A Day Trip and a Big Mistake

It was actually a terrific day, until it ended.

But even the best day can go bad, when you realize you’ve been had.

It was the first day trip from  Urfa, and it really was an excellent one.  Once we recognized that we’d been suckers, though, the memories of the day soured.

It makes the day tricky to write about.

I was staying with two friends in a guesthouse, and the owner seemed gregarious and friendly. We were right in the center of the Old City, in a thousand-year-old building that stayed cool in the courtyard– a blessing in Urfa’s 103 degree heat.

We chattered away about the trips we planned to take– Harran, Halfeti, Gobekli Tepe– and the friendly owner offered to give us a ride.

Harran, the first stop of the day, skirts the Syrian border by about 10 km and is famous for its beehive-shaped houses. Harran was all heat and dust— it was the first day that the temperature cracked 105 degrees, though certainly not the last. The iconic houses were designed to stay cool in the unforgiving desert heat, and it was a pleasure to wander through the few that are open to the public. The first written record of Harran is from 3 BC, and settlement around the city is even older than that. Harran historically was an exchange point between empires.

These days, though, its geographical proximity to current events made a bigger impression. We were surrounded quickly by begging children, many of whom were Syrian refugees. The immediacy of the poverty was heartbreaking and disturbing; ultimately, this memory is stronger than any house. Heat, dust, and begging children… Harran was heavier emotionally than anticipated.

From Harran, we were off to Gobekli Tepe, a freshly-discovered architectural wonder. We were planning to skip this site, but the guesthouse owner was insistent. Onward we barreled, through the dusty roads to the tiny site. Gobekli Tepe wasn’t excavated until the Germans swooped in during the ‘90’s, and for a discovery of its stature—Turks told us repeatedly that it was OLDER THAN STONEHENGE!—it’s strangely nondescript, with minimal explanatory text accompanying the barely-covered excavation.

Gobekli Tepe is more interesting to an archeology buff. I found it superficially intriguing, but mostly eye-glazing. If you don’t know what you’re looking at, it’s just a lot of old rocks in the hot sun. I appreciated Gobekli Tepe, but I don’t know that it was worth the out-of-the-way journey. It isn’t the kind of place I geek out over.

Afterwards, our guide took us to his farm outside of Urfa. It was lovely.

We sat in a shaded area strung with dried green peppers and surrounded by sunflowers and tomato fields, eating salty white cheese and cucumbers. Girls with startling sea-foam eyes served us endless cups of tea and men who didn’t speak English made silly faces at us. We ran through the fields, helping the workers pick tomatoes and snagging a watermelon to take home for dessert. It was a quiet, rural retreat from cities, and a welcome one.

But ultimately, an expensive one.

The owner’s initial offer had seemed so friendly, so offhand, we didn’t quite realize what we’d signed on for– a day tour, and a costly one.

Yep—there were three of us traveling, and not one thought to ask about the price. I feel silly even writing that.  We all paid significantly more than we’d budgeted for the day trip.

It tainted this day. It’s hard to admit to such an easy mistake, but there it is. We didn’t ask for the price. We should have. It was a costly mistake for all of us.

The trip to Harran is a cheap ride in a dolmus (shared taxi). Gobekli Tepe wasn’t a priority for me, and I wouldn’t have minded skipping it. The farm was a wonderful experience, but felt less like Turkish hospitality than an overpriced excursion once we found out the reality of our day. Our guide was a businessman, first and foremost, and it was foolish not to realize that.

I consider it a learning experience. Unfortunately, it continued to color the next day’s trip from Urfa. But that’s a story for the next post…