Though riding in cars with strangers in a foreign country is not exactly torn from the “safety” section of the guidebook, at 3 a.m. on my third day in Turkey, I found myself in the passenger seat of a shiny black SUV, dodging packs of feral dogs on the highway and cruising through police checkpoints with the knowing nod of my driver’s chin.
It started, as it often does, at a bar. After sharing a ride from the airport with a well-intentioned but clearly directionally challenged businessman who was staying “near” me, my backpack and I trudged across half of Istanbul and finally took a rest at my hostel’s rooftop bar. Not knowing what it was, I decided to try a drink called raki. At first an innocuous looking clear shot of liquor, after the bartender added water it became a cloudy storm that appeared ominously like a fiercely shaken snow globe. Three blizzards later, I had unintentionally befriended the bartender, Neco, a successful, self-made businessman who also appeared to be the unofficial ambassador of Turkey.
Many people claim their countrymen are the friendliest, most hospitable people in the world. These people have probably never been to Turkey. My mission was to get out of the city and see the untouristed countryside. Neco’s self-proclaimed mission was to take me there. Though I love a teeming, frenetic metropolis, I find a special intrigue with the local intricacies that rural villages elicit. And so we drove to Iznik, a small farming town in western Anatolia.
Perhaps the best way to get to know a conservative, Muslim society is by traveling through it with a local character of the opposite sex thirty years your senior. As a frequent solo female traveler, I’m accustomed to curious stares. However, the furtive glances I received here were barely concealed daggers. Being a young American woman, I was already an oddity. But this was a town where men and women rarely appeared in public together. In fact, women rarely went out at all. While I saw dozens of men eating lunch in restaurants, smoking pipes in taverns, or slinging cards at cafes, women were conspicuously absent.
This bothered my makeshift tour guide. To Neco, the attitude here was as ancient as the 1000 year old stone walls surrounding the town. So he ignored the disapproving gazes and encouraged me to do the same. Like a small act of civil disobedience against the local status quo, he did what he thought was right. Neco’s other mission was to improve the treatment and status of women in Turkey. He led by example.
Neco and I continued on a tour of the countryside, through villages that had existed in some form for thousands of years. As we passed what must have been the thousandth minaret, the afternoon prayers started droning out of its loudspeakers. Simultaneously, Bob Dylan came on the radio started mumbling, “The times, they are a-changin.” I smiled to myself; I knew he was right.
