June 24, 2006

Day four: Nemrut Dağı national park

Today is actually already day five of the trip and I will start the journey back to Damascus. Because travelling through Antakya means I'd have to spend the night there (something I'd like to avoid), I'm going to try a different route today: bus to Gaziantep, from there to the border at Kilis (about one hour by minibus), and minibus from the other side of the border to Aleppo. I need to check out from my hotel in about 15 minutes, so obviously I can't now write about yesterday's trip at length!

It was really fantastic and definitely the highlight of this trip. And I was really lucky because when I went to the office yesterday morning, another tourist from Switzerland hat turned up, so we were able to divide the cost! He had also come from Aleppo and was an expert in plants, agriculture and especially history, so I learned a lot of things just listening to his running commentary! He was fun company, but in the end he got a bad headache and got grumpy. Yusuf, on the other hand, was a real bag of laughs! There are many stories I could write about him but one of the best ones was that every time before you could see something important from the car, like the artificial lake created by the Atatürk dam or our first glimpse of Nemrut, he burst into "One, two, three, four - SURPRISE!!" Chanting along was obligatory.

We left at eight in the morning and came back past one at night because the car almost broke down and we had to take it slowly. I just visited the office of the tour agency and the manager told me all our money went into reparing the car. Bad luck, but that's business! All in all I have to say that I don't think I have ever felt that hot in my life. The air was absolutely baking! We stopped a lot of times before Mount Nemrut itself. About one hour after leaving Şanlıurfa was the huge Atatürk dam, and after that we stopped to take pictures of the Euphrates and the lake which was created by the dam (a lot of Kurdish villages now lie under the water).

Lunch was in Kâhta, a small ugly town full of gipsy children asking for money. Here we had some interesting "cheese pizza" wıth sugar sprinkled on top. From Kâhta, we made the short drive to the entrance of the national park.

I need to stop here but I'll continue another time, so come back to check for updates to thıs entry! I wish I could have ended in a more catchy way, like "It was then that we noticed our backpacks had vanished from the van, and kind old Yusuf had magically transformed into a sword-wielding maniac..."

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