We walked through Qamishli as it was waking up, reached the ring road and found a guy with a pick-up truck who was up for driving us to the border. We jumped in.
At the border, the Syrians were, as always, incredibly nice but also very slow. We waited for the right guy to arrive, then waited until we were invited into his office and then waited again while he perused our passports with a cheerful but slothful indifference. Eventually, satisfied that our passports weren't out of a Mafia printing press, he opened the Big Book and began to ask the all-too-familiar questions.
"Father's name?"
We told him.
"Mother's name?"
We told him.
"Occupation?"
"Genius," I said. CL choked on a guffaw, turning it into a cough.
The official paused, the pen hovering tantalisingly close to the paper. We were almost through.
"What is your job?" he asked again.
"Jen-yoos," I said. CL coughed again. The official scribbled into the book.
"And you?" he asked, pointing the tip of the pen at CL.
"Dreamer," said CL. It was my turn to cough.
Again, the official paused, pen hovering.
"Dah-ree-mehr," CL elaborated.
The official nodded and wrote in the book.
We emerged from the office and waited for our passports to be stamped. The border guards took their time, examining our passports not out of official scrutiny but out of curiosity. CL and I took turns using their toilet and then play-fought behind the customs desk while the guard toyed with the notion of stamping us out of Syria. Eventually, the ink pad was squelched and our passports were stamped. We were out of Syria.
We walked through the barriers and up through the parking lot that leads to the Turkish customs hut. For the first time in weeks, I was looking at buildings and windows that didn't have Bashar al-Assad's photograph on them. It felt weird.
Once we were inside Turkey, we walked into the town of Nusaybin, a border town mirroring Qamishli's size and location but with no indication of the bustling nightlife. A group of kids shouted "Hello mister what is your name?" and then ran off, giggling. Nusaybin, like most of the places we would pass through on the way to Georgia, was in the area of Turkey known to everyone but the Turks as Kurdistan. The population are almost entirely Kurdish, most of them speak what is known as Kurdish to outsiders (minor point of pedantry - there actually isn't a language called Kurdish; the Kurdish people have many different languages corresponding to different sects, such as Kurmanji and Soranji). Until fairly recently, it was illegal in Turkey to speak Kurdish, write Kurdish, teach Kurdish, have a radio station in Kurdish or make any references to the existence of a separate and distinct people known as Kurds. Mostly due to the desire of the Turks to join the EU, those restrictions have been lifted, although in practice the open speaking of Kurdish is still cause for heated arguments in Turkey proper.
Passing through the main square, CL and I paused to marvel at a statue of Ataturk. Ataturk is revered in Turkey to the point of being worshiped. His statues, busts, portraits and quotes are everywhere. On the YTL notes, the older Ataturk glares up from the paper in an attitude that for some reason always reminds me of Peter Cushing. This particular statue of Ataturk was interesting because it was surrounded by red and gold plaques that gave the entire thing a very Chinese feel.
As CL and I took photos, a young boy ran past and shouted "Hello mister what is your name?" and then took off.We stopped by an internet cafe to check on the status of our CouchSurfing requests for Armenia. The owner of the cafe was eating a very delicious-looking meal. CL and I suddenly realised that we were very hungry. The owner very kindly ordered food for us and, for 2.50 YTL, it was the most reasonable meal we ate the entire time we were in Turkey. As we ate, we told him where we were headed and he arranged for his son to walk us to the bus stop that would take us to the edge of town. One of the great things about the Turkish language is that, unlike Arabic, there is a specific word for hitchhiking - autostop - which made explaining what we were up to much easier.
The minibus dropped us at the edge of town at a petrol station. We piled our gear up to make it look as minimal as possible from the road and then began thumb-jockeying. We were picked up by Erhan, a Kurdish travelling pharmaceutical supplies salesman. He was on his way to take a few meetings and happily agreed to drive us as far as he was going as long as we didn't mind waiting for twenty minutes here and there while he met his customers.
Our first pit stop was in Kiziltepe, a small town with a broad main drag. I dashed into the local hospital to make use of their toilet and was surprised to find that the Middle Eastern habit of never turning on the lights until nighttime also applied to hospitals.
Our next stop was Mardin, a great town built on a mountain with an old fortress on the summit. From pretty much anywhere in Mardin, you have a glorious view of Turkish Kurdistan.
Another highlight of our visit to Mardin was the local supermarket. One of my favourite things about Turkey is its amazingly high instance of wildly inappropriate product names.
