So we sat at the Ibrahim Khalil Border Crossing from midnight until 8.30am... creeping forward past lines of lorries, which eventually passed us; having all the luggage on the bus scanned, and just sitting. A hazy dawn broke to reveal that we were just before a bridge across the river, some tributary of the Tigris, with sharp hills behind us on the Iraqi side. We crossed into Turkey with a flat coppery sun showing through the haze. More scanning of luggage and the underside of the bus was checked, and I was marched off by the delivery boy to buy a visa from a guichet around the back of the post office - where a lady was feeding some skinny cats - and we were through to the car park, where there was a duty-free shop and another wait of an hour for, it seems, another bus to finally get through the process, and we were off in convoy. I don't know if this convoy was a security thing; buses have been stopped by the PKK in the past.

So we drove out across a flat plain and then into hills and stopped for breakfast and to drop people off and on and on... finally reaching Diyarbakir about 2pm. I am in my hotel of choice (2*, clean and cozy, blazing internet) and too tired to eat out, but I wandered down the shopping street, which has a European feel with Middle-Eastern colour, and into a bazaar of sorts which leads to what is evidently the Kurdish quarter of the old town, as I came on the unveiling of a Newroz banner, with Kurdish music going and kids dancing and running around.

I bought a flat bread hot hot from the oven, tiny almonds, chechil cheese (the salty Armenian/Turkish plaited curd), oranges and pomegranate tea -which is only tea in the sense that elma cay is tea, ie it's sweet crystals for hot water, but it's nice. Diyarbakir appears not to be on anyone's itinerary but it has battlements, old mosques and a much better vibe than Erbil, and a tourist office that's closed, and I'll be back on my way out.