to my chair stashed neatly in the rack above my seat. The guy looked kind of surprised. While I was playing with his kids he had no idea I was a para. He started speaking to me in Turkish, but I shrugged my shoulders and poked at my dead legs letting him know it was my chair. He motioned he had to get his wife and kids off the train, but just seconds later he was back with two other helpers. They plucked my chair off the rack, we assembled it and the three of them lifted me down three tight steps to the platform. Seconds later, my bag followed. I pulled out my luggage racks and bungy chords, showed the Turks my system, and thanked them in one of the few Turkish words I’d picked up, ‘Tesekkür ederim' or ‘Thanks broham!’
Once loose in the station, I bought my ticket to Istanbul, found a card phone and called one of the guest houses. I scored an English speaker on my first attempt. The concierge at the Hotel Spor in the middle of the town center or ‘Ulus’, ended up being the only English speaker I ran into the entire weekend in Ankara. He had a $50 room he thought might work, but told me he’d help me find a room if it didn’t. Had there been daylight I would have navigated my way with my bag bungied to my feet, but at night it’s always best to find a home before exploring. I had no idea what the curb cut situation was, and with a heavy bag on my feet, I needed a cab.
The concierge at the Hotel Spor was a blond Turk who had spent years abroad as a truck driver in Germany and England. He had short hair and tight cheekbones and was a spitting image of Lance Armstrong. When I said he looked like Lance, he said I should call him that so I wouldn’t forget his name. Lance had a room for me on the 6th floor and was worried I wouldn’t get into the elevator. I unstrapped my bag and, with it balancing lengthwise on my lap, was able to close the door. I made it to my room but couldn’t get past the first of two small beds. I called downstairs and Lance came up to figure out the situation. He lifted the first bed on its headboard and leaned it against the wall. I was short one closet, but I wasn’t going to use it anyway.
The biggest issue was getting through the tiny bathroom door. I asked Lance if he could pop the door off the hinge, but he said the owner would kill him if he messed up the paint. Instead he suggested I use the restaurant bathroom on the first floor. It was potentially a pain in the arse, but since I was leaving on the midnight train the next night and I’d only be staying for one night, we were square. We settled the difference over a few Effes beers (best beer in all of Ephesia!) and I was out to discover the nightlife of Ankara.
Whereas Kayseri had no drinking and no nightlife, Ankara had a bustling, if not seedy, night life. There were plenty of bars in Ulus; basically open-air restaurants that stopped selling food after dinner. Most of them had TV’s tuned to horse races or Turkish MTV. The tables were full of men, but no women patrons were in sight. The only women around were overly made up barmaids who, although sitting behind the bar, were not carrying out any drinks. It didn’t take a Mensa to figure out what they were doing.
I discovered the same beers I was paying 4 TL for at the bar were available at the convenience store for half the price. Since I wasn’t chatting it up, there wasn’t any live music and I wasn’t in need of a hooker, I got a six pack and rolled to the room. Lance told me they had ESPN on the tube and plenty of international channels. The Turkish version of ESPN was showing archery (no sport could ever be more TV unfriendly) and none of the international channels were in English or French so I flipped off the tube, popped open an Effes and watched the streets of Ankara go to sleep from my 6th floor window. There was a 15-storey building under construction across the street from my window and the construction workers slept on sight instead of going home. The hookers and the construction company were doing ‘bang-up’ business. It wasn’t a pretty night.
##
The air-conditioning unit in my room gave off more heat than relief so I woke up with sweaty sheets and catheters sticking out of the two Effes bottles I’d stored because I couldn't get into the bathroom. Although my chair couldn’t breach the bathroom door, I was able to reach the sink to empty my bottles and wash my hands. I couldn’t see leaving the bottles of Effes full of piss for Lance to clean up.
I made it downstairs and found Lance off duty, replaced by a non-English speaking Turk. He didn’t get the idea that I was checking out but wanted to leave my bag. And then he freaked out when I headed for the restaurant bathroom with a towel and my shaving kit. His 20-word English vocabulary and my five words of Turkish wouldn’t do the trick, so I left my bag and went in to clean up.
The whole reason for my side trip to Ankara was that I’d met an American doctor at the Kayseri conference who told me he had an American friend in Ankara who builds wheelchairs. I told the doctor that I’d love to check out the workshop and he said when I get to Ankara, I should call. Evidently the guy thought there’s no way I would take a seven-hour train by myself so it shocked the hell out of him when I called saying I was in town. The doc fumbled for words then told me he would call his chair welder to see if he could meet me. Since my Verizon cell phone was useless (get a T-mobile phone if you plan on spending any time in Europe) I left him with the hotel phone number and started out on a nice reconnaissance mission through the center of Ankara.
Ankara, like many Middle Eastern capitols, is a series of steep hills with thousands of apartment buildings saturating the landscape. There’s been people living there for 3200 years, but until Ataturk moved the capitol from Istanbul in 1923, the population never amounted to more than 35,000 people. Now, there are more than 4 million Turks creating a no-nonsense business, government and academic climate. Whereas the folks in Istanbul like to get loose and party, the people of Ankara tend to buckle down and work.
Just 100 meters outside of my hotel, I realized my decision to take a cab from the train station instead of rolling the streets with my bungied bag was the best decision I’d made since leaving Portland. The curbs were preventatively high and although there were some curb cuts, most of them were ridiculously conceived and poorly maintained. Beyond that, the hills of Ankara can be viciously steep, turning a mile on the flat Lonely Planet map into an insurmountable wall for someone in a chair. The main streets of Ankara are divided by foot-high boulevards that an able-bodied person can step over, but a person in a chair may have to detour more than a mile to get to the opposite side of the street.
TURKISH CURB CUTS
Instead of following a map (I couldn’t find one – Ankara is not a big tourist destination and there is very little tourist infrastructure) I looked towards a hill just outside Ulus and made my way along a sloping boulevard towards the summit. I tried to stay on the sidewalks as much as possible, but at some points I was forced to jump off foot-high curbs and roll hundreds of yards on busy streets before I could find a driveway with access to the sidewalk. My chair started feeling a little soft, but I didn’t realize for another week that I’d actually snapped one of the support bars of my chair jumping the curbs of Ankara.
After an hour of climbing, I reached a high-end antique market at the summit of Kale hill. I was soaked and my hands were filthy so I chilled with a bottle of water and got my bearings before the drop down the hill. One might ask why I was getting myself in such a state when surely there are busses and metro trains in a city of four million. There are, but the busses are inaccessible and most of the metro stops are a flight of stairs below ground. Ankara had some accessible mini-vans, but they were only for residents who filled out long medical questionnaires and phoned in for rides 24 hours in advance. Cities all around the world have programs like this, but they are so impractical that only the most disabled citizens use them. Most of the insurance regulations are so restrictive that any semi-functional crip finds another way to get around. For me it’s rolling and getting filthy; unless I need to show up looking respectable - then I buck up for the cab (and usually roll home).
