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***Part I: Obstacles***

There are thoughts that always seem to spring up during my yoga practice:

“I bet I look ridiculous right now, like a monkey doing an arabesque”; “I was pretty good at basketball, and soccer. Tennis, too. Boy, those were the days”; “Why, oh why, is my right hip so tight? What is in there? Daddy, are you in there? I know you’re in there. Get out of my hip!”; “How thankful am I to have a body that works. Okay, fine, how thankful I should be to have this body. I am thankful for my body, right?”; “If only I was still with that last girl, or the one before that, then I could think about hot sex while stuck in this stupid room balancing on one foot with my legs and arms crossed”; “That second paragraph in chapter six, maybe I should use ‘patio’ instead of ‘deck.’ No, no, deck. Or patio. Deck. Fuck!”

I expected those thoughts and so was truly surprised when the one I hadn’t anticipated trumped them all, lodged itself into a huge ball in my forebrain: I am transgender. I am DIFFERENT.

I guess I don’t have to think about that as much in San Francisco, or in the Castro where even if I’m the only trans person in my yoga class, my ego is at least comforted by the knowledge that in the distance between my studio to my home, I have received both a girl’s phone number and a guy’s tongue in my mouth.

But the second I arrived in Guatemala, I felt my difference: I laughed uncomfortably when the hotel concierge said, “That’s not your real name right, you don’t strike me as a Nina,” and I quaked in my zip-off pants when a uniformed officer with a gun said, “Good afternoon, sir” while staring at my open passport with the big letter “F,” and I panicked for a moment at a bar in San Pedro when I was directed to the “bathroom,” a cement hole with only a bare bones partition blocking it off from the center of a crowded courtyard.

And the second I arrived on my retreat, I felt my difference: When I met my new roommate, who was upset to have been matched with a guy, me, I took on the burden of the situation, as if I had solely caused the problem, as if my being was an irreconcilable problem. And when I removed my shirt, I realized that even though top surgery was without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me, I still felt stigmatized, a tiny bit ugly, when my scars were acknowledged: The mom who asked, “Are you okay?”; The child who asked, “What are those lines?”; The massage therapist who asked, “Are those tribal markings?” And every time I heard someone address the woman named “Mina,” I felt my entire stomach drop before I’d realize that nobody knew my birth name, that the present incarnation of myself was safe.

At this point in my life, I find it easier to out myself instead of biting my tongue when I’m about to tell a girl I used to play sports against her all-girls school, or explicate that I played in the Sydney Gay Games as a dyke not a gay dude, even though I’m at least kinda gay-ish now. It’s also easy to out myself because I’m writing a transgender memoir and since writing is what I’m most passionate, it’s often the first thing I want to share with new friends.

Within the first few days, I’d told several folks I was trans (although I always said the full “transgender” and tried not to wonder if they had any sense of what I meant by a word that I believe holds a great deal of diversity). If I didn’t tell someone, I assumed they either heard or figured it out, and then, once everyone knew, I developed it into a new worry: I am only a Trans Person, that’s all I do, all I am, all I have to offer.

Different may have been the word I used to describe myself initially, but separation, isolation, and loneliness were the blocks that I turned it into inside my head.

*** Part II: Intention ***

On Tuesday, when I had settled into the retreat enough and still knew I’d have enough time to relax when done, I pulled out my manuscript. It took me a day-and-a-half to get through, and I read it as planned, in a hammock without a pen in my hand and without an eye towards revision. But I also read it with an intention I would not have considered had I not had a brief exchange at breakfast with my teacher who framed my upcoming task as a “nod to the work done.”

Four years of my life, a great deal of pain and triumph, and hundreds of hours writing, revising, writing and revising went into those pages. Some of those paragraphs had been sentences that became chapters that became words that moved from chapter 3 to chapter 5 before finally finding a home. I nodded in acknowledgment, in awe really, of the journey my words had taken. When I bumped into my teacher later, she said I looked clear. She wasn’t aware that I’d read my manuscript, and that after four years, I believed, for the very first time, that I may actually have a book on my hands.

But perhaps the clarity came from the experience of reading a story about a narrator who just happens to have been me, and the new perspective this gave me. For I’d just read a “book” that at its core is a queer coming out story about a person afraid of becoming an outsider, of not being “normal.” And there I was now, a person so comfortable in the Castro as a queer and outsider that “normal” people scared me. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself, at the circularity of my course.

***Part III: Yoga***

We practiced yoga every morning and every afternoon, except for the one morning when a few folks climbed a volcano, an adventure I didn’t even consider after focusing on this concept of intention and setting my own for the week: not to go anywhere or do anything; to banish “should” from my head, to let go of any notion of achieving anything.

