Cukurbagli's Blog   My life in Turkey

This time of year is breeding time for the Loggerhead turtles here on the Mediterranean beaches. After a struggling up the beach at night to dig a hole the female turtles lay their eggs in the sand and cover up the hole. They make an effort to dig the hole far enough away from the water for the sand to be dry and warm enough to incubate their eggs. In this picture you can see the tracks that the turtle made as she came and went, the eggs were laid where the two tracks met. I’m not sure which track is the coming and which the going one but they must have only been made a day or two before I saw them.

This is Rami on the beach at Demre, he is a research assistant and was going round measuring the temperature of each of the nests, there are ten on this beach. On the 7Km beach at Patara he said there are over one hundred nests.

The eggs take between forty and forty five days to hatch, I hope they are all successful and the babies can find their way to the sea for their epic journeys around the world’s oceans before they come back to breed here again. It was wonderful to see this activity that I had only ever seen on television before.

You’ll notice that I used the plural in the title, recently the car and the scooter both had to be tested so I have been able to try out the new system that is employed for us now. We have a bright shiny new testing station to take our vehicles to, unfortunately for us it is 44 Km away by the junction for Patara, an ancient Lycian site which also happens to have a nice 7 Km sandy beach where turtles lay their eggs. This distance is not a problem if I take my car because the car is relatively comfortable but on the scooter it’s a bum-numbing trip and shakes your insides up a lot. The springs and shock absorbers must be on a racing set-up or they expect two (or three) people to be on board, it nearly shakes the scooter to bits too.

Anyway I made it over there with the car a few weeks ago, I only had to wait a couple of minutes because there was only one other car there. Unfortunately it failed for cracked brake hoses on the rear but I found a place to get them done and took it straight back to the tester and he passed it. Very quick, I got there about 9am and arrived back home at 11.30 or so.

Today was a little tedious because I seemed to be waiting for a lot longer but maybe it was just feeling all shaken up by the ride over there. I didn’t have to get anything repaired though and was still back home at 11.30. A couple of my friends were there getting their scooters done too so I had someone to chat to. Here’s a photo of the new station.

Ooooh! Dead flower stems…..my favourites! Yum yum…..

Mustafa the kamyoncu (truck driver), an old friend of mine here, was telling me how his daughter Merve needed a computer for part of her studies. He was trying to see if I could help him decide on what kind to get for her, he has no experience of computers at all. After I talked to Merve about it I thought it would be a good way to dispose of my old laptop. It needed a new key, which I ordered online, and I gave it a good clean but I’m happy to say that it now has a good home. It won’t win any awards but it might help her with English, it runs XP and has an English keyboard, no wireless card (it’s ten years old), no camera, but as a first computer it will help. Actually the English version of XP might be better than the Turkish as a number of Turkish friends have said that they don’t understand the Microsoft translations for actions.

The donkey, I called her Fiona, is enjoying her stay with me and I’m discovering little bits of her character now. She likes to come and stand by the house in between bouts of feeding and stamps her foot when she wants some attention. I give her a carrot in the mornings for breakfast and she noticed one sticking out of my pocket the other day as I was taking her down the garden so she came up close behind me and pulled it out and ate it. I had noticed that her hooves are a little bit overgrown so I wanted to get a couple of tools to help me trim them. I have never been a farrier and didn’t know the slightest thing about how to go about it but all you have to do to learn something these days is look on Youtube. Yes there are instructional videos even on trimming donkey hooves! Well I asked one of the market traders to get me a couple of things, describing what I wanted to do stretched my Turkish a bit but in the end he understood. There are traders that sell what I call “village tools”, implements to do all the things that village men and women do, things like a spike with a swivel with a chain that you can stick in the ground and tether your donkey to so it won’t tangle the chain up, or a tara, like a machete but the curve goes inwards like a billhook, it’s used for general cutting of the bushes that grow all over the countryside here. Well this guy didn’t have the tools I wanted but said he would bring them and he did. One of them was a big rasp, a very coarse file for trimming and smoothing the hoof after it’s been cut, the other was probably the most dangerous hand tool I’ve ever seen. Here’s a picture.

