Day 11 – Konya

After burning myself spectacularly at Pamukkale, we pushed on eastward, and hit a city called Konya, having pre-cached some maps on Google Maps on Jon and Myke’s phones in order to find the hotel we had booked.

Heading down the long, sweeping road from the mountaintop to Konya we were rather taken aback, the city is monumental. Covering the entirety of the horizon just about as you approach it, at night it was rather a sight to behold, millions of lights sparkling and creating the impression of a speckly, starry blanket across the landscape.

On the down side, this meant that the tiny sections of city we had cached on the phones was woefully inadequate to get us to the hotel, we may as well have been trying to find it with a dowsing rod. We pulled over after about five minutes of optimistically driving towards the city center in the hopes of simply stumbling onto the place by sheer luck, and pulled up outside a café called ‘Vale’ I think. The locals were delighted and stepped out almost to a man to look at the car.

We ordered some tea and coffee and set about using the wifi to try to get some more accurate maps cached before we set off again, already late to check in at this point. The guys drinking in the café started talking to us in very broken English, and one of them, the owner we think, took Jon off to show him the hotel, which was apparently just around the corner.

While Jon was gone, one of the guys, who had demonstrated he was a mechanic by gesturing with an adjustable spanner, took it upon himself to teach Myke some Arabic, having him repeat, syllable by syllable after him.

The owner (we think) came back and told Myke that now that he had recited what the other guy said, he had sworn himself converted to Islam. ‘You now are Muslim! Your name now is Mikhael!’

We set off again, and immediately went in the wrong direction, into a maze of one-way streets, and became rather lost, trying to navigate with a mixture of semi-cached maps and compass.

Eventually we found the street, and the hotel, Hostel Konya Is-der. The area looked rather grim, graffiti on most of the walls, and the plethora of dented cars with smashed lights didn’t help. The room was fine though, and the people very helpful.

In the morning, we came down for breakfast, and the owner’s son Emrehan pointed out that the food in the hotel was ok, but it was much better to go into town to buy breakfast, so he was going to take us and make sure we had something good, from the local area.

He walked with us into town, and showed us a small café, serving what he told us basically was sort of fast-food breakfast in Turkey. We ate some very good quiche-like pastries and drank a pasteurised yoghurt drink. When we had got back to the hotel, he insisted on taking some photographs with us to put on the hotel’s facebook page, under the heading ‘Distinguished Guests’.

I’m not sure if we actually count as distinguished, but it’s at least half right!