17 July, Şanliurfa to Veranşehir, 95km
Öğretmenevi 50TL

We thoroughly enjoyed a day which we had been dreading for several days. We left an already warm Şanliurfa at 05:00 and were ensconced in our air-con hotel room by 12:30, for which the excellent road, friendly terrain and cool following wind were entirely responsible. For several days now the villages have no longer been of the orange-tile-roof variety. The villages in eastern Turkey comprise flat-roofed homes constructed of breeze blocks sometimes plastered, sometimes not, seldom painted. They are brown, dry places beside cultivated fields made possible by Turkey’s major infrastructure spend on irrigation dams and canals. In this area, cotton fields stretch green as far as the water reaches; then the countryside is tan and harsh, bleached pale by the heat. We particularly enjoyed our watermelon stop today. Having weighed the fruit, our seller obligingly cut it open, invited Charl to sit on the end of his under-the-stars bed, provided me with a crate to sit on, and chatted excitedly with his friends and customers as the two of us devoured half the melon with juicy, greedy abandon. At a small market (shop) near our hotel the young man who served us told us he was from Syria. “War”, was his one-word explanation for being in Turkey.

Between Şanliurfa and Veranşehir

Between Şanliurfa and Veranşehir