I was hoping to find a music shop in the district so I asked one of the antique dealers if he knew where I could find a guitar shop. Again, English wasn’t working, but the universal gesture of strumming lit up the eyes of the forty-something Turk. He rushed into his shop and returned with a nylon-string Gibson which, unfortunately, was strung up right handed (I’m a lefty – curse of my musical career). I gestured to him that I wanted to hear him play, but instead he offered it to me. I protested towards my blackened forearms and sweaty shirt, but he insisted I play. I set the guitar besides me, cleaned up with baby wipes and got a feel for the axe.
After nimbling through upside down scales and finding a couple of barre chords I could fake, I lifted my head to see a dozen Turks waiting to see if I could play the damn thing. My seven years in the circus taught me to never waste a good crowd, so I cleared my throat and dug into a set of the easiest tunes I could muster. The first thing that came to mind was Johnny Cash’s ‘Big River’. I belted out the tune and, to my surprise, got a nice round of applause. I followed it with ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ and even got a few of them to sing along. But these were Turkish antique-ers, not classic rock fans. They put up with one more tune, but after that I was playing to the shop owner and his son.
I gave the guitar back to the shop owner who was too shy to play, but his son ran into the shop and came out with a Turkish 'Saz’ or ‘long-necked lute’.
It’s a three-string instrument with movable frets that are actually pieces of tied string. You can tune it with the pegs or realign the frets. It’s a freaky, funky, bazookia-sounding rig that takes a week to learn and a lifetime to master. While I played some twangy rhythms on the guitar, the kid sat there and whaled on the Saz. I was dying to rip out some runs on a lefty guitar, but I wasn’t going to be too upset with the experience anyway. Just as I was about to leave, the shop owner came out with tea and sandwiches. You just can’t beat the hospitality of the Turks.
After lunch, I had the harrowing task of dropping back down the two-mile hill. On a bike, the reward for a climb is shooting the down hill. In a chair, going down a steep hill in traffic is scary as hell. First, I put on a pair of thick leather gloves (Thanks Mom!) and check my bags (I’ve got a backpack and two small sacks on the legs of the chair) to make sure they’re zipped up. Then I pop a wheelie and drop the street like a ski racer. I can’t squeeze my rims too tight or I’ll burn through my gloves. I can’t drop the hill at full speed because there’s no way I can brake without tossing the chair on the pavement. I let gravity pull me and wherever I can, and use the street like a slalom course. I wait for a red light behind me then lean back in the chair and do wheelies that last a quarter-mile at a time. Once the traffic comes up, I duck behind a parked car and wait for it to pass. My goal is to make the hill without anyone honking at me. In America I usually succeed. In Asia, they honk at anyone no matter what they’re doing.
Eventually I made it back to the Hotel Spor where Lance was back at the helm. He told me my friend called, but there was no way I would be able to meet the chair builder. So much for my reason to be in Ankara, but then again, I had the rest of the day to explore. I spent the afternoon in and around the walled Ankara Kalesi, or citadel. Again, it didn’t look far on the map, but the climb up to the summit was too steep to do by myself. It took two hours to get to the top, but it was only by the grace of a lightly trafficked back road and the help of a half dozen Turks that it was possible. The reward for reaching the summit was a glorious view of the city as well as a visit to the Museum of Anatolian History, named Europe’s Museum of the Year in 1998 even though it’s not even in Europe.
By late afternoon with temperatures hovering around 90, I peered over the edge of the citadel walls and looked for a long route back as opposed to the steep ascent I took to get up. There were plenty of roads back down to Ulus, but all of them were life-sized HotWheels tracks.
Ever since breaking my back my athleticism has been severely limited and I’m frustrated when I watch people play the sports I love. But wheeling in Ankara was the coolest shit in the world. Bombing a killer hill in a funky Asian capitol was as fukked-up as jumping off a 90 ft. ladder. I don't know if that means anything to you, but it's gold to me.
When I got back to the Hotel Spor, I was drenched and as filthy as could be. Lance gave me the same look my mother used to give me after returning from a day playing along the banks of the Milwaukee River. He smiled, tossed me a towel and asked me if I needed a clean shirt. I told him any shirt would do so he dug into my bag, found a my Portland Marathon shirt and sent me to the restaurant toilet with a towel and my shaving kit.
I spent the evening at the restaurant watching game one of the Turkish basketball league final (Effes beat Finnerbachi for all you Turk hoops fans) and asking Lance questions about the future of Turkey. Before I knew it, it was time to grab a cab for the train station. When I went to pay my bill, Lance’s cash register had run out of 5 TL bills and he was short. He’d been an invaluable help so I told him to hold onto it. He told me I’ve got a 5TL credit next time I stay at the Hotel Spor.
I’d love to take him up on it.
Kayseri
After the 33-hour flight from hell I didn’t have much time to collect my wits. The reason I was in Turkey was to present my Internet strategy to the doctors of the International Rehabilitation Forum (http://www.rehabforum.org). Just seven hours after arriving in Kayseri I found myself on stage in a large academic hall at Erciyes (EAR-jis) University addressing 75 doctors and medical professionals hailing from every corner of the globe. It was a fairly daunting task seeing as I’d only had six hours of sleep out of the previous 72. But the silver lining of all this was that just 15 minutes later, my major responsibility for the trip was over. I still had to attend group sessions and address the conference in the wrap up session, but for the most part, I was on vacation.
IRF Pres and CFO, Andy Haig and Devendra Peer.
But when you’re traveling in Asia in a wheelchair you’re never really on vacation. Although my room was in a modern hotel and 100 percent accessible, the rest of the city, including the University, was 100 percent inaccessible. There are no curb cuts, no ramps, no busses. Elevators are non-existent or, even more annoying, in foyers three steps up from street level. Phone booths and public toilets are tucked behind tiny doors and even something as simple as washing your hands can become a half-hour excursion.
In order to deal with the town without going crazy I need to come equipped with four things – money, sanitary wipes, an above-average fitness level and a blind faith in the human spirit. In America I probably take a cab once every two years, but with accessible public transport being virtually non-existent in darkest Turkey, I end up taking more cabs than I ever would in the states. The price of taking a cab is probably five to ten times more expensive than the public transport, but it’s still a third as expensive as cabs in the U.S. or Europe. The other thing that comes with the cab in Asian cities is a cool, savvy driver. This is my third trip to a third world setting while in a wheel chair and I’ve discovered that if a driver picks up a handicapped person they will make damn sure that person gets exactly where they want to go. I’ve had drivers argue hotel fares for me, carry me up flights of stairs and even have me into their house for tea. On the other hand, I’ve also gotten dropped off miles from my destination on the far side of town (in Delhi) so the driver can get a commission on the hotel he knows. But by and large, cabbies in the third world have saved my arse.