Erhan dropped us off at the autostop in Diyarbakir, the capital of Turkish Kurdistan. The autostop was a junction just outside of the city centre. We were heading east, towards Lake Van. We bought some food. As we walked in and out of a couple of stores, I became very aware of the eyes of every person there being glued to us. The men sitting around playing crackgammon and drinking tea, the women in small clusters talking amongst themselves and, most of all, the children. The children followed us en masse, not just with their eyes. As CL and I set up our gear by the side of the road and started thumbing, a crowd of about ten or fifteen kids had gathered. After five minutes in that spot, there were thirty or forty kids. They stood very close, all around us, occasionally shouting "Hello mister what is your name?". Nobody stopped for us. What motorist in their right mind would stop for two scraggly-assed travellers in filthy clothes and a horde of staring, gesticulating children? The kids were very sweet but they didn't grasp the concept of hitchhiking. They just clustered around us, sticking out their thumbs when we did, laughing when CL and I looked at each other, shaking our heads. Eventually we had to decamp to a different spot. As we walked down the hill along the side of the highway, the kids followed us. All of them. I felt like the Pied Piper. About a kilometre from where we started, all the children suddenly stopped following us, as if an invisible wall had sprung up in their way. On the other side of the road, a new group of children were waiting to walk with us. There was obviously a territorial issue in play of which we weren't aware.
There was a filthy stream clotted with garbage at the foot of the hill. A convenience store backed onto the stream bed. We dropped our bags. I went to the store to get a piece of cardboard to write our destination on. The owner and his employee were very nice and insisted that I sit down and let them hitch for us. CL and I sat by as the store clerk waved down cars until one finally stopped. There were two students inside on their way back to their dorm. They would give us a lift four kiolmetres or so up the road. He crammed our gear into the boot and back seat and clambered in.
The students dropped us next to a police checkpoint. They told us that the police would help us. Sure enough, right after the car pulled away, before the dust even had time to settle, the police captain came out of the checkpoint hut in his vest, drying his arms. We told him we were going to Tatvan. He put on his shirt, strapped on his gun and started flagging down trucks for us. After ten minutes, he told us to come inside for tea. It was getting dark, so CL stayed by the road and I went inside. There were four or five officers inside the hut, talking and laughing. They brought out the tea in the traditional two-tiered teapot. The bottom pot has hot water in it. The tea is poured into the cup until it is about two-thirds full and then the final third is made up of hot water so that the tea won't be too bitter. I was just lifting the cup to my lips when CL burst in. We had a ride.
Our ride was a schoolteacher named Mustafa who lived 12 kilometres east, just outside the town of Silvan. He spoke some English and was keen to practice it.
"Perhaps I invite you to eat at my home tonight?" Mustafa asked.
"We'd love to sleep at your house," CL replied, not realising that he had misheard the invitation.
"Oh," Mustafa said, "yes, sleep at my home tonight. You are welcome."
CL beamed back at me and I winced. The Kurds are a very hospitable people and so are the Muslims. Muslim Kurds are exceptionally polite and helpful. Mustafa was a very religious man and, since we had requested shelter, couldn't refuse us even though it hadn't been what he meant. We had hijacked a crash pad.
We pulled off the highway onto a dirt road that shuddered and bounced us two more kilometres to his house. Mustafa lived in a one room house adjacent to the school at which he taught. He was married and had two children. All four of them lived together in a tiny house that had a squat toilet, a sink and a modest living room where they all slept. Mustafa never invited us into the house because his wife was inside and had no scarf to cover herself with. We sat on the stoop of his house, spread out one of CL's kaffiyehs as a tablecloth and ate a delicious chicken stew with rice. Before we could go to use the toilet, Mustafa would tell his wife we were coming and then go wash the toilet and sink. His children came out of the house to stare at us shyly or sit on their father's lap. We took out the crackgammon board CL had bought in Damascus and played for hours. Mustafa was very curious about life in England. He told us about his teaching. We talked about religion and Mustafa, a very quiet, delicate man with a painfully soft voice, told me with a beatific smile how wonderful it would be if Turkey had Sharia law.
"I am Muslim," he said. "Of course I would like Sharia law here."
We set up our tent in his front yard and bedded down for the night. Mustafa quietly left us a bottle of water to wash with and told us that during the night we were welcome to perform our functions in the backyard.
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