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By Root 902 0

Day and How to Beat the High Cost of Travel for Frommer’s and had for a number of years been the author of Lonely Planet Turkey. Tom wrote the very first Lonely Planet Turkey guide, and went on to update it for more than twenty years; he also authored the Lonely Planet Turkish phrase book and is the author of more than forty other guidebooks with over four million copies in print worldwide in more than ten languages; in 2005 he wrote Bright Sun, Strong Tea, a memoir of his life in Turkey. I had already had a growing curiosity about Turkey, as I mentioned in the introduction, but when the director of the Turkish tourist office came to Tom’s book signing, and complimentary trays of baklava (with pistachios, which I’d never tried before) suddenly appeared, I realized I was in the presence of a “somebody” and I knew I would be en route to Turkey.

To my mind, nobody knows more about contemporary Turkey than Tom. He is not a scholar of antiquities, literature, medieval society, or Islamic history (though he knows an awful lot about those subjects), but he really knows, and is greatly respected by, the Turkish people. He first landed in Turkey as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1967, was a Fulbright scholar there from 1974 to 1975, and has figuratively never left. After authoring books for Lonely Planet all those years, Tom now owns and operates the outstanding Web site Turkeytravelplanner.com, the very best Internet site about Turkey in existence. (He operates about a half dozen other Web sites, too.)

In 1990, the year my husband and I put our belongings in storage and traveled around the Mediterranean, our copy of Lonely Planet Turkey was stolen from the trunk of our car in Lisbon (it was inside a bag we’d reserved for upcoming countries on our itinerary). I knew that, without this guide, we were doomed to a bumbling adventure in Turkey as opposed to an enlightened one, and when we related our day’s bad news to our fellow travelers at the youth hostel, a very kind British woman offered to send us another copy if we provided her with cash and a mailing address. We wasted no time in giving her an American Express office address in Italy, where we knew we’d be for some time, and thanks to her the book was there when we arrived. All was well in our travels throughout Turkey, but one night, when we took an overnight bus to Göreme, we were awakened at five in the morning and told we had arrived a bit ahead of schedule. I didn’t discover I’d left the book in the seat pouch until about noon. We discussed the matter and decided we could not continue traveling in Turkey without Tom’s book. So, off I went to talk to the staff at the local tourist office, who talked to the folks in the bus office, and for the equivalent of about ten dollars the book was returned to me. I still have it. It is filled with handwritten notes in the margins, as well as a letter of introduction from one Turk to another. Lonely Planet Turkey is still one of the most trusted guides available, and I highly recommend it, even though subsequent authors have had mighty big shoes to fill.

Q: What did the Turks think of the Peace Corps when you were there, and where were you assigned?

A: I was assigned to Izmir Koleji in Bornova, a suburb of Izmir. The Turks had mixed emotions about the USA in general, and the Peace Corps in specific. They were heartened when America helped them, as it had during the Truman administration. They were wary when it went to war in a small country far from its borders, as it did in Vietnam. As for the Peace Corps, the Turks we knew personally appreciated our help, even though it didn’t make sense to them that we should leave the security and wealth of the Land of Opportunity to earn a subsistence wage helping people we had never met before. As for those Turks we didn’t know personally, most were suspicious of our motives. Unable to make sense of our volunteerism, some concluded that we were informers or even spies.

Q: You’ve witnessed changes in Turkey that can probably only be described as extraordinary. What are some aspects about the country