Besides the cabbies, I cannot be shy in asking anyone for help. You don’t have to speak a lot of English to get the point across. When you point at stairs or are sitting outside of a train or bus, it’s pretty obvious what you want. I’ve asked hundreds of strangers for help and only once have I been ripped off. That was some A-hole in Jerusalem’s old city who took me for 20 bucks after I got stuck in a dead-end at the bottom of 50 long stairs. I was screwed, he knew it and, as soon as he got me up the stairs, he held me up for everything I had. Luckily I didn’t have much cash on me.
That explains money and faith in mankind. The wipes just make intuitive sense. If I can’t get to a sink, I need to be able to wash my hands at anytime. They don’t just get dirty, they get filthy. I’m basically walking on my hands wherever I go. Whatever is on the streets or sidewalks ends up on my wheels and eventually my hands – even if I wear gloves. I bring gloves with me, but unless I’m in a hilly city, they’re more trouble than they’re worth. I’m constantly taking them off for money, my camera, a credit card or my phone (although my Vorizon phone was worthless on this trip – you need T-mobile in Europe). If I’ve got a steep downhill where I go for a half-mile wheelie and use my hands as brakes or if it’s so hot that my rims get blistery, I wear gloves. If not, they’re not worth the hassle.
And that leaves the fitness level. I wasn’t in marathon shape before I left, but I was cranking out 3-5 15-mile hand cycle rides per week heading into the trip. At any point I could easily find myself miles away from my destination without anyway to get there. It’s reassuring to know that if I find myself ten miles from home with no cab in sight, it’s no big deal to go ahead and roll it. I’ve done it before – and eventually on this trip, I would do it again.
In Kayseri I was participating in a conference with 75 doctors, so I didn’t need to use any of my solo-ranger tactics. The university was completely inaccessible, but I was traveling in a sea of adaptive professionals so I didn’t even have to ask for help. If I wanted to get on stage or up to one of the classrooms there were immediately four people there to lift me. If I needed a gopher for water or food, my 11-year-old nephew, Will was always at my side. Nonetheless, when the president of the university gave his closing remarks, he apologized profusely for his institutions lack of handicapped awareness (yes, it was a medical school!).
Unfortunately the mode of transport for the conference was the dreaded five-step luxury bus. That meant everywhere we went as a group, my brother, Andy, stowed my chair under the bus and we made our way up to the seats, one step at a time. I used rails to lift my upper body and Andy took my legs. I was so filthy after the first bus trip (a city tour to the oldest hospital in the world) that I never wore the good clothes I brought – including to the final banquet.
In order to deal with the town without going crazy I need to come equipped with four things – money, sanitary wipes, an above-average fitness level and a blind faith in the human spirit. In America I probably take a cab once every two years, but with accessible public transport being virtually non-existent in darkest Turkey, I end up taking more cabs than I ever would in the states. The price of taking a cab is probably five to ten times more expensive than the public transport, but it’s still a third as expensive as cabs in the U.S. or Europe. The other thing that comes with the cab in Asian cities is a cool, savvy driver. This is my third trip to a third world setting while in a wheel chair and I’ve discovered that if a driver picks up a handicapped person they will make damn sure that person gets exactly where they want to go. I’ve had drivers argue hotel fares for me, carry me up flights of stairs and even have me into their house for tea. On the other hand, I’ve also gotten dropped off miles from my destination on the far side of town (in Delhi) so the driver can get a commission on the hotel he knows. But by and large, cabbies in the third world have saved my arse.
Besides the cabbies, I cannot be shy in asking anyone for help. You don’t have to speak a lot of English to get the point across. When you point at stairs or are sitting outside of a train or bus, it’s pretty obvious what you want. I’ve asked hundreds of strangers for help and only once have I been ripped off. That was some A-hole in Jerusalem’s old city who took me for 20 bucks after I got stuck in a dead-end at the bottom of 50 long stairs. I was screwed, he knew it and, as soon as he got me up the stairs, he held me up for everything I had. Luckily I didn’t have much cash on me.
That explains money and faith in mankind. The wipes just make intuitive sense. If I can’t get to a sink, I need to be able to wash my hands at anytime. They don’t just get dirty, they get filthy. I’m basically walking on my hands wherever I go. Whatever is on the streets or sidewalks ends up on my wheels and eventually my hands – even if I wear gloves. I bring gloves with me, but unless I’m in a hilly city, they’re more trouble than they’re worth. I’m constantly taking them off for money, my camera, a credit card or my phone (although my Vorizon phone was worthless on this trip – you need T-mobile in Europe). If I’ve got a steep downhill where I go for a half-mile wheelie and use my hands as brakes or if it’s so hot that my rims get blistery, I wear gloves. If not, they’re not worth the hassle.
And that leaves the fitness level. I wasn’t in marathon shape before I left, but I was cranking out 3-5 15-mile hand cycle rides per week heading into the trip. At any point I could easily find myself miles away from my destination without anyway to get there. It’s reassuring to know that if I find myself ten miles from home with no cab in sight, it’s no big deal to go ahead and roll it. I’ve done it before – and eventually on this trip, I would do it again.
In Kayseri I was participating in a conference with 75 doctors, so I didn’t need to use any of my solo-ranger tactics. The university was completely inaccessible, but I was traveling in a sea of adaptive professionals so I didn’t even have to ask for help. If I wanted to get on stage or up to one of the classrooms there were immediately four people there to lift me. If I needed a gopher for water or food, my 11-year-old nephew, Will was always at my side. Nonetheless, when the president of the university gave his closing remarks, he apologized profusely for his institutions lack of handicapped awareness (yes, it was a medical school!).
Unfortunately the mode of transport for the conference was the dreaded five-step luxury bus. That meant everywhere we went as a group, my brother, Andy, stowed my chair under the bus and we made our way up to the seats, one step at a time. I used rails to lift my upper body and Andy took my legs. I was so filthy after the first bus trip (a city tour to the oldest hospital in the world) that I never wore the good clothes I brought – including to the final banquet.
The final day of the trip was an incredible day trip to the Flintstone-type villages in the Cappadocia region of Anatolia. The volcanic plumes of the region have been the hiding place for everyone from the early Christians to the wandering Hittites of the 8th century. Houses are carved out of porous rock and have been standing for millennium. The neighborhoods are a system of stairs and caves, which of course I couldn’t explore.
But I wasn’t complaining as the cities are some of the most stunning sights I’d ever seen. What I did complain about, however, were the 15 trips up and down the bus stairs. By the end of the day I was so exhausted that I turned down the dinner offered to us at the home of the hotel concierge. Andy and Will went to dinner, but I hit my bed at 7:00 and slept for 14 straight hours.Friday, June 19, 2009
Simply the Worst Flight Ever
I’ve been road tripping for most of my adult life and I have to challenge anyone to come up with a worse travel day than my recent Portland, OR to Kayseri, Turkey flight. If you are currently staring in the National Geographic series, ‘Locked Up Abroad’, you may have had worse days, but aside from that – I think I’ve got you beat.
