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  PRAISE FOR FULL MOON OVER NOAH’S ARK AND RICK ANTONSON

  Full Moon over Noah’s Ark

  “Antonson shows an indefatigable and intrepid spirit in this swift account of his ascent of Mount Ararat and his travels through some of the most dangerous territory in the Middle East, including Iraq and Iran … A book filled with the enthusiasm of discovery, the delight in accomplishment, and the relief of return.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Antonson’s absorbing narrative combines the mystery and intrigue that shrouds the historical Ark story with all the color and drama of this swirling, turbulent region. Packed with historical facts and anecdotes, enhanced by excellent maps and photos, this is a fascinating travel adventure to one of the most ancient areas of the world … A reader’s feast that is not to be missed.”

  —John A Cherrington, author of Walking to Camelot

  “Sharing a treasure trove of compelling and beautifully observed stories, Antonson draws us along on a remarkable, yet deeply personal odyssey through near-mythic lands. This is one of those rare books, full of emotion and insight, the work of a true traveler.”

  —Dina Bennett, author of Peking to Paris

  “An educational, amusing and inspiring tale told by an experienced and worldly traveler … a fabulous weaving of adventure and research.”

  —Shannon Stowell, President, Adventure Travel Trade Association

  “An adventure story for adults.”

  —from the foreword by Garry Marchant, author of The Peace Correspondent

  “Rick Antonson radiates the curiosity and vigor of an explorer and an intrepid traveler. His writing captures the essence of the spirit of adventure and trust in fellow human beings.”

  —Mandip Singh Soin, mountaineer and explorer, founder, Ibex Expeditions India

  To Timbuktu for a Haircut

  “Anyone planning a trip to Africa should put Antonson’s book on their packing list right after malaria tablets.”

  —National Post

  “To Timbuktu for a Haircut is a great read—a little bit of Bill Bryson, a little bit of Michael Palin, and quite a lot of Bob Hope on the road to Timbuktu.”

  —Professor Geoffrey Lipman, former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations World Tourism Organization

  Route 66 Still Kicks

  “One of the best books of the bunch.”

  —2012 round up of holiday travel books by The New York Times

  “A must for Route 66 aficionados.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “The most impressive account of a road trip I have ever read.”

  —Paul Taylor, publisher of Route 66 Magazine

  “A middle-age Woodstock in motion, an encounter with an America that isn’t as lost as we think … in the end Antonson proves that Route 66 indeed still kicks—as does America.”

  —Keith Bellows, editor in chief, National Geographic Traveler

  ALSO BY RICK ANTONSON:

  Slumach’s Gold (with Mary Trainer and Brian Antonson)

  To Timbuktu for a Haircut

  Route 66 Still Kicks

  Whistle Posts West (with Mary Trainer and Brian Antonson)

  Copyright © 2016 by Rick Antonson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. ®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-51070-0565-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-51070-0567-8

  Cover design by Jane Sheppard

  Printed in the United States of America

  A donation from the royalties earned by this book will be directed to assist refugees in Iraq.

  To Mom and Dad, Elsie and Al Antonson, upon whose knees I first heard the tale of Noah’s Ark, and from whom I got the nudge to question everything, to explore.

  To editor John Eerkes-Medrano (1950–2015), a collaborator and elder to many and a friend to all.

  A portion of the always fascinating and complicated Middle East/Western Asia, showing the countries of the author’s travels.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  ONE. The Forbidden Mountain

  TWO. The Bosporus Strait

  THREE. Whirling Dervish

  FOUR. The Van Gölü Express

  FIVE. Women of Ararat

  SIX. Turkish Honeycomb

  SEVEN. Taking Tea with Van Cats

  EIGHT. Doğubeyazit

  NINE. Base Camp

  TEN. Mountain of Pain

  ELEVEN. Final Ascent

  TWELVE. Walking Bones

  THIRTEEN. Turkish Bath

  FOURTEEN. The Lost Ship of Noah

  FIFTEEN. Fish Lake

  SIXTEEN. The Buried Book

  SEVENTEEN. Kurdish Lands

  EIGHTEEN. The Trans-Asia Express

  NINETEEN. The Unfinished Quest

  TWENTY. Mother of the World

  AFTERWORD. Begin Again

  A Timeline

  Appendix

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Sources and Recommended Reading

  Credits and Permissions

  Index

  Also Available from Rick Antonson

  Excerpt from "To Timbuktu for a Haircut"

  The “Ark Tablet” (front view, shown at actual size: 4.5 inches [11.5 cm] tall by 2.3 inches [6 cm] wide). The story within these 600 cuneiform characters revamped our thinking about The Flood. They were pressed into clay in Babylon around 1900–1700 BCE, predating the written Hebrew texts and the Biblical Noah’s Ark story by over 1,000 years, and describe a round ark. (Associated Press/Sang Tan)

  FOREWORD

  Some travel books are the result of intense academic research of previous publications, of early journals, official reports, historic texts and autobiographies. Others are first-person narratives of private journeys.