Yoga can be a complicated endeavor. It can be about trying to get my leg behind my head (I’m not even close). It can be about learning that my pelvis has a floor and if I can just convince it to feel like its holding onto a tampon for dear life, I might be able to do a handstand. It can be about discovering that there are words like kapalabhati and uddiyana bandha that I cannot physically understand, nor even pronounce.

Yoga can also be profoundly simple. It can be about being compassion to oneself and being compassionate to others. It can be about learning what happens when a handful of people who do not know each other take off work, leave behind children and husbands, drop some cash, shed their defenses, and connect. It can be about discovering that my experiences, my story, may be different from that of others, but that a good story, a real story, is universal—that we all experience joy, worry, pain, sadness, anxiety, passion, loss, grief, pressure, fear, loneliness, and if we’re lucky, some gratitude.

***Part IV:Transformation***

In the end, I didn’t leave the retreat property for six days. I’d wanted to see what would happen if I stopped moving, what would move inside of me if I stayed still. I’m not sure when it happened, or how it did, but I visualized the change in a ritual, an image, my separation going up in flames, and in the experience of diving into the icy volcanic lake every morning and sloughing off my coat of isolation

What took its place shocked me: the words of a friend who said I seem “really happy” and another who said I’m “magnetic” and exude the sense of someone who knows it; a friend on the mat by my side, stabilizing me with her steady strong breath; the pale blue eyes of a friend locking her drishti onto my heart every time I opened my mouth; the ease of skinny-dipping in the womb-warm watsu pool under a swollen moon; the cohesiveness of a circle, undulating, and the flickers of light that powered us from our center.

***Part V: Return***

I went to yoga class on Monday night, the first day I was back. I’d told myself I didn’t *have* to go, but after practicing daily, it seemed easier to go than not to, to stick with a good habit rather than force myself into a bad one. And besides, it was less than a five minute walk to the studio from my house, only a few minutes longer than the walk from my retreat room to the yoga palapa. I’d just spent a week with people who flew to Guatemala from NY, Minnesota, and Colorado to practice with my teacher, and now, back in San Francisco, the distance to her seemed even shorter.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that she was happy to see me, for she is human and not immune to the retreat withdrawal I was experiencing; she too had to let go of the community we’d created; she too had to acclimate back into the urban chaos.

After class, she was excited, telling me that she could see it, that my practice had shifted. Although I downplayed it, as I do, I would agree. I’m a little stronger, a little less self-conscious, a little more aware of my body, able to breath a little deeper. But it is off the the mat where I’ve noticed the shift the most. I waited for the panic to hit when my travel plans went awry after I left the retreat property, and I waited for my job annoyance to hit when I went back to work, and I waited for the overwhelm to hit when I got back to my manuscript and realized I have less than five months to finalize this book. But nothing hit, at least not as hard as it used to, not hard enough to knock me over.

After bandying around quite a few possibilities, I finally found my spring vacation, a yoga retreat to Guatemala. When I told my pal, who’d heard each of my previous trip ideas—all good none great—she said, “Now that sounds like a Nick vacation,” and I knew there was no turning back. I was equally excited and terrified, the two ingredients that make the most enjoyable and meaningful adventures for me.

I am going alone, which is usually no problem, except this time I’m going alone but with people. I’m meeting about fifteen or so strangers there, the lucky one to be my roommate. Yoga is twice a day, early morning and early evening. Have I mentioned I suck at yoga, that yoga is a physical workout but more than that it’s a mental challenge unlike anything I’ve ever encountered? I have a seven-day date to waltz with my demons while twisting my body into positions that are actually natural but that have been strayed from for over thirty years of habitually trying to mask, hide, and avoid pain, and while doing this, I have to breathe, breathe, breathe. I hope the volcanoes are as imposing and inspiring as the pictures, the lake as majestic as it appears, the setting a cradle to hold me.

I have put a great deal of trust in my teacher, Janet, and she’s earned it after two years of picking me up, consoling me, guiding me in times of struggle. Hers was the first class I ever attended as part of my journey into yoga. It was Friday night mellow flow class, happy hour and a half. I remember being surprised to find an actual DJ in a yoga class and as much laughter as sweat. When my girlfriend and I broke up a few weeks later that Friday night class became my refuge, Janet’s words my salve. It was the one night that I didn’t have to make plans to fill the space and distract myself, an activity I could do alone but with others, a place where I learned to put down the memories of what was, the story of what I hoped could be–it was remarkable actually, that without those two things constantly clouding up my head, the weight of suffering was lifted, if only for a moment.

