On our last night in Goreme, sadly Helen suffered an upset stomach and was poorly. There are also others on the trip who are suffering - Frankie and Becky are two of the more severe victims.
We say our goodbyes to and leave Rick, Lisa and Allen behind at Goreme, as they were either not granted or not able to get Iranian visa's – they take a side trip by boat to meet up with us again in Amritsar.
As we pull out of the accommodation Helen asks David if he has his passport (a daily ritual) and David has a slight moment of not knowing where his passport is (almost a daily ritual) but finds it before traveling a kilometre into the journey.
Sometime during the morning Lana, the leader, receives a phone call that Kenneth has left his passport behind and as we stop for lunch decisions are made on how he is going to be able to retrieve it. The result is for him to stop at a bus station in the next town, so he becomes the 4th person we temporarily say goodbye to in the same day. The options for him appear to be to get a 3 o'clock bus back to Goreme and then get either a 9, 10 or 11pm overnight bus to meet us in Erzincan the following morning. When he has left though, we strangely still have the same number of people on board as we appear to have picked up someone from the bus station who is guiding us back on route to the road to Erzincan. He is with us for a few minutes before getting off the bus and returning to the bus station across a busy main road. Erzincan is a large, populated town, set within the valley of a mountain range and it is busy when we arrive. We notice our first unusual pedestrian crossing of the trip, where there are lights on the surface that are lit red when it's supposed to be unsafe to cross the road. The lights in the road turn green when the green man also appears, although whether it's any safer is up for debate.
On our way to Dogubayzit, we pass increasingly poor settlements with correspondingly smaller smallholdings. We pass through many interesting settlements too but, as usual sadly only to get to stop at a service station for our regular driver break or lunch stop. The reasoning behind this is simple enough to understand from a logistical point of view - it minimises the chance of members of the bus from having anything to wander too far off to see. Today's lunch stop is an interesting one though as there is a bit more to see. There are some extremely cheeky boys who entertain us, and when David tells them his name and asks him what theirs are, they appear to have no understanding until they walk away shouting 'What is your name' at the tops of their voices. Whilst we are waiting to get back on the bus, there also seems to be some off road driver training in a minibus on the off-road car park. Hopefully it involves a bit more than needing to drive in a straight line, turn around and then stop, although in the time we are there we don't see much more than that.
We have news from Kenneth along the way, the evening buses were all fully booked and he is now catching a bus in the afternoon that's an overnighter to get him to Dogubayzit on the morning that we leave Turkey and he will have to catch us up at the border.
Some way out of the border town, we continue to see impressive mountain ranges and in the distance a significant one. Mount Ararat dominates the early evening skyline as we approach our hotel (note no 's'). Dogubayzit, we are assured is pronounced Doggybiscuit, but perhaps should be more aptly called Dodgybiscuit. It is massively busy, part of this due to us arriving at school closing time and although many children clearly don't have the luxury of doing anything other than walking to school, those who travel by car seem to be the same the world over by parking as close to the school gate as possible at the inconvenience of everyone else and without realising to themselves too.
In the evening we manage to eat out in the street with some of the locals, and the stares are not actually as noticeable as you might imagine. We have a fairly early night so that we can have as early a start as possible on the experience of getting across the border.
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