It all started relatively well as I woke up in my friend Bill’s house at 5:00 a.m. without even using an alarm. I groggily bungied my bag to my chair and made it out the door to the Portland light-rail train. As the train pulled into the airport I couldn’t believe how smoothly things had gone. Just three days earlier I was forced to drive up to Seattle to wrestle my passport out of the hands of a bungled rush-order passport operation. They said my passport photo was 1/8 of an inch too small. The only way I could get it was to take new photos, drive seven hours out of my way, sit in their line and walk out of their office with the passport in hand. Stunningly enough, when I got the new passport, I discovered they had attached a scanned copy of my photo, not the actual pictures I’d had taken at Kinkos. They could have scanned the originals, enlarged them 5% and saved me the two days. But that headache was gone. This trip was gonna be fun.
Nonetheless, I made my 7:45 a.m. flight and was on my way to Newark for the first leg of a 4-flight, 20-plus hour travel day to Kayseri, deep in the center of ancient Anatolia. I was going there to present my communication plan for the future of the International Rehabilitation Forum, a group of doctors headed by my brother Andy who deal with rehab medicine in third world settings. Ten days earlier I didn’t even think I was going, but when the call came to hop on a plane, I was on it.
It was a cloudy day in the Northwest so only the tips of the biggest Cascade and Rocky mountains snuk above the cloud cover. I’m always game for a nice ride over the great American West, but seeing as I was in for a marathon travel day, I was just as happy to slide back and catch a couple of z’s on route.
The six-hour flight was harmless enough and two hours later, I was giddy with the fact that I’d made my transfer and was on a cross-Atlantic flight to Rome. Whereas missing a connection is a rarity for an able bodied traveller, it is a common threat to a crip. We are always the first ones on the plane and the last ones off. In order to get us to our seat, we are strapped onto a thin aisle chair and carted down the walkway in the same fashion that Hannibal Lector was transported in Silence of the Lambs. If one of these aisle chairs is waiting at the terminal upon arrival, I have a decent chance of making my flight. If the aisle chair is a half mile away, I have to sprint like crazy to make my flight. But in this scenario, the chair was there and I even had time for a slice of NYC pizza.
The long haul to Rome was again eventless as the same pack of clouds that had been following me since Portland was still below me. As the sun rose following a three-hour night, I was not greeted by the shores of France, but the same collection of non-descript fluffy white teasers. The plane was flying directly over Marseilles, Corsica, Sardinia and Tuscany, but I was watching marshmellows. Annoying, but typical; nothing to lose my socks over… yet…
The transition in Rome was typically Italian. Whenever I’m strapped onto the aisle chairs in the states, the attendants make sure every strap is fastened and every belt is firmly connected to the chair. Once a guy in Cincinnati pulled out an instruction manual to make sure I was properly loaded (yes, I did miss my connection that day). But here in Italy I bounced on the chair, the AlItalia worker shrugged his shoulders and pushed me through the aisle with me holding my knees together and balancing on the chair while the belts hung loosely below, clanking against the seats. I’m not sure how the quads feel about it, but I’ll take the Italian method any day. Once back in my normal chair, I was accompanied the entire way by a cute Italian woman who didn’t speak a word of English. In U.S. airports, I’m almost always left to my own devices, but in European airports I am always escorted. The first time it happened I found it was annoying, but I quickly discovered that along with the escort comes the line-skipping at customs and security checks. They also take me right to my next gate and push me to the front of the line at check in. I know I don’t need it, but after missing as many flights as I have, I just let them do their job.
As I was waiting for the plane to Istanbul I made my first mistake. I took out 80 Euros at and ATM. I didn’t think twice about it, but in just a few hours that was to be my undoing. At this point I’d been travelling for 18 hours and had only caught a few hours of sleep. My head was nodding and the realization that I still had at least five more hours to go was weighing heavy. Once again I was strapped onto an aisle chair, tossed into the plane and tried to get some shut eye.
And this is where things started to get annoying. There was a mess up at the airport and I was stuck in the plane, on the tarmac for over an hour. This being my third flight of the day, I developed a little headache. The odds of me catching my connecting flight in Istanbul were shrinking which meant a possible five hour layover before my final flight. Finally the plane lifts off the tarmac and for the first time since leaving Portland, the skies clear and I am witness to some of the most famous real estate in the world. The plane swings down the Mediterranean and swoops over the boot just North of Mt. Vesuvius. The organic Italian country side morphs into villages and vineyards as we cross the boot and witness sleepy port towns along the Adriatic. The plane hits land over Albania and wisps along the Aegean coast until the church steeples of Greece are replaced by the prayer turrets of Turkey. Before long I see the Bosphorus and the traffic-clogged streets of Istanbul. I know I should have been sleeping, but who can pass up sights like that?
I’m just one leg short of getting to Kayseri with no major mishaps, but my luck has just run flat to zero. This time when I am strapped into the tiny aisle chair I am met at the gate, not by my chair, but by an Ataturk Airport guide with a nurse-pusher wheelchair. Since I can’t go to the bathroom on the plane, the first thing I always do upon deplaning is hop in my chair and roll to the nearest toilet. This was not an option with a Turkish woman pushing me, and me having no say in where I was going. Nobody within earshot spoke any English or French so my protestations made me appear to be not only paralysed but mentally ill.
I am rolled over to Turkish customs where I hand my passport to the officer who stares me down and demands to know where my visa is. I was told U.S. citizens didn’t need a visa, but when I inform him of this he slams my passport down and in a perfect Soup Nazi voice he screams at the airport guide to fix the problem. The guide takes my passport and tells me to give her 20 Euros. I hand her the bills and she disappears with my passport and my money. I sit motionless in front of the Soup Nazi who keeps staring me down as travellers from all over the world pass by, assuming I’m at best a smuggler but probably a terrorist.
Ten minutes go by and the woman arrives with a visa stamped in my brand new passport. The Soup Nazi grudgingly lets me pass and I am whirled down to baggage claim where I have to pick up my bag before transferring over to the domestic terminal and the final flight of this never-ending ordeal. I’m also told that I will be reunited with my chair which will in-turn allow me to say good bye to my ever increasing supply of urine. Since everyone in my flight is long gone, my bag is the lone article on the carrousel. Good luck, one would think, except for the fact that my chair is nowhere in sight. My Turkish hosts, who now number three don’t see the problem as they are more than willing to cart me around the airport for as long as it takes. But there’s no way I’m going any further without my chair. The odds of it showing up in Kayseri without it showing up first in Istanbul are nil and there’s no way I’m going to try to tackle a Middle Eastern city without my chair.
