An American in Turkey

You all may or may not have heard about the string of bombings in Turkey over the past two days. If you want a detailed run down of what has happened look on cnn.com and bbc.co.uk. If you would like a complete history of the PKK (Kurdish Nationalists) and their actions over the past two years visit travel.state.gov and look at the travel page for Turkey. As for myself being affected my group has made a couple of changes to the upcoming tour schedule. Mainly we will be avoiding Kuşadarsı, which is a large port city that is an appetizing site for tourists and terrorists alike, this also means we will be bypassing the Roman site of Ephessos. So the new itinerary looks something like this:

Wed morning - leaving at 7.45am for Gallipoli and later Troy, spending the night in Altınoluk (a small beach resort on the Aegean)
Thursday - leave, see and spend night in Pergamon.
Friday - Bypass Ephessos and see Aphrodesias and spend the night in Pamukkale
Saturday - Day trip to Sardis, spend the night in Pamukkale
Sunday - Quick stop in Gordion, and then on to Ankara

I suggest taking a look at a map, because it is hard to explain the geography of the coast in a blog.

And now, if you don't mind, I'd like to step on the soap box a little bit and also give a little more background to my take on what is going on.

The PKK is a political party of Kurdish nationalists that support any and all efforts for the creation of a Kurdish Republic that includes lands in eastern, south eastern Turkey, northern Syria and northern Iraq. The group has sponsored or laid claim to several small strings of bombingsin Turkey since the large Turkish police campaign in the early nineties that wiped out a lot of its infrastructure. The current string has been claimed by a splinter sect of the PKK that appears to be highly unorganized and unsophisticated. They are targeting tourists in order to scare foreigners away from funneling money into Turkey's number one industry. Thus, this sort of thing tends to happen in some capacity or another at the very beginning and in the middle of the tourist season (april-september). Also tomorrow is the Turkish holiday that comemmorates Ataturks victory over the Greeks, and some Kurds have always felt slighted by the holiday. On top of things the cheif of staff of the Turkish military is changing hands, and as one of our supervisors explained the PKK wanted "welcome him with the appropriate fireworks".

Things have been dicey in the Middle East over the past few years as you all know, and people in Turkey specifically have felt a bit testy about everything. One thing that is not necesarrily pervasive is the carte-blanche dislike of the USA, I have gotten into conversations with a few Turks and when such subjects as my country come up it seems that the love America, but have a strong dislike of our current head of state, yet as soon as you say that you agree with them everything is peachy (of course if I happened to be a supporter of Bush I might feel bad about this, but I'm not). I have witnessed here one or two peaceful, well policed, yet agitated protest marches against the actions of the USA and Israel. To that end I have been doubly impressed by the abilities of the Turkish police forces in containing these marches and identifying suspicious materials and bomb threats. I have supreme confidence in Turkish authorities to carry out a proper investigation of the bombings and bring the perpetrators to the appropriate level of justice. Knowing that it is toursits that are being targeted, it becomes relatively easy to avoid such run ins. If you simply travel off the beaten path a bit and stay out of tourist traps your level of safety triples, and that is what we intend to do on this trip. That said, we will keep a close watch on the state department travel advisory, and if a threat is raised (and one would hope it would not be a knee-jerk reaction to minor incidents) more serious actions will be taken on our groups part.

OK, in all, I am safe, my group is safe, and the bombings have not drastically affected our plans. My next blog may not come until I make it to Ankara, I am unsure of my ability to connect to the internet until then. Take care all of you, and don't worry too much about me.