Day 65
Wednesday 31st December
Tartus, Syria - Aleppo, Syria

The Tartus Grand Hotel is a pastiche of the great turn of the century British seaside hotels.  It has a sniffy man on reception, dressed like an English gentleman with a tiny moustache.  It is tired and empty, the big function rooms echoing the ghosts of its glory days.   They have breakfast in a huge grand restaurant overlooking the front with splendid art nouveau mirrors and a filthy pink tablecloth. 

Grandpa Pete and the Child Bride have a vague fancy that they will travel north and find the Dead Cities - abandoned Byzantine towns - before finding some nice countryside inn to spend New Year's Eve in.   Syria laughs in the face of laissez faire plans and sends a snowstorm to derail this dream.  As they head north, the leaning pines of Syria become dusted with snow.  Then covered in snow.  In the white weather, Syrian drivers become conservative and tentative, the roads calm down.

The snow is thick, however, and is limiting their options - ruling out the smaller country roads and making a definite plan for the night a necessity.  A stop for a (kebab) lunch sees them accept their fate and reluctantly decide to head back to Aleppo.  To add insult to injury, when they phone ahead to hotels they are of course all booked.  It is, after all, New Year's Eve.  They will have no choice but to brave the Aleppan traffic on spec and take whatever they can find, hoping that it is not the Hotel Faisal.

Reception staff at a glitzy hotel close to the Faisal at first promise a room and then in a split second change their mind, deciding apparently that GP and the CB are not their kind of people.  They begin to feel desperate, and a little outraged.  The Ramsis hotel comes to their rescue with a cosy clean suite on a corner with a view.  Spirits soar then plummet again as they discover it is a dry hotel and that a French coach party have booked the entire restaurant for a New Year's Dinner.

They take to the streets and are turned away from one booked out restaurant after another.  The finest French restaurant in Aleppo turns its nose up at the vegetarian.  Finally they find a snack bar that will feed them downstairs, along with a handful of other tourists seeking refuge from the inhospitable night.

Upstairs is a New Year's party for the youth of Aleppo and it is going off like a frog in a sock.  Dressed up and made up, skinny jean and headscarf clad, clutching handbags and mobile phones, a constant stream of Arabian princesses arrive to be met by smart hair gelled, designer labelled boys in a flurry of air kisses, shrieks and gossip.  They are sucked into the throng and discarding chaperones to the side, are lost in a thumping world of middle-eastern house music.

On the way home GP and the CB have at last a stroke of luck, find a booze shop and are able to toast to a happy new year in front of yet another American war apology film on satellite TV.

Day 66
Thursday 1st January
Aleppo, Syria - Gazientep, Turkey

Syria's credit card network is down again so there is a delay in departure while they go on a walking tour of Aleppo's cash machines so they can pay the hotel bill.  On the way out of Aleppo, they find themselves driving through a charming residential area with appealing looking cafés and restaurants, and large gracious mansions and wide boulevards.  At the last minute Aleppo has thrown up a charming surprise, but too late, they are Turkey bound.

At the border they are surprised by a 'get out of Syria' tax and begin to shuffle their way through offices to have Gordon's Carnet de Passage stamped and their own passports checked.

It seems at first as if this border is not going to be so straightforward as one border guard summons them into his office and starts asking questions with no clear objective, eyeing Gordon critically.  He stands up and leaves the office and asks them to wait.  When he returns, it is with lunch and he stokes up the fire and gestures at them to begin eating, making sure that they take a taste of each dish.  His questions become more wide-ranging until he has almost the full life story of the pair.  He is delighted with his new friends, approving of Grandpa Pete's 'second' wife - "you are like Arab man" - and examines closely the age difference between the pair.  They wait while he gets on with some of his other business and then says "oh, you can go, you know".  Their detention has been entirely social.

Grandpa Pete and the Child Bride are delighted to be back in Turkey, to smell woodsmoke in the air and to feel the warmth of Turkish smiles as they drive through.  They are also pleased to find the Anadalou Evleri http://www.anadoluevleri.com hotel open on New Year's Day.  Up a steep lane, behind a closed stone façade and through a small door is a series of courtyards around which this restored old house holds quirky guestrooms and suites.  GP and the CB are in a tiny wood panelled room with shutters onto the courtyard.

Gazientep is a studenty town and they discover a third type of Turkish woman.  Here there are the ladies modest in black, the saucily clad western styled Turkish girls, and now also the bohemian, stylish but not overtly feminine - interesting looking.  They stop for a snack in a converted hammam and a local band are playing to a mostly student audience, they are delighted with their tourist audience.  "English very nice people.  You are welcome."

Day 67
Friday 2nd January
Gazientep, Turkey

Grandpa Pete and the Child Bride welcome with open arms the Turkish breakfast and savour fresh levened bread in the sunny breakfast room.  They wander the streets and the neat wood shuttered souks to watch craftsmen and coppersmiths at work.  The mosaic museum is one of the key attractions and of international renown, holding treasures unearthed from Roman site of Belkis-Zeugma.   They go square eyed looking at the tiles, watching the patterns make pictures.