It was a similar feeling, not nearly as devastating as this time in 2008, but similar in what I’ve now come to recognize as the need to return my attention, energy, and focus to me that opened my ears. And so it was, on a Friday night in February, after months of listening to Janet mention her upcoming yoga retreat that I finally heard her, the invitation became personal and the idea lodging itself inside me, the potential expanding. In the end, it was one word, one explanation, that sold me:

Rasayana. The path to rejuvenation.

There are terms I often use to rationalize and justify my actions, like deserve. Used in a sentence: I deserve this vacation because I haven’t taken a trip since Turkey last April, I work 6- 7 days a week between my book and can’t remember the last time I took more than 3 days off of both. But “deserve” doesn’t work so well for me—I think it encourages me to beat myself up so that I will deserve my reward. Permission is another term, a therapy word, and it’s a tiny bit better. Used in a sentence: I am giving myself permission to blow a shit-ton of money, more than I’ve ever spent on a vacation, staying in hotels rather than hostels, and pampering myself for no reason at all. Permission lacks the “because” element, which makes it more of a skill, and although crucial to my life, it’s not the perfect word.

I like “rejuvenation.” Used in a sentence: I am taking a vacation to rejuvenate myself so that I can return fresh, strong, and grounded to the things I love—waking up before dawn to write my book, going out and being social with my friends, pursuing new relationships, and doing a decent-enough job at my workplace.

Aside from the yoga there will also be the pleasure that I find in every trip, like the time to read. Although this trip is too short to truly develop a travel booklist (I’m even breaking one of my rules and bringing library books) I packed: Robin and Ruby (K.M. Soehnlein)–the new novel by my friend and teacher that I’m ridiculously excited to read; Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger) because Salinger’s death triggered my return to his brilliance and reading short books in one sitting is a favorite vacation pastime; Happy Baby (Stephen Elliot) and Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins) as dependable back-ups; and finally, my book, or manuscript in-progress.

It’s sitting right next to me, 200+ pages printed and bound with a large clip, scaring the living bejesus out of me. I am not bringing my computer and will not write/revise my manuscript while I’m gone, but I have promised myself I will read the whole thing. It’s necessary and it’s time. I haven’t looked at this book holistically in years, or ever really, certainly not in any form resembling this current draft. I’ve spent the last several months immersed in the first 6 chapters and now, as I turn to the last 6, I can barely remember what I got down on paper when I first drafted them this past summer/fall. It is part of the rejuvenation, of both my writing process and my book’s narrative to take in the whole story for another big push, the one final push. I do not know what I will find when I read 65,000 of my words and I am truly afraid to find out.

But it is the unexpected that holds the excitement and terror, the adventure. What will it feel like to be outside my comfort zone in Guatemala? Who will I meet, connect with, what conversations will inspire and move me? How will my body and mind feel, starting and ending every day will yoga, feeding it with nourishing food? How will being transgender change my travel experience, my perspective, from that of all my previous trips? What will fill my journal, my blank composition book—will my words come from the triggers in my pocket notebook, the projects I’m currently in the middle of, or will they be fresh and new, born from the present. Will I desperately need to hit publish and share my words with you? What will enter the space once I create it? What will rejuvenate me?

“I just tell people they’re shark bites,” he said.

My first response, a testament to either my ridiculousness or literalness, was that my chest scars are too symmetrical to be shark bites. Or, maybe it was a testament to how ignorant (and I mean that in a mostly friendly way) I believe most people are about trans folk. But headed to Guatemala on a yoga retreat at the end of next week, I realized I may want to have a story or two in my back pocket, whether it’s about precancerous tissue removed from chest, or my passport.

Because I didn’t want to start the long arduous process of changing my name/gender, especially when I’m not sure I ever want to change my gender (mostly for health insurance fears but also because M and F as designations are beyond meaningless to me), I’ll be traveling under a passport with an “F” and the name “Nina.” My picture is pre-testosterone, but it looks enough like me now that I figure most people won’t notice my name or gender. However, I am having some awkward moment worst case scenarios like having to acknowledge that the F is a mistake and that Nina is a boy’s name in Russian–both almost as believable as the shark bite thing.

Then there’s the retreat itself, which I imagine will consist of a handful of people from San Francisco, as well as people who work there, and of course, all of the people who fall into the “unforseen” circumstances category. I am expecting/hoping I feel safe enough to be trans without any explanation for my scars, and walk around in just shorts, because, well, I’ve waited fifteen fucking years to be comfortable in a bathing suit.