When I put the brakes on the nurse-pusher chair and refuse to move, they get the idea that I want my own wheelchair. Two of them run behind the magic baggage claim curtain and ten minutes later, they come zipping out with my chair which had been tagged for the far-off land of Portland, Oregon. With that crisis over, I strap my bag to my feet and roll as fast as I can to the domestic terminal hoping beyond hope that my flight to Kayseri was delayed.
It was not. So now after travelling for 22 hours, I am faced with a five-hour layover. The patience for this voyage is just about empty. Aaaahh, but that’s when they get ya! I rolled up to a Turkish Airlines check-in, show them my ticket and explain that I need to get onto the later flight. The man behind the desk looks at my printout and says, ‘This flight has left. You must get new ticket.’
He sends me over to a ticket window where I show them my paper and ask for a new ticket. The man behind the window pounds on his keyboard for ten minutes then hands me my new seat assignment and says, ‘158 Turkish Lira, Please ($140 US).’ I chuckle at the miscommunication and say, ‘No,no - I’ve already bought the ticket, this is just for the new flight.’ He’s not chuckling, ‘158 Turkish Lira, you must buy new ticket.’
Obviously this guy isn’t getting the situation so I ask for the manager. The manager comes over, looks at the situation then says in perfect English, ‘You missed your flight. Now you have to buy a new ticket. 158 Turkish Lira, please.’
At this point I am ready to blow up. I tell them that no airline in the world behaves like this. I was detained by airlines. This is not in anyway my fault. I have a perfectly good ticket in my hands…
‘158 Turkish Lira.’ he says (note, no ‘please’ this time).
I decide that I’m in no position to argue and I’m on the other side of the world and they’ve got me by the short and curlies so I pull out my Visa card and slap it on the counter. The ticket agent runs the card and, of course, it is declined.
I’ve had this card since 1994 and it has never been declined and I even got a brand new one just a month before taking off because the magnetic stripe failed on me once and how awful would that be to find myself in say, Turkey, without my card.
They run the card again. Declined. My friendly credit union in Portland has decided that there’s no way I could be in Rome pulling out Euros so they cancelled my card. Even though I’ve used this card in more than 20 countries since I’ve been a member. I pull out my wad of Euros and discover that after cashing them in I will be 10 Turkish Lira short of the ticket. I put the bills on the counter, they do some math and come back saying, ’10 more Lira.’ Again, I pull out my printout and start yelling, ‘Look! this is a perfectly good ticket! I’m only 10 freaking Lira short of buying another ticket! I’ve been in the air for a day already and now you are stranding me for 10 freaking Lira!’
‘NEXT!’ he shouts (this guy has the Soup Nazi down pat!) and I am pushed aside.
At this point I roll back from the counter and collect my assets. I’m in Istanbul, a city I spent four days in 22 years ago and have absolutely no contacts whatsoever. My cell phone does not work here. I have 70 Euros and a worthless credit card and nowhere to go and somewhere to be. This is not stacking up well on my side. I’ve also been travelling for so long and passing through so many time zones that my body has absolutely no clue as to whether it is tired or dead or getting some kind of weird adrenalin buzz from the whole thing.
Just then another Turkish Airline worker asks to see my ticket and says, ‘I can get you on the 5:30 flight. I’ll put you on standby and if there’s room, I’ll put you on.’
Holy crap! I’m on! My troubles are over! I knew the Turks were a hospitable lot! I just had to find the right one! The ordeal with the baggage and the ticket had taken so long that my plane was boarding in only three hours. I parked next to his counter, pulled out my book and tried to make those three hours disappear. I needed a good eight hours of sleep at this point, but it wasn’t coming now. I was staying awake until I was on that plane.
Eventually the time passed. There were three open seats on the flight and I stepped up to claim one of them. My friendly Turkish Airline rep tagged my bag, and printed out a boarding card. Then he asked to see my passport and ticket printout. I showed them to him with my eyes wide open and my lips sporting a purely ecstatic grin. I might even get to Kayseri in time to have a drink with Andy who has been in town for two days already. Anatolia here I come!
Then the Turkish Air worker responds, ‘Mr. Haig, this is an old ticket – you must buy a new one.’ My face turns crestfallen, my energy level turns a sour shade of green and I emotionally collapse. ‘I have paid already!’
But my friendly Turkish Air worker misunderstood what he overheard. He thought I just wanted to get onto an overbooked flight. He hadn’t heard the real problem. He pulls my bag off the conveyor and says there is one more flight – at 11:45 if I can come up with the cash.
If only I’d brought my guitar I could set up on the sidewalk and surely I could make 10 Lira in six hours. What if I sang A cappella? What if I just sat out there looking crippled and defeated? Maybe if I ripped my clothes and rubbed dirt on my face – I’m sure I had the right expression to pull it off?
When I looked up from my quandary I saw a row of card phones mounted to the wall. I saw an airport sign that read, ‘Post Office’ so I rolled over and bought a phone card. I could reach high enough to put the card in the phone and touch the numbers, but I couldn’t read the instruction screen. After about a dozen tries of various card insertions and number combinations I was able to call my brother, Bagus in Denver. I told him how screwed I was and he set out to call Turkish Air and buy me the new ticket. We decided I should hang up and call back in a half an hour. It was about an hour later when I finally got a hold of him again, but he said he couldn’t buy the ticket without showing his card in person. The Turkish Air on-line sales system is a pitiful excuse for ecommerce, but I was just hoping he could find his way through it. I told him I’d call back and I thought of another option.
During my wait, I’d called my sister, Sue, in Oregon and left her a message saying I was stranded. When I finally got her live, she had already found the phone number for my bank in Portland. She’d already figured out that they cancelled my card after the withdrawal in Rome. Luckily, by this time my bank was open and, after pushing five option buttons, I finally got a live voice. I must have sounded like someone trying to rob a bank over the phone, but they finally got the message that it was actually me and I was actually in Istanbul. They opened up my card and 10 minutes later I was rushing to the ticket window with 200 Lira.
I slapped down my cash and everyone in the office seemed genuinely happy that I had solved my problem and I was going to make my final flight. I rolled over to the counter with my new ticket and presented it to the very first agent I’d seen. He smiled, tagged my bag, cranked out my boarding card and then said, ‘Now Mr. Haig, who are you travelling with?’
‘Nobody,’ I said, ‘I’ve been here all day by myself – don’t you think I would have gotten the money from a friend if I had one?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Haig,’ he said, ‘but we simply cannot let you travel on Turkish Air by yourself. What if you get sick? How will you go to the bathroom? A man in your condition can only travel with a doctor.’
‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!’ I said. ‘I’ve been travelling for 12 years in a wheelchair and nobody has ever refused me before. I’ve been travelling for 24 hours TODAY! This is crazy!’
