Go it alone or with a group? Sometimes it's an easy call: China is a group tour kind of place, Orlando is clearly do-it-yourself. But what about Turkey? More exotic than England, not as daunting as, say, Bhutan. We couldn't decide, so we did both. On a recent spring day, John Deiner boarded a tour bus in Kusadasi and Steve Hendrix hailed a cab in Istanbul. Same week, same country, two very different experiences.
One for the Road
By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wait a minute . . . did I forget to panic?
Ataturk International Airport had just spit me out onto the curb, jet-lagged, alone and all but empty-handed in the hinterlands of Istanbul. Without knowing a soul, I'd arrived in Asia Minor with nothing but a carry-on, a one-night room reservation and a week to kill. My hotel was on a street I couldn't pronounce, written in letters that don't exist in my alphabet. The fistful of local currency I had just changed was so crammed with zeros and commas I couldn't tell the difference between a tip and a ransom payment. I was on the lonely side of passport control, with no language skills, no itinerary and no clue about the next seven days.
And yet I was as calm as a mosque at midnight. Why? Because I had something better than a clue -- I had an invitation to dinner.
For it turns out I do have a friend in Turkey. And guess what? So do you.
You may not think so, but ask a couple dozen people you know. One of them will cough up some connection to a Turk. It may be only a friend of a friend. It may be only a friend of the brother of some guy you met on the train to Philly. In a place like Turkey, that's all the entree you need to be received and feted like a returning native. Six degrees of hospitality.
Call it network tourism, traveling the same way you find a new mechanic. In a place with such rooted traditions of hospitality as Turkey, walking out of the airport with even a single local name can launch a solo traveler onto the inside tracks where no crowded tour bus can fit. Add that to the Turks' willingness to befriend any stranger on the street, and you're on an instant tour.
In my case, it was a long-ago colleague of my wife's uncle. I called a few days before I left, and voilà! They invited me for dinner the night I arrived. That dinner would Ponzi into other introductions and, quickly, a locally grown itinerary of hotels, restaurants and tourist sites all over western Turkey, with names and contacts to go with each.
I anointed one of the clamoring cabbies at random and we headed into old Byzantium. Everywhere were the minarets of Islam, singing needles on the skyline. I could hear the faithful chanting their midday prayers toward Mecca even as we passed under an ancient stone aqueduct that must have been imported from the opposite direction. This was the Istanbul that filled my fantasies, the crossroads of East and West, the cloverleaf of the Silk Road.
We drove along a coastal street, the very edge of Europe, with the big snub-nosed boats of the Marmara Sea tied up along the seawall. Asia loomed clear on the other side of the channel, and I could see the freighters heading north from the Aegean into the Bosporus. We turned back through the old quarter, where the streets narrowed, and drove under the shadows of balconies that hung on pastel-colored frame houses.
The Ayasofya Pansiyonlari, a small hotel in a block of restored houses in the old neighborhood of Sultanahmet, was the first fruit of my network. I never cracked a guidebook or called up a Web site to research Turkey. Instead I found this hotel through -- now follow this -- the wife of former British diplomat to Turkey who is a friend of the uncle of this guy I know in Cambridge, Md. I called her in London and she recommended this one.
