Over and Done in Turkey

Purchased: Ticket to Cyprus from Tasucu.
Time of Departure: Midnight.
At hand: A bottle of wine on the promenade as the boat warms its engine.

And with that ends my two months in Turkey and the most rewarding bike tour I have taken. Oh - that's right. I talk like I didn't spend three weeks in Georgia. Oh Georgia. I'll check in with you again in 20 years and see if you've learned yet to clean up after yourselves and to throw your trash in places other than rivers, to drive and to brake for crippled old ladies in the road rather than honk and hope they move. And remember that car accidents are not inevitable tragedies of the road but avoidable mishaps. I hope that in 20 years you'll have learned to take "No thanks. I don't want any of your cha-cha" for an answer. I hope you'll have learned that when a tourist asks where the nearest hotel is it doesn't mean they want to sleep at your house in a bed with your cousins and uncle - because your hospitality is famous but it borders on infamous. I hope, too, that you will in 20 years allow women a seat at the dinner table and that you will let a lady smoke a cigarette in public if she likes without branding her a whore and an outcast (though really I think the whole country could cut back a pack...). I hope that you'll have neutered a few dogs and that you get into the E.U. even though you are in Asia. And please, please, Georgia - I know he wears pretty spots and would be worth hundreds of lari shot and dead - but please do no harm to Noah the leopard. He's the last spotted cat you've got.

I have a week in Cyprus - but unless I almost die or find a fig the size of a melon or see a particularly massive diaper heap, I won't tell about it. So long.