I have a new moustache. It's excellent.

With the run up to the Turkish elections and in celebration of the recent opening of the Nationalist Party branch in my neighbourhood, I thought I'd add a touch more style to my look.

Men are winking at me a lot more often out in the street. In broad daylight. And in view of their wives.

Pistachios and sugar and more pistachios and more sugar.

Jen eats more than her fair share of the kadayıf.

My fondest memories of my grandmother, and there are many, revolve around sweet food. Back in the days before some idiot invented nutrition, when most parents understood that a balanced diet was all that was need to spare a child from obesity and dieticians were thought of with the same abhorrence as African dictators, my grandmother would all but force feed me unending sickly sweet chunks of shortbread topped with glistening red glacé cherry. How I never ended up with a higher Body Mass Index score is anyone’s guess but I suppose I’ll have to thank genetics and the people who invented that particular branch of science.

And so we come to Gaziantep, clearly the sweet capital of the world. What a French bakery might require in sugar for a month’s worth of pain au chocolat goes into the making of a single tray of baklava. Dentistry must be profitable in this town.

As with all places in this part of the world, there’s plenty of history to be had. Unfortunately, we weren’t really up for it in the heat and realized that in fact we’d spent the entirety of the previous day mooching about Urfa during the hottest parts of the day. It had taken its toll. We wandered about languidly in the heat, usually in search more of shade and fresh orange juice than the ethnographic museum, at which we conveniently arrived ten minutes after it had closed.

Gaziantep was a break from Urfa’s heat and surliness, and it did feel good to be back in what we felt Turkey ought to be like. The moustaches were friendlier, the heat less draining and the kebabs forever ubiquitous.

Now it was time to leave the planet altogether and head for the wonderful landscapes of Cappadocia.

Not so much fun

The only living creatures in Urfa able to find respite from the heat.

Please, staring like that is just rude.

Şanlıurfa or its shortened form Urfa as most Turks call it, lies several hour’s drive directly west of Mardin. Though as far as the culture spectrometer reads, it’s indeed quite a lot further away. Urfa is Arab, not Turk. Geography and borders confused us into thinking we were holidaying firmly in the Turkish heartland, but only ubiquitous kebabs and lack of vegetarian food remained the same. Urfa, or Şanlıurfa as I insisted on calling it, was a bit disconcerting. Well, not for me, but for Jen, because she’s a woman, and often it’s a man’s world.

Mardin had been as warm as and welcoming as the sun’s rays which enveloped the city. Therefore, upon arrival we were disappointed to be in the territory of people who stare, furrow brows and ruffle bushy moustaches unfavourably in our general direction. Urfa was clearly an Arab town and at times like this I’m glad to be a man, although some of you who know me personally might actually dispute that.

the very latest in safety fencing for wet areas.

For females travelling among the Arabs lands, it can’t be all inane giggles and laughter. Since I love getting attention I often forget that for others there is an unwanted variety of it that makes them feel uncomfortable, out of place, and can push limits of cultural sensitivity. A glance is fine, because yes, we are probably exotic to you because yes, you are certainly exotic to us. Even an extended that’s-the-first-time-I’ve-seen-a-woman
-with-two-legs-since-those-two-blonde-
Dutch-women-rode-through-here-on-bicycles
-wearing-little-else-but-their-jewellery kind of look is not discomforting for me. However, an outright thirteen second stare with fly-entering-mouth expression is, in my opinion, a bit, you know, villager. And more truthfully, it ain’t the staring that concerns me, rather the accompanying body language, as though someone had just swung a Gorgon head through their line of vision. I’d like to think my beauty has that effect on people, that an Arab man with an unkempt eyebrow and incongruously jet-black moustache be so taken aback by my svelte form for a man in his late thirties that he is rendered awestruck. But I think not. Then again, the Arabs do have a reputation for boys, but a boy I no longer am. I simply act like one.

Do you look this good in a tea towel? I doubt it.

So, I’m not really sure how women cope with the lingering, sometimes predatory I’d-like-to-forcibly-exchange-you-for-my-wife look, but I personally recommend you employ the very handy and usually ineffectual stare-off. We’ve all done it. All of us. Truth be known, I like a challenge. I can’t compete in the moustache stakes and Allah has blessed me with two distinctly separate and non-furrowing eyebrows, but I can mimic disdain as well as any South Sydney City Council public servant, or for sheer vehemence, a Woolhara retail sales assistant. (Sydney customer service and the appalling standards of it accepted by the city’s population are a continual bugbear and sense of bitter humour for me, but I digress). Suffice it to say that our time in Urfa was not the Wilkommen Bienvenue and Hoş Geldiniz diagonally stencilled in stark baby blue Comic Sans font (another pet hate) on the side of our ailing inter-city bus.

Urfa is birth place to Abraham, father of the Arabs and devoted vandal of idols. He also tinkered with human sacrifice but as you well know, thought better of it at the last minute, substituting a ram for his son. As the son I actually would’ve been feeling a little rankled. I mean, it’s hardly a gesture of equivalent stature. Ram for son. How about son for ten kilos of gold? How about no sacrifice at all? Maybe just going without dessert for a week? That particular Koranic and Biblical scene will no doubt be familiar to you as every painter worth his mettle from Giotto to Ruben, passing by Caravaggio and countless other have depicted it in oils on canvas. If you haven’t seen it, pop along to your local major European capital city art museum and have a peek. Along with Judith making Holophene into two distinct pieces, it’s a winning combination. Isaac, the goat, Dad and his big sharp knife. Whoever believes video games are violent for children should not at the same time be a literal reader of the Old Testament. If so, your hypocrisy starts here. Maybe time to rework your ideas. Oops, more digression.

