We ride the buses from Konya to Antalya today, southwest over the Taurus mountains and to the Mediterranean. (Some of us do yoga or get on the children’s playground at a rest stop.) We visit the ruins at Aspendos, the world’s best preserved Roman amphitheater. There are still opera and drama performances going on there today, and the acoustics are amazing. Jsu Garcia and Matt Van Fossen recite Shakespeare on the stage and I can hear it all the way at the top. Lunch is in a beautiful wooded setting (that includes a paintball court and ropes course) where they’re also setting up for a wedding. John reviews logistics for the next couple of days and does a blessing.
Lunch is a western style grilled chicken, rice and salad, a break from our usual Ghettoterranean lunches of flat bread and dips, flat bread with cheese or ground beef, lentil soup, tomato/cucumber salad, and lamb, beef and/or chicken kebabs. It’s good, simple food but repetitive, served by hurried, anxious young men who throw the dishes around like they’re mechanics in an auto parts store. There are virtually no waitresses, except at the pricier resorts and hotels. This is still a relatively poor, second-world nation when you’re in the countryside and small towns, where repetition and ritual are used to compensate for a deep fear of poverty that suppresses innovation and creativity—especially around food, money or anything related to survival. There are lots of skinny looking stray animals, especially cats. I photograph a couple of homeless dogs later in the day. They are often fed by restaurants, locals, tourists, etc.
In the afternoon we drive on to Perge to wander around the Greco-Roman ruins that include a big theater, baths, agora and colonnaded street. St. Paul started his missionary work here. For me, these “ruin days” are like the polar opposite of, and complementary to, our visits to the sites centered around spiritual teachers and Travelers. It’s a chance to see what the impermanent outer world comes to in the end, a spoiler alert for life, the bad cop in the Traveler’s good cop/bad cop routine, a confrontation with our mortality. People wander and poke around these ruins as though they’re looking for some piece of jewelry that they’ve lost. It’s a different quality from the rapt expressions at Rumi’s tomb the day before. It’s a look of searching, or remembering vague wisps of a dream, rather than bliss and contentment.
Finally we arrive at our seaside hotel on the Mediterranean in time for sunset. It’s hot and humid again, in contrast to our days on the cooler high plateau. We’re in beach resort mode now, and some of us take the hotel elevator down to the ocean and jump in.
