Leaving the tourist trail behind

Her list of possible cities included Adana, Antakya, Antep and Van.

Our veteran friend wrinkled her nose, and out of this list proclaimed that only Van was really in the East.

It all depends on how you define East. This is a problem that has vexed geographers and explorers for centuries. As the world is round, it all depends on your starting point. Cartographers count anything west of the Greenwich Meridian as West and anything east of it as East. This view makes countries such as the UK and France split between East and West.

The Romans called the sea whose three shores they conquered the Mediterranean -- the Middle of the Earth -- and took East and West as stretching out from this point. We have tended to agree with them. In our European-centric view of the globe, the West is Europe and the US, the Middle East lies approximately between longitudes 30 and 60 east, and the Far East is anything further.

Christopher Columbus was the first to challenge the idea that to get to the East you had to go East. As one of the first to obey the later command, “Go West, young man!” he set sail across the Atlantic and discovered what we now call the West Indies.

This problem of geographical perspective was hilariously illustrated by a New Zealand speaker at an international conference I once attended. She took issue with our usual map of the globe, that is, based on a Greenwich Meridian center and the International Date Line at the far edges. “There’s New Zealand here,” she pointed, “Just falling off the map at the bottom right corner.”

“I prefer this perspective,” she proclaimed, and proceeded to her next slide, which showed a world map with New Zealand at the center. South America was top right, Australia was to the left and Africa was at the top left. Even more striking was that Asia and Europe in the bottom left and North America in the bottom right quadrants were inverted from our usual view -- they appeared literally to be upside down.

I think that my English friend’s objections to the description of Adana as East were less geographic and more socioeconomic. For Turkey, as with the world, the area in the west is more wealthy, has more education and employment opportunities and is more developed than its eastern counterpart. As vibrant and growing cities, she could not place Adana and Gaziantep in the category of East.

I was reminded of this encounter when I picked up the newly published Bradt travel guide, “Eastern Turkey.” The back cover promised the traditional concept of the East as “this wild and little-known region.” I was a little taken aback when I opened the contents page to discover that Bradt’s definition of East equals the capital city of Ankara and anything to the east of that. (In actual fact, they also slip in Konya, which strictly speaking is longitude 20 minutes west of Ankara.)

According to Turkish geographical classifications, a large part of this guide relates to Central Anatolia, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. But, if you can get over this slight geographical anomaly, you will very quickly agree with travel writer Diana Darke that most visitors to Turkey “only know one face of Turkey: İstanbul and the Western shores.”

In this guide she offers us a valiant effort to describe the “two-thirds of the country where 55 out of 81 provinces are found.” Now, usual guides to eastern Turkey focus on the regular high spots of a Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) tour, and overlook most of the rest. Not so with Bradt’s guide, which literally does take you around all 55 of these provinces. Even small places like Tokat, Ardahan, Bitlis and Bingöl get a look in. This vast stretch of territory is divided into 10 easily accessible tour routes for those who wish to take the road less traveled.

Some guides seem just to have been written from the comfort of an office, copying from other reference books, with a Google search engine doing most of the work. This is different. Darke has up-to-date and detailed information that can only have been amassed by actually getting on and off the buses she lists as travel possibilities, and staying in the hotels named. For each area the “Other Practicalities” section contains useful tips written clearly by someone who has trod the path before you.

The only criticism I would level at the guide is that, probably like most independent travelers, the budget seemed to have run out for the last few days of the expedition. The final section of the book, from Trabzon to Samsun, then Samsun to Sinop, and Sinop inland to Kastamonu and Safranbolu seems rushed, with less detail, skipping over many smaller places en route.

This impression of the author as a traveler who has gone before you is confirmed when you reach the section on Ağrı Dağı -- Mount Ararat to you and me. Six magnificent pages are devoted to a detailed diary of Darke’s own climb of this most impressive mountain. The account of the first few days is interesting, but as she nears the summit it becomes more breathtaking and you enter into the excitement and emotion of the climb:

“I well recall the elation when Ahmet turned to me and said it was only 50m from the summit. [These last 50 meters were painfully slow in bad weather conditions, but the fog finally lifted almost on cue as they reached the top.] The summit was so windy and such a small spot that my main emotion was fear of being blown over the edge. ... The sense of camaraderie and achievement was immense. We had shared in an experience none of us were likely to have had again.”

Like me, you may not be as intrepid as Darke, and may know that you could never climb Ararat. But, still much in this land of the Hittites, Assyrians, Seljuks, Karamanids, Akkoyunlu and Karakoyunlu, Kurds, Ottomans, Armenians, Laz and Turks is easily accessible to the traveler who is prepared to go off the beaten track.

Five UNESCO heritage sites await you: the churches of Göreme, the Great Mosque of Divriği, Hattuşaş the Hittite capital, Nemrut Dağı and Safranbolu. The two mighty rivers of the Middle East, the Euphrates and the Tigris, await you. So, too, does stunning scenery, from steep mountain valleys with fast-flowing white-water streams to huge expanses of plateaus with cornfields. Regional music and folkloric dancing await as do the tastes of spicy kebabs and syrupy desserts.

This beautiful, welcoming and, to foreigners, little-known part of Turkey is normally relegated to the last brief section of a more traditional guidebook that devotes pages and pages to the tourist trail of İstanbul, Gallipoli, the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Darke ensures that Turkey’s Cinderella finally gets to go to the ball and star in its own guide.