Sanlıurfa to Tatvan

We set off for Urfa soon after posting the last post. The sun was warm, the wind was low and the road was flat and quiet- it was going to be a good cycling day.....

....30km later Ed is not feeling so great..
...31km later Ed is really not feeling great...
...31.5km later Ed makes an emergency stop in a roadside ditch, whilst Helen fends off a motorbiker. Helen conveys with the aid of mime (!) what the problem is, although to be frank it is fairly obvious. Motorbıker takes this as an invitation to stick around and asks Helen if she is married (which when asked as an opening conversational gambit always appears to have the subtext of 'are you an easy western lady') and on receivıng a disappointing answer asks for her sunglasses. Charming gentleman.

Toilet issues and motorbiker dealt with, we turn round and cycle 30km back into Urfa and stay there for another three nights.

We set off again and this time make it to a village around 90km along the road where we ask to camp.

We are invited in by a family for çay and more dressing up. The village is another village like the one we stayed in before Urfa, of Turkish arabs, where most of the women and some of the men wear distinctive lilac head scarfs. We are not allowed to leave without eating breakfast with them the following morning.

It's a long cycle the next day, and just as it gets dark and is time to camp...nightmare.... an airport...then a never ending military base.. then the grotty outskirts of town and the road begins its 1000m ascent to Mardin. We flag down a minibus and whizz the final (steep) 5km to Mardin and a hotel!

Mardin is perched high above the edge of the Syrian plain.

The landscape has changed dramatically and we spend the next two days cycling through arid mountains. We are heading into the Kurdish heartland of Turkey and we often round a corner to find a checkpoint of the Turkish army or a tank. No one seems to be remotely bothered by us being here though.
Man and horses ploughing.

We drop down into Hasankeyf on the Tigris river: an amazing place with hundreds of cave dwellings cut into cliff faces.

Take a good look because most of the place will be under water by 2012 when a dam is completed.

We cycle on to Batman, a place not as excitıng as it sounds. As we leave town, a teenage boy on a snazzy mountain bike cycles up to us and shouts "monkey monkey" by which he means "money money". We roar with laughter and point at his bike. It seems to be a good strategy and he cycles away crestfallen. Opportunistic begging by suspiciously well dressed children is getting a bit wearing though. We are not quite sure who taught them this.... Lots of kids we have met in this part of Turkey have been really great but some shriek 'money money' at us as soon as they spot us. A mixture of shocked disapproval and laughter seems to do the trick. The general adult population does not seem to be encouraging this sort of behaviour as we have witnessed quite a few of the cheeky beggars being clouted!

We cycle on and are invited for tea by an Iranian Kurd, a Turkish Kurd and an Armenian. Helen is told to speak German to a relative in Germany on the phone. He is an electrical engineer in Dusseldorf. When asked what she thinks of Turkey, she says how wonderful the culture of hospitality is here by comparison with Western Europe. He laughs and agrees: 'Yes, people are a bit cold here'. Dusseldorf (which we passed through months ago) seems another lonely world away....

The scenery has changed again and we find a place just off the road to camp. Soon after we pitch our tent, we are discovered. 'You can't camp here' they say and mime a gun action and then try and extract what we assume is protection money from us. Once we get the mimed message, we roar wıth laughter (again). Yes, you guessed it: they are about 8 years old and their operation is not very slick yet (much discussion before they can remember the English word for money). They seem to settle for a biscuit, a ride on Ed's bike and a nice chat instead.

Lunch break in the sunshine the next day. A group of men get out of a van and play a game of backgammon together by the river.

Lots more tea in the afternoon and lots of questions about how we like Kurdistan.

We ask to camp in a field and instead are shown to an empty appartment in a local health clinic. If that is not enough, food appears as if by magic and then later we spend a lovely evening drinking tea and eating cake with a couple who are a district health officer and midwife. We play with their two year old daughter and they explain to us via Google translate that some girls here get married as young as 12 and boys as young as 15 and that family sizes of 12 children are not uncommon. The legal age for marriage in Turkey is been 18. Their main aim is to try and encourage family planning.

More beautiful scenery...but zoom in to see the rubbish. Rubbish disposal has been a huge issue in all the countries we have been to since we left Hungary. The main culprits: plastic bottles, plastic bags and nappies (yuck).

Bitlis, another town with very few women on the streets and where teenaged and not-any-more-teenaged boys have a disconcerting habit of laughing a lot when they see Helen on a bike. The few women we do see, seem petrified at the sight of us, although Helen manages to share a conspiratorial smile with two ladies when no-one else is looking. As we leave town, an old lady waves at us furiously from her balcony, so maybe it's not quite so bad.... it is very hard for us to tell....

It is snowing now and we blast on towards Tatvan, on the shores of Lake Van, before it starts to settle. First road sign for Iran!!! Feels like we might actually be getting somewhere .....

We get to see Lake Van the next day (hidden in a whiteout when we arrived). This place was starting to reach almost mythical status in our minds. Now we are here, in the east of Turkey proper......