Sluts and Rebels
Protests, a girls' trip, and Platinum Range Travel Joy.
Oh, we were so happy, that morning.
We found a row of four seats on the ferry. Selen brought coffee. I brought salty cookies, a Turkish tradition. We were joined by Saskia and Nichole, two Americans who also live here.
We sat, waiting to leave, chatting about all the things we were going to do on Rhodes, a Greek island a 90-minute boat ride away. All the food we were going to eat. How we were going to go to a beach further down the island, and maybe a gay club.
“I can’t wait to have non-Turkish wine,” somebody said, probably every 5 minutes.
We were supposed to be on Rhodes two nights, but because of the weather forecast, we had to take the ferry back the following day. So we had 28 hours away, and dammit, we were going to make the most of them.
The ferry berthed. We drank coffee. We showed each other things on our phones. We talked about other Greek islands we’d visited and wanted to. The boat rocked a little bit. Nichole asked if that was normal. She was the only one of us who’d never taken this trip before.
I waved her concerns away. “We’ll be there almost before you realize we’ve left.”
The ferry picked up speed. We dipped and bobbed some more.
“What’s happening?” Nichole asked, gripping her armrests.
“Nothing!” Saskia said. “It’ll pass.”
“Why is he going so fast?” Nichole hissed. “Can someone talk to him?”
“If he goes any slower,” I said, confidently, “it’ll be worse.”
We dipped higher and bobbed lower. Some eople at the front started shrieking, in a “this is fun but also scary” way. Nichole clutched Saskia’s hand. Saskia shot me a raised eyebrow look that said, “What am I supposed to do with her?”
“It’s like we’re all surfing!” I exclaimed. “Together! We are surfing… collectively.”
Nichole searched for her safety belt.
“Do you get seasick?” Saskia whispered, to me.
“No,” I said. “Well… I’ve started to a little bit in the past few years. But I’ll be fine.”
The waves really started coming. It felt like we were on a roller coaster, except one belonging to Mother Nature. The ferry staff started cheerfully passing out motion sickness bags, which were really just regular plastic bags.
Nicole was now pale yellow.
Saskia kept talking to me, and I kept nodded, trying to ignore the fact that I was starting to feel less surfey. I have never done sick well—I mean, the seasick kind of sick. I’m not sure if you’d call it a phobia, but I would rather run naked up and down the aisles of this ferry singing ABBA songs than… you know.
I can’t even type it.
“Maybe I should get her a bag,” Saskia said.
I looked around to try to wave down one of the people who worked on the ferry.
At which point I realized that turning my head was a bad idea.
I closed my eyes and gripped the back of the chair in front of me.
“Maybe I should get you one too?” Saskia added.
“Hmph,” I said.
Selen took Nichole to the back of the boat. I fixed my eyes on a point on the horizon like they tell you to. The ferry was becoming a zombie horror movie, with people stumbling all over the place, clutching each other and making horrible sounds. A woman near the front got so panicked she stopped breathing. Some people stood up to see if she was okay. I didn’t. I couldn’t. All my energy was going towards not being sick. I stuffed in my earbuds and blasted “calming frequency” music. I kept my laser focus on the horizon. I said mantras. Nothing was really making a difference, so I resorted the one thing I left: the very loud voice in my brain.
I will not be sick.
Rainbows. Unicorns. Puppy dogs. Purifying rain showers. God, please don’t let me be sick. God of the sea, maybe? Is that Poseidon? Are you there? I can’t remember if you’re supposed to be causing waves or stopping them. You’re a man and you have power so you probably do whatever you feel like. Or you disapprove of boats since were are fucking up the earth with all this oil and oh god this is not helping.
Saskia came back from the back of the boat, where she’d been helping Selen and Nichole. She rubbed me on the shoulder, which made me feel worse, but I felt too awful to tell her that.
“It’s a lot better in the back,” she said. “Why don’t you come?”
I made a feeble waving motion with my hand.
We crossed the invisible line where the Turkish cell signal stops and the Greek cell signal doesn’t work yet. My music cut out. I kept my earbuds in anyway, praying to Hera, Jesus, Allah, whoever was listening, clutching my motion sickness bag like a life preserver I would rather die than use. Each minute lasted a year.