  In Full Moon Over Noah’s Ark: An Odyssey to Mount Ararat and Beyond, Rick Antonson skillfully combines both methods to provide a compelling book—part travel, part adventure, with history, social commentary, and contemporary politics integrated into the entertaining text.

  In two of his previous books, To Timbuktu for a Haircut and Route 66 Still Kicks, Antonson perfected the technique, the academic and the experiential, providing significant background information, but always keeping the story rolling along.

  Once more he has managed this with his immensely enjoyable Full Moon.

  If there is any downside to this life-long travel writer, it is a slight twinge of envy. Why didn’t I think of that?

  Getting there is half the fun, as the old Cunard Line’s slogan goes, but reading about Antonson’s odyssey offers a great deal of pleasure.

  The author is as much at home scrambling over an ice field in crampons as he is sipping sherry in an exclusive London club, wearing his “post-explorer,” early 1900s retro tweed suit.

  Antonson is not a typical traveler. He does not seek out the ob
vious destinations, no matter how attractive, romantic, or popular. He admits he has never been to Rome.

  Yet he has been to North Korea, Mali, and Belarus, among many other remote destinations. Few contemporary travelers, not even professional travel writers, can make that claim.

  In this work, he takes us from Canada to Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia, and finally to the British Museum in London.

  Antonson was inspired to make this challenging journey as a young boy when he read The Forbidden Mountain by French explorer Fernand Navarra. The thought of climbing Mount Ararat lay buried in his mind for decades, until he came across the book again—and he was off on his quest.

  This is partly an adventure story for adults. I know many people (myself included) who have climbed Japan’s Mount Fuji, Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, and Malaysian Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu. Antonson is the only one I know who has tackled this much more difficult ascent, which requires some mountaineering expertise. “The climb was for the ‘professional or amateur mountaineer,’” he notes early on, with some trepidation.

  Despite the title, this wide-ranging book takes us far beyond the mountain, and the mythical ark. The author says he would “venture among the oft-contested boundaries where Greater Ararat and Lesser Ararat sit, traveling to seldom-visited places.”

  When he gets there, Antonson notes, “I had landed at the crossroads of history, ambition, conflict, and enterprise.”

  On the way, Antonson has many adventures, on the mountain itself, and misadventures—getting his eardrums torched in a Turkish barbershop, dancing with Persian ladies on a train to Tehran, missing ferries, inadvertently crossing borders with cigarette smugglers, and much more.

  This story, both scholarly and adventurous, is more than just a tale of a fabled ark on an awe-inspiring mountain. It deals with the whole exotic, tumultuous, and increasingly dangerous region. Here he delves into the complex politics and turmoil of the area, including Kurdistan and Armenia.

  “Despite Halim’s warnings, I felt the desire to be where I should not go,” he says. Fortunately, he takes us with him.

  —Garry Marchant

  Author, The Peace Correspondent

  A nineteenth-century line drawing of Mount Ararat and Lesser Ararat (on the left), taking a south easterly view, from Armenia. From the 1893 book The Land of Ararat; or, Up the Roof of the World by Alexander MacDonald. Courtesy of the British Library.

  Before 2000 BCE, traditional oral histories told of a long-ago Great Flood, a boat, and survivors. With the invention of writing, the story began to be recorded in various forms.

  On Mount Nimush the ship ran aground,

  The mountain held it and would not release it.

  —Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI, written down c. 2000 BCE

  And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.

  —Torah, Bible, Book of Genesis 8:4, written down c. 538 BCE

  And the water abated, and the matter was ended.

  The Ark rested on Mount Judi.

  —Qur’an 11:44, written down c. 630 CE

  We need not try to make history out of legend, but we ought to assume that beneath much that is artificial or incredible there lurks something of fact.

  —Charles Leonard Woolley, The Royal Cemetery: Excavations at Ur, 1922 CE

  Overlooking Khor Virap monastery (from the fifth century, CE) and citadel, near Yerevan, Armenia. The chapel, originally built in 642 CE and rebuilt in 1662, is still in use today. The view is toward the north face of Mount Ararat, a volcano whose last activity, in 1840, coincided with an earthquake and landslide. Photo © Andrew S. Behesnilian.

  ONE

  THE FORBIDDEN MOUNTAIN

  “Here was a mountain with character and variety to match its size! The challenge of the peak filled us with quick, suffocating eagerness.”

  —Oliver S. Crosby, The American Alpine Journal, 1954

  When I was twelve years old, an extraordinary book sat on the shelf in the bedroom I shared with my older brother. Next to volumes of the Junior Classics, The Jungle Book, and Scouting for Boys was a lesser-known title: The Forbidden Mountain. Written by French explorer Fernand Navarra, it recounted Navarra’s 1952 climb to the top of Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, in hopes of finding Noah’s Ark. The book’s flyleaf claimed that “the Mountain of the Flood is the highest mountain in the world from base to summit.”

