A bus office in Erbil, for the bus to Turkey. It started well: left on time at 8pm, with a fullish bus and a young steward dressed like a 1950s delivery boy (bow tie, bright blue cardigan) doling out lemon cologne, sweets, tea and sour cherry juice. We made exceedingly slow progress on terrible bumpy roads to the north of Kurdistan, stopping for snacks twice, and then over a sort of mountain pass. We arrived at the border about midnight, and parked up alongside some other buses so everyone could snore for an hour (the others were mostly men - a mix of Iraqi and Turkish passports).

It's cold out by Mesopotamian standards, but was soon stifling in the bus. My seat companion is a Kurdish girl, not too young, from Diyarbakir in Turkey, who is studying Kurdish language and I guess literature at the University of Kurdistan. She has 50% more English than I do Turkish or Kurdish (shameful - I should be trying harder) so we have 12 words with which to communicate.

So it's midnight and we're still all sitting in the dark outside the sprawling border post...