Discount Travel Guide to the Balkans, Turkey, and the Caucasus

By Ernie Piper IV

Hi. This is Ernie's ex-roommate, Joe, and I know you like to travel. You may have even already picked up a Lonely Planet or Rick Steve's book about the same areas Ernie described and I bet there's a ton of useful, amazing information in those books. You might even have downloaded a translation app or a currency calculator or figured out how to avoid (or, if you are anything like us, say) all the Serbian profanities. Woo. That's great. Keep going. You are well on your way to having the same travel experience as everyone else. Oh don't forget to book your hotels and rental cars and charge your DSLR batteries. I know that sounds condescending and I am sorry (probably heartily biased). I'm here to tell you that this book is nothing like any of the others. It can even live in a harmonious relationship with them and actually make them better.

When you are done reading Discount Travel Guide, you are done. Unlike Lonely Planet or Rick Steve, leave it at home. Cast it into the pits of your desktop recycle bin. I don't care because I know that once you have finished reading this, you're mind will be ablaze with the thought of going to these places and molding the experience of a lifetime.

It's true that this is a travel guide and it is full of tons of stories, anecdotes, and suggestions. But more importantly, I think this is a book about how to experience a place wholeheartedly. This is a book about adventuring and breaking down the fear of people that permeates so tacitly. On top of all that, this book is about how to reconstruct travel for stupid cheap.

I have first hand experience of traveling with Ernie in the Balkans, Turkey, and the Caucasus and can say with complete honesty that I had no idea what I was in for. I am actually sitting on Ernie's couch in Turkey at this very moment raving about his book. I'm also unemployed and desperately poor. Money just works better over here.

Here's the bottom line. If you want to stand in line for hours to see the Mona Lisa through a horde of froth-mouthed oglers and snap pictures of it with your iPad, please don't read this book because after you've read it, your Mona Lisa dreams will be just like wisps in the wind. You'll be laughing at them as you clamber over ancient castles alone and explore ancient abandoned towns sans red tape. But if you want to rock at traveling, if you are poor, and if you want to experience crazy parts of the world that get so easily overlooked, read this book. It's written for you.

Oh yeah, I made the cover. Isn't that cool? I'm cool, everyone. woooooo o o........

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ernie Piper IV
• Release date: Aug 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781370067022

Ernie Piper IV

Ernie grew up in Alaska and currently lives in Istanbul. He is a giant dog.

Book preview

DISCOUNT TRAVEL GUIDE

Discount Travel Guide to the Balkans, Turkey, and the Caucasus

by Ernest W Piper IV

with contributing authors

Will Dawson, Julia Harte, Jari Piper, Alex Guyton, Larissa Olenicoff

Distributed by Smashwords.

Copyright 2015.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

A Speculative Dialogue on the Nature of Travel

Orientation

Long Term Travel Advice

Short Term Travel Advice

Tools

Balkans

Albania

Macedonia

Kosovo

Montenegro

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Serbia

Bulgaria

Turkey

Istanbul

Southern Turkey

Central Anatolia

Eastern Turkey

Caucasus

Georgia

Armenia

Azerbaijan

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Thank you to everyone who donated to this project. The money was a big help, but more importantly, it was the knowledge that I'd never live it down if I didn't put out a book. Thanks for your belief in me and you all made me feel like one lucky duck. As promised, I've given everyone who contributed to the book a benign superpower. You can find them below!

Arran Forbes: the power to spell benign correctly every single time you type it

James Pfleuger: the power of changing the shade of your teeth from white to sorta yellowishg

Leif Sawyer: the power to make people notice your new haircut

Kristen Natwick: the power to cry inexpensive fake crystals

Dave Brown: the power to open any catalog and wear the clothes displayed within, but only inside, and only if they're darker than a dark blue

Jodie Banks: the power to play Risk or Monopoly and not have it end in friendship-ruining fights

Reed Tompkins: the power to think of insects really specifically

Gae Pervier: the ability to speak a language which nobody around you will understand

Nicholas Oen: the power to turn wine into water, in your mouth

Stephen Nand-Lan: the power to make bread come out of your ears--either crumbs or really tiny loaves

Ian Tromble: the power to draw a perfect circle or square, but only for the amount of times equal to the sides of the polygon in question

Chris Peeler: the power to have conversations with the people in commercials

Shauna Zoller: the power to write by shooting invisible lasers out of your eyelids and moving your head around, so you can't look at what you're writing

Ariel Graham: the power to make people think of exactly the same animal you are thinking of

