The East of Turkey has been good to us. Its long mountain ranges with backs like huge sleeping animals, snow along their spines, have soothed and cleansed us of that old Ankara tension.
Things change slowly here. Peasants bring their produce to town on horse drawn carts, and in the fields the women work from dawn to dusk using wooden tools.
They are always bent over lines of vegetables, weeding, a scarf around their heads.
Every now and then they take a pause and drink some tea sitting in the field in a semicircle.
At four P.M. children come home from school, all in uniform. Little boys and girls in light blue with dainty white collars bearing the red crescent. Older boys wear dusty suits and ties, girls plaid dresses and heavy stockings.
Seeing a foreigner drives them crazy and they'll come running to you screaming, Hello Hello What's Your Name?
We've heard it so many times we can hear it in our sleep and curse the teachers who had the brilliant idea of teaching this one phrase to their students.

Officially, Kurdistan doesn't exist.
Even the spelling corrector of Microsoft Word has never heard of it.
And yet at a certain point you know that you have left Anatolia and climbed onto another sphere of influence. The architecture of the mosques has changed, as well and since Sivas we can feel the Seljuq influence: the unity of the structures, the refinement of the sculpted bas relief's, the double minarets of turquoise and stucco.
Men wear coloured turbans and more and more women are walking around wearing heavy black chadors so you can only see their eyes. It is easy to say they walk like ghosts, and we often joke, "Mommy, is that you?".
But the more time I spend here the more I realise that things are much worse than that, for if men can only see the eyes of women, then they are free to invent for their own needs the woman they cannot see. This habit of covering women up does not protect her, as religious fanatics claim.
On the contrary, it makes her more vulnerable since as a pair of eyes she has now become a projection of male fantasy, and nothing could be more dangerous than that. Chador means 'tent', by the way, and I'm sure they're not air-conditioned in the summer.
I wonder why it is that religious fanatics the world over insist on covering women up?
What miserable fear is lurking behind high-sounding phrases about 'modesty'?
There is one thing we have discovered, and that is that men who live in most societies where the presence of women is unknown, or limited to specific roles, become stupid and dirty and arrogant.


North of Erzerum sits another miracle, the Georgian Valleys.
Once a part of the Kingdom of Georgian, they are a series of steep valleys run through by magnificent rivers swollen now - it is the end of May - by the melting snows.
How much snow can melt?
Day by day the river gets thicker and louder, until your ears are full of it and any other sound is a catastrophe. In the local restaurants they already know us and turn the boom-boom music off when they see us coming.
Which brings me to one of the most lovely aspects of Turkish life: power cuts. I remember two power cuts which were memorable and magic: one in Cappadocia and one in Yusufeli.
The power cut in Cappadocia was at night and we danced to traditional music in and out of candle glow and the cut in Yusufeli was in the middle of the day. Yusufeli is in the heart of Georgian country.
A tiny village built around two bridges and a mosque and quite a few tea houses. A two second walk outside the town and you are into vineyards and vegetable gardens where peas and leeks and onions grow in perfectly straight lines and are weeded daily.
You can easily imagine yourself in France at the end of the 19th century.
There are few cars in town, mostly carts. The streets are full of horse shit and the town uses the river as their toilet.
Still, light bulbs burn and music seeps out of somewhere and the computer screens of the Internet cafe are on with their army of kids playing war games and blowing up aliens.
Then the power cut comes! Oh, the magic silence! No more dots of light, the kind that burn your eyes in the middle of the day.
No more boom-boom music and imperceptibly, the town seems to slow down a notch. People walk slower, drink their tea at an even more reasonable pace.
They are biding their time, waiting for it to pass.
And it doesn't pass. This cut last for hours, and the town was slowly plunged by dusk into its old and primitive self. Gas lights went on in the shops and restaurants.
Everything became gentle and calm.