OPINION (AN COLÚN): An enjoyable Turkish evening in Cloughjordan's Eco Village

On Saturday evening Rosalind and I joined a group of friends in Cloughjordan's Eco Village at a private house where the owners cooked a fabulously delicious Turkish, six-course meal.
The Eco Village is looking well. The place is obviously prospering which is good to see.
I remember back in the 1990s and early 2000s writing many stories about people's plans to create an Eco Village in Cloughjordan but as the years passed and nothing happened some of us began to wonder if it would ever happen. It eventually did and it's now a success story, being an embellishment to the area and emanating a positive vibe.
One of our hosts for Saturday's meal, a very pleasant Turkish man who has been living in the Eco Village for a number of years, told us that many of the ingredients in the six courses were grown organically locally. He also said he adores Irish beef and it's something which we should be proud of. Courses five and six were sweetmeat dishes, something which the Turks are famous for. Course five was a sublime Fig and walnut dish bathed in Tahini. Course six a delicious Baklava.
It was very pleasant being immersed in this Turkish atmosphere for an evening and it made me reminisce about my trips to the country. I was there a couple of times during my twenties and thirties, during which I packed in a lot of adventure, including many days of hillwalking, and sightseeing, visits to wonderful ancient Roman and Greek sites, and a bit of canoeing including a fabulous sea kayak above the submerged ruins of an ancient Greek town. My visits also included a climb of Mount Ararat (in 2011), which was a very special experience.
Rising above the brown landscape of eastern Turkey, the great snow-capped peak of Mount Ararat is a magnificent sight. It has drawn admiration from passers-by for millennia, including Marco Polo. The first man to climb it was a German scientist in 1829, doing something that was considered wildly eccentric at the time - mountaineering. Because Ararat (5,137 metres/16,854 feet) is a freestanding volcano it dominates the landscape for many miles around. It's a dormant stratovolcano, which means its structure is made up of layers of solidified pumice, tephra, lava, and volcanic ash. When my friends and I walked Ararat's slopes we could see the mountains of Iran nearby. As we ascended, Kurdish muleteers and shepherds chatted away to each other and bade us good day as they walked swiftly past, wearing light plimsoll things for footwear. We looked down on the large town of Dogubeyazit, an unprepossessing place, with many unfinished buildings. We had been travelling in western Turkey and we could see that eastern Turkey was more impoverished and more conservative. There was also a heavy military presence in Dogubeyazit, because we were near Iran and there was also tension with the PKK.
On our first day of slogging up the steep, stony flanks of Ararat it was 40 degrees celsius. I stopped regularly to sit on rocks and drink copious amounts of water. During one of these stops I fell into conversation with a lone trekker, an American, who told me he was a Christian Scientist and was looking for Noah's Ark, which, some believe, landed on Ararat after the floods receded. There has been a steady stream of Christian evangelists to the mountain over the years to search for evidence of the elusive Ark.
Camp two, high on the slopes of Mount Ararat, was not a pleasant place to be. The air was thin and the tents were pitched amid a field of boulders, negotiating which was time-consuming and had to be done carefully as some were unstable, which could have led to injuries. There were no toilets up there or any washing facilities. It was important in these difficult conditions to look after your personal hygiene as much as possible, as contracting a stomach bug was all too easy. The scenery was magnificent from our Camp Two vantage point with a gigantic chasm to our right, into which a glacier flowed and down which a very high waterfall descended. Above this chasm rose the snow-capped summit of Ararat.
To climb Ararat we rose at 12.30am. I had been lying in my tent for the previous six hours trying to get some sleep but without success. For breakfast all I could manage were a few sips of tea because I thought I might vomit if I ate anything. We set off at 1.30am, joining a queue of about 60 other climbers. The ascent was a steep, slow climb over difficult, rocky, slippy terrain. Far away beneath us we could see Dogubeyazit with its hundreds of lights looking something like a fairy encampment in a fantasy story. There were countless stars in the heavens and dawn was four hours away. It wasn't that cold, perhaps 5C. At about five o'clock in the morning it became noticeably colder as the wind picked up, becoming quite strong. After half an hour the light had increased to such a level that our headtorches were unnecessary. A short while later we were putting on our crampons to make the final climb across the snow slopes and up the summit dome. At 7am we reached the summit, which is the highest point in Turkey, and the highest point of what is a stunning, magnificent mountain. Sadly, there was a haze on the horizon and one could only see across the brown landscape for about 20 miles.