Marika Allely: the power to watch cartoons and then make exactly the same noises they make

Raymond Furer: the power to wear bathrobes but it looks extremely elegant all the time, even if it's a terrible bathrobe

Annie Rose Favreau: the power to wish away your problems

Anthea Carns: the power to eat honey without limits

Zoe Mote: The power to drink a glass of beer or juice from across the room

Evan Estola: The power to frighten things larger than yourself with rock sounds (not music, actual rocks)

Erin Quinn: The power to travel in time, but only to really boring things

Gordana Olbina: the power to know if there are spiders, ants, or wasps immediately upon entering any building

Karl Park: The power to yell in circles

Kirsten Park: The power to never have to explain to kids that Santa, Easter Bunny et cetera aren't real

Leah Bailey: the power seeing into vegetables

Joyce Mayer: the power of wind on beaches

Ben Ryan: the power to sink one or both feet into an apparently solid surface up to a depth of one foot

MacKenzie Cobb: the power to always have enough suds

Anna Bergstresser: the power to pick ripe fruit from anything

Dick Steele: the power to speak Chinese to someone's parents, but only to the parents

Stephen Williams: the power to steer the conversation away from dinosaurs

Sydney Lazarus: the power to dig faster than anyone, but it's still not very fast

Phillipp Kunz: the power to flip coins and have it land on its side whenever you want

Becky Crandall: The power to make any day a Sunday

Herta Bolgar: The power to herd animals a that are not normally herd animals

Kate Willette: the power to make anything smell like aftershave

Ian Petersen: the power to climb anything, as long as you're carrying a turtle and a head of lettuce

Chris Sutliff: the power to sing a song so catchy it will never be forgotten, but only once, and it has to be about cats

Stephen Haycox: the power to uncover the truth about rugs

Joy Sherman: the power to unbend metal

Dianne Swanson: the power to speak to daisies

Jack Roderick: the power to make people think about volcanoes

Keith Blake: the power to do your taxes flawlessly when you're onstage

Sharman Piper: the power to play oboe underwater

Rosalyn Thompson: the power to walk any number of dogs

Ernest Piper III: the power to use a wiffle bat to solve any problem

Jay Bergstresser: the power to send letters and have anyone respond, but when you open the letter back, you get a head cold for two weeks

Teresa Cairns: the power to slip into iambic pentameter

Maddy Klever: the power to reduplicate the sound of any animal

Rachel Whitcomb: the power to wake up whenever you want without alarm clocks, but the sound that plays in your head when you DO wake up is a police siren from every country in the world at the same time

Kelsey Dawley: the power to get mentioned in the newspaper whenever you want, but you cannot control the context

Heather Hanson: the power of ten

Jillian Winter: the power to just make people just like get you, y'know? Like really get you.

Sage Bilderback: the power to scuba dive while the world burns

Denise Galbraith: the power of moral ambiguity

Dorcas Zeiner: the power to grow things made from paper in a standard garden

Bev Postman: the power to taste the rainbow

Dan Bilderback: the power to know how tired you'll be at any point in the future and plan accordingly

Carole Triem: the power to eat metals and plastics and have it taste, feel and digest like butter

Joe Clark: the power to play chess from any angle

Ryan Bergerson: the power to speed read and have perfect retention of books you'd never read otherwise

Duncan Ariey: the power to find your keys three times

Kelly Zeiner: the power to set up tents just by looking at them and counting under your breath really really fast

Anonymous: the power to stay hidden

Special thanks especially goes to:

Anna and Jari, because I could not and would not have done this without them and their support

Alex Guyton, Will Dawson, Larissa Olenicoff, Jari Piper, and Julia Harte, who generously contributed their stories to the book

Jon Coumes, who volunteered read and mark up the first few drafts, and made me stop repeating myself, and again to Jari for doing the final proofing

Mom, Dad, Kelly, Libby, Eliot, and Biscuit of course

A SPECULATIVE DIALOGUE ON THE NATURE OF TRAVEL

(Anna and Ernie are sitting on the couch, examining a travel website which offers flashy package tours for younger people in different flavors like comfort, classic, yolo [really], marine, etc etc.)

Ernie: How can we communicate to people what we learned on this trip? I'm pretty concerned it won't get across.

Anna: You should get rid of the introduction.

E: Yeah, my writing is typically better when it just goes directly into the story, you know? But there's that need—

A: Right, to balance—

E: To balance actual travel advice with a total lack thereof.

A: The less the better.

E: So it's like a big middle finger to all other guide books.

A: Ya, I guess so.

