Turkiye

Our first stop in Turkey was the smallish town of Gaziantep. During WW1, most of the young, fit men of Gaziantep - or Antep, as it was known then - were off fighting when a force of 2000 Allied soldiers, armed with the best automatic weaponry of the time, snuck around and approached the town unexpectedly. Some 600-800 Turks formed a milita, gathered up what shoddy rifles and handguns they could lay their hands on, and sucessfully defeated the opposing Allied soldiers. I was very impressed by this till I learnt the Allied soldiers were French... did those guys ever win a fight? Anyway, the Turkish government awarded the city the title of Gazi, or "Victorious Warrior" as a prefix.

Upon arrival in Gaziantep, it was clear we were in a different country. The roads were wider, the area was cleaner, the cars were nicer, the houses were more affluent, trees adorned streets... it was a strange mix, as it was like a Western country and yet decidedly... not.

We headed off to a local park on the outskirts of town for a bbq immediately after arrival. This is, apparently, a favourite pasttime of locals and the park is packed on the weekend - we were about the only ones there this day. There was no webber or hotplates to be seen though - rather, they use tiny, shoebox sized bbqs which the fill with coal(?) and fan till smoking hot, then lay skewers - shishkebabs - across the top. It proved to be quite a wait for them to be ready, the first batch in particular, and by then we'd been up and moving for about 6-7 hours and so were quite hungry. Worth the wait though. One takes a piece of hot, thickish pita bread and forms a tube, empties the skewer within the wrap, tops with a special salad + dressing (almost like a sauce, wraps it up an enjoys. Naturally my years of burrito training put me at the fore of this particular procedure, a king amongst peons, aloof and assured, quietly mocking from my throne as piece after piece of charcoal'd lamby goodness fed the ravenous earth below.

Add a beer, and it was rather a nice little feed.

That was about the highlight of our trip to Gaziantep, apart from that we wandered around the town for a while and... well, i can't really remember anything else.

The next morning we upped and loaded in to the bus for an 8 hour bus trip. Along the way we stopped for a special type of ice cream. Mine tasted pretty much identical to a normal strong chocolate ice cream, but it's made with extra thickeners to the point where it pretty much doesn't melt, and can be carried around for days without refrigerartion. The sometimes display it by hanging it up meat hooks like a side of beef at a butchers! It's a funny old world. We also had a chance to take in the snow covered mountains - snow that had just fallen that morning.

We were on our way to a place that I knew very little about but (perhaps for that very reason) would turn out to be one of the highlights of the entire trip, trumping even - at least for me - Petra and the Krak de Chevaliers.

Welcome to Cappadocia.

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