As far as my testosterone, I’m on a ten-day shot cycle and my trip is about ten days. When I booked the trip, I looked at a calendar and realized that if, leading up to my departure, I pushed off a few of my shot cycles by one day, then I could line up my trip and a cycle perfectly. It wasn’t entirely necessary; I could bring my vial, a syringe and needles, but I’d prefer not to. I’d prefer not to deal with any of these things, I guess, but these things are my life as I know it.

There was a time, about a few years, when I spent most of my mental energy trying to reconcile what seemed to be a whole lot of no-win choices. Breasts or scars. My happiness or the happiness of others. Traveling as a woman or never traveling again as a trans person. I wondered how much I’d have to give up for what in the end felt less like decisions and more like instinctual mandates.

So, here I am, about to go on first trip abroad as a transboy. And the truth is, I haven’t been too worried about it. Sometimes I forget that for being so neurotic and anxious, traveling calms me down. I’m good at planning, managing situations. I fixed this trip as sort of a training wheels, a place to test how comfortable I feel with my “F” passport and how safe I feel alone for a couple days at the beginning and end of the retreat. Part of my decision to go on a destination specific trip as opposed to a backpacking  trip, even stay someplace “resorty”–something I’ve never done before–was so that I could settle into being myself around the same people, build them into a comfort zone.

And I’d be an idiot to think traveling as a trans person is any more dangerous than half the shit I pulled traveling alone as a woman. I’m also crazy if I think being trans is going be the hardest part of my trip. Because it’s entirely clear to me that the yoga is what is going to kill me.

ALLi: I want to get a tattoo again.

Last year, when we were all here in New Orleans, ALLi got a tattoo of the number 152. I went with her, hoping to get a bicycle wheel just below my neck. I brought some images, none that I loved, for artistic direction, and in the end, I skipped it. I decided the tattoo was too big in size, cost, time, obsessive pre-trip thought, and (as ALLi would remind me) I didn’t want to have a blow-up with my parents when they saw this new tattoo at a pool the next month, especially since I was considering chest surgery and wanted to save my energy for that blowup. Besides, I wanted something more like ALLi’s many tattoos, which are like small iconic stamps. But after scrapping the bicycle wheel, it felt too late to be whimsical.

eS: What are you going to get?

ALLi: I like words. I think I’m going to get the word unfold. That’s my favorite word.

Me (aka NiX): You have one. One favorite word? How can you have one favorite word?

ALLi: It’s my favorite. I think about it all the time. I say it a lot to myself. Unfold. eS, come here and write unfold.

eS writes unfold on a piece of scrap paper.

eS: I can do better.

ALLi: It’s perfect.

Me: One? Really? Out of all the words how do you have one favorite?

ALLi: You’re such a fucking writer.

Me: I’ve been wanting a writer tattoo. What about punctuation? I really hate exclamation points.

I pause, look down, look at ALLi.

Me: Maybe I should get an exclamation point.

ALLi: You’re kidding. What about parentheses?

Me: What if I got one on the back of each ankle?

ALLI: That’d be cute. Whatever is or isn’t between your legs would be be parenthetical. Ha ha.

NiX

ALLi

ALLi, eS, NiX

Photos by Mari

Names by ALLi

Don’t think I’ve forgotten. It’s been on my mind for days, weeks, almost a month. I owe you this post, a reflection on the books I did in fact bring and read on my trip to Turkey, the conclusion to my pre-departure post, ”Developing the Travel Booklist.”

What I packed:  Snow (Orhan Pamuk), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz), The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Sandy Tolan), The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson).

What I bought: The White Tiger (Arvind Adiga)

Reading in Turkey: The Reflections of a Traveling Book Whore

Things got off to a bad start. You could even say I blew it. The plan was to finish my library copy of Snow (Orhan Pamuk), a political novel fictionalizing the very real tensions surrounding religion, the State, the West, class, and gender in modern Turkey, before departure. For a variety of reasons, including my dwindling lack of interest in this depressing, humorless story, I had to purchase and bring my own copy, spending the first few days of the trip whining, “I just want this book to end.” Although it did give me some desired context for Turkey, I wish I’d gone with (and am currently reading) Birds Without Wings (Louis de Bernierres) for my ”destination-specific” book.