E: But like in real life people will just ask me for advice.

A: Ernie the best thing about what you're doing is that we're in a world with smartphones and Google now. It's stupid to publish all that information anymore. You can look it up when you get there.

E: Right, totally.

A: And I understand why someone would want to buy one of these tours.

E: But who. Who has that kind of money.

A: Well if you only have 2 weeks’ vacation every year and you wanna make damn sure it works! Having all that money makes you less willing to take risks with it.

E: You say the most insightful shit, this is so helpful.

A: Really?

E: Definitely. Being poor and having a lot of time means you're willing to try a lot of stuff and you'll have low expectations.

A: Oh absolutely. And you're trying to make people go on adventures.

E: And that's what they're advertising. And we had such a shit time in the Balkans.

A: Right, right.

E: Why was that?

A: Well it was because we kept trying to see too much and kept moving.

E: Right. We didn't let the trip dictate the travel.

A: And we'd sort of seen it before, you know? Sarajevo was awesome—

E: Sarajevo WAS awesome.

A: Right, it was a fascinating city. But we'd sort of seen it before, you know?

E: Right. The old city, the tram, the European feel, the broken stuff, the churches, etc.

A: And we wanted to have misadventures. I feel like misadventure means you had a good time doing the wrong thing.

E: Right. That's absolutely what we were going for.

A: And I would rather, and I think most people would rather, have this crazy story of where they tried to go see the Eiffel tower but got sidetracked with this group of musicians, etc etc etc.

E: An adventure.

A: Right, and I think that sort of stuff is more important—

E: I agree—

A: And I keep thinking about the time we tried to go to Nemrut Dag, and I know you were just thinking about that too, but we tried to go there and instead we had that great time with the Kurd dude and his family.

E: Ya.

A: But the Balkans was a true mis-adventure.

E: It was a difficult trip.

A: Tried to see too much.

E: And the fucking dog.

A: Learned our lesson.

E: Puppy opened as many doors as it shut.

A: And all those awful people we met couldnt've been our fault.

E: You know?

A: Hm?

E: I bet, if that trip through the Balkans was my first trip ever, I would remember it much rosier.

A: Yeah, you're right. I would have noticed a lot more details.

E: We'd just kind of seen it before.

A: But you should include that kind of stuff.

E: You think?

A: Yes, definitely.

E: We certainly learned a lot. We couldn't have made those mistakes any other way.

A: If I could have convinced you of anything—and I wasn't sure I believed it myself—I would have tried to make you slow down and stick around in the cool places longer.

E: We missed fishing in lake Sliven, and that mountain trip to Lovcen in Montenegro...

A: Those were both because of the dog.

E: Right.

A: And I didn't want to be stuck in a forty euro a night hostel and the only thing to do in the city is go out and drink a beer.

E: Which are truly not bad things—

A: They're great! But like I said, it's like why I understand my parents like to relax on vacation. They don't have a lot of time to waste so they don't take those kinds of risks. I was just expecting more adventure on this trip.

E: Me too.

A: And if I just came to Istanbul as a regular tourist, I think I wouldn't like it much. And you'd be missing out so much.

E: Right. I mean what's happened in the month and a half we've been here? There was the trip to the forest, the beach, meeting all the neighbors when our plumbing got shut down...

A: We probably never would have met them had that not happened.

E: Right? And Ayse lives right below us, too. And then she fixed the Ukulele, and also we've been to Taksim twice already, we had the Kavun birthday for you, Jari's dating a spacey Turkish architect, and then getting kicked out of the hipster’s apartment...

A: Oh my god, I'd almost forgotten. That was the most stressful 48 hours.

E: And Jari had flown in the NEXT DAY.

A: I forgot how weird those people were.

E: And then there was the party that got all-too-real, and...

A: And someone who came as a tourist would miss all that stuff.

E: Yeah, just going to Sultanahmet would miss out on the insanity and the chaos of living in this city.

A: We can just see it from the seaside and appreciate it.

E: It's certainly interesting. What would we be doing if we were just living in America?

A: Oh, I'd be stuck in a dead-end job, I'd have to have a car, an apartment. You know my co-worker Jeremy at Chipotle?

E: Ya.

A: He used to take two buses to get to work, and then to go home. That was his whole life. Chipotle.

E: At least it's not Qdoba.

A: At least I had an out, you know? With English you're never be at a lack for work abroad.

E: And cost of living is higher in America, and you wouldn't be able to afford a car so you'd have to pay super high rent to afford living close to your job.

A: You know I was getting paid more at Chipotle than I am at my fancy preschool here?

