Turkey is one country I'm sure is on everyone's wish list to travel to one day. I regard Turkey as a similar country to Australia. It's a vast and open country with plenty of sights to see, things to do and great people.
But bombs and me seem to always meet!
It happened in India and Indonesia and it was happening again here in Turkey. I seem to have a knack of travelling to countries where there seems to be unrest. In this case it was the PKK, the Kurdish group of Independence fighters who are quite sadly caught between 3 countries, Turkey, Syria and Iraq. As most people want their own country it seems only fair that they should have theirs too. But, because they are considered Gypsies, and the land they want borders a lot of oil fields, they are denied.
That though leads to a more political story.
So, I was in the really cool town of Antalya which is on the southern coast, not so far from Cyprus. Antalya is a coastal beach type of place and is very popular for tourists. It is also a busy diving town for the dive enthusiast. During my time there the Red Hot Chili Peppers was blaring out of the beach front bars and the atmosphere was just one party to the next, go with the flow and do what you want to do. There were a lot of tourists in this town enjoying themselves.
I was catching a bus to a town up the road, about 6 hours away, it could have been more, my head was still cloudy from too much partying. Anyway, about half way through the trip our bus was stopped at a road block manned by heaps of what appeared to be police. Everyone on the bus had to get of while the bus was searched and passports produced.
It was a long wait while each person was interviewed and asked where they had come from and where they were going. It was eventually ascertained that just after our bus left Antalya, a bomb was detonated from a rubbish bin in a bust tourist area. Moments later another bomb had exploded at the destination I was heading to.
WHOA!! Maybe I should get off here and hitch-hike to a place in a totally opposite direction.
By the time I arrived at Fethiye there didn't seem to be any chaos or panic on the streets. All seamed quite normal. The next day at the harbour while eating breakfast, I was talking to a local that explained to me that the PKK have been exploding bombs around the tourist area for some time now so it's usually cleaned up quite quickly in order for the tourists to continue the money flow.
Still, as a tourist/traveller myself in a country that contains this kind of situation and being so close to me was quite an eye opener. I'd heard about the PKK while in Greece but being in between detonations is another thing though!
The bonus about travelling is you never know what you will run into. We have a saying in Australia: "You'll never never know unless you never never go"
KEEP ON TRAVELLIN'
No comments:
Post a Comment