And once again, I was staring down a Turkish Airlines employee who was holding all the cards. Except one. I had my boarding pass. I rolled away from the counter, rolled out of his sight, then dashed over to the customs maze and crossed over without him seeing me. I still had two hours to kill and I was feeling the thrill of victory so I found a faux British Pub and settled into a pint of the Islamic world’s finest brew, Efes.
One pint led to three pints at which point I discovered a German couple, heading to Kayseri on the same flight. I explained my situation to them and they, being equally outraged, agreed to adopt me for the flight. Then I did Turkish Air one better. Evran, a German doctor who spoke fluent Turkish and was on his way to the conference, spotted me in the line and recognized me from my picture on the conference website. Evran became my new best friend, and we went down the runway to the plane together.
Instead of waiting for Turkish Air employees to get me on the plane, Evran held my chair as I pulled off the wheels and he rolled me on my small front wheels to the front row. I hopped in the first seat, buckled in and nobody ever questioned us. The chair went under the plane and at Midnight, Istanbul time, 30 hours after I’d left Bill’s house in Portland, I was on my final flight.
The beers and fatigue put me out and I woke up as the plane was floating over Kayseri. I was told someone from the conference was going to meet me at the airport, but seeing as it was 2:30 in the morning and I saw no sign in the small provincial airport, I just grabbed a cab and landed at our hotel. 33 hours door to door – the last ten of which were hell.
Five hours later I woke up and found Andy and my nephew Will on their way to breakfast. They were the most welcome site I’ve ever had in my life. While at breakfast I overheard two doctors talking about their travel horrors. One of them was simply beside himself: There was nobody at the airport to greet him! Can you imagine the outrage!
It all started relatively well as I woke up in my friend Bill’s house at 5:00 a.m. without even using an alarm. I groggily bungied my bag to my chair and made it out the door to the Portland light-rail train. As the train pulled into the airport I couldn’t believe how smoothly things had gone. Just three days earlier I was forced to drive up to Seattle to wrestle my passport out of the hands of a bungled rush-order passport operation. They said my passport photo was 1/8 of an inch too small. The only way I could get it was to take new photos, drive seven hours out of my way, sit in their line and walk out of their office with the passport in hand. Stunningly enough, when I got the new passport, I discovered they had attached a scanned copy of my photo, not the actual pictures I’d had taken at Kinkos. They could have scanned the originals, enlarged them 5% and saved me the two days. But that headache was gone. This trip was gonna be fun.
Nonetheless, I made my 7:45 a.m. flight and was on my way to Newark for the first leg of a 4-flight, 20-plus hour travel day to Kayseri, deep in the center of ancient Anatolia. I was going there to present my communication plan for the future of the International Rehabilitation Forum, a group of doctors headed by my brother Andy who deal with rehab medicine in third world settings. Ten days earlier I didn’t even think I was going, but when the call came to hop on a plane, I was on it.
It was a cloudy day in the Northwest so only the tips of the biggest Cascade and Rocky mountains snuk above the cloud cover. I’m always game for a nice ride over the great American West, but seeing as I was in for a marathon travel day, I was just as happy to slide back and catch a couple of z’s on route.
The six-hour flight was harmless enough and two hours later, I was giddy with the fact that I’d made my transfer and was on a cross-Atlantic flight to Rome. Whereas missing a connection is a rarity for an able bodied traveller, it is a common threat to a crip. We are always the first ones on the plane and the last ones off. In order to get us to our seat, we are strapped onto a thin aisle chair and carted down the walkway in the same fashion that Hannibal Lector was transported in Silence of the Lambs. If one of these aisle chairs is waiting at the terminal upon arrival, I have a decent chance of making my flight. If the aisle chair is a half mile away, I have to sprint like crazy to make my flight. But in this scenario, the chair was there and I even had time for a slice of NYC pizza.
The long haul to Rome was again eventless as the same pack of clouds that had been following me since Portland was still below me. As the sun rose following a three-hour night, I was not greeted by the shores of France, but the same collection of non-descript fluffy white teasers. The plane was flying directly over Marseilles, Corsica, Sardinia and Tuscany, but I was watching marshmellows. Annoying, but typical; nothing to lose my socks over… yet…
The transition in Rome was typically Italian. Whenever I’m strapped onto the aisle chairs in the states, the attendants make sure every strap is fastened and every belt is firmly connected to the chair. Once a guy in Cincinnati pulled out an instruction manual to make sure I was properly loaded (yes, I did miss my connection that day). But here in Italy I bounced on the chair, the AlItalia worker shrugged his shoulders and pushed me through the aisle with me holding my knees together and balancing on the chair while the belts hung loosely below, clanking against the seats. I’m not sure how the quads feel about it, but I’ll take the Italian method any day. Once back in my normal chair, I was accompanied the entire way by a cute Italian woman who didn’t speak a word of English. In U.S. airports, I’m almost always left to my own devices, but in European airports I am always escorted. The first time it happened I found it was annoying, but I quickly discovered that along with the escort comes the line-skipping at customs and security checks. They also take me right to my next gate and push me to the front of the line at check in. I know I don’t need it, but after missing as many flights as I have, I just let them do their job.
As I was waiting for the plane to Istanbul I made my first mistake. I took out 80 Euros at and ATM. I didn’t think twice about it, but in just a few hours that was to be my undoing. At this point I’d been travelling for 18 hours and had only caught a few hours of sleep. My head was nodding and the realization that I still had at least five more hours to go was weighing heavy. Once again I was strapped onto an aisle chair, tossed into the plane and tried to get some shut eye.
And this is where things started to get annoying. There was a mess up at the airport and I was stuck in the plane, on the tarmac for over an hour. This being my third flight of the day, I developed a little headache. The odds of me catching my connecting flight in Istanbul were shrinking which meant a possible five hour layover before my final flight. Finally the plane lifts off the tarmac and for the first time since leaving Portland, the skies clear and I am witness to some of the most famous real estate in the world. The plane swings down the Mediterranean and swoops over the boot just North of Mt. Vesuvius. The organic Italian country side morphs into villages and vineyards as we cross the boot and witness sleepy port towns along the Adriatic. The plane hits land over Albania and wisps along the Aegean coast until the church steeples of Greece are replaced by the prayer turrets of Turkey. Before long I see the Bosphorus and the traffic-clogged streets of Istanbul. I know I should have been sleeping, but who can pass up sights like that?
I’m just one leg short of getting to Kayseri with no major mishaps, but my luck has just run flat to zero. This time when I am strapped into the tiny aisle chair I am met at the gate, not by my chair, but by an Ataturk Airport guide with a nurse-pusher wheelchair. Since I can’t go to the bathroom on the plane, the first thing I always do upon deplaning is hop in my chair and roll to the nearest toilet. This was not an option with a Turkish woman pushing me, and me having no say in where I was going. Nobody within earshot spoke any English or French so my protestations made me appear to be not only paralysed but mentally ill.