E: Ya, but...

A: I was making ten bucks an hour at Chipotle.

E: Ya, but two thousand dollars a month in Seattle goes way less far than three thousand lira does here.

A: So true.

E: You know, I read that there is no state in America where working 40 hours a week at minimum wage can afford rent on a two bedroom apartment.

A: That's awful.

E: It is. And here you know we don't have to have a car or anything, because I can pay a DOLLAR and take a ferry ride to the other side, any time I want.

A: And car loans are so expensive, that's like a few hundred, plus insurance.

E: I don't even know who would be crazy enough to give us a loan.

A: It's almost more expensive to just stay at home.

E: What kind of world is that? Where you have to crush yourself into debt just to do normal life stuff?

A: How could you fit in travel to all that?

ORIENTATION

What do people do when they're on vacation, and what are they taking a vacation from?

If you're from the states, like I imagine most of my readers will be, vacations are a chance to do one of two things: relax or get cultured. If you're relaxing, you don't want to think about anything—not your problems, not your job, not taking care of your family or your dogs, just plunk yourself down in a beach chair and drink a fruity cocktail out of half a coconut. Maybe swim, maybe read a Robert Ludlum thriller or something.

Or perhaps it's a chance to get out of the states and improve yourself, see some of the most important things in the world. The Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Colosseum of Rome, the Brandenburg Gate, the Mona Lisa. They're all on the list of 1001 Things To See Before You Die. Again, this is contrasted to America, where we might have hot dogs, baseball, line dancing and the headquarters of Amazon.com, but certainly no historical or artistic things of importance to western civilization. Again—you've only got two weeks, and you want to pack in the largest amount of important things in that time frame, perhaps in the hope an epiphany will emerge while viewing old art or architecture. You'll come back with great pictures.

Either way, you certainly don't want to worry about where you're sleeping or how you're getting there. So you get a travel agent or a package tour—it might be expensive, but it frees you from the twin anxieties of being away from home and trying to figure logistical things out on the road. This is because, in America, we work 50 weeks and get 2 weeks paid vacation to do whatever it is we want. Freedom is largely defined as freedom from, a womblike place of sensory delight where you are free from worry and consequence, and free from other people making demands upon that freedom. Travel is the luxury, the two-week apex of an entire year of suffering, the freedom towards which all spent time inclines. If you've ever been on a cruise ship you'll know what I'm talking about. Working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year (and sometimes more) makes you exhausted when you finally get that time off. Planning the whole trip up front and outsourcing the planning to travel professionals guarantees you won't waste your leisure time.

This is, I think, the model for travel we natively understand, and the economic system that supports it.

Now, if you'll permit, imagine that you graduated college in the last six or so years, suddenly had to take responsibility for a five figure debt, and emerged into an economy where nobody is hiring. Imagine that you're told that the economy is a freelance or a flexible workplace now, so being successful is about using time-management apps and lifehacking and a FitBit, all to extract the productivity from your time. Imagine being told that everyone has a passion, and that this passion will make you money—and if it's not, you're either not working very hard, or you're not very passionate. Imagine 400 resumes getting emailed to the same Craigslist ad for a barista, and the cafe won't hire you to make coffee because you don't have at least two years' experience. Imagine seeing your peers getting their art shown or writing published, but not for money, just for exposure. Imagine living with your parents because you felt bad about asking them to pay half your studio's rent every month, so you moved home because it was the only way to save anything. Imagine seeing 26-year-olds compete for an unpaid internship to do data entry. Imagine thinking of jobs which offer salaried work, benefits, and a retirement plan as real adult jobs, and that it's something so obviously out of reach that you've seen maybe your one friend who knows how to code C++ nabs the gig but you never see him anymore, because the office is always asking him to stay late, and he feels he has to demonstrate loyalty or face the axe. Imagine never having the opportunity to sell out, so you become an idealist by default.

Imagine seeing all this, and still wanting to travel. Imagine having no money, but also no responsibilities, and all the time in the world.

What would you do on vacation, and what do you go on vacation from?

***

For four months in between February and June of 2012, I participated in a program in the Republic of Georgia run by their government. It was called TLG, Teach and Learn with Georgia, which should tell you something about the official level of English there. The Georgian government was offering free plane tickets, room and board with a host family and a modest salary to any native speakers of English to live in the country for between three months and a year. I lived in a village called Buknari between the regional centers of Chokhatauri and Ozurgeti. I lived on a farm with the Iremadze family and taught English, along with two Georgian co-teachers, in the village school house, a falling-down pink concrete Potemkin set from nineteen-thirty-something.