  Paging through this book for the first time one evening as I lay on the lower bunk-bed, I was struck by the near inaccessibility of a place where border guards were grumpy and entry was frequently refused. And yet, what a fascinating place Forbidden Mountain depicted: the interior had captivating pictures of nomad camps on the mountain, and women wearing festive costumes while standing in pastures. But what enticed me most were photographs of the jagged terrain on the steep and permanently ice-capped Mount Ararat.

  No legend was needed to lend this mountain an air of mystique in my eyes. Although the twelve-year-old me knew little about this region of the world halfway around the globe, it was tantalizing to read that the “forbidden” massif towered alongside countries with names like Turkey and Iran, and that the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as the Russian bear was then known) had its arms around Armenian lands adjacent to the mountain. And the book referenced “the Kurdish,” a people I was to learn later held a national wish but lacked their own actual country. Lying there excited by this faraway mystery and wanting to know more, I said to my brother—who was on the top bunk listening through earphones to his Rocket-Radio (an early transistor radio of the day)—“One day, I’m going to climb Mount Ararat.” He was tuned in to the Top-Ten songs countdown on the radio and did not reply. I was not discouraged.

  As best I can track it, that book (along with a boyhood of hiking and wilderness camping) inspired an adulthood of roaming oft-forgotten places living in the shadows of past glories, and my own personal pursuit of a life less ordinary. I’ve traveled to Timbuktu, taken a meandering road trip down dilapidated sections of the old historical Route 66, and slept in a yurt in Mongolia. As a husband and father, I’ve benefitted from a rare individual freedom adjacent to family obligations. You’re more likely to find me in North Korea than in Rome (where I’ve never been), or in Belarus rather than Belgium (where I’ve also never been). However, in spite of the many places I’ve journeyed, over the years the imperative of climbing Ararat drifted away from me.

  That changed nearly two decades later, as I was clearing boxes of memorabilia and stumbled across my old copy of Forbidden Mountain; the red and brown cover art of a jeep in the foreground of a mountain was beguiling. It brought a flood of memories, and my childhood dream. I reminded myself: “I’m going to climb Mount Ararat.” But things were not as simple as they might have appeared when I was young. Despite the immediacy of the temptation, I had a job that kept my life at a hectic pace, built on the precept that I must work until the work is done. Much as I wanted to go, I told myself, “I just can’t,” and continued to squander time on what now, having retired from the business world to become a full-time author, seems like a comparatively irrelevant task—career building. The trade-off was that it brought business travel, often in the field of tourism and frequently with side jaunts.

  So The Forbidden Mountain moved homes with me for another twenty years, earning a respected if ignored place amid a growing spread of bookshelves. I came to an age when I couldn’t wait to go to bed at night because I so much liked waking up in the morning. Still, something was unfulfilled.

  One evening, as I was looking at a map of the Middle East, Mount Ararat drew my eyes to the cartography’s upper right hand corner. I remember thinking, What might come from a journey in eastern Turkey? Reminded of my adolescent commitment-to-self, I sought out The Forbidden Mountain from its place on the shelf. Rereading portions of it revived that longing I feel after hearing the whistle of a train—that tomorrow might find me somewhere completely different. I set my i
ntentions, now much more determined, to see the mountain that had motivated a life of travels and have a walkabout on its slopes. Afterward I might venture among the oft-contested boundaries where Greater Ararat and Lesser Ararat sit, searching out the sources of both the truths and the fictions I had come to believe.

  The author’s tattered copy of Fernand Navarra’s 1956 book, The Forbidden Mountain.

  I began to do some research. I found a guidebook to Turkey, which mentioned that trekking on Ararat offered an experienced hiker the opportunity to summit the mountain. Summit! Stand on top of! A fit outdoorsperson, the handbook assured—armed with determination, practicing proper field craft, and led by a knowledgeable local guide—could ascend the peak.

  In less time than it took to finish my glass of wine, I’d made up my mind; I would join an expedition attempt to summit Mount Ararat the coming August. Summit. I clutched the word in my hand, opening and closing my fist around it as one would a stress ball.

  Naturally, the uncertainty of success when it came to summiting a 16,854-foot (5,137-meter) Mountain (with a capital “M”) tempered my talk as departure neared. I’d trekked in the foothills of the Annapurna range in Nepal, hiked the Bandiagara Escarpment in West Africa, and climbed a few mountains in North America, all under 8,000 feet (2,500 meters), but I would in no way consider myself a seasoned climber. Just looking at pictures of Ararat was enough to convince me that I would have to take preparations and training for my climb very seriously (and even then, nothing was guaranteed). “I’m going to hike on Mount Ararat,” was all I would tell family and friends about the pending journey. Travels in far-off lands frequently bring unexpected difficulties, and I have a tendency to drift into awkward situations. When in the company of mischievous people, I’m easily led. I’m also no stranger to aborted intentions; I’ve taken plenty of trips where the feasibility of half-baked schemes quickly turned sour once I found myself on the ground. So, I did not mention my private plans to reach the mountaintop of Ararat. Such a statement seemed presumptuous to announce until the feat was accomplished, if it was.