From Diyabakir to Adana

As we're travelling away from Iran, through Turkey towards Europe, everything around us changes constantly. The children perceive Turkey as a huge improvement (as it seems more civilized to them), for us, traveling to Turkey is much easier: the traffic seems more organized, we don't spend too much time in banks changing our money into two different valuta's, we haven't booked any hotels so we're more flexibile and there are actual supermarkets where we can buy bread, drinks, lunch, etc.
The view has also changed significantly and it changes constantly. We have now travelled from the more poor 'Kurdisch' part of Turkey to a more and more European view. For us, we feel as if we left the Middle East, so coming home is now getting closer.
Yesterday, we visited the most bizarre place ever: Mount Nemrut Dagi where a narcissist king (pre-Roman) ordered some statues to be sculptured. It is said he is buried underneath the rubble on the mountain, but nobody actually knows for sure. The statues are littered around the mountain looking over the Turkish country.

Leaving Diyabakir, a Kurdish city in Eastern Turkey

On the ferry on our way to reach the Nemrut Dagi

The trip meant a few hours long detour, time consuming with all the winding roads to reach the top, a steep climb to the top on foot (painful for me with my aching spine).
But my camera was itching in my hands, and I didn't want to miss the opportunity.

We reached the top, the car worked hard on the winding roads and when the temperature got up, the airco shut down. We all went silence in our car and I'm sure we all had the same thoughts:  "please, make it..."

Reaching the top was amazing: the view was incredible and the statues had been waiting for our visit for a few centuries.


After the visit, Thijs got extremely fed up with the bad road conditions and the continues road-construction worksite and little villages we had to pass. We've been travelling on Secondary roads for the past 5000 km and we were exhausted. We looked at the map (a gift from a Iranian traveller who lived in Holland and made the terrible mistake to travel from the Netherlands to Iran, taking his car).
With all of us, we decided it was worth it to travel down southwards, to the Syrian border to catch the highway to speed up our journey.
When we finally reached the highway, it appeared to be a toll-highway and as Touristic Turkey likes to be; no explanation was found on how to enter this road and how to pay toll...
Thijs got out of the car, took the map and his wallet and went looking for a living person around the entry to the toll way. He returned with a card and yes, we could continue!
Entering the highway felt like gliding on ice. The kilometers were melting away and we decided to use the opportunity and travel as much as we possible could so we would have an easy day to travel to Capadocia the next day.

We drove until it was dark (not a safe option on secondary roads, but you can do this on these highways) and checked in at a hotel in Adana. We were all exhausted, hungry (we have a bad habit of skipping lunch) and dirty.

How great the disappointment was when I discovered that a problem appeared with my flash card in my camera corrupting all 1000 raw files on my new card.
I could no longer find the pictures of Nemrut Dagi and lost all the other 1000 files from our journey.
Thank God, I copied and did backup my pictures daily and thank God for fantastic computer and camera freaks who develop restoring applications like Zero-assumption recovery.

And thank you Thijs, for acknowledging my frustration and helping me to find a solution while I was mourning for the lost files of Nemnut Dag...

I'm pleased to share my restored files, enjoy!