A Novel Path – Tales of an Adventure Goddess

2007-03-27 12:14:12

Somebody once told me that road trips are a veritable plethora of pleasures one can’t quite sum up neatly in one sentence or thought. It’s the ability to enjoy life as it passes, and the control to stop it if the moment looks enticing. You are safely locked up in your little cocoon and when you feel the moment is right, you step away from it long enough to enjoy the present before you feel the need to step back. So I thought, why not take a road trip in Turkey? I’ve got the time and the resources (my rent was less expensive than originally planned) and since my roommate’s cat was trapped in Izmir, I now had an agenda.

I could write off the weekend as a sea of firsts…First time driving manual trans farther than 5 km from my house and longer than an hour. First time driving in Turkey and for that matter, in a foreign country. First time on a ferry while in a car. First time almost destroying a car (burning oil) from said first time driving manual trans. First time realizing I have criteria for road trips which include a co-pilot who generally knows where we are going. First time in a country where asking directions in the native tongue will get you a complete waste of oxygen and therefore, could have asked in English to get the same result. First time channeling an outrageous temper (apparently my friends have only seen “upset”). I can’t forget the most important one: it was the first time for many Turkish Muslims watching a woman drive a car.

While I love her to bits, I thought that Gokçe knew how to drive a manual transmission (ie., drove one in the last few years longer than 10 minutes) to take the edge off of a long journey and navigate to where we were going, even though I still longed for the creature comforts of a map. It turns out that even though she is from Izmir and lives in Istanbul, she has only flown to her parent’s house and in town she takes the bus and the metro. As they say – ‘shit howdy’ – because Gokçe is lacking the requirements for the makings of a good co-pilot. Perhaps it was to be expected but we couldn’t find our way to the ferry, which was okay since I had trouble getting the car out of the Thrifty lot. I put the car in neutral, my foot on the clutch and brake, started the car, and geared into first, but nothing happened when I released the brake. Acceleration didn’t seem to solve the problem either. I started to hover in panic mode as I knew the agent was standing right there, probably thinking ‘What have I done – she doesn’t even know how to drive???!!’ Finally, the answer came to me. Nice job…the emergency/parking brake is on.

I was slowly catching onto driving manual transmission but while driving on the freeway, I was plagued with all of these technique-type questions that only my father could answer (or at anyone who was capable of driving manual which eliminated both of us). I tucked the frustration of not getting the full story from my roommate away as I tried to navigate a steep hill. I downshifted to accommodate the decreasing speed, but my inner voice kept saying ‘Don’t ride the clutch.’ Did that mean that once I got the speed up I didn’t need to push in the clutch? I wasn’t sure and at this moment of realization, decided I didn’t want to test the theory on a hill. Just then, a man pulled up in his Smart Car alongside us, honked, and motioned us to stop while pointing at my smoking hood. Nice that I didn’t notice this…

When we are safely on the shoulder, he tells Gokçe that I am burning oil and at once I turn back to panic mode. I ask Gokçe to ask him whether or not burning oil could be a side effect to my driving. The man tells her that too much clutch could be the cause of that. Damn it. I can’t believe I am already breaking the car and it’s been less than two hours of driving. I never knew I could burn the oil on a car; I thought the only potential for damage was dropping the transmission. He recommended we take it to the first service station we see and talk to the mechanics to make sure everything is okay.

When we pulled into the Shell Service Station a few kilometers down the highway, I asked Gokçe to translate to him that I needed to know the finer points of manual transmission driving. So after we were given the green light on the oil issue, I sat in the back seat as the mechanic drove the car around the station lot, telling Gokçe that the best advice he can give is to downshift when the rpm’s drop below 10 and change gears when the rpm’s exceed 25 to 30. The only shifting tips I remembered from learning (which consisted of two hour-long sessions with a stunt driver) were based on the speedometer readings (which was in miles); the Fiat Palio was only in kilometers, leaving me to mathematical guesswork and more frustration. That, in fact was the word of the weekend: frustration.

