I'm going to Amsterdam tonight, straight from work to Heathrow. I love the feeling of rocking up to work with my bag and my passport, casually slinging mud in the face of my workmates, reminding them that they're stuck in London while I'm off being all exotic. Even finding my stash of euros this morning got me excited.

Travel is good.

It's still not funny but this is the next draft of the work that I'd like to share. It's fair comment to say that it's a heavier read, especially compared to my Bill Bryson-like adventures climbing mountains and swearing at dogs.

But: It's more challenging to write seriously and keep the jokes out, and, really, how many jokes can you make about civil war? And can't a man aim a little higher than airport reading? Can't he? With the second section there's more of a narrative flow to the piece now, and there'll be some closure when I finally write the last 500 words. If anyone is still reading at that stage.

Hills began to appear across the plains, hazy from the heat and the distance like a mirage. They passed by with the hours as we moved further east, sometimes replaced by more hills, sometimes not. No-one else on the bus seemed to registered their presence but to me they were a welcome change from the vast dry emptiness of the plains.

I had been in Turkey for only a few weeks, but apart from the fairy-floss mounds of Capadoccia, these were the first hills I'd seen since leaving Istanbul. They were beautiful.

Eventually the hills closed in on the road, forcing the bus to make a path around their contours. The road climbed on gradually steeper and higher paths until we were among mountains. A sharp and terrifying drop lay to the right of the road and the bus driver, his blue-eyed good luck charms bobbing around him, driving in precisely the middle of the road until forced to one side by oncoming traffic.

An hour out from Diyarbakir, the southeast's regional capital, men in army uniforms with rifles slung casually over their shoulders flagged the bus over to the side of the road. Experiencing mild alarm at the presence of guns, I looked around me but like the hills beforehand, the Turks barely seemed to notice this army roadblock. I think they'd seen it all before.

With Syria 100 kilometres south and Iraq only another 100 kilometres beyond that, this wasn't a border control. In a civil war that lasted 15 years, over 30,000 men died in the mountains around me, fighting for the independence of the local Kurdish people. Diyarbakir was the centre of the rebel army, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. The fighting stopped only a few years ago, but the army checkpoints are still trying to flush out the 5000 guerrillas still at large.

An officer took passports over to a small concrete building surrounded by barbed wire, where more soldiers slouched against mounted guns above and beside it. To my naive eyes, the guns could have brought down low-flying aircraft. I wondered what battles they'd seen. Beneath the guns, the driver stood next to the officer and offered him a cigarette.

I joined all of the other passengers on the side of the road. Some were talking on mobile phones, some were lining up for ice cream or snacks at one of the roadside kiosks, and most were smoking. They were almost all men; I hadn't seen many women travelling in Turkey. Even in August, the air was cold here, crisp and fresh from the altitude. I'd never felt cold air in Turkey before.

Finally the officer came back to the bus with our documentation. The Turkish men swamped him so I joined the confused gang just as the officer began gesturing people away.

'OK?' I asked, pointing at my passport. He didn't seem to hear me. I remembered some Turkish and tried again. 'Tamam? Tamam?' He shooed off a few more people like they were flies and turned to me with a similar expression. He looked at me and suddenly broke into a large grin.
'Tamam,' he chuckled, and handed me the only passport without looking at it. He gave the rest of the documents to the driver and walked away. (this para needs work but I'd like to keep to link to me learning kurdish)

I continued south through Diyarbakir to Mardin, a small town perched on a hillside overlooking the vast plains of Mesopotamia to Syria. I couldn't feel the heat - it was still unseasonably cool - but I could see its effect all around me. Pale yellow houses and streets looked scorched by centuries of the sun. Women shuffled along the street and men sat sedentary in tea houses, still conserving energy in the day's mild weather.

Searching for a place of activity I found the covered market and looked for trinkets to take home. Shopkeepers sat on the stairs outside their shops drinking Turkish tea in small glasses shaped like tulip bulbs and watched me go past. I searched desperately for something exotic to inspect and haggle over, but it was all cleaning products with familiar logos and new Turkish names. Nobody even tried to sell me a carpet.

I was trying to leave a clothing hall when I turned a corner and was hijacked by a stream of greetings coming from a small store. Two men, probably in their fifties, were excitedly gesturing me towards them. One was skinny, with black hair and a moustache, the other heavier with a very grey beard. There was also a bug-eyed five-year-old, backing into a corner, stunned into silence by my appearance around an otherwise perfectly normal corner.

The bearded man quickly took me by the arm and led me the inside of his shop. The room was tiny, but every wall was covered with filled shelves. Much of the shelves were full of used junk like coffee pots, but one corner was deep in religious icons. He showed me Islamic wood carvings, where whole verses of the Koran were assembled with such detail and splendour that they became candelabras, trees or entire mosques. I'd never seen anything like it. I tried to buy one, but he pushed back my lira without explaining why.

He took me to another corner of the room, where there was a small collection of Christian miniatures, colourful and shoddy compared to the wood carvings I'd just seen. He pointed to a bright orange and blue nativity scene and said 'Jesus.' He pointed at me as asked 'Christian?'

'Ehh...' I replied, shaking my hand to indicate some ambiguity on this matter. I didn't identify with any religion, but I felt that saying 'No' would have been uncharitable to my obviously religious host. Compared to his world of praying to Mecca five times a day, even my non-religious western upbringing seemed very Christian.

'Ah.' He understood. 'Jew.'

Satisfied by showing me their goods and by their new understanding of who I was, we left the shop and within seconds I was sitting with them and cradling hot sweet tea.

