We had taken the overnight bus from Goreme to Gaziantep, expecting to arrive at 5 am at the Otogar (bus station). We planned to spend an hour or two working out our movements for the next few days, only for the bus to arrive an hour early. Fortunately, because Turkey has an extensive, efficient, well patronised and highly competitive bus network; the infrastructure is appropriately large, offering proper meals of good food, tea (tea, tea, always tea. The coffee is only marginally better than in Iran, which was horrid. Always choose tea). bathrooms etc. Some travellers obviously prepared for long journeys, travel with blankets and whatnot and were stretched out on the floor, We found some seats and relaxed for a couple of hours, watching a day's activity unfold. At about 6am, we succumbed to the smells from the delivery of an assortment of fresh bread and pastries.
Into the city, to our hotel, Hotel Yunus. This one was an easy winner for worst hotel so far, but at least it was clean, and our room was ready for us even though it was only 7.30 in the morning. LP was our guide again, and it had mentioned that Gaziantep is something of a culinary centre, so we followed the LP advice and sought beyran for breakfast. It was fantastic - rice and shredded lamb (coated in the ubiquitous tomato paste) in broth, heated to boiling and served with warm bread. It was delicious and a perfect hearty breakfast for a cold day.
Gaziantep's tourist information was really good, and had just about the only English speakers we encountered in the entire city. Very helpful and gave us a lot of information about the place, a population of 3 million supplemented by 200 000 Syrian refugees. This certainly makes Australia's refugee position look petty.
There is a culinary museum here, which of course we visited. They do take their cuisine seriously here, and we spent a lot of time in the bazaar where there are so many shops selling so many different spices, and the smells of all the different spices are so seductive. And pistachios! This is apparently the pistachio, and sweets, capital area of Turkey. So many pistachios, so much pistachio baklava. Mountains of it are freighted daily to all parts of Turkey. Apparently the secret is terroir, the Gaziantep one for pistachios and that of the nearby Haran Valley in upper Mesopotamia for the durum wheat. But it is not just baklava, there is a cornucopia of sweets of many types. Sadly, not enough time nor spare notches in our belts to sample more than a few. There are sweets shops every which way you look, the ones selling the ingredients with great piles of pistachios and other nuts cascading onto the footpath and towers of mysterious things, and the more restrained sellers of final product, usually the many variations of baklava. It is made daily for consumption that day or the next.
Finally, dinner at a restaurant recommended by LP. As with the rest of the city, practically no English was spoken, so between us and our hand signals and our waiter's patient attempts to explain, we finished up with no idea of what we had ordered other than the mutually understood Gaziantep cuisine. The result was, thankfully, a spread of typically Gaziantep dishes, and it was fantastic. A lot