This trip has come to life without much long-term planning, as a backup plan to avoid the difficulties I would have come across in Lebanon, severely battered by Israeli attacks this summer. Arrangements luckily aren't always a prerequisite for success, and I have come back content and enriched with a great human and personal experience, which has also allowed me to catch up with old friends in Syria. But adventure and unforeseen events have not been missing either.
3 August - I'm unwell. I call by the chemist's and get myself a syrup that is as yellow as a text marker, to be taken three times a day. At 10.30 comes the bus and they call me while I'm having breakfast with Ibrahim. I had been reading for an hour on the café terrace overlooking the river. Now and then the words from two old people chatting in Arabic got to my ear. How funny, if I think we are so far from the border!
The journey isn't very comfortable. It takes place at a temperature that is hardly bearable, in a bus without windows, with hot air blowing down from the spouts. We have three stops, but it's always 5 hours on the road. I don't have anything for lunch and get to the hotel in Tatvan quite faint. However I decide to use the last of daylight to visit Ahlat, but before that I do the washing to have it dry by tomorrow.
After a lovely half an hour's ride on the minibus along the lake shore, I wander across the old cemetery, among stones decorated with Kufic inscriptions and lichens, and tens of beautiful turtles living they mating season. I observe with curiosity their courting ritual in which the male knocks the female along in the grass with his shell.
1 August -I'm writing sitting on the terrace of a café in Mardin, a terrace looking out on a marvellous view enhanced by its high position over fields burned by the sun, yellow and ocre, only a little green, stretching towards the nearby border with Syria and beyond into its interior. It's a view and an atmosphere that fill me with euphoria. The hot sun tinges with handsome golden full light this spectacle of nature and architecture sculpted in the stone of various buildings. It's a admirable place. Funnily enough I have got here with a lot of incertitude because I didn't know what accommodation I could choose for the night, given that I had news of three hotels of a higher budget range than my usual. But I was lucky to find a rather run-down place where, just about to have a shower, I started to fill a bucket because I hadn't noticed an unlikely spout in the ceiling.
This morning I walked around the mosques of Diarbakir and its alleys, then the market and even some churches. In one of these I was impressed by an ancient tapestry hanging on a wooden palanquin as old as the hills and depicting a crucifixion scene. I then made my way to the otogar, but it turned out that it wasn't the right one to Mardin; so I took a dolmus that conveyed me to the right stop. Unfortunately I realised I had taken the hotel key with me. I looked for a good soul to oblige me and take it back to the hotel, but I couldn't find any volunteer in the short time before a rather sudden departure.
6 August - Last night Dominic self-complacently told me about the feats he has carried out: overnighting in his sleeping-bag on the pyramid of pebbles on top of Nemrut Dagi (which is obviously forbidden to climb) and some years ago clamber up Cheops' pyramid in Giza. I remarked he is more megalomaniac that the king Antioch who had the Nemrut built!
We left to the bus sop and drank a tea chatting away the hour that we had to wait. We find Hosap castle closed, but while we are thinking out a plan to sneak into the tumbling ramparts we catch sight of a group of tourists that have got the key from the police and are about to get in through the gate. After the visit we walk down to the main road and bump into Mariangiola and Ibrahim, to whom I'd left a note with my plans for the day.