On the five hour bus ride from Gallipoli to Effesus, I fell in love with Oscar, the protagonist who didn’t get as much page time as I would’ve liked, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz). What can I say: some of the most inspired original sentences every written, 100 nuanced ways to describe Dominican (and Haitian) women, a plethora of SAT words, New Jersey (where a quarter of my heart lives), and in my opinion, too many points of view that read more like linked short stories than a sustained narrative. I’ve bookclubbed the shit out of this novel with friends and writers alike, and one of the aspects I remain most impressed by is the healthy infusion of Spanish. Not only is it natural for the characters, a gift offering an extra layer of meaning for the bilingual, and clear enough for monolingual readers, it also, without turning me off, made me feel a little stupid for being an American (and a Californian) who doesn’t speak Spanish — a welcome feeling.

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Sandy Tolan) – This was the “educational” addition to my travel library, and educate it did, linking together the various things I’ve read and learned about the last 50 plus years of Israel-Palestine history in one book. The vehicle is the interweaving narratives of two people, Dalia and Bashir, and the house they both call home. I thought this book of “serious nonfiction” would take me forever to read, but it took only a few days since reading it became more important than being a tourist. This book also provided me with one of my favorite travel feelings, a sensation of, “I don’t give a damn about those must-see sites; I don’t have to go to work today; I don’t have a cell phone; sex is not an option – all I need is a comfortable seat and decent lighting.”

The Lemon Tree is literary nonfiction at its absolute best — sickly researched and beautifully told. Do you have any idea how hard that is to do? I heard the author, Sandy Tolan, speak at a narrative journalism conference once, and he said that if a person is 6′ 3″ and the doorframe is 6′0″, as an author he would not draw conclusions and write the line, the person “ducked when he entered the room,” unless someone was there to witness and record that moment. While I think his adherence to “fact” is over the top (which is why I write memoir), I’m thoroughly impressed by it, and forever in awe of those who who rock the literary nonfiction world. (The Devil in the White City, Erik Larsen is another impressive one.)

I only needed a book for the flight back and had two choices left: My copy of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson) and my brother’s copy of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakami), a memoir that might have appealed to me more if I hadn’t already read his long essay, excerpted from this short memoir, in the New Yorker. My brother, clearly and expectedly, did not put enough thought into his travel booklist. He brought too many books thinner than a slice of New York pizza, would read one in a day, and then be stuck trading it in for the best of the 6 books at the hostel exchange. And, I was kind of a dick, only willing to loan him Snow and the Bill Bryson book, which he read and kept saying, “You know, it’s about a guy growing up in the 50’s. It’s kinda funny. If you want to read a book about a kid in the 50’s, you’ll like it.” I didn’t and sorry, Bill, you are funny, and I know you’re prolific, but you gotta offer me better than a one in four chance of a good read.

I thought some good magazines could carry me home, so I searched the Amsterdam airport on my layover for the New Yorker (I also brought and read two backissues, cover-to-cover on the trip, something I never have the time to do at home. And I even brought a John McPhee essay about lacrosse from an older issue for Bro – which means I’m not that big of a dick, right?) Anyways, the New Yorker cost $15 there — seriously. So, I did something I’ve never done in my whole entire life: I bought a book at an airport.

One of the things I forgot to mention while developing the travel booklist is the enjoyment I take from perusing foreign bookstores (or airport bookstores in foreign countries, if you will) where bestseller lists, awards, national interests, and the sensibility of the reading public are different from those in America. To conclude my international reading adventure, I picked up White Tiger (Arvind Adiga), the Man Booker Prize (British Award) winning novel that seemed to be in every European tourist’s hand, written by an author who has duel Indian and Australian citizenship. The novel is a very quick read, which gives the illusion of it being a Sue Grafton paperback mystery when really it’s a darkly humorous commentary on class or caste, upward mobility, entrepreneurship, globalization and modernization in India. This book carried me home and through my first sleepless night with jetlag.

 All in all, this was a very successful reading trip.

I’m told that the statute of limitations on posting trip pictures is a month. With a few days to spare, I bring you the mediocre pictures of two less than average photographers and one only slightly better caption writer, here’s a link to the “best” pictures from Bro and Bro go to Turkey.

It’s going to take me another month to deal with my travel pics. Until then, here’s my favorite from Amsterdam…

My eyes fluttered open to the daylight and a flat desolate landscape of rock, scrub brush, and windswept sand. I closed my eyes for another half hour of rest. At 7 am the bus, or what would soon seem like a spaceship landing on an undiscovered planet, dropped us off in Cappadocia (Goreme Village). “Dude, this is weird,” I said. ”Dude, this is weird,” Bro replied. Everywhere we looked, there were large rock cones rising from the earth, many with odd shaped holes that looked like windows. Perhaps it was the delirium of 16 hours of travel, and a night passed sleeping sitting up on the bus with its many interruptions — neck cramps, a violent Turkish drama blasting on the bus TV, the Jandarma (police) waking everyone to check identification — but this place was weird.