Urfa attracts serious pilgrims and though I write like a prat I am respectful and sensitive to other cultures. I’m especially sensitive to woman wearing all-encompassing black shrouds in thirty-seven degree heat. Thank you Saudi Arabia. The sooner you deplete you petroleum sources, the sooner you will be reduced to the pointless cultural backwater that you deserve to be. May your wells run dry that your women may revolt and the world be free of your nefarious cultural influence.

I like the word pilgrimage because the medial syllable is grim. Apt. Pilgrims are thus. People stared and wandered ever so poignantly and unsmilingly about two wonderfully enigmatic pools abundantly brimming with plump carp, the fish apparently the descendents of logs on a pyre built to punish Abraham. Legend dictates to us that King Nimrod, riled by Abraham’s idol-breaking incursion into the temple, broke from the tradition of crucifixion and creatively treated the latter to a Joan of Arc form of death. Extreme heat. Fortunately for Abraham, at the last minute and not unlike his own timing with human sacrifice, God entered the scene turning the logs into fish and scorching flames into water. I like a good legend and I especially like a good piece of architecture that has grown up around it in the following centuries. Jen and I wandered about too in the stifling heat, too seriously for my liking but then this was not a place for mixing fun and worship.

I feel, while we both experienced something unusual, we were glad to be heading out the following day. And with all the thousands of pilgrims in town, how is it you can only get kebabs? I’m a little let down by all of this. All that meat makes you constipated. Perhaps I’ll end here.

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

Methinks rather spectacular. Checkin' out what the Syrians are up to from high up.

There are very few places left on the planet that allow the imagination to soar, that bedazzle the senses and that truly transport you to another world. I like these kind of places.

Mardin, a hilltop city perched high on a flat-top hill and overlooking Syria, is simply beautiful. If you've visited magical Jaisalmer in India, and even if you haven't, then throw together the pictures that your mind conjures up of the Middle East (or northern India). Swirling arabesques, pointed arches, elegant minarets, shaded tea gardens, moustachioed men, countless children, cobble-stone stairways leading to more cobble-stone stairways, donkeys, wailing Arab music, massive hewn stone, hummus, eggplant, olive oil, the odd madresse or two, and soak the whole in a bath of golden light from a cloudless sky with a cool breeze sweeping across recently reaped wheat fields. And you have Mardin.

Once you veer off from main square of Cumhuriyet Meydanı, you leave behind the already slow pace of a city far from the bustle and grime of Istanbul and fall under the spell of the Middle East proper. Jenny and I spent the entire day strolling aimlessly throughout the town, walking perhaps ten kilometres in no particular direction, backtracking across narrow lanes of walled houses where fig and apricot tress stood listlessly under the burden of ripening fruit, children played among themselves and women sat chatting in doorways.

Kurds are an affable bunch. Like the rest of the people inhabiting the giant swathe of lands from Lahore to Cairo, we were treated to smiling and quizzical looks at every step. These men have the best moustaches in the world and also like most of the Middle East any woman not of those parts invites some general interest. Well, stares actually. Personally, I love getting attention, in fact, I clamour for it, so I was pleased that Jen took it all in her stride and wasn't bothered at the fact I probably could have sold her for a few dozen donkeys. Which I would never have done because who else would listen to my daily monologue?

The newly-opened Antik Tatlıdede Butık Otel. You ought see the view in the other direction too...

We were invited into the home of Memur Bey who introduced us to his family and showed us the vaulted ceiling of his wonderful 400-year-old home while his wife, mother of seventeen children, offered us the perfectly sickly sweet lemonade that I've developed a taste for recently.

Mardin, for the time being, is not on the tourist map. The fighting of the last decade between the fairly angry Turkish government forces and some fairly angry Kurds has all but scared off most intrepid visitors but it's a town that is truly remarkable for the friendliness of it's inhabitants. As the sun sets, Mardin is among a handful of cities that can truly be called gorgeous. As the late afternoon sun descends stone walls glow yellow-orange and fields stretching down the hillside and into Syria turn a golden shade of brown. Nice postcard stuff.

The interior of the very recently restored Sultan Isa Medresesi.

Completely unrelated to this spiel is that Jen called me a chatterbox today. Well, I think that's what she said but I couldn't hear her properly as I was in fact talking at the time. I make no apologies, I have many varied and interesting things to say. Besides, I may talk a lot but she can certainly eat for someone with such a petite frame. A course of action she may later come to regret when we hit the Aegean coast in a week or so, you with me?

Jenny starts to eat everything at once and doesn't seem to care that she clearly ate the greater share of the dishes. Likewise for the dessert. I barely got a bite.

After hours of wandering we settled onto a terrace overlooking the cropped wheat fields and ordered up big. Sebzeli patlıcan salatası, kurtulumuş domates salatası, humus, zeytinyağlı yaprak dolması and muammara, followed by irmik helvası. Just think the best of Mediterranean food with a dash of the Middle East. Eggplant, tomatoes, olive oil... you know the drill.

The stars came out and we got sleepy. It has been a very good day indeed. Jen went to bed with a full stomach and I didn't. Tomorrow we have to catch a bus and I don't like buses.