Oh, the Places You'll Go

May 5. Eskişehir. By Gary

Winter has returned, especially at higher elevations. We left Izmir yesterday by bus, five hours, up and over some mountain passes where temperatures dropped to 6C and there were a few centimeters of snow on the ground. It won't last as today warmed up a bit and tomorrow even more. 

Riding the bus helped me realize how very rugged not just this country but all of Europe is. Taking the cruise ship along the coast of Spain, France, Italy and Greece showed a mountainous coastline. Our month traveling Spain two years ago and France last year showed us a deeply crenelated topography. Dr. Suess (no, not that Dr. Seuss, notice the spelling) aka Edward Suess 1831-1914 from Austria noticed the same thing. 

A chain of mountains including the Atlas in Morocco, the Pyrenees in Spain, the Alps, all of Turkey, Caucusus, Hindu Kush, Himalayas, and all the way to Indonesia. Not only that, but he looked at fossils in those mountains and correlated them to what other geologists were finding elsewhere. He concluded that these mountains were once an oceanic basin, which he named the Tethys Sea which had been upthrust and folded to become these mountains. He also coined the word Gondwanaland for this ancient land on the other side of the sea. That he figured this out before the acceptance of Plate Tectonics and Continental drift I find amazing. 

After WW2 and modern geological thinking, we could understand how the ancient continent of Gondwanaland broke apart, drifted north in the form of the African plate, Arabian plate, Anatolian plate and Indian plate, and crashed into the Eurasian plate. The rain in Spain does not fall mainly on the plain, as there are almost no plains anywhere in this vast region. 


All this geology made minerals available to early man, and also created cultivatable valleys separated by mountains for villages and cities to spring forth. Which became kingdoms, which went to war with the neighboring kingdom, which generated greater demand for resources like bronze and iron, and eventually modern warfare and progress and here we are fighting for resources. But I digress.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Even the Best of Plans Can Be Disrupted

 The title says it all.  We've waited for what seemed like an opportune time.  We have the houses sold and most of our "stuff" sold off, donated or put into storage.  What we take with us, we take as backpacks.  Imagine that, our entire world of possessions in a backpack.  Well, we don't really have to imagine it because two years ago we spent four months taking cruise ships as transportation to South America and to Spain and Africa.  We found we had enough "stuff" to either enjoy a hot-tub on a cruise ship, or enough winter clothing to manage a trip into snowy areas, enough to hike a mountain or just the right accoutrements for a formal dinner invitation by the city president of a Spanish exclave (Melilla). So packing is not our problem.  Getting our responsibilities reduced by divesting ourselves of houses (and lawn mowers, cars, hot water heaters, heating bills, etc.,) has not been part of the problem.  Money to travel is not a problem....
Read more

Prelude to a Journey

All great journeys start with a small disturbance in the ordinary.  It is a question that flickers in the depths of the imagination and a door that is left slightly ajar in the mind. Sometimes it arises like a curiosity trying to clear its throat Sometimes its an incessant restlessness tapping at the hands of time on a watch.  A great journey begins at the exact moment that staying put becomes the stranger choice. And that moment of wanderlust has again arrived. ..... Pull out an old fashioned globe of our planet.  For this exercise, a Google map will not be sufficient.  It is sometimes necessary to hold the tangible in our hand in order to begin to imagine the inconceivable with any sense of understanding.  Now that you've pulled out your globe, or, in the case of you, the dear reader, your virtually imagined globe, spin it and drop a finger at random at some point, stopping the spin and igniting your imagination.  Look at where your finger landed and read...
Read more

Some Surprises....

Image
 April 21 Two days out of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Sometime during the night we transited through the straits of Gibraltar, anarrow passage only a few miles wide that separates the Atlantic and Mediterranean Oceans. On either side of our ship, they say about 3:30 in the morning or so, we would have been able to look out the port (left) side of our ship and see Spain, while a glance out the starboard (right) side would have offered us a view of Africa, specifically the dry and arid lands of Morocco. Now that we are in Europe, we are one step closer to the lands where my great grandparents and grandparents hailed from on my father's side. In five days time we will disembark in Kusadasi, Turkey for the beginning of our land adventure. To say that my feelings similar to that of the average tourist would be the understatement of the year. I'm literally working my way back to the villages they once called home prior to the genocide that saw 1.5 million people literally e...
Read more