I am rolled over to Turkish customs where I hand my passport to the officer who stares me down and demands to know where my visa is. I was told U.S. citizens didn’t need a visa, but when I inform him of this he slams my passport down and in a perfect Soup Nazi voice he screams at the airport guide to fix the problem. The guide takes my passport and tells me to give her 20 Euros. I hand her the bills and she disappears with my passport and my money. I sit motionless in front of the Soup Nazi who keeps staring me down as travellers from all over the world pass by, assuming I’m at best a smuggler but probably a terrorist.
Ten minutes go by and the woman arrives with a visa stamped in my brand new passport. The Soup Nazi grudgingly lets me pass and I am whirled down to baggage claim where I have to pick up my bag before transferring over to the domestic terminal and the final flight of this never-ending ordeal. I’m also told that I will be reunited with my chair which will in-turn allow me to say good bye to my ever increasing supply of urine. Since everyone in my flight is long gone, my bag is the lone article on the carrousel. Good luck, one would think, except for the fact that my chair is nowhere in sight. My Turkish hosts, who now number three don’t see the problem as they are more than willing to cart me around the airport for as long as it takes. But there’s no way I’m going any further without my chair. The odds of it showing up in Kayseri without it showing up first in Istanbul are nil and there’s no way I’m going to try to tackle a Middle Eastern city without my chair.
When I put the brakes on the nurse-pusher chair and refuse to move, they get the idea that I want my own wheelchair. Two of them run behind the magic baggage claim curtain and ten minutes later, they come zipping out with my chair which had been tagged for the far-off land of Portland, Oregon. With that crisis over, I strap my bag to my feet and roll as fast as I can to the domestic terminal hoping beyond hope that my flight to Kayseri was delayed.
It was not. So now after travelling for 22 hours, I am faced with a five-hour layover. The patience for this voyage is just about empty. Aaaahh, but that’s when they get ya! I rolled up to a Turkish Airlines check-in, show them my ticket and explain that I need to get onto the later flight. The man behind the desk looks at my printout and says, ‘This flight has left. You must get new ticket.’
He sends me over to a ticket window where I show them my paper and ask for a new ticket. The man behind the window pounds on his keyboard for ten minutes then hands me my new seat assignment and says, ‘158 Turkish Lira, Please ($140 US).’ I chuckle at the miscommunication and say, ‘No,no - I’ve already bought the ticket, this is just for the new flight.’ He’s not chuckling, ‘158 Turkish Lira, you must buy new ticket.’
Obviously this guy isn’t getting the situation so I ask for the manager. The manager comes over, looks at the situation then says in perfect English, ‘You missed your flight. Now you have to buy a new ticket. 158 Turkish Lira, please.’
At this point I am ready to blow up. I tell them that no airline in the world behaves like this. I was detained by airlines. This is not in anyway my fault. I have a perfectly good ticket in my hands…
‘158 Turkish Lira.’ he says (note, no ‘please’ this time).
I decide that I’m in no position to argue and I’m on the other side of the world and they’ve got me by the short and curlies so I pull out my Visa card and slap it on the counter. The ticket agent runs the card and, of course, it is declined.
I’ve had this card since 1994 and it has never been declined and I even got a brand new one just a month before taking off because the magnetic stripe failed on me once and how awful would that be to find myself in say, Turkey, without my card.
They run the card again. Declined. My friendly credit union in Portland has decided that there’s no way I could be in Rome pulling out Euros so they cancelled my card. Even though I’ve used this card in more than 20 countries since I’ve been a member. I pull out my wad of Euros and discover that after cashing them in I will be 10 Turkish Lira short of the ticket. I put the bills on the counter, they do some math and come back saying, ’10 more Lira.’ Again, I pull out my printout and start yelling, ‘Look! this is a perfectly good ticket! I’m only 10 freaking Lira short of buying another ticket! I’ve been in the air for a day already and now you are stranding me for 10 freaking Lira!’
‘NEXT!’ he shouts (this guy has the Soup Nazi down pat!) and I am pushed aside.
At this point I roll back from the counter and collect my assets. I’m in Istanbul, a city I spent four days in 22 years ago and have absolutely no contacts whatsoever. My cell phone does not work here. I have 70 Euros and a worthless credit card and nowhere to go and somewhere to be. This is not stacking up well on my side. I’ve also been travelling for so long and passing through so many time zones that my body has absolutely no clue as to whether it is tired or dead or getting some kind of weird adrenalin buzz from the whole thing.
Just then another Turkish Airline worker asks to see my ticket and says, ‘I can get you on the 5:30 flight. I’ll put you on standby and if there’s room, I’ll put you on.’
Holy crap! I’m on! My troubles are over! I knew the Turks were a hospitable lot! I just had to find the right one! The ordeal with the baggage and the ticket had taken so long that my plane was boarding in only three hours. I parked next to his counter, pulled out my book and tried to make those three hours disappear. I needed a good eight hours of sleep at this point, but it wasn’t coming now. I was staying awake until I was on that plane.
Eventually the time passed. There were three open seats on the flight and I stepped up to claim one of them. My friendly Turkish Airline rep tagged my bag, and printed out a boarding card. Then he asked to see my passport and ticket printout. I showed them to him with my eyes wide open and my lips sporting a purely ecstatic grin. I might even get to Kayseri in time to have a drink with Andy who has been in town for two days already. Anatolia here I come!
Then the Turkish Air worker responds, ‘Mr. Haig, this is an old ticket – you must buy a new one.’ My face turns crestfallen, my energy level turns a sour shade of green and I emotionally collapse. ‘I have paid already!’
But my friendly Turkish Air worker misunderstood what he overheard. He thought I just wanted to get onto an overbooked flight. He hadn’t heard the real problem. He pulls my bag off the conveyor and says there is one more flight – at 11:45 if I can come up with the cash.
If only I’d brought my guitar I could set up on the sidewalk and surely I could make 10 Lira in six hours. What if I sang A cappella? What if I just sat out there looking crippled and defeated? Maybe if I ripped my clothes and rubbed dirt on my face – I’m sure I had the right expression to pull it off?
When I looked up from my quandary I saw a row of card phones mounted to the wall. I saw an airport sign that read, ‘Post Office’ so I rolled over and bought a phone card. I could reach high enough to put the card in the phone and touch the numbers, but I couldn’t read the instruction screen. After about a dozen tries of various card insertions and number combinations I was able to call my brother, Bagus in Denver. I told him how screwed I was and he set out to call Turkish Air and buy me the new ticket. We decided I should hang up and call back in a half an hour. It was about an hour later when I finally got a hold of him again, but he said he couldn’t buy the ticket without showing his card in person. The Turkish Air on-line sales system is a pitiful excuse for ecommerce, but I was just hoping he could find his way through it. I told him I’d call back and I thought of another option.
