TURKEY

I know I am way behind in posting photos, & I have some goodies, but I will put it right as soon as I can. We are currently in Goreme, central Turkey. We took a good couple of hours to cross the border, & that was with some preferential treatment. We both really enjoyed Iran. We found the people with whom we dealt, & numerous others we met in the street, to be exceptionally friendly, genuinely interested in us & Australia, and generally a savvy and cultured group of people, & very western oriented, quite at odds with the sort of diatribe from the top that gets all the publicity. Although as we were leaving, just before we entered the border zone, we noticed an American & an Israeli flag painted on the road. It took a second or two for the penny to drop, but the idea was that all the drivers could insult both countries by driving over the flags. Nice touch, & as I said, quite at odds with the courtesy & generosity we encountered. There is no shortage of pizza joints, burgers, coke , pepsi, Mack trucks, & the only cash they will take at banks is US dollars. So go figure!

Anyway, we crossed into Turkey, & immediately the standard of the roads fell away rapidly. Back to potholes & all kinds of bumps. But, we now have insurance cover again, & we can get BEER. We stayed at the nearest town to the border, Dogubeyazit, & escaped early next day. We decided to abandon our southerly route due to the internal security problems here, & instead headed north to Erzincan & Sivas, then to here. It was some solid riding, but the weather is cool, & its very pleasant riding. We cant remember the last time it was cool! We still ended up going through 4 army checkpoints. Once they see the Aussie passports, they just wave us through. It is becoming clear to us that Aussies are respected in Turkey for obvious historic reasons, & the history is important to both countries. More later.

Goreme is a fairly bizzare sort of place, in more ways than one. It is what is left after a large valley was eroded, but the remnants are a huge number of rock pinnacles, some of which have been hollowed out naturally, and some by human intervention. People have been living here since the year dot, but more recently, others have started converting the pinnacles into habitable structures. The hotel Kelebek where we stayed is part cave, part sandstone blocks. The whole place looks like Middle Earth as in The Hobbit, or even Bedrock from The Flintstones.
We then headed straight for the Mediterranean coast, and ended up at great little spot called Fethiye for 2 days, then moved on to another nice spot at Celcuk for another 2 days. We will check out the remnants of the Great Library of Ephesus, one of the ancient wonders of the world while we are here. Efes is how you refer to Ephesus in Turkish, and I note with interest that the main brand of beer in Turkey is Efes. Gotta love that! Matter of fact, I think Ill have one right now.