Mardin

The next morning we hopped on a series of minibuses to get to Mardin. The whole bus of people almost died once in a head on collision, but other than that the three hour ride was easy. We switched buses in the town of Midyat, and on the second leg I was asked by a Kurdish man to hold his five gallon tank of gasoline.

Mardin is Southwest of Hasenkeyf, right on the Syrian border. It is a very charming place that is built on the top of a hill. When we arrived, we hiked up towards the top of town, and got tea next to a mosque. The view into Syria was absolutely breathtaking. It was crazy to be looking down into the Mesopotamian planes, where civilization began. I really didn’t think that I would be seeing Syria any time soon.

On our way down to find a place to stay, I stopped on a baklava shop. The man who ran the place was morbidly obese. He got completely winded leaning over to cut a piece of the pastry out of the tray. It pained me to see him struggle to wrap up it up put it in a bag. Baklava had obviously ruined this mans life, and I was glad that I would be cut off when we left from Istanbul.

After dark we headed up back up the hill. There were some ruins at the very top that we wanted to see. We wound up small passageways sandwiched between houses. When we got above the buildings, we found our way onto a dirt road that seemed to be going to the top. There turned out to be a big barbed wire fence stopping us from getting to the ruins, but we found ourselves above a pretty cool mosque. It was a little sketchy being up there in the dark, but whatever. I snapped some cool pictures before we climbed our way back down.
The next day we hopped on a flight back to Istanbul.