The Promised Post

If anyone was wondering, here finally is the last of the posts of my week in Turkey. One filled with observations on the kind of things I notice - apart from all the usual things that one sees in a foreign country & around its tourist attractions.

Firstly, on one of my back-street wanders between attractions (in this case the Golden Horn & Galata Tower) through reasonably normal city shops I stumbled across dozens of little shops. Each shop seemingly devoted to an individual aspect of, all things, engineering - covering process, mechanical, manufacturing & more.

Want a fan or blower?  There's a shop for that:

How about an electric pump? There's a shop for that too. Actually, I was keen to investigate replacement soap initials pumps for work - but I don't think they would have fitted in my baggage allowance & I don't know the Turkish for flowrate, head or impellor.

Pallet trolley?

Petrol-driven pump? Compressor?

Traffic management items?

A very bizarre little shopping area to wander around. Air-tools, welders, power tools, hand tools - there were shops for each of those too & many more.

Once I was in Cappadocia, it was a much more rural area - which meant tractors. I was most pleased to see that ninety percent of the tractors used on the many fields were of one type. Classic Massey Fergusons - for some reason my father has a particular liking of these small tractors. Consequently, I'm quite fond of these little red workhorses as they remind me of Dad & my childhood growing up on the orchard in Papamoa.

Most of the Massey Fergusons I saw were 135s, - such as the one below in the main street of Goreme - which were built between 1964 and 1975. I'd always been under the impression that Massey Ferguson was an English company - probably because ours was built in England; but as it turns out Massey-Harris and Ferguson were two Canadian companies that merged in 1953.

The Massey Ferguson 35 is probably the most recognisable model, it was the largest selling tractor in the world. It was made from 1957 through to 1964 in various countries - this is the model that we had when I was still small enough that driving it was a bit of stretch. There were a few around town - this was the best looking example. I must have looked rather strange - a tourist wandering back through town after dinner out, spending an inordinate amount of time peering at all the details in the dark.

As well as old tractors, there were scores of old Renault 12s.  These were discontinued by Renault thirty-odd years ago, but there were so many still around I was bewildered.  Apparently, they still sell for six thousand lira (just under £2000) - which is astounding as my ten year old car only cost me half that.  It turns out that variations of the 12 were made in Turkey until 2000 - so not quite as strange as first thought.