Mardin

An unpleasantly stressful journey from Batman involving a surprise bus change to a minivan, and we arrived at about 10pm starving hungry and tired. No taxi within sight so wandered around trying to find one and then once we were stuck in traffic in Mardin's one driveable street, discovered that we'd been given the wrong location for our airbnb, and once we found it, the pizza delivery unfortunately didn't. Bed with no dinner (aside from the emergency crunch mix) for us.

It was worth it when we woke up and saw the view from the balcony. Mardin is on the northern edge of Upper Mesopotamia and sits on top of the ridge, with a view over the plateau into Syria that looks like it goes on forever and is visible from everywhere in the town, to the extent that it feels like you're about to fall off the edge of the world most of the time. Even putting out the washing was a surprisingly vertiginous exercise and we probably wouldn't have got our socks back if we'd dropped them.

Loads of interesting streets to walk around with narrow alleyways and interesting bazaars, especially if you got off the main street, and interesting carvings and little arches (all mostly very well preserved Artuqid architecture). We were there during Turkey Independence Day so it was heaving on Tuesday but calm by Wednesday and we enjoyed the peace with some very long, large and scenic breakfasts on one of the many terraces (not as big as Van's but getting there). The city has an interesting mix of ethnicities and religions and is full of madrassas, mosques and churches, so went to see some of them and were woken up every day at 5am by the minaret right next to our house.Les mer