Then the miracle happened. I spotted land.
Or maybe it was low hanging clouds.
I laser focused harder. The boat did not get any steadier. Dontbesick donotbesick. Ifeelgreat Ifeelgreat. Iamnotafraid Iammnotafraid oh fuck I am so afraid.
Saskia reappeared. “We’re almost there,” she said, gently. “If you can make it to the back, we’ll be able to get off the boat faster.”
She might as well have suggested I jump on top of my seat and start pirouetting.
“No,” I hissed.
She stood patiently for a moment.
“I promise you’ll feel so much better.”
I listened to the sounds for a minute. I thought about being on this godforsaken boat for a second longer than necessary.
She held out her hand. I took it.
Selen reappeared and took my backpack. Somehow, I made it to the back of the boat with them. The crew had (wisely) opened the doors to let in the fresh air, and there were a few people staggering around in various shades of green. Nichole was on the floor next to the luggage, looking a lot better, probably because she’d, you know, done the thing you’re supposed to do when you’re seasick.
There was a guy lying on the floor on the other side of the pile of luggage. He looked like he might be dead.
I went out onto the deck with some of the green people. I gripped a metal pipe thing that was sticking out of the wall and watched the horizon and prayed some more. Someone had the nerve to light a cigarette, but inhaling smoke out here was better than being in there. And then finally, finally, several millennia later, despite everything I knew to be true, we docked in Rhodes.
We were almost the first off the boat, and on dry land.
I tried not to cry.
We walked to our hotel, which thankfully was only a few minutes away. We rested for a bit, but I was so ecstatic that the whole ordeal was over that I insisted we head out for breakfast, even though my stomach felt like it was still out at sea. (If I’m honest, as I write this several days later, it still feels that way.) Nichole kept talking about the sick people on the boat ride. I kept hissing at her to stop.
It started to rain.
Later in the day, I made an audio recording on my phone to get everyone’s take on how the journey thus far had gone down.
“Okay,” I call out. “So then what happened?”
[Sound of munching chips in the background.]
Saskia: “Why is there no top sheet on the bed?”
Me: “Here. It’s folded up.”
Saskia: “Why don’t they put the sheet on for you?”
Me: “Guys, work with me here. First we found breakfast, then it started raining. Right?”
“Then we found the church,” Selen calls out.
We all laugh. At the church, a giant, gilded orthodox thing near the port, I had tried to give one of my favourite history lessons: on how the Greeks built churches dedicated to Mary on top of ancient goddess sites.
But I talk fast, and Selen’s first language is Turkish.
“Yes!” she had said, enthusiastically, as we dripped all over the floor. “People do get married here!”
We'd erupted into hysterics. The guy working at the church did seem pleased about four soaking women laughing at the foot of Jesus.
We dashed outside. It started to pour.
The stone streets of Rhodes are beautiful, but in heavy rain, they become rivers. We ran through the gushing water, only to discover the local eavestroughing/defense system, which collects water at the top of buildings and spouts it out into the streets to attack pedestrians. We spotted a few of its victims, huddled together under umbrellas, some of them in shorts and flip flops.
Recollecting this during the audio recording, we start shrieking with laughter.
“And we’re HAVING FUN!” Saskia roars.
It rained almost non-stop for the rest of the day. We wandered amidst the ancient castle walls, and down in the now-empty moat, littered with cannon balls.
We took shelter in a cavernous wine shop, where, when we asked for a wine recommendation, the owner launched into an oenological treatise about two kinds of grapes from two different parts of the country and then went back to the dawn of time.
We stood there, four human puddles, staring at him uncomprehendingly.
“I don’t think he’s had a customer in ten years,” Selen whispered.
On our way back to the hotel to change, we stopped at a corner store to get some snacks to go with the wine. And gingerale, because they do not have gingerale in Türkiye, for reasons I will never understand.
“The gingerale is warm,” Saskia called from the back of the shop.
“I don’t care,” I called back.
I felt a tap on the back of my arm. I turned. A very bald man silently motioned for me to follow him. He led me outside to a row of fridges, and pointed at some cold cans of gingerale.
