Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places Read online

  Don’t Go There

  From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

  Adam Fletcher

  Contents

  Disclaimer

  1. Istanbul, Turkey: “How could you be so stupid?”

  2. An interlude: The night before Istanbul

  3. Istanbul to Berlin: “I fear this ends in some kind of Eat Pray Love epiphany.”

  4. China: “It’s ugly in here. And murdery.”

  5. Kissi, Ghana: “It’s not really fun in the classical sense of fun.”

  6. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel: “Can you feel the fire?”

  7. Hebron, Palestine: “I don’t need sex, the government fucks me every day.”

  8. Hare Krishna Ashram, Argentina: “It’s you who’s running away from things.”

  9. Chernobyl, Ukraine: “If someone ask, you scientists, okay?”

  10. Liberland, Croatia/Serbia: “Hitler was also democratically elected. There is no virtue in democracy.”

  11. Interlude #2: Real life, real problems

  12. Tiraspol, Transnistria: “It’s like The Truman Show fucked The Twilight Zone.”

  13. Chişinău, Moldova: “I AM THE DEVIL INCARNATE!”

  14. Thetford, England: “What are you doing here?”

  15. Interlude #3: A gift

  16. Pyongyang, North Korea: “He praised it for its revolutionary spirit.”

  17. Berlin, Germany: The end

  You! Me! Free Stuff!

  Help me keep doing this

  Disclaimer

  I’ve changed the names of many of the people in this book because I’ve said questionable things about them. I don’t want them to find and punch me. I’ve a very delicate disposition that does not respond well to punching. I’ve also changed the order of a few trips to make things less chaotic and nonsensical than real life has a regrettable habit of being. Please forgive this neatening of history.

  1

  Istanbul, Turkey: “How could you be so stupid?”

  Erdoğan, (un)relaxing city breaks, Crippling Englishness, Gezi Park

  The first hint this wasn’t going to be a relaxing city break in Istanbul came immediately upon landing. Wheeling my suitcase through the airport, I looked down at my phone to find the following SMS.

  Ada: “Hi Adam. Public transport has been shut down. It’s a bit crazy here. Get the taxi driver to call me. Okay?”

  Ada was our Airbnb host. My German girlfriend, Annett, and I had prepared for backgammon, ferry rides, tea, and eating large slabs of foreign cake. Not for craziness.

  Me: “Who shut it down? Getting in a taxi now…”

  Ada: “Who do you think shut it down? Get the taxi driver to call me.”

  I had no idea who had shut it down. It wasn’t like there was a master public transport switch you could just turn off, right? It’s not a floor lamp.

  Me: “The taxi driver says he knows the address. See you in a bit.”

  Ada: “Get him to call me anyway. I’ll tell him what roads are still open.”

  Me: “Why are the roads closed?”

  Ada: “Do you watch the news? There are big protests here.”

  I did not watch the news. I avoided the news like other people avoided cholesterol. But that’s not something you admit. Ignorance is not a virtue.

  The other reason I didn’t want to ask the taxi driver to call Ada was that I suffer from a hereditary disease called Crippling Englishness (CE). This renders me incapable of inconveniencing people, however mildly. Asking our taxi driver to call someone? Madness. Finding a specific address and reaching it in a motor vehicle was the man’s entire job. He was a logistics professional. I looked across at him from the passenger seat. He was in his early forties, balding, and attempting to compensate for this by allowing the frizzy hair from the sides of his head to grow free from the confines of good taste. He looked more than familiar with the art of scowling—his eyebrows sunk deep into his eyelids, reminding me of imprints in a well-worn sofa. His off-white T-shirt was flecked with recent lunches eaten at the wheel. He was muttering to himself.

  So he was a shabby, irritable example of a logistics professional, but a logistics professional nonetheless. I would not call that into question by suggesting he would not be fully abreast of the latest road closures in this, his city.

  The next time I looked at my watch an hour had passed. “Are we nearly there?” I asked. We’d just turned onto a hilly street to find it blocked by a barricade of trash, wood, and two upside-down shopping trolleys. Around us flowed a mass of young people in home-made riot gear. It looked as if there were to be a reunion party for the hit 1970s band Village People. It was the third such do-it-yourself barricade to hinder our progress in ten minutes.

  “Fucking idiots,” said the taxi driver. He didn’t seem to be abreast of any of this. He crunched the gear stick into reverse, turned around, and tried to steer us back to the road we’d just come from.

  “What are they protesting about?” I asked.

  “Protesting, yes,” he said, his reversing manoeuvre complete. He scowled at two women carrying a large gay pride flag. “Fucking Terrorists.”

  He didn’t seem like a very nice man. The few English words he had mustered during the journey had been spat aggressively in my direction. Turkish words, I suspect of an adult nature, went the other direction, out of the driver-side window and into the faces of pedestrians, other drivers, and any inanimate objects brazen enough to be in our way. Inanimate objects he seemed to find particularly irksome.

  “These people don’t look like terrorists,” I said.

