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.