turk’d

I really should’ve written during my train trip, but there was too much excitement — and too much blogging for work — to keep up. So I’m going to cheat and use photos to tell the story.

My itinerary: Diyarbakır, Malatya, Gaziantep, Iskenderun, Antakya and Mersin. Basically, I rode the train through most of southeastern Turkey, near the Iraqi and Syrian borders. And it was … incredible. Minus the bomb scare. But that might be a story for another day.

Let’s start with Diyarbakır. It was my fav.

After touring the city and seeing a couple of historic sites (bahring), we headed to the Dicle River, which was infinitely more interesting.

The Dicle River and its regulars.

After leaving the river, we traveled uphill to find women making fresh bread in outdoor stone ovens. More on that in a sec.

In order to fuel the fires that cooked the bread, the villagers use ... wait for it ... dried dung. Not joking. They break it up by hand.

Then they flatten the bread and stick it (somehow) to the sides of the oven, like so. We bought a loaf (?), and, oh my god, so delicious. You can't taste the dung.

Then we posed. The women weren't comfortable with the cameras unless I posed, so I did. I was trying to get a little girl to join. No go.

And that’s pretty much all I have energy for — right now. There’s more to come, but for the time being, you can see more photos on my flickr, and you can check the nonsense I wrote daily for my newspaper’s blog. (You might have to scroll until you see my name.)