Remember those drip castles you made at the beach as a kid, holding the wet sand and letting it spill through your fingers until small hills rose. Now picture them lifesize and you’ve got Cappadocia, a whole region of them. The reality of these formations is not that far off: a volcanic explosion thosands of years ago covered the ground with tuff, or ash, creating nature’s very own drip castles. Exposed to the elements — air, fire, and wind — the rock hardened into a landscape of these geological spectacles, the main draw to this region.

People lived, ate, and prayed in these caves, some of which were called fairy chimneys, for the smoke rising out of the the narrow tops and the observes who imagined that fairies, not humans, must’ve been inside. As you may have guessed, most of the of activities here surround viewing these formations — from the inside (most of the hostels/hotels are in caves), outside, the sky (in a hot air balloon, which we skipped). My fascination carried me through the first day and the open air museum, a collection of cathedral and church caves, many with frescoes from the 11th and 12th centuries, some mindblowing in their intricacy and others that looked like Pictionary drawings of pizza. The second day, we took a bus tour of the region with a variety of odd stops, the green tour, or the “And then” tour.  We’ll see a cave church, and then a valley hike, and then lunch, and then a cave church, and then an underground city (a multi-floored 4km square collection of rooms, tunnels, ventilation shafts, and stone doors, built 50-80 meters below ground that was pretty damn cool and not for the claustrophobic), and then another cave church, and then another cave, and then an onyx demonstration, with its not so subtle purpose to sell us tired and weary souls jewelry.

For fear that this travelogue turned into one giant humorless ”And then” days ago, I’ll stop it right here.

Today, our last full non-travel day of the trip (tomorrow we fly, thankfully, back to Istanbul, and then home on Saturday), and it is raining, our first truly bad weather day. Which suits our mood, our desire to do nothing but cafe hop and read and have one final day of relaxation, both Bro and I knowing we have work on Monday.

While I’m ready for yoga and running, salads and fruit, I could easily stay in Turkey for another two weeks, the time that it would take to explore the Black Sea coast perhaps and maybe head East, slightly off the beaten path, the time that it would take for this place to sink through my skin and seep into my bones. What I have now is an awareness of the history and the challenges of a country that straddles East and West, a developing taste for the varying regional foods, an appreciation for the amazing kindness and friendliness of the Turkish people, and a cursory experience of the different landscapes — sea, city, and moon. But my understanding is vague; this is just the beginning. I’ve always found that to feel a place, I need to sit in it, that understanding comes not from the sights ticked off, but the interstices between them, the absorption of things heard and seen at a market, restaurant, or on the bus.

It’s been a little while since I’ve taken a “backpacking” trip, one in which there is no plan, no agenda, and all is decided as we go. I had my doubts about myself, that I might’ve grown out of my lust for the travel lifestyle that dominated my twenties. And although now, I’m often willing to pay a few bucks more for a double hostel room rather than a dorm, not that much has changed. Yesterday, when we were on the “And then” bus tour, I looked around. We were Spanish, Brazilian, British, South African, American, Canadian, Japanese. Exchange a few words with anyone, and it was clear we’d all been ripped off, slept in gross beds and on long buses, taken a bunch of excessively long monotonous guided tours just like this one, and we were united in that we wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything. I may be older, but the one thing that is the same is that I’m at home on the road, at home with fellow travellers, deepening my humanity and opening myself to the foreigness and vulnerability that comes from stepping outside the known. On that bus, I felt a sense of community as strong as the one I feel in San Francisco amongst my fellow trans guys and queers. At one point, I was chatting with the South African about his time spent living in Zanzibar and the guided overland tours he led from Eastern Africa to the south. “It’s brilliant,” he said. “Oh man, is it brilliant.” My mind took off on the possibilites, the adventure, the enormity of the world and my curiousity to explore it.

But until then, my final advice for those traveling to Turkey: Learn to play backgammon first. Don’t go in July or August.

It is part of my travel philosophy to take vacations within vacations, an escape from the escape. Bro and I shoved our winter jackets to the bottom of our packs, pulled out our bathing suits and headed to the Western Mediterranean coast, a town called Fetiye, where at all hours of the day men with bristly paintbrush mustaches play backgammon and sip tea from tulip bulb glasses at cafes that line the harbor, and two decker boats, each holding a max of 150 people, are docked in a row as far as the eye can see, the occasional workman with an electric sander or a bucket of paint crouched by the hull, preparing the vessel for the explosion of tourist season.

