Intrepid traveller… The good, bad and ugly in Istanbul

Valentine’s Day was a mixed bag. We started off slow, escaping the torrential rain with tea at a café near our hotel that offered Wireless and when the sky cleared, we made our way down to the Kumkapi fish markets – via every conceivable side street, because Boyfriend has a ‘thing’ about always taking the scenic route.

Squeezed between the waters edge and Kennedy Caddesi, one of the city’s busiest roads, the Kumkapi markets are famous for their live catches and reasonable prices. As we’d already lunched on Turkish pizza rolled with coriander leaves, sliced tomato and fresh lemon juice (all for 4 lira) our visit was purely voyeuristic until a conversation began with a local restaurateur, Garip.

This guy not only addressed me personally – as I was snapping away at his sardines and sea breams – but he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say: I was putty in his hands. It turned out that Garip’s uncle had immigrated to Melbourne 45 years ago (Garip even scrolled through his mobile address book to show said-uncle’s Australian phone number) and had recently flown back to Turkey to visit Garip’s dying father. In less than five minutes we’d learned all about his family and shared tales of both the joys and sadness that come with immigration (me regaling my mother’s own story of moving over from Slovenia). So of course I promised that we’d return for dinner that evening and bring our new tour group. Happily envisaging his prospective table-of-eight, Garip continued to wave to us from across the caddesi as we made our way back up the hill into the city.

Knowing full well that we wouldn’t be making the trek back to Kumkapi I spent the next hour composing the apologetic postcard I would send to Garip from our next port, Boyfriend chiding me once again for being so naive. Then he noticed a dropped brush of a shoe shiner who was racing down the path, he pointed it out and the man thanked us profusely – then turned and motioned for me give him my foot, to polish my very muddy knee highs. Thinking his gesture one of thanks for saving his mislaid brush I too thanked him profusely. He then went at Boyfriend’s trainers with a toothbrush as I began searching for a few coins for his hard work. But it turned out he was after more than a few coins, asking for 14 liras to compensate his efforts. We literally only had 10 lira on us. After checking our money purse for himself he took the 10 and a few cents and walked off in a huff. I was mortified… for about two minutes until the next shoe shiner that passed our way also (deliberately) dropped his brush in our path. The nerve!

We were feeling decidedly used as we arrived back to our hotel ready to meet our new tour group. We went to our room to gather our things, including our local payment money for our guide, and convened with our group in the lobby. It was then that Boyfriend realised we’d been robbed. While we had gone to the trouble of putting our wallets and passports in the hotel safe, Boyfriend had forgotten about the American dollars we’d had converted for the tour – that $880 he’d kept in his travel pouch tucked into the bottom of his daypack. It turns out that morning our cleaning lady had down more than simply make our bed and change our towels, she’d helped herself to $160! Of course the guy at reception denied any hotel staff involvement, but Boyfriend, being even more anally retentive than myself had noticed that the travel pouch had not only been moved but that the sheets of paper within the pouch had also been put back in a different order.

Needing to bond with our new friends, we went out to dinner and planned to drop into the police station on the way back, to file a report in the hopes that I might be able to claim it back on insurance. The police station was right by our hotel, we envisaged the process might take an hour, at most.

And so began the saga of our night in a Turkish police station.

First off none of the policemen spoke English; one who spoke a little bit – a sweet guy in his late twenties with a vicious receding hairline – came over to our hotel to talk with the receptionist and apparently watch a copy of the video surveillance from the corridor outside our room. However, the only person with access to the surveillance tapes was the owner, and he was out with his wife for their Valentine’s Day dinner, and not due back until Monday.

We went back to the station and waited. It was at this point that our nice policeman scattered off. The next hour and forty-five minutes was spent perched on two plastic chairs in the bare, smoke-filled room that constituted their police station. It was obvious the sergeant in charge - a sturdy, arrogant bastard in his late forties – had no desire to help; telling me (via the very broken interpretation of a visitor in the waiting room) that $160 was ‘nothing’ and it was our fault for leaving the money in our room. Six policemen stood around chatting in Turkish (laughing at us), sipping tea and chain-smoking cigarettes as we waited for the return of the English speaking sergeant. Another, pimple-faced sergeant asked – via the same visitor-interpreter – if we knew the serial numbers of our alleged ‘lost’ bills.

Finally the English speaking one returned, only to tell me that they wouldn’t be able to help us: that there was no proof of a theft and that the tapes had been watched – they hadn’t – and no one besides us had entered our room. I had explained a number of times that we didn’t want to claim against the hotel or find the suspect; just that we needed an official form to say we’d had money stolen so that we might claim against our travel insurance. A process that should have taken 20 minutes had now taken over two hours.

With the clock rapidly approaching midnight and them all jabbering in Turkish and looking at me as if I was a madwoman, I finally cracked. I burst into tears, called them all liars and ran outside into the cold. Coming to my defence Boyfriend stayed to attempt to explain my outburst and in his own way berate the Turkish justice system. With everything getting much more heated inside and me bawling out in the rain, the young guy ran out to ask me to come in, promising to write up the report and begging me to stop crying. It was Valentine’s Day, after all.

So two hours and twenty minutes after meeting him, Sergeant Nuri finally wrote up the report – albeit in Turkish – and gave me his personal email address should I require any further copies be sent back to Australia. He even offered us dinner at his friend’s restaurant to apologise for how we’d been treated. In stark contrast to the animals in uniform in the other room, Sergeant Nuri proved himself a true gentleman.

Travelling overseas it’s hard not to make comparisons to life ‘back home’. And the sad and twisted thing about this saga is that I’m not even sure I’ll draw on my insurance in this case. But it was the way those policeman tried to bully me into submission by deliberately sending Sergeant Nuri off and keeping us waiting as they chatted amongst themselves, clearly not working, that made me furious and determined enough to waste my last evening in Istanbul in their company. I hate that it took tears to break them, but if the hoo-ha I caused makes our hotel think twice about the trustworthiness of their cleaner – their name now smeared in public record – and makes the police redress the way they treat the next foreign victim of theft then it’ll have been worth it. Not worth $160 perhaps, but worth the two hour wait.