20th hole: Kirazli to Izmir -- February 8th

So Friday morning we all gathered back at the tea house and said good-bye to our hosts. Turkish men typically greet and say good-bye to each other with a kiss on the cheek, which Faruk had done when he'd said good night the previous evening and bid farwell to Scott, Brian and me the same way. At one point during the evening Faruk paused and looked at the three of us and asked rhetorically, "Tonight, we have good time didn't we?" We certainly did.

We had a bit of a drive that morning heading north along the Aegean coast to the small town of Seferihisar, mostly in the rain though it let up long enough for me to snap a couple photos.

We had one of our more comical moments that morning. As Larry had predicted there was tight turn in the small town of Seferihisar that our bus couldn't navigate and we had to walk about a half mile to the Baltali goat farm. We passed a burial en route and were passed in turn by a white Mercedes with a woman in the back seat with blond hair, who turned out to be our host, Funda Ozer Baltali.

This was not your average goat farm, in as much it was a large modern facility with several hundred goats and a processing plant on site not to mention it was owned by a woman. We actually didn't go inside the barns for biosecurity reasons but had a lively discussion followed by tea and refreshmants before a quick look inside the processing plant. We had to walk back to the bus from the farm even though our host explained to our bus driver a different route to the farm, but the bus driver would have none of it. At another point in the trip our tempermental bus driver shut off use of the bathroom because he claimed we'd clogged it with excessive disposal of toilet paper. [At the risk of TMI, throughout the country, the plumbing is fragile so in many places toilet paper goes into a waste can instead of the toilet, and evidently the same goes for the bus toilets as well.]

The corner the bus couldn't make

We had about a half hour drive to the city of Izmir, the third largest in Turkey and home of Ege University, which boasts rhe largest ag. faculty in Turkey, where we would spend the afternoon. We had a great lunch in the faculty dining room and then two presentations on Ege and ag. education and the second on the Central Anatolia Project (CAP).

The CAP was a subject we wanted to learn about (though we didn't travel to that region) as it's basically a giant irrigation project to boost agricultural productivity in the arid regions of the Central and Southeast Turkey. We saw a state-produced promotional video on the project, touting its merits, though the environmental underpinnings of the project, given the crops (like cotton) they intend to produce in that region are questionable. Clearly the Ege faculty didn't want to say a lot on the topic. In general we got mixed reviews from industry people about the role of ag. universities in Turkey.

We were going to check out some university greenhouses, but the weather was terrible and it was difficult to navigate the campus in our bus late on a Friday afternoon, so it was off to the Aksan hotel, which was in a bit of sketchy part of town. At the very bottom is a view from the rooftop of the hotel in Izmir.