One boat is ready, or desperate, and thus has a monopoly on the island cruises, on 18 of us interested travelers, about half the visitors to the town. A natural separation sent the families to the lower deck and the sunphiles — mostly teachers in UK schools on break, like Bro — to the mats laid out on the upper deck, as the trail of morning clouds said their final goodbye. 

Our near private boat, sandwiched between clear blue skies and a clear blue sea, cruised from island to island to island, until all Bro and I could do was turn to our new friends and exclaim, “Another one?!” So quiet were these island coves and inlets, the only sounds came from our shouts and splashes as we took turns canonballing (and dangerously backflipping) from the top rail of the upper deck.

I’m not the biggest travel partier, but I liked our new friends, and as I said to the one planning to go paragliding the next day, “It’s not like I have to do anything tomorrow, but ride a bus.” Famous last words. We shared a bottle of raki (the doing of the half-Turk, half Ozzie — guess who was doing the boat backflips) hit up the one Irish bar, where we decided Bro is the love child of Adam Sandler and Ben Affleck, and ended up at a bar with the awesome name, Car Cemetary, packed with locals, if only becuase it was Saturday night. Somewhere before the place closed, Bro and I danced like two white boys to the live Turkish rock band, receiving only a few evil stares, and trying to ignore the flashes of our friend’s camera capturing evidence. Everyone has a perfect travel day. That was mine.

I didn’t fully comprehend the degree of my hangover until I finished the large glass of freshly squeezed tart pomegranate juice at the bus station. The second our minibus hit the first bump, I turned to Bro. “Just breath” he said. But the bus only had one window (useful only for the driver to smoke a cigarette), and all I could inhale was a passenger’s horrific body odor, gasoline fumes, and stale air. For an hour, I fought the explosion of the purple water balloon in my stomach into the pail by my foot until the liquid finally stopped sloshing around inside.

I stared out the window as we passed the sheer plastic covering of the greenhouses where they must grow the local vegetables. While there’s no shortage of vegetarian (or pescatarian) food, the peppers and zucchini and green beans are soggy and blanched, as if the chlorophyll has been beaten out, or soaked for too long in the oil that forms the soupy base of every dish. Two hours later our minibus turned a windy bend and spit us out by the sea once again.

As if someone stood atop a 500 meter sheer cliff and dropped a town over the edge, only to have it land before falling into the Mediterranean. This is Kas. I define a small town, not by the population of people, but by the population of roosters. Here there are many or so their comforting wails would indicate. We chose our hostel for its rooftop deck, the hammock and pillowed platforms and views of the boat masts in the wineglass shaped bay. From the outdoor computer where I type this, I can see the whole town – the sheets flapping on balcony clotheslines, the grizzled grape vines sprouting serrated leaves that climb the neighboring houses and weave through rooftop trellises, the orangy earthen tones of the steppest faces of the cliff wall, and on a hill, the crescent and star of the ubiquitous Turkish flag.

Yesterday, Bro and I rented kayaks, our only instructions, “Don’t paddle too close to Greece.” It pisses the coastguard off. So, we stayed away from the largest island, and focused on circling smaller ones, cutting across the placid open water, and hugging the Turkish mainland. Kayaks are so cool, like sitting on a glass-bottomed couch. The Mediterranan sea is as you might imagine — turquise kissed by emerald, deepening to a midnight blue.

But now, after sampling all the coastal fare — the grilled sea bream, fish casserole, and fried calamari, we will leave the cobblestone alleys and kids skateboarding around the Ataturk statue, for two buses, fourteen plus hours, and a destination that will probably require us to extricate our crushed, wrinkled winter jackets from our packs.

Today is the first day that the effects of jetlag and beer, the constant movement and steady stream of information, may have calmed down enough for my brain to work and for me to process some of this trip — but maybe not. I forgot how much backpacking, no cardio exercise, and meals that lack protein and often consist of bread and cheese (the meat here exacerbates my vegetarian tendencies) can suck the mental and physical strength out of a person.

The bro and I are in a town on the Mediterranean Coast called Fetiye. Last night we sat at a restaurant in an open air fish market where we picked out our sea bass and prawns from the daily catch and toasted what both of us considered the official start of our “vacation.” To me this meant staying in a private room with an ensuite bathroom and a shower that made me feel cleaner rather than dirtier. To my brother, this meant following the lead of the Turkish businessmen at the table next to us and sitting at dinner for two hours, stray cats and dogs sleeping under the table, while getting shitcanned on a bottle of raki — 90 proof grape spirit infused with aniseed, kinda like ouzo, that turns cloudy when mixed with water and had our waiter holding up fingers as an intoxication test for my bro when we left. To get to Fetiye, we’d traveled hundreds of miles, walked through a WWI war zone and an ancient city, taken a ferry, an overnight bus, and traversed two continents.