That sort of experience sounds like it could be, oh, chic I guess: living on a farm and only eating things grown within a 20 mile radius, being a beloved local educator in a third world country, living off of the cultural currency that being in a Peace-Corps-type volunteer program affords you. No. It was terrifying. The buildings were assembled from ambient garbage as if the landscape itself had acquired a vegetable sentience, animals wandered without masters and everything was covered in a fine layer of ivy or dust or or mud. Nobody spoke English, save my co-teachers and my host brothers, limited to a vocabulary of mostly present tense verbs and creative uses of the word fuck. I had to learn the local language, a croaking popping barking crocodile language, to communicate with anyone. One of the village water buffalo eyed me in a way that suggested I was trying to challenge its dominance over the other cows, and there were wasps the size of my index finger which sneaked through the crack in my window and buzzed at a low, horrifying drone around my ceiling like a propeller-driven spy plane, which my host family told me could kill with a single sting, and hundreds of howling jackals, who never showed themselves but always made themselves known in the middle of the night. I kept thinking, what if I have an allergic reaction and die out here? Will they even know where to send my body? Literally zero humans I know from home knows exactly where I am right now. It was visceral. For the first time in my life, I had no control over anything that happened to me.

There were about 1,000 other TLG volunteers in the country, plus about 60 or so Peace Corps people. Having someone from America (or really any other western country) with whom I could discuss this insane place made it memorable. (More to the point, it made me functional.)We tramped all over the country together. We picked a destination, and then accepted whatever happened along the way—people making you drink vodka, cars breaking down, sleeping on stranger's couches. There was no sense in trying to plan or control anything from beyond the barest variables, because nothing worked the way it was supposed to. But it was alright that nothing worked—me and the other travelers in Georgia received a surreal, radical level of hospitality from everyone we met. Everyone in the country treated us like welcome guests. Our principals practically demanded we take time off school, just because they wanted us to travel the country and see their homeland. Strangers in restaurants were curious as to why we were in the country, and offered us food or drinks or a place to stay. My parents were initially worried that I'd get kidnapped by Chechen gangsters and ransomed or killed—instead the entire country conspired to keep me and the other volunteers safe and well fed. This is where and how I learned to travel.

My time in Georgia made me question what exactly I was after while traveling. First of all, it was not at all relaxing. This four-month extended cram session into another way of life was intense, and intensely difficult. Secondly, Georgia is far away from the cultural wonders of Western Europe. I felt the opposite of sophisticated. I barely showered the first two wintry months I was in the village, and my long johns still smell like woodsmoke.

And yet: I'd been to Europe before, and while I'd loved it, I wondered why the most memorable things were never the things that were supposed to be the most memorable. We saw Michelangelo’s David, and Botticelli's Venus, but the thing I remember most was having dinner in a restaurant called Acqua All'a Due and sitting next to a table where a large group of friends in their forties were celebrating someone's birthday. They all lived in the same boarding house, and my family and their family had a hilarious hybrid Spanish-Italian-English-Sign Language conversation trying to communicate in caveman sentences like Happy birthday or The wine is yellow. What made that memorable?

It was the surprises and the people and the stories that I remembered most of all. And Georgia was nothing but surprises.

***

The two-pronged definition of travel as relaxation and acculturation—this kind of travel is about keeping people in their comfort zone. In America, we devote an uncharacteristic amount of time and resources to roosting. I mean, think about why Netflix is so successful—instead of dragging yourself to the video store, you can sit down and watch as many episodes as you want without ever once dealing with another human being. Comfort zones make us feel good about ourselves and make us more productive, because we can trust the routine will center us once again. Any travel that comes from that kind of lifestyle is designed to fit into the structure of your life. It has a beginning and an end, and that end is two weeks from now when you show up on Monday with a thermos full of latte and a weary smile.

Luckily for me, my life back home had failed to take off. I could never have afforded a package tour through Western Europe, or a week at a five-star resort on a beach. The conventional definition of travel was utterly denied to me. The kind of travel I'd found myself in was grueling, uncomfortable, unpredictable, scary, weird, gross, covered in cow shit, and the most fun I'd ever had.

"Getting out of your comfort zone makes good stories. If you just keep going to work and back home, seeing the same things, you'll never get out of the comfort zone, and never have any stories to give shape to your life. Travel is an easy way to shake up your routine and do that. That's why it feels magic." --Anna Bergstresser

I wrote this guidebook as an attempt to redefine how we look at travel. Most guidebooks