The
Cakir family has been away on holiday!
We had a few days in Ankara and from there we went to the north east of
Turkey to ski. It’s one of the few
things that we all enjoy; even me who hates the cold and EVEN Cem who usually
hates any form of exercise!
There
are several ski centres in Turkey but the place we went is in the north
east. It’s a small town called Sarikamis
and is supposedly the only place in Turkey that has the same type of snow as the
Alps. It certainly has the best snow of anywhere we have skied in Turkey, but
it is also the coldest place with temperatures generally -5 to -10 degrees in
the day! Sarikamis is famous in Turkey
as the place where a large number (often quoted as 90,000) of Turkish soldiers
froze to death whilst fighting the Russian army during World War I.
Unlike
those poor soldiers, I was prepared with layers of thermals under my ski
clothes, two pairs of socks and two pairs of gloves with hand warmers inside
them and still my fingers – and sometimes toes – were frozen at the end of the
day! But we had fun skiing. Emre changed
to snow-boarding, having a couple of lessons and learning quite well in a short
time. Kaan just wanted to be the fastest
thing on skis – and with an app on his phone, he could check every day how fast
he had gone (he stopped telling me when he passed 80kmh as he knew I would get
cross!) as well as how far he had skied, gradients etc.
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| Kaan on ths slopes |
We
had been to Sarikamis before about 10 years ago (actually it’s where Cem’s
parents grew up too). There are now 4
more hotels at the ski centre (total 6, though the biggest was closed this
year) but it was still very quiet. It
gets a bit busier at the weekend when some of the locals come to ski, but
during the week you can usually get on the lift in 5 minutes at the most – and the
boys were even complaining about this sometimes, I don’t know what they would
think of the queues elsewhere!
There
are several ski schools and the Turkish Ski Federation is always training
children who might enter the national team.
We were chatting with a local boy on the lift whose brother is already
in the national team and who hopes to get in it too. He’s 14 and has been skiing since he was
5. But he also wants to be an attorney. It’s hard sometimes in these little places in
the east of Turkey – the standard of schooling might not be so good and the
children do not have the same opportunities.
We took his address to send him Kaan’s old school books and the boys
were amazed that he doesn’t have a mobile phone. In Fethiye, any child above the age of about
8 has a phone!
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| Emre boarding |
We
flew to Kars, which is the nearest town – and the regional centre – though it
is much smaller than Fethiye! Close to
the Russian border (now the Georgian and Armenian borders), Kars was occupied
by the Russian Empire for a time in the nineteenth century and many of the
older buildings were built by the Russians.
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| Old Governors Residence built in 1883 |
It
is famous for several types of cheese including a hard yellow cheese called ‘kashar’
that is like cheddar and a stringy, fibrous cheese that is best eaten when blue
(with mould). Unlike the UK where you
can generally find everything everywhere, most areas still have their
specialities and people like to buy it from the source. Apart from anything else, though you can buy
Kars Kashar in Fethiye, it is more expensive, so several people had asked us to
get them some. We went to a little shop,
tried lots of cheese and bought three whole wheels of kashar (39kg) which were
supposed to arrive yesterday by cargo; hopefully they will turn up today!
That
part of Turkey is also known for having tasty meat – and particularly ‘Cag
kebab’, which is marinated lamb cooked on a horizontal spit (with tail fat –
ugghh!) As a veggie, I obviously can’t
comment on it, but the boys and Cem enjoyed it.
