So Turkey is quite like being in Europe in many places partıcularly cities in the western half..but once you go off where no other tourists are its much more interesting, like Borat, yay! I knew I'd find it here somewhere.

First though in Turkey I continued my tour of the world's hospitals, managing to get into two in Antakya, just over the border with Syria, after having a seizure which was due to malaria medication, I believe. Amnesia is fun!

After remembering who and where I was I had a week in Goreme in Cappadocia with an Ozzie bogun- you know who you are Kimmy. It was fun to relax and go to a Turkish hammam to be scrubbed, sit in cafes, and chat to locals. They are very friendly and several of them invited us to cook dinner for us. After 2 days there it took half an hour to walk down the street cos we met so many people we knew who stopped to say hi. We nearly didnt leave it was so nice! Sweet..

Then I had to depart for Ankara, the capital (not Istanbul), which is booorrrrring. I spent about 5 hours on the internet every day for 5 days there on my own, there is not even half a days worth of sightseeing. It is modern and European but a bit downmarket. Although, saying its dull there, a few days after I left there was an attempted suicide bombing at the University there- fortunately the explosive vest failed.

I then joined my tour group for my trıp round Eastern Turkey- I am the youngest by about 30 years and its not the most exciting of my trips! No disrespect, its that the group dynamics are not that sparky, not purely that theyre older! Where is a bogun when I need one eh Chantelle?

But eastern Turkey, epecially the most eastern section if you divide it into vertical quarters on the map, is much more what I hoped to see. Small mountain towns with wooden houses and chickens and people gathering firewood or tilling their gardens, remote villages on the vast grassland steppe plains with snowy mountains beyond, no other tourists, less and less sign of Europeaness.

A lot of the people are Kurdish and refer to the area as Kurdistan- they mostly live as sheep herders guiding their flocks across the steppe with sticks and living in houses with turf and grass rooves. In fact its only been possible to visit this region for about 5 years because until recently the Kurdish separatist group the PKK was highly active here, terrorising the area by bombing schools, hospitals etc, at the cost of 45,000 (!) lives over the previous 15 years. Now you still see a heavy military presence here as a peacekeeping force, and have to stop for any number of road checkpoints as you're driving around.

I saw some fully Borat things, such as a little Kurdish fella who'd parked his horse and cart at a petrol pump at a fuelling station! To be fair to him, he was just there to chat with someone. But it was funny as a visual image :) Lots of people come up to us and stare at us in a curious but friendly way too, as they're not that used to seeing Western tourists. Some of the places were almost as remote as the villages I visited while trekking in Nepal, and had that same bleak moon colony look. I recommend visiting the area if you can stand the enormous amount of driving involved on poor roads to get there and get around!

Anyway I could have stayed longer there, but now we are on the second leg of our tour back to the south and central parts of Turkey, and then to Istanbul! And then home! :)