  “Terrorists, yes.”

  I wanted to debate this further but I held back—mostly because he was driving as if we were in a go-kart and he’d eaten a special mushroom giving him infinite lives. I looked out the windscreen at a group of protesters, at their face paint, dyed hair, ripped jeans, and multicoloured vests. I was pretty sure these were not terrorists, and were even, probably, The Good Guys. Protesters are almost always the good guys, right? Because protesting is way more effort than not:

  If people can be bothered to organise a demo, write songs, paint signs, and march through the streets holding those signs and singing those songs, outraged, you can be pretty sure they’ll have a valid point. On the rare occasion they don’t, there will likely be an even bigger protest-protest against them. You don’t see the people doing the bad things out chanting: “What do we want? MORE TYRANNY! When do we want it? Well, that’s up to us really, isn’t it?” No, you don’t see those people because those people have already won.

  The taxi driver pulled into yet another side street, was confronted by yet another home-made barricade, and said, yet again, “Fuck.”

  “Did you know about any of this?” I asked Annett, the trip’s instigator. She looked at me, tutted, sighed, frowned, and rolled her eyes, all at once. When it came to communication, she was a quantity person cruelly stuck in a quality world. She took a breath to compose herself. “About the protests? You betcha I knew. It was in the news. But I didn’t know it was this big or that we were anywhere near it. Or in it, which it kinda seems like we are now.” She looked around. “We’re in it, right?” She twitched her nose.

  We were in it.

  I’d made the mistake of sitting in the front of the taxi, a rare mistake of perso
nal initiative that meant I was now responsible for liaising with the taxi driver. I hated responsibility. I hated solving. I wanted to be back home, on my couch, ignoring all of life’s problems while eating biscuits.

  The next street the driver tried had a somewhat familiar feel to it. I think, perhaps, because it was the third time he’d tried it. I pinched the bridge of my nose, fought off some CE, got out my phone, called Ada, and passed the phone to the driver. Ten minutes later, and five floors higher, we found ourselves standing in front of a pink door.

  That door opened and a short girl in fluffy unicorn slippers wrapped me in a warm hug. The sort of hug that suggested a far deeper friendship than the simple apartment-for-money economic exchange that was actually occurring. Ada.

  “I wasn’t sure you would come. Were you not scared?”

  Annett and I exchanged a blank look that said we’d have been perfectly willing to be scared if only someone had told us what about. “Scared about the protests?” Annett asked as she stepped into the apartment’s hallway. “We have a lot of protests in Berlin as well.”

  “Really?” said Ada, leading us past her small green-tiled kitchen. “This one is quite violent. The police are behaving like animals. You should be careful.”

  “We won’t get involved,” I assured her, as we arrived in the living room. “We’re just here for tourist stuff.”

  We spread out on the living room’s giant navy corner couch. I began to relax. This was better. This was like home even, only with a little more rainbow iconography. “What is the protest about?” I asked, as Ada poured tea from a shiny red teapot. “That’s complicated,” she said. “Specific things and also general things. I think, mostly, the feeling that Erdoğan is trying to make the country into an Islamic state like Saudi Arabia. They even tried to ban kissing in public!”

  She handed us our cups. “You know about Erdoğan, right?”

  “Yes, of course,” I lied. I knew he existed. Was that enough?

  Ada was in her late twenties. She had short hair, shaved completely on one side. Each ear was pierced six times, and her neck was branded with a tattoo of a goldfish. Even when saying nothing she screamed counterculture. When her apartment was rented, she would stay with her girlfriend, a chef who owned a restaurant nearby. She would fit into an Islamic state about as well as I would an Italian nunnery. I could see why she was protesting. She had a lot to lose.

  Her phone beeped. “Oh, shit. I have to go,” she said, cruelly orphaning the remainder of her tea. “I’ve been sleeping in Gezi Park with friends. There are developments there.” There was an ominousness to the way she said the word developments. “Come by later if you like?”

  We made noises that emphasised the possibility of this while simultaneously hinting at its underlying impossibility.

  Ada left, her face noticeably whiter than when we’d arrived. We celebrated our new-found aloneness by placing more of our limbs on her sofa. It was comfortable. Which was how I liked it. A short time later, there was a really loud banging noise from outside, like the early, enthusiastic thrashings of a rhythmless drummer. The sound got louder and louder the closer we got to the balcony. From that balcony we had a stunning view sweeping down the hillside. We could see at least a hundred balconies from this vantage point, and people emerging onto them to hit saucepans with wooden spoons: a kind of kitchenware orchestra. It was a remarkable spectacle. Simple, effective, lo-fi dissent. A Mexican Saucepan Wave. In the flat diagonally underneath Ada’s, a small girl of no more than five came outside armed with a spatula. Her mother bent over to hold a saucepan at the right height, so she could swipe enthusiastically at it. Occasionally she even hit it. It was utterly adorable.

  “Should we join in?” I asked Annett.

  “I don’t know. We don’t really know what they are banging for.”

