Last Saturday night (the 5th) I was in Adana for Columbian trainee Manuel’s 25th birthday.

It was a good party with the other trainees and friends in attendance. Rifeh was also there after returning to Turkey from Tunisia. The vodka/Kahlua/milk mix I brought was a winner.

Following the party several of us went with Deniz to People Nightclub. Deniz had a business relationship with this club so it was free entry and drinks for us. I stuck to water. I hadn’t let my hair down at a club for aeons so I enjoyed myself until the intense cigarette smoke and tiredness became too much. After the nightclub it was soup at a 24-hour restaurant. The tripe soup (not “iskembe”, but something similar) was growing on me but not fast enough to finish the bowl. In bed by 6, just as the sky was lightening.

Nepal is a fascinating and extremely friendly but troubled country. Sandwiched between the two most populous countries in the world, China and India, Nepal contains 8 of the world’s 10 tallest mountain peaks.

Nepal is also a very poor country. This poverty has not been helped by a 2001 royal mass murder, continuing Maoist insurgencies and an overbearing king.

Colin (on the right in the below photo), an English friend I met in Germany, is currently in Nepal volunteering as an English teacher.

Colin’s email updates and photos are very enlightening. Following is an extract from his latest email:

I was in Kathmandu and Bhaktapur for the last 6 days. I travelled by plane, a 20 min flight versus a 7-10 hour bus ride and that’s without many roadblocks, bandas (strikes) and suchlike.
Bhaktapur is beautiful. There was no traffic in the ancient centre. Nice. Nagarkot a walk down the hill to Chengu Naryaan – the oldest temple in the Kathmandu valley, with the Himalayas to the north clearly visible, although clouds scurried around their peaks later in the day. I got sun-browned and reddened. Nice.
I’m going to Darjeeling in North-eastern India tomorrow by train so it will be interesting, as it is my 1st trip of this nature.

Mersin sounds very boring, indeed, although my current city has the same drummers as Nepal!

Recently, since sacking the government, the king has cracked down on freedom of speech. A blog covering this is Radio Free Nepal. I hope Nepal can soon progress and become peaceful once again. Its people deserve it.

Special thanks to Colin for the photos and for allowing me to quote his email

Also from Friday night, a photo of my apartment’s lounge room. The photo was an accident – I wasn’t aware I had taken it.

Don’t you love the furniture?

From Friday night: a sign at a cafe in Mersin offering “Nest Kafe” for 1,000,000 old lira or “1 one” new YTL (“bir” in Turkish is “one”).

I guess the cafe meant the well known multinational coffee brand that is also the generic word for instant coffee in Turkey: Nescafé.

In the past week bootlegged raki has killed at least 15 people in Turkey. This has lead to a massive recall of all the current authentic raki bottles on the market to be replaced by bottles with different colour caps.

The motivation to produce illegal raki is fairly easy to find. Recently, the tax on a bottle of raki went up again. Now a 700 ml bottle costs 22.5 YTL (almost US$18 at today’s rate), 65% of which is tax. For a poor country this is a lot of money.

Raki is not the only product or service to have a recent price rise. Other rises I have personally experienced:
* My last haircut (without a wash) at local hairdresser cost 5 YTL, whereas the previous one, including a wash, was 4.5.
* The cost to dry clean a pair of pants has risen from 3.0 to 3.5 YTL.
* A return Mersin-Adana train trip is now 5.0 YTL, up from 3.5. When I bought my ticket Saturday I gave a 5-lira note and waited, expecting to receive change…

In Turkey’s hyperinflation past, regular and large price increases were the norm as the lira was always losing value (see table 2/3 down page). Correspondingly, wages also rose. However, in the past 2 or 3 years, both inflation and the lira value have stabilised. In fact, the Turkish lira is at its strongest against the USD since July 2001. This financial stability has helped keep salaries in check.

Stable salaries and rising prices result in a squeeze, causing people to either modify their purchases or go without. For an essential like raki, many people and restaurants decided to buy cheaper, for going without was not an option…

See what the Columbians, German, Indian and Romanian are up to at: blogspot.com/.

UPDATE: The lads have now joined the wonderful collaboration nomadlife and their blog is now at: http://adanatrainees.nomadlife.org/.

My blog will be joining nomadlife as soon as non-nomadlife-hosted blogs are allowed.

Looking upstream from the bridge at the river outlet.

The river bank.

The large light in both photos is from the corner of the residential military base.

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