Voyages in Kebabland, Part V

Georgia --> Kars --> Van --> Hasankeyf --> Midyat --> Mardin --> Diyarbakir --> Shanliurfa (Urfa) --> Gaziantep (Antep) --> Aleppo (Syria)

I left Georgia on Christmas Eve and can say right now that Turkey was bloody freezing: Kars was experiencing daytime highs of -9C and further south in Van it was even colder. All I had to do was take in the one corner of Turkey I hadn't yet seen - albeit under a uniform veil of snow - and then skip out of the country to Syria to soak up the summer rays. The race was on but I wasn't hanging around.

I can safely say this was the least interesting part of my time in Turkey, no doubt in large part due to the weather although I liked Van a lot (the town was ordinary but the lake and mountains made up for this).

Hasankeyf was also interesting; an ancient town with cave dwellings set in cliffs above the Tigris River. I spent half a day then then finished in Midyat which has nothing really to boast about. Likewise Mardin, one of the main Kurdish towns in Turkey and sitting perched on top of a great mountain above the plains of northern Syria was bleak and quite uninteresting (and bloody expensive). I dashed through there too.

The remaining stops - Diyarbakir, Shanliurfa and Gaziantep were all fairly ordinary large cities. Lonely Planet describes Gaziantep as the city "most likely to be Turkey's Barcelona" which is the most positive way of saying "it's not at all like Barcelona". Doubt it ever will be either.

So, after about a week of snowy, wind-swept southern Turkey I headed to Syria.