We thanked him and paid for our things. He never spoke a word.
It kept raining. Most restaurants were still closed for the season, but we found a touristy one and ordered chips and taramasalata. We watched the downpour, which was so ferocious in moments that it looked like it was raining upwards from the ground. They drank beer served in glasses shaped like boots. I had sparkling water.
I was still just so happy to be on solid land.
We ran back to the hotel to change again, but no one had packed for biblical times, so we left for dinner looking like we were going to yoga class in our pyjamas.
Finally, the rain let up.
In the tiny, ancient alleyways of the old town, everything glistened.
At a family-owned taverna Selen had been to before, we had tiny Simi shrimps and horta (steamed dandelions) and fava bean dip and home baked bread and little deep-fried fish and lokma. It was all so good. I had a quarter of a glass of the house wine. We went over the day’s events and laughed some more. It barely rained on our way home.
Selen and I were sharing a room, and as we climbed into our beds, we talked in the darkness about the protests that have been happening around Türkiye. She, like many, is very angry about what’s been going on with the government. In fact, part of the reason we took this trip is because she was at the end of her EU visa and was scared she’d never get another one.
On my birthday the weekend before, I’d said I wanted to go to a protest. Selen made me a sign, which half of the city took photos of and with.
I woke up at 4am to a crack of thunder.
I checked the weather for the millionth time—not the normal app, but one that tells you wind speeds for each hour of the day. It hadn’t changed since last time I checked. It was worse than it had been on our way here. I’d bought motion sickness pills at a pharmacy after breakfast, only to realize in the later that they were not actually drugs but basically powdered ginger. (They were also named, reassuringly, “Platinum Range Travel Joy”.)
I thought about getting back on that ferry My heart started to pound.
I’m just going to have to stay here alone. At least until the sea calms. I’ll just stay inside and write. I’ll be productive. I’ll go to museums! We paid for two nights at this hotel anyway. It could be fun. I’ll eat at that taverna every night. I’ll befriend the locals. Maybe I could just move here.
A roll of thunder exploded outside.
Oh my god. What if the ferry CAPSIZES???
I was sweating. I checked the weather app again. I went through my whole still-existing Greek vocabulary. I looked at some photos of the protests in Istanbul; of people chanting and fighting for justice and standing up for one another.
I thought about how I’d been on the ferry ride over.
Not the laser focus part, but how unhelpful I’d been to anyone. How I had thought only of myself the entire time. My suffering had eclipsed everyone else’s.
It would be very easy for someone to judge me for this.
I know I could have, and, lately, would have.
“That person isn’t doing anything for the cause.”
“He isn’t shouting and screaming.”
“They don’t care about anyone else but themselves.”
“For godsakes, Karneef,” my friends could have said. “Get your shit together. It’s only seasickness.”
But they didn’t.
How many people feel much more scared every day than I had on that boat?
How could I be impatient with others for not fulfilling my idea of how they should be behaving, when I had no idea what was going on inside their minds?
The next morning was sunny and clear.
We tried to find pharmaceutical-grade motion sickness pills, but all the pharmacies were closed.
We went to a nearby beach and lay like lizards on the sun loungers. We had gelato for breakfast. The wind speed dropped slightly (I only checked 40 more times).
Finally, we got our bags from the hotel and reluctantly made our way to the ferry, passing the corner shop again. There was a a sign on the wall for cannabis, which is (very) illegal in Türkiye.
“What do you think?” Selen asked. “Maybe it will help?”
I pondered this, and decided that being stoned and possibly paranoid on a boat full of zombies was not the best solution at this moment.
As we left, the silent bald man waved at us, like old friends.
Everyone who had been on the ferry the day before looked terrified. I was relieved to see the guy I’d thought was dead, but also felt very badly for him.
I boarded while the girls were still in the duty free. I took the row of seats closest to the back, and swallowed three motion sickness pills. I would still have paid an obscene amount of money to be teleported back home.
The engine started up, they blasted early 90s music on the loudspeakers, and we left. We kept looking at each other with wide eyes.
The entire ride home was smooth as butter.
Nichole fell asleep.
I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon, just in case.
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Only amazing! I feel so grateful you took us along virtually in this Big Adventure.