During my wait, I’d called my sister, Sue, in Oregon and left her a message saying I was stranded. When I finally got her live, she had already found the phone number for my bank in Portland. She’d already figured out that they cancelled my card after the withdrawal in Rome. Luckily, by this time my bank was open and, after pushing five option buttons, I finally got a live voice. I must have sounded like someone trying to rob a bank over the phone, but they finally got the message that it was actually me and I was actually in Istanbul. They opened up my card and 10 minutes later I was rushing to the ticket window with 200 Lira.
I slapped down my cash and everyone in the office seemed genuinely happy that I had solved my problem and I was going to make my final flight. I rolled over to the counter with my new ticket and presented it to the very first agent I’d seen. He smiled, tagged my bag, cranked out my boarding card and then said, ‘Now Mr. Haig, who are you travelling with?’
‘Nobody,’ I said, ‘I’ve been here all day by myself – don’t you think I would have gotten the money from a friend if I had one?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Haig,’ he said, ‘but we simply cannot let you travel on Turkish Air by yourself. What if you get sick? How will you go to the bathroom? A man in your condition can only travel with a doctor.’
‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!’ I said. ‘I’ve been travelling for 12 years in a wheelchair and nobody has ever refused me before. I’ve been travelling for 24 hours TODAY! This is crazy!’
And once again, I was staring down a Turkish Airlines employee who was holding all the cards. Except one. I had my boarding pass. I rolled away from the counter, rolled out of his sight, then dashed over to the customs maze and crossed over without him seeing me. I still had two hours to kill and I was feeling the thrill of victory so I found a faux British Pub and settled into a pint of the Islamic world’s finest brew, Efes.
One pint led to three pints at which point I discovered a German couple, heading to Kayseri on the same flight. I explained my situation to them and they, being equally outraged, agreed to adopt me for the flight. Then I did Turkish Air one better. Evran, a German doctor who spoke fluent Turkish and was on his way to the conference, spotted me in the line and recognized me from my picture on the conference website. Evran became my new best friend, and we went down the runway to the plane together.
Instead of waiting for Turkish Air employees to get me on the plane, Evran held my chair as I pulled off the wheels and he rolled me on my small front wheels to the front row. I hopped in the first seat, buckled in and nobody ever questioned us. The chair went under the plane and at Midnight, Istanbul time, 30 hours after I’d left Bill’s house in Portland, I was on my final flight.
The beers and fatigue put me out and I woke up as the plane was floating over Kayseri. I was told someone from the conference was going to meet me at the airport, but seeing as it was 2:30 in the morning and I saw no sign in the small provincial airport, I just grabbed a cab and landed at our hotel. 33 hours door to door – the last ten of which were hell.
Five hours later I woke up and found Andy and my nephew Will on their way to breakfast. They were the most welcome site I’ve ever had in my life. While at breakfast I overheard two doctors talking about their travel horrors. One of them was simply beside himself: There was nobody at the airport to greet him! Can you imagine the outrage!
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Hey Joe
After suffering a piercing sinus headache on my flight back from KC; enduring a 2-hour delay getting out of PDX and losing my muffler on a 100% UNNECESSARY drive to Seattle to pick up my passport in person because they said my pictures were 1/8" too small AND I'm leaving for Turkey and London on Monday.... I was a bit peeved.
Ron and his babalicious wife, Holly, patched my wounds at the end of the drive and got me out the door yesterday morning in time to catch my meeting in downtown Seattle. I arrived at the passport office at 8:00 a.m. sharp and finally spoke to a human being. They said they didn't realize my urgency (I paid 'em and extra 75 bucks just so they WOULD realize my urgency!) and they would have my passport ready at 2:00 p.m. Four hours to kill in Seattle so I drifted over to the Hendrix museum and tried to unwind.
It's a fantastic guitar museum - everything from 1900 Hawaiian guitars to 1930's VOX amps to the newest carbon fiber stand-up bases. You can get an Ipod guide that has sound clips of most of the guitars as well as histories read by, in some cases, the original lithiers.
On the second floor they've got a sound lab with tons of instruments wired up and a bunch of sound booths where you can plug in and go nuts. Being as it was the Hendrix museum they actually had the forethought to include a left-handed strat which was plugged into a massive Marshall Stack with a pedal rack that could substitute for the control panel of the Starship Enterprise. You get ten minutes to do what you want, so I turn everything up to 11 and blast the shit out of a 10-minute earsplitting Hey Joe (btw - CGDAE - all day). My ears turned inside out and bled the few times I dared go up to the high E way the hell next to the pickup.
It was loud as shit and I'm jumping up and down in my chair just sending this thing into sonic orbit, when my ten minutes are up and the amps turn off. The silence hit me like a ton of bricks and I leaned back and laugh like the Reefer Madness guy. I lay the axe back in it's cradle and turn around to see four 8-year-old kids with their heads glued to the glass door, looking back at me like I was the heroin addict exhibit in a human zoo.
I made my move for the door and they scattered.
I'm now officially ready to go to Cappadoccia.
Ron and his babalicious wife, Holly, patched my wounds at the end of the drive and got me out the door yesterday morning in time to catch my meeting in downtown Seattle. I arrived at the passport office at 8:00 a.m. sharp and finally spoke to a human being. They said they didn't realize my urgency (I paid 'em and extra 75 bucks just so they WOULD realize my urgency!) and they would have my passport ready at 2:00 p.m. Four hours to kill in Seattle so I drifted over to the Hendrix museum and tried to unwind.
It's a fantastic guitar museum - everything from 1900 Hawaiian guitars to 1930's VOX amps to the newest carbon fiber stand-up bases. You can get an Ipod guide that has sound clips of most of the guitars as well as histories read by, in some cases, the original lithiers.
On the second floor they've got a sound lab with tons of instruments wired up and a bunch of sound booths where you can plug in and go nuts. Being as it was the Hendrix museum they actually had the forethought to include a left-handed strat which was plugged into a massive Marshall Stack with a pedal rack that could substitute for the control panel of the Starship Enterprise. You get ten minutes to do what you want, so I turn everything up to 11 and blast the shit out of a 10-minute earsplitting Hey Joe (btw - CGDAE - all day). My ears turned inside out and bled the few times I dared go up to the high E way the hell next to the pickup.
It was loud as shit and I'm jumping up and down in my chair just sending this thing into sonic orbit, when my ten minutes are up and the amps turn off. The silence hit me like a ton of bricks and I leaned back and laugh like the Reefer Madness guy. I lay the axe back in it's cradle and turn around to see four 8-year-old kids with their heads glued to the glass door, looking back at me like I was the heroin addict exhibit in a human zoo.
I made my move for the door and they scattered.
I'm now officially ready to go to Cappadoccia.
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