buttery trout and tea

Salad, real honey with a slab of fresh butter, the butteriest pan-fried trout, and biscuits for your çay. What more could you ask for except perhaps one more çay?

the third time's the charm

I cannot remember what time we met Mustafa at the front door of his house, but I can tell you it was at some ungodly hour of the morning when even the rooster was still asleep. He excitedly jumped into the passenger seat of our rental car, and guided Pedro to drive to a place that can only be described as a rental company's worst nightmare— ok, we've done worse on previous trips— and that time with the volcano was with our own Atilla The Krill Mobile (you shall be missed).



This was going to be the day. We would not accept any less than one Caucasian Grouse, and Mustafa assured us that yesterday he saw plenty up there in the pastures doing their thing— çok var! I was optimistic until the rain began— and it wasn't a heavy rain, but that insistent, nagging rain that feels like the very air is a thin veil of wetness. My dutiful boots, which served me so well in hiking through five years of Nepal's monsoons, decided that this was also their day. I squished up the mountainside while testing to see if I had any telepathic powers by mentally calling the grouse. Maybe it would work.

In a flurry of heavily accented Turkish, Mustafa suddenly called out to us, the only words I picked up were Dağ horozu and iki tane— Caucasian Black Grouse, and two. There they went!



This is sadly the best photo we have of the six grouse we saw on this trip, as my little camera can't handle distance nor rain. We each took turns watching a very smart-looking male fan around the female with his brilliant red eyebrows and puffed chest— it was both marvellous and comical. Birds have developed a myriad of absurd ways to attract each other (just think of those crazy Birds-of-Paradise!)— but then again, don't we all look a bit silly when flirting?



Wind and rain prevented us from going any further, and so we made our way back to the car, thrilled and soaking wet, our shoes caked in mud. Mustafa kindly invited us to his home for a breakfast of fresh eggs, milk, and butter— and a hot stove to warm our bones.

every shade of green

As we promised the mythical Mustafa last summer, we returned to Sivrikaya this May to hire him as our guide into the high altitude pastures in search of the Caucasian Grouse, which we failed to see on our two previous attempts. We had four days in the Kaçkars, and we were geared up with more weather-appropriate clothes this time, ready to climb as high as we needed to, determined to see that bird.



As soon as the hills before us were coloured in every shade of green imaginable, I felt the tension of a city of 14 million leave my shoulders. The pollution, noise, traffic, and crowds of Istanbul fell so far away...



We might as well have been on the other side of the world.

into the fog

In the Spring of 2012, Pedro and I took a smaller road trip around the Black Sea and Kaçkar Mountain regions with the ultimate goal of seeing the Caucasian Black Grouse in the alpine meadows of a dot on the map called Sivrikaya. Sivrikaya was not an easy find— no one seemed to know where it was. When we finally found the forgotten town, it was being swallowed by a fierce fog at sundown, and with nowhere to stay, we had to turn back. No grouse, no meeting the mythical Mustafa, who could take us to see the birds.

This time around, we knew exactly how to get there, and though it was a completely different season, the fog situation remained the same.



We did however, meet the very friendly and gracious Mustafa, who invited us into an old wooden tea house that clung to the edge of a very steep hill. Through the haze of smoke from the wood burning stove, I spied the craggy faces of several older gentlemen leaning heavily on their hands, waiting for the azan. Mustafa explained that this was a very difficult season to see the grouse— especially with the fog, and so we shook his rough hand and promised to return in May.



One of these days, we'll get that grouse!

another u-turn

After leaving Sivrikaya with a heavy sigh, we rerouted ourselves towards Anzer, hoping to get there before we were immersed in the blackness of unlit rural roads. The pockmarked one we were travelling on became dirt somewhere in the darkness, and we were soon bumping along in rocky muck— giggling about the look on the faces of the car rental agency if they knew where we had taken their poor vehicle.

The road was little more than a scratch in the surface of the Earth, serpentine, with shoulders that plunged into hidden rivers. At some point we doubted the map— there was nothing about our environment which promised a charming village of bees and honey at the end of it. Eventually we came across another human being, casually strolling in the darkness, hands folded behind his back. We asked him with all the naïveté and hope of lost tourists, if we were on the right track to Anzer.

Anzer? He repeated with a chuckle, and dramatically lifted his hand in the direction we were already set on, and let out another soft laugh. The gleam of amusement in his eye concerned me, and as we followed his fingers, we began to worry about that chuckle. Just where was this place?