* Frustration of highways where the lane suddenly merges into a wall. You are left to wonder where the sign (in Turkish or pictorially) was stating that you needed to move over, but in reality there was no sign – it’s just Turkey.

* Frustration from the lack of good directions given by random men off the street – ‘Just follow the road; you’ll see it’ doesn’t quite cut it, especially when your co-pilot doesn’t repeat everything they just said and instead keeps it to herself or forgets most of it.

* Frustration of your copilot confusing the word left for right, and vice versa. My insistence on using the Turkish words for right and left fell to the wayside.

* Frustration that the only highway connecting two major cities in Turkey is a two-lane road with a thousand 18-wheeler trucks you need to pass with oncoming traffic. Let’s just say I hate playing chicken…

* Frustration that a 400-mile journey takes between 8 and 10 hours to complete.

* Frustration in realizing that you have truly bitten off way more than you could chew by renting a manual car to drive in a foreign country.

* Frustration of said weak ability to drive manual transmission compiled with your co-pilot shouting right when you are in the far left lane with cars to pass and ten feet before the off-ramp. This little number happened often and I chocked it up to being a Turkish thing.

I was more than ready to celebrate finally getting home and being able to park the car within 100 feet of the front door since it started pummeling rain, one of the nastiest storms of the season in Istanbul was underway. My moment of celebration consisted of washing my face and falling dead asleep fully-dressed.

The next morning, the gods were smiting me by bringing hail and dreary gray skies to Istanbul. Of course, neither of us own an umbrella. It took a whopping two hours to get to the Asian side of Istanbul (which is not that far away). When we finally arrived after 12:45p (instead of 11:30a), it was business as usual. I paid my bill for the rental which cost half of what other companies assessed for the same car and the same timeframe. The agent went to inspect the car and I mentioned that the driver’s side stereo, an essential long-range driving aid, was broken. Ten minutes later he came back, asking us to follow him out to the car. Did my roommate’s cat leave a gift under the backseat? Was he going to declare I am an idiot because I didn’t push a button to give me the long-awaited driver’s side speaker I had desperately needed? Meanwhile, Gokçe is thinking to herself that perhaps he didn’t appreciate the little bit of trash we left…Hmm.

My jaw dropped to the floor when he showed a dent and a scratch to the paint to the driver’s side rear door. I was so careful…even in my struggle to drive manual I was meticulous about where I parked. As the wheels began turning in my head, I trudged back to the office where the agent prepared two options. Option one: I pay up 250 Lira ($160US) and walk away. Option two: I park the car in the street nearby, “notice” the dent and scratch combo, and call the police to file a report. They had warned me that the insurance company requires a police report for any accidents in order to reimburse for damages. Sounds a lot like if I fake the police report, I would get away scot-free which is what I like to hear when someone wants me to cough up more money than I was initially quoted. Turns out though that option two meant I need to pay for another day’s rental of the car since I would take possession long enough to file the police report, which means 30 Euros up against 250 Lira. It’s still a better option.

Right about then, the entire weekend ending with this incident was way more than I could handle and I began to cry (despite my father’s voice in my head yelling at me for being such a pansy). I couldn’t help but think about all of the positive karma I’d built up over the weekend only to stand here, owing money for damage I didn’t cause in a country where I had already been way too mentally and emotionally taxed in the last 48 hours. Gokçe whispers that ‘perhaps God is testing us’ which means a lot since she is Agnostic. She wants to calm me down because whenever I start crying, so does she. Right about the time I [melo]dramatically declare I will never leave the apartment again or ever rent a car in a foreign country, another agent walked over to us and started to speak in Turkish. Gokçe grabbed my arm wrenching me out of my own little world and told me that the agents found paperwork stating the dent was already there. The tears screeched to a halt and a smile broke across my face – ‘Really?’ Gokçe smiles. I shook the agent’s hand, wanting to kick my heels together. This was the best news ever!!! I don’t owe any more money!!! If God really was testing us, I failed miserably on that one. I have never really passed the ‘keep it together’ test with flying colors.