  I didn’t want to tell Annett about my “protesters are always right” theory because she’d been known to argue using facts, while I came from more of an anecdotal background.

  We didn’t join in, but we did watch with great delight and awe and a light peppering of positive adjectives. Later we learned this was a traditional form of protest in Turkey and that it always takes place at 9pm, the time Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was said to have founded the Republic of Turkey, in 1923.

  Finally, bereft of entertainment and hungry, we headed out.

  “Should we go check out the park?” Annett asked.

  I scratched at my beard. “That sounds pretty intense. Do you want to?”

  “Yeah. It’s the most interesting option we have right now.”

  I swapped to my neck. “Hmm. I think I mostly want to have dinner.”

  She shrugged. “I can live with that, I guess. Or I’m willing to try to anyway. So shall we wander down the back streets then and find somewhere quiet where we can sit outside?”

  It was clear from the first few minutes of that walk just how much of life in Istanbul happens on its streets. Kids play football, hitting parked cars and running away as their angry owners appear, shaking their fists. Elderly people pass buckets on ropes down from high apartment windows to more sprightly neighbours who fill them with vegetables and fruits. People ride their mopeds up to the entrances of restaurants and a second later are air-kissing friends’ cheeks and taking puffs of shisha. I guess there’s a relaxedness here in summer that comes from knowing tomorrow is going to be warm. The day after that? Looking pretty good as well.

  We navigated some quiet backstreets using the popular tourist method: Which Street Looks Prettiest? After turning a corner, and spotting in the distance a promising little cafe with blue mosaic tabletops, I felt a burning sensation in my throat. “What’s that smell?” Annett asked through a cough. Suddenly a group of protesters ran around the bend, one pausing briefly to splash his face with some kind of milk-like substance. We backed into a door frame to let them pass. Four policemen in riot gear chased them. We were pinned against the wall. A policeman threw a hissing canister towards the protesters—tear gas. It landed a few metres to our right, bouncing off a wall. The police passed us, moving uneasily with their clunky gear, shields, and gas masks. The cloud of gas spread quickly, taking just a few seconds to catch within our throats, setting them alight.

  Adrenaline surged through us. Go. Move. Where? Who cares. Now…

  We ran away from the protesters and police officers. At the next corner was another small cluster of police officers. A protester in the distance threw a rock at them, and so by extension, at us.

  Not that way then.

  We turned and ran, which is difficult when trying not to breathe. On our left we saw a courtyard with its gate open. Annett pointed and we dashed inside, slamming the door behind us. It was a courtyard shared by three buildings. We collapsed, coughing and spluttering, against the iron railings at its rear.

  I viewed the world through the tiny blurred slits that were my eyes. “Oh God… This is…” cough, cough, wheeze “…horrible.”

  “Shit.” Annett mopped her face with her sleeve. “Ow. Fuck. Tear gas?”

  I’d never been tear-gassed before. It’s hard when you leave the house as little as I do. It is a deeply unpleasant experience that feels like a mixture of both drowning and being on fire. “Must be,” I said, rubbing my face in my shirt.

  “It earns its name.”

  Some other protesters appeared, in the same dishevelled, spluttering state, before closing the gate and entering the building behind us. Keen to be inside, where the air might be less noxious, we followed their lead. It was a bar. On seeing us its barman, now a makeshift field nurse, rushed over and squirted some of the mystery, milky liquid into our faces.

  “This would help,” he said, in somewhat broken English. It did help. The flood of liquid leaking from our eyes and noses dammed, we were able to properly see the bar for the first time. A dark, alternative bar, the walls full of handwritten messages and heavy purple curtains that perfectly hid the politics erupting outside.

  “I think we�
��d better have some strong drinks,” I said to our nurse, who had taken his place behind the bar.

  He turned and unscrewed a bottle of raki.

  “I’m not sure what tastes worse, this or the tear gas,” Annett said, after her first sip. She put the drink down. A protester from a nearby table took a call, stood up, and ran out into the courtyard. The rest of the people at her table were staring up at a TV. It was a news report about the protests. The reporter stood on one of the streets we’d taken to get here.

  We’d thought we were on a relaxing city break. Things had escalated quickly.

  “Can you tell me what’s happening?” I asked the barman. He put his phone down and came and sat on the barstool next to us.

  “The police try to clear Gezi Park. There was big camp there.”

  He whistled to get the attention of a girl sitting two tables over. She wore knee-high brown boots, a Che Guevara T-shirt, and had wrapped herself in a thick blanket of self-confidence.

  “She speak better English,” he said. She introduced herself as Dora and explained that the protester camp had been getting bigger and bigger. Hundreds had been sleeping there, and thousands more had been turning up each day to protest with them—against the park becoming a shopping mall, against the country’s becoming increasingly Islamic, and autocratic. In the past hour the government had cracked the whip. Police had been sent in with one clear objective: to take back control of the park. The protesters were resisting. It had gotten violent. Skirmishes had spread out to the surrounding streets, such as the one we had accidentally stumbled onto.