Gazientep is important to them also because of its cash machines.  As Iran does not have any ATMs equipped to dispense to foreigners' cards, they need to stockpile Euros to take into the country.  They are not sure what the availability of Euros and cash machines will be further west in Turkey, so they are stalling a day here to use up their daily withdrawal limit and top up their coffers.

It is a very pleasant town to waste a day or so and that evening they dine at Ìmam Ça gdas famous for its baklava.  An established business, it is now housed in a new building that gleams with gold décor and has an army of waiters ready for action.  Locals are queuing to shop for their sweets at the huge counter and while these are being packaged up, some stop for a meal.  The waiter with the confidence of a good kitchen behind him subtly steers them into ordering his recommendations and the CB revels in the juiciest, gently charred lamb.  The baklava is served without being ordered and is the crakliest honey treat. 

Day 68
Saturday 3rd January
Gazientep, Turkey - Mardin, Turkey

Grandpa Pete and the Child Bride loiter round the cash machines in Gazientep trying to top up their Euro fund.  Having swept the banks they hit the road.  There is still a lot of ground to cover in Turkey to reach the Iranian border and they will be driving through the South East of Turkey, Southern Anatolia and the home of the Kurds.

To kick this off the CB picks a long road that hugs the Syrian border.  Straight and flat, from the map it looks like an easy drive.  In reality it is deadly boring and badly surfaced.    Bumpy hour after bumpy hour passes through flat red rocky landscape scattered with the white skeletons of parched dead trees. 

They reach Mardin in the dark and the chill of the day has frozen into a bitingly cold night.  They settle into the Otel Bilen and head off on foot up an icy road 2km up the hill to the town centre.  More than once they wonder if the climb will be worth the effort but they are lured by Cercis Murat Konagi (www.cercismurat.com )  a recommended restaurant.  Set up by a local female entrepreneur who gradually won the trust of the local menfolk, she persuaded them to allow their wives to work outside the home and provide their traditional cookery skills and knowledge to the kitchen. 

In a grand carved stone dining hall, another waiter confident of his fare bosses them into the right selection, screwing up his nose at choices he doesn't approve of until he is happy with their menu.  Though when they insist on white and not red wine, he looks as though they have thrust a dagger through his heart. 

Traditional this food may be but rustic or crude it is not.  Delicate plates with very pure flavours are set before them; steamed meat dumplings are light but intensely meaty at the same time, smoked aubergine has a deep smokiness and a real creaminess.  The Child Bride looks doubtfully at the stringy of lamb meat with a hint of plum sweet and sour that she had been bullied into.  But finger length strings of lamb are juicy and rich, with hours of roasting softening the fibres and only the slightest scent of plumb, the flavours linger and deepen in the mouth.

Pudding is a revelation and is indescribable.  They have never eaten anything that is quite like this and quiz the waiter about its ingredients and how it is made.  But alchemy must be at work for this is more than the sum of its parts: "semolina fried in limin ? cheese with orange jam and oranges, whipped cream and milk".  Somehow all this fat and sugar is whipped into delicate scoops of light sweetness, sprinkled with cinnamon and coconut.  All the sticky sweet comforting taste of a traditional british stodge pud but without the heaviness.

The Child Bride is beside herself, manages a quick digestive of tomato juice, mint and sugar before stumbling out dazed into the cold night.

Day 69
Sunday 4th January
Mardin, Turkey - Tatvan, Turkey

Grandpa Pete and the Child Bride do their usual morning rounds, emptying cash machines of Euros before hitting the road.  They climb up to 1,000m to a wide mountain plateau with a delicate covering of snow.  Hugging the Tigris River a sheer cliff face above drops straight to the river.  Half way up the cliff face are tiny cave houses.  How anyone gets in an out of those is anyone's guess, but this landscape is temporary and GP and the CB are lucky to see it.  If the GAP hydroelectric project is implemented a dam will flood the land from Batman to Midyat and this will all be under water.  

This part of Turkey and the lands further East saw the focus of the violence between the government and the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the KPP, that brought about the state of emergency of the 1990s.  Some outbreaks of violence still occur and the region has a distinct army presence.  Roadside command posts have armed men in them, guns are poking through pillbox slits.

A thin road takes them North towards the far eastern reach of 3750m2 Lake Van.  The going gets muddier and in a dip between hills the road becomes a swampy mess and traffic slows.  In a queue of lorries slowly rocking and rolling their loads through the slush Gordon takes his place and trundles through.  This gives the lorry drivers drawing alongside from the opposite direction to stare and smile and shout over the engine noise "where you from?"  "you wilcome!"  One is stuck alongside long enough to advise on the road ahead:  "Big snow in 170km, sleep first, then drive tomorrow".

Sure enough the snow lies thicker and fresh snow falls as they crawl into the small town of Tatvan.  Frank Sinatra is on the stereo, giving their entry to the town a belated Christmassy feeling. 

Boring cash machine plundering is given a new twist this today as the Child Bride realises that she doesn't have a credit card to insert anymore.  She had inserted it in Mardin, and never recovered it.