It’s almost designed to slash your wrist for you. This is a right handed model, I assume left handed ones are available too. Actually I think he had it made specially for me. To use it you lift the donkey’s hoof and cradle it in your left hand with your thumb alongside your other fingers to keep it out of the way. Then you sharply hack at the bottom of the hoof in an attempt to remove shavings. This means that the (extremely) sharp blade is pulled directly towards your exposed inner forearm so that the outer corner of the blade is in exactly the right position to sever the arteries and veins near your wrist. I have used all sorts of tool all my life, both in work and play but a more effective tool for committing accidental suicide or at least giving yourself a serious injury I have never seen. It was obvious too that the market trader was aware of the dangers of using it because he warned me at great length, clearly the reputation of this thing is well known. Actually I don’t like the method at all, I’m not a fan of tools used in a hacking or hitting manner and I won’t be using it, a nice sharp pair of cutters will do the job much more accurately and with less danger to everyone involved. The rasp has proved to be a bit of fun though. Maybe it tickles the feet but as soon as I finish using it Fiona is off, jumping, skipping and running around and the dogs join in the fun. Of course it could also be the removal of all the stones and dirt from the recesses of the hoof that make her feel good, imagine if you were walking around with three or four sharp stones in your shoes all day, wouldn’t you jump for joy when someone took them out for you?

Spring is with us again and we’ve just had the almond blossom decorating the village. There are thousands of almond trees in the village and great drifts of white and pink could be seen from my house. They only look a kind of muddy grey until you get closer so here’s a picture to show you what it’s like, one of mine in close-up and in the background an example of what the rest of the village looks like.

All of the other trees are budding or bursting their buds, it’s great to see all this growth in spring, easy to understand why so many people used to worship the spring Gods. On the other hand all the weeds are growing at an alarming rate, I’m going to have to get out the strimmer pretty soon.

For the last few days I’ve had a visitor, Aslan, my neighbour’s dog, he’s been sleeping on my front step on a big cushion I gave him. He has been very unwell and I’ve been trying to nurse him back to health. I gave him worming tablets, eye drops, antiseptic on two of his paws and some stuff get rid of fleas and ticks. He is very much brighter today and has a bowl of chicken soup this afternoon in addition to breakfast and dinner that I give him anyway. He needs building up since the worms sapped all of his strength and every time he shakes himself clouds of dried skin fly all over the place.

My dogs usually play with him but won’t go near him at the moment. After I gave him the chicken soup he followed me down the garden when I went to check on the fruit tree buds then he had a roll around in the long grass and made a nest to have a sleep in the warm sun. He’s not a pretty or handsome dog, in fact he doesn’t look very nice at all especially with that spiked collar my neighbour insists that he wears, but he is a big softie really.

For the last few days I’ve been pounding my fingers to the bone and suffering all sorts of vision problems because I’ve been at my computer transferring all my old blogs from Myspace to here. Now, with a simple click of your mouse button you can switch over to my old blogs.

Just click the link in the Blogroll window on the left and by the magic of the internet you’ll be taken there as fast as your connection can do it.

Hope you enjoy it.

I now have a 6.67kg turkey sitting proudly on the bottom shelf of my fridge. Whatever possessed me to buy it instead of a reasonably sized chicken I have no idea, I hadn’t been drinking, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. So that explains why I have spent this morning perusing all the cooking websites I can find in the quest for hints, tips and recipes for cooking the bird. Delia Smith’s advice was first on my list but since then I’ve looked at two dozen other sites at least. The basic cooking instructions are fairly straight forward, I’m pretty sure I can cope with that but I would like to put a stamp of individualism on it if I can, you know, a little personal twist that says “I prepared the meal”. I’ve come up with a few ideas involving the addition of fresh fruit and the like so we’ll see how it turns out.

To everyone who reads this I wish you all a Happy Christmas or the equivalent seasonal wishes in your own religion.

Yesterday I woke up to grey skies and later it started raining. A steady rain fell for most of the afternoon and a friend told me that the forecast was for it to continue for about three days. Well I’m glad to say the forecasters got it wrong, at least until 10.00 today when I’m posting this. It was a lovely morning today so I went up to the top of the ridge behind my house to photograph the valley. Here is one of the shots that I took showing most of the village, my house is at the bottom in the middle with the green roof. The last time I took a photo like this you could see all of the house and my car park but the trees have grown a lot since then.

Well here’s another sky photo just to show that is not all sun, sea, etc etc. The weather is bad sometimes.

Not technically a great photograph but all I could manage at the time.