Day 13 - Ani and Dogubayazit

40km East of Kars is Ani, an ancient Armenian capital city that has been captured, recaptured many times, and converted from Christian to Muslim at least as many times. Now as we walk through the ruins we can see the fence separating Turkey and Armenia, guard towers dot the horizon as a reminder of the vigilance that keeps borders in this part of the world.

Ani is essentially a huge green field with occasional ruined buildings poking through the grass, but as you walk through it you can see rough stone walls everywhere show that the entire place was once a bustling city, and now only the most well constructed buildings (churches and mosques) remain.

We race back to Kars and on to Dogubayazit, hoping to arrive before the Isak Pasa Palace is closed for the day, but we miss the closing time. Thankfully we're just in time for a beautiful sunset, and we befriend a young Kurdish man named Adem. We drive him the 8km into town and we invited us to visit with him and his friend at a carpet shop. We sat with them for a couple hours, through many rounds of tea talking about what life is like for them, and for us in Canada. They show us some Youtube videos of traditional Kurdish music and dancing, but they get a little sad and almost reluctant when talking about the politics of being a Kurd in Turkey.

At this point I'm quite pleased with how far we have travelled into Turkey, as we're now in the far east of the country where very few tourists go. We're making heavy use of our Turkish phrasebook, something we've never had to rely on in other countries we've visited.