We started in Istanbul, where we took a cruise on the Bosphorous  — on one side is Asia on the other side Europe, a suspension bridge separating the two, an image that is by no means visually stunning, but as a metaphor speaks to a city that is both modern and cosmopolitan and yet has a skyline of mosques with their round domes and pointed minarets, and speakers that broadcast prayers at irregular intervals, a constant reminder that this is a muslim country (although many people do not practice) — the primary reason according to some locals for why Turkey still has not been accepted into the EU.

The bro and I spent our two days in the city trying to enjoy the tourist sites (Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia), but mostly enjoying afternoons of Turkish tea and nargileh (hookah) and evenings of Efes beer while chatting up any local — usually hostel workers and our tour guides — willing to engage. (For me, this seemed like using my brother, the man, as the bait while I, perceived to be a woman after a few minutes time, and an undesirable woman at that, feel mostly ignored.) So far, I’d sum up the sentiment towards America as this: Obama, one thumb up; mention George W. and Obama quickly gets a two thumbs up. But Turks dig Bill Clinton — he apparently visited Turkey three times. Obama’s message of hope has not yet reached here. There’s a “we’ll believe it when we see it” attitude towards us, and a despair that comes from the futility of hoping for timely inclusion into the EU.

Next stop — Gallipoli — a peninsula along the Aegean Coast and an Australian movie (which bro and I saw in HS) in which Mel Gibson is incredibly young and ridiculously fetching. For four hours we toured the grounds of perhaps the most concentrated battles of World War I. Some crazy stats — 600 bullets fired per sq meter, 2000 casualties per sq kilometer. We saw the beach the Anzac troops landed on, the trenches, some spaced a mere 8 meters apart, that the allies — mostly Anzac (Australian and New Zealand) and British here — and Turkish troops tossed grenades and the occasional pack of cigarettes (or so we were told) back and forth between. We saw too many cemeteries, the headstones of 14 year old Ozzies who lied about their ages to fight, and we heard the historical narratives that brought what is little more than some hilly grass to gutwrenching life. We were led by our awesome guide, Hasan, so proud to be a guide there that he claims to sleep with his badge, and so kind that when we bumped into him at a locals’ restaurant, he helped us order and invited us to eat with him even though he hadn’t had a day off in months.

While museums aren’t my thing (not that unnecessary death is), I found the geographical positioning that goes into military conflict fascinating. This Gallipoli peninsula guards the Dardanelles (a strait) that leads to Istanbul and through to the Black Sea. Control the peninsula and control the waterways. The battles here, perhaps glossed over in the US, are of enormous importance to the Kiwis and Ozzies, commemorated by Anzac Day on April 25, for which many make the pilgrimmage.  (We had to book our last night in Istanbul in advance because of the huge expected influx from Down Under.) Later, I asked an Ozzie what it is about these battles that are so imporant to inspire a memorial pilgrimmage — is it a nationalism that I, an American, don’t understand, the fact that Australia hasn’t fought in many wars? “The Anzac soldiers were there to die,” she said. “And they went anyways, knowing this.”

The next day (an overnight bus in the middle), and we were on the grounds of an entirely different type of history — the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Ephesus. (I’m guessing our favorite beer, Efes, is named after this.) Forgive my lack of general knowledge from times Before Christ or of archaelogy, but damn, this shit was old. Looking down one of the main marble streets flanked with pillars, or sitting at the top slab of the Grand Theater (which held 25,000 people), walking through the stone graves that made up the necropolis, stopping before a variety of fountains, and contemplating the athletics that went on in the gymnasium, for the only time other than watching the movie Gladiator did I actually get a sense for the life of an ancient city. I know there are plenty of tourist “ruins” that are a handful of stones and the rest is up to your imagination, but this was the real deal. I half expected to see a gaggle of toga-clad old dudes in the library and Socrates philosophizing in the Odeon, but that would be ridiculous — cause Socrates was Greek and all.

After knocking off enough must-see sights (even doing one up with a rather useless audio tour), Bro and I are done educating ourselves for a bit, and we put on our shorts and t-shirts for the first time today. Here in Fetiye all sorts of boats are parked in the harbor (gearing up for the impending start of the tourist season that I can only imagine is nuts and I’m glad to be missing) and across the bay snow-capped mountains dissappear into the clouds.