Their goodwill towards me far exceeded their command of English (and mine of Turkish), so I pulled out my map of Turkey and recreated my route through their country so far: south from Istanbul along the Aegean coast before turning east. Either my travel path was the most fascinating concept they had yet been exposed to, or they were momentarily happy to stick to our mutual vocabulary of Turkish towns. I traced my next week's path to the Iranian border before flying back to Istanbul, but they wanted to know more. 'America?' the skinny one asked, pointing at me. 'England?'

'No. Australia.' I said. He was very satisfied by this news, approvingly repeating 'Australia' to his friend's child, who continued to stare at me, nonplussed.

'Kurd,' he said, pointing to all three of them in turn. Inspired, he began writing on a piece of newspaper. 'Kurdistan Kultur' was first. He looked up at me mischievously and quickly scribbled it out. His friend began paying closer attention. 'Ernesto Che Guevara' appeared next in his large, uneven script, quickly followed by 'Markism' and 'PKK.' They were both delighted to show me these ideas, but soon the bearded Kurd took the newspaper and carefully tore it up. With a broad sweep of his arm beyond the shop, he mimed their writing being shown to others and him wearing handcuffs.

This new form of communication inspired the skinny Kurd. He pointed at his friend, then mimed him discharging a machine gun across the horizon. His friend waved this attention away, seeming more bashful than anything else.

I was dumbfounded. What had I just been told? Turkish and Kurdish men had died in the civil war; had my new host actually fired at his enemy? Had he killed Turkish soldiers like the bored teenagers I'd seen checking papers? Would he be as relaxed as my bus companions when he went through an army checkpoint?

Unaware that my mind was racing, the Kurds continued playing sociable charades, and produced some pellet-like snacks from the boy's pockets. They looked like nothing but rat droppings, so I wordlessly expressed gratitude and left. I never got their names. (isn't this a bit of a weak way to end this anecdote?)

(In the next exciting instalment, I meet a businessman Kurd with excellent English. We have some real dialogue covering the location of the Kurdish area of Turkey, how the government left it poorer than rest of Turkey, his opinions on Kurdish politics (he doesn't want a separate country, he's happy with the recent reforms, he hates the PKK) . While he is passionate about it, he's a little bemused by my interest in Kurdish politics. He sees a great time ahead for himself and other Kurds - why am I so worried. He also teaches me some Kurdish, jumping out of his skin with delight at the thought of me speaking Kurdish to anyone I meet from now on. One of these two thoughts would end the piece.)

I'm working for the London Underground at the moment, and let me tell you the public service ethos really agrees me. One guy on my floor had a little snooze at his desk the other week. Just dropped off for a while, thinking that he was shielded from public view by a pillar. He wasn't. I walked into the kitchen just as his boss saw him. Her face dropped and she stayed in there for a while thinking about it, but she didn't say anything (believe me, I was monitoring the situation.)

So I get a nap most afternoons now. I'm debating bringing in a pillow to compliment my blanket, but I don't want to take things too far. You know.

This is the first 500 words of my travel writing piece -- there will be 1500 in total. My class has put it through a few edits now, but I can still recognise my work in it somewhere.

I found myself writing in a different style for this class -- definitely closer to all the Serious Travel Writers that I've been reading since I started this course.
It's more formal and less funny than the rest of my posts on this website, and there are also fewer spelling mistakes.

Anyway, on the off-chance that the handy-dandy comments fields are actually working, let me know what you think of the piece!

South-eastern Turkey
Hills began to appear across the plains, hazy from the heat and the distance like a mirage. They passed by with the hours as we moved further east, sometimes replaced with more hills, sometimes not. No one else on the bus even registered their presence but to me they were a welcome change from the vast dry emptiness of the plains. I had been in Turkey only for a few weeks, but apart from the fairy-floss mounds of Capadoccia, these were the first hills I had seen since leaving Istanbul. They were beautiful.

Eventually the hills closed in on the road and forced us to make our path around their contours. The road climbed across them on gradually steeper and higher paths until we were among mountains. A sharp and terrifying drop lay to the right of the road and the bus driver, his blue-eyed good luck charms bobbing around him, decided that the best strategy was to drive in precisely the middle of the road until forced to one side by oncoming traffic.

An hour out from the southeast's regional capital, Diyarbakir, men in army uniforms with rifles slung casually over their shoulders flagged the bus over to the side of the road. My heart skipped when I saw them, but like the hills beforehand, the Turks barely seemed to notice the army roadblock. I gratefully handed over my passport when the driver asked for it.

But with Syria 100 kilometres south and Iraq another 100 kilometres beyond that, I wasn't entering another country. In a civil war that lasted 15 years, over 30,000 men died in these mountains, fighting for the independence of the local Kurdish people. Diyarbakir was the centre of the rebel army, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. The fighting stopped only a few years ago, but the army checkpoints are still flushing out the 5000 guerrillas still at large.

The officer with our passports took them over to a small concrete building surrounded by barbed wire, with more soldiers slouching against mounted guns above and beside it. To my naive eyes, the guns could have brought down low-flying aircraft. I wondered what battles they'd seen. Beneath the guns, the driver stood next to the officer and offered him a cigarette.

I joined all of the other passengers on the side of the road. Some were talking on mobile phones, some were lining up for ice cream or snacks at one of the roadside kiosks, and most were smoking. They were almost all men. The air was cold here, crisp and fresh from the altitude. I'd never felt cold air in Turkey before.

Finally the officer came back to the bus with our documentation. The Turkish men swamped him so I joined the confused gang just as the officer began gesturing people away. I was used to the guns; now I wanted my passport back.

'OK?' I asked, pointing at my passport. He ignored me. I remembered some Turkish and tried again. 'Tamam? Tamam?' He shooed off a few more people like they were flies and turned to me with a similar expression. Then he suddenly broke into a large grin.
'Tamam,' he chuckled, and handed me the only passport without looking at it. He gave the rest of the documents to the driver and walked away.