At some point, thoughts of dealing with popped tires in the middle of nowhere, with no cell reception, hungry, in the cold, began to weigh heavily against the possibility of dining on honey and resuming our search for the Caucasian Black Grouse. After some debate and a few more sighs, I got out of the car to help direct a dangerous U-turn, delighted with morbid fantasies of wolves circling me. We would not see the grouse on this trip, but sometimes the journey and the search are what we remember and carry with the most fondness.

That night, we drove all the way back to Trabzon.

facing the myth

After countless head shakes and many a tss!, we had given up on ever finding the mythical Sivrikaya, deciding to head toward Anzer, otherwise known as Ballıköy, famous for its honey with alleged healing powers. Having most likely been a bee in my former life, Anzer seemed like paradise— images of beehives and wildflowers dotting the green hillsides filled my head, and I was already salivating at the thought of slathering some warm bread with butter and Anzer's legendary honey. While playing the navigator and plotting our course on doubtful roads through the valleys, I randomly followed a yellow line on the map that lead toward the town of Ispir, and let out a shout— Sivrikaya!

We immediately changed our course (birds trumped the bees) and began to excitedly discuss the possibilities of meeting this Mustafa, and hiking through the snowy plains to catch a glimpse of the Caucasian Black Grouse.

As the narrowing road led us uphill, the temperature dropped in the car—our ears gently popped, and our curiosity grew. Would we make it before sundown? Would we find lodging? Would we finally see the bird we were hoping for? Then, to our dismay, a red sign with a lot of exclamation marks declared that the road to Ispir was closed to traffic.  We decided to ignore it.



We pulled over to the side of the road and stepped out of the car, just in front of another massive sign that threatened us in blinking lights, to go no further. The air was crisp and sweet, lightly biting my cheeks. There, on the hillside, the humblest homes clung desperately to the earth, and a vast scooping plain opened up before us. Fog obscured mountains, falling toward us, and a small, squarish man passed us with suspicious eyes.

Merhaba, we chimed, and smiled.
We were offered a grunt and a respectful nod of the head. Could he be Mustafa?

I was convinced I would spot the black dots of the grouse on the plain any minute, but as the looming clouds behind us turned orange and the fog grew denser, we looked at Sivrikaya and knew. We had to turn back. The road was shut, and the few lean houses looked unable to host two wanderers. We hadn't eaten since breakfast, and the thought of asking someone to share their food, which seemed hard to come by in this desolation, made me uneasy.

It would have to be another day.

reaching snow

We hadn't planned a thing. We bought plane tickets, packed only the essentials (which included sketching gear, binoculars and a scope), laced our hiking boots and took off. There was an old Lonely Planet guide which nested back and forth between our bags, providing us with some slightly outdated information on lodging. Upon arriving in Trabzon, the Kaçkar mountains, like phantoms lining the horizon opposite the blue line of the sea, seduced us. We rented a car and drove toward their whiteness, hoping perhaps, to catch a glimpse of a resident black grouse.

There was rumour of a village named Sivrikaya, which stood on the edge of an alpine plain. Each time we asked someone on our journey where this mythical Sivrikaya was, they would reluctantly shake their head and shrug their shoulders. Bilmiyorum, was the constant response. Apparently this unknown village was known outside Turkey for its proximity to the habitat of the famed Caucasian black grouse. There was a man named Mustafa, who could take you to see them.

One night, not knowing where to go but up, we headed to Ayder, which our Lonely Planet promised a bed to sleep in. Little did we know the town was entirely touristic, and being off-season, empty. Lodging under 100 lira was difficult to find, but eventually an old insistent lady in a floral headscarf offered us an unheated room with a low ceiling for 70. Fortunately she gave us a little plug-in electric heater she called a soba, which helped keep the mountain cold at the door.



Mounds of old snow lay about the green hills, and it reminded me a bit of childhood trips to Switzerland, though a lot more ramshackle and disorganised. The air was crisp, and held notes of wagtails, crossbills, and crows. I layered on two pairs of socks, bundled up in a yak wool sweater and coat, readying myself for a hike in the snow. Crunching uphill, we passed three wooden signs with crude illustrations of wolves, bears and lynxes, with instructions in Turkish of what I assume were the proper means of dealing with an encounter of each. I made a mental note of the shape of each carnivore's footprint pattern, just in case.