Midnight Express

Disembarking the wind-swept ferry at Canakkale in the Dardanelles Straits and the ghosts of history are everywhere you look. On the left a small museum plays a continuous big screen loop of mustachioed Ottoman soldiers marching off to war. A few metres away a field gun of World War One vintage hones in on the Hotel Anzac (Australia and NZ Army Corps), where every year hordes of Australasians bed down for the night before a dawn ceremony of profound national catharsis. Most patriotic of all is the twenty metre white imprint of a Turkish soldier emblazoned on a patch of deforested hillside across the bay. An adjacent message declares: Dur Yolcu – Stop Traveller. For the nations of four countries this was hallowed ground.

I had come here to explore those past glories and tragedies, but it was an unsought for encounter with the Turkish military of the present day that would make this battlefield visit more harrowing than I could have imagined.

My innocent first day objective (the opposite of over-ambitious World War One commanders), was a small fort on a peninsula 5 km from the town centre. Google maps showed a public road leading straight to it.

A few minutes walk along the blustery promenade brought me to a military checkpoint. Men in military fatigues strolled around nonchalantly. The only real concession to combat readiness was a goofy youngster manning a machine gun behind a wall of sandbags. I ducked under the barrier, asking the nearest soldier where Nara Kalesi was. A jolt of the head told me I was heading in the right direction.

I can only assume with the benefit of hindsight that they thought I was a visiting naval official, or perhaps a guest professor, off to the academy to give a lecture on the Battle of Lepanto. Although with my hiking boots and scruffy day pack I hardly looked like an Oxford don.

For the next hour I was waved through barrier after barrier, watch tower after watch tower. I even politely refused a lift from an army jeep driven by some bemused, suited officials. Every time I asked directions I was prodded in the right direction.

To be fair there was only one route, but I was becoming slightly apprehensive about the terrain I was walking through. To my right the land banked upwards in a mixture of pine trees and telecommunication towers. To my left the churning waters of the straits were plied by Turkish patrol boats. One enormous battleship scythed through the water, guns bristling: perhaps it was passing directly over the wrecked hulks of the many British ships sunk here in 1915.

And of course I was the only day tripper on the road.

My luck ran out at the final hurdle.

The two junior soldiers that exited the land rover that roared up behind me looked harried and worried, and I didn’t need to understand Turkish to know that my walk was at an end. I was invited with firm insistence into the car. They either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, reply to my protestations.

Back at the first checkpoint in town things got heated and confused. Locked in the back of the car I watched with growing alarm as a confused mass of soldiers made hurried phone calls.

I was eventually told to pass through a metal detector and took my place at a small table in an airy office.

“Who are you?”

“Why you here?”

“I am a tourist. I came to walk to the castle…”

“OK.”

And so ended the interrogation. The two junior soldiers didn’t speak enough English. We settled into a fairly comfortable silence, given the circumstances; they resorting to Google Translate to apologise for the poor quality of English tuition in Turkish schools, me commenting favourably on the only Turkish football player I could remember. Thank you brain for pulling Middlesbrough’s Tuncay Şanlı from the bowler hat of my memory.

“Yes, Yes…very good football man……Çay?”

I love Turkey. I may have been suspected of spying and trespassing in the country’s largest naval base, but guest or prisoner, tea had to be served. If this was how things were going to continue I could handle it.

Then, sure enough, the big dog arrived. And he was big and bald, all thick-set muscle and piercing, Nordic eyes. In civil and polished English he introduced himself as the senior security officer of the base. The eyes seemed never to blink. Bring back the goofy privates with the football chat please.

Those blue eyes sized me up with interest. I stared back politely.

“How did you get past the barrier?”

I explained everything that had happened, how I had been waved through, how no one had stopped me. I even got a little angry myself, implying the negligence of his own soldiers.

This point he agreed with.

“Yes, this is a terrible breach of our protocols.” He shot a glance outside with some vehemence.

He got to work. My history and work credentials were probed. I was made to prove my status as a teacher with a digitized copy of my diploma. Old addresses were dredged up from the dark recesses of my memory and always those cold blue eyes, businessman-like, clearly worried I was up to no good.

“Look I am not going to lie to you. This is very, very serious.”

But things seemed to be heading in the right direction when my phone showed no photos of naval vessels or military installations.

Things took a U-turn and headed in the wrong direction whey they checked my bag.

Look, I grew up in Africa. I travel in mountains and remote places, and am passionate about wildlife and all aspects of the natural world, and frankly any hiker in the wilderness who doesn’t have a pair of decent binoculars should head back to the municipal park.

He groaned, head dropping in consternation, the first time he had lost his composure. I could see him struggling to reconcile the pair of high-grade optical equipment with the good-humoured, scruffy monkey sat across from him.

“It’s mainly for bird-watching,” I offered a little pathetically.

“Interesting features of the landscape….”

He cut me off.

“This has become more serious and I must contact my superiors in Istanbul. The police may come and arrest you.

He paused.

“I suppose you have seen the film Midnight Express?”

This was said with a smile that was so fleeting and enigmatically drawn across the tight skin of his face that it was impossible without re-watching it in slow-motion to know if it was meant as a joke or a warning.

My stomach churned.

“Do you think I’m a Kurdish spy?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you think I’m a British spy?”

“I just don’t know. I don’t know what to think of you. That little fort is just a tiny ruin. There is nothing to see. And people don’t carry binoculars here.”

“I know.” I said sadly, becoming immediately nostalgic for the days when as matter of course men carried with them terrain maps, Winchester rifles and enough pipe Tobacco to last a season in the Yukon.

He left abruptly. I re-read the same passage of my book, unable get through more than a few sentences before thoughts wandered to bars of soap slipping in showers, rusty prison weapons and what accent I would have to assume in order to have a chance of surviving in prison. Was Glaswegian an intimidating accent for Turkish drug pushers?

I never saw my chief interrogator again. After another hour of waiting everything ended as abruptly as it had started. A private soldier came in and told me I could go. I high-fived him.

The mood of celebration continued outside as I neared freedom. I shook hands with a number of soldiers as I left, who seemed genuinely to share my elation. Never one to miss a chance for a joke I mimed turning back into the naval base which made them laugh. One soldier even mimed drawing his handgun from his holster and shooting me. Squaddies love banter.

It snowed near constantly the next few days and I never visited any of the main battlefield sites or main cemeteries. The Gallipoli campaign lasted from February 1915 – January 1916 and cost the lives of a 100,000 soldiers. Mine had lasted 3 hours, and cost me nothing. But it was enough military action for me and I was ready to be demobilized.

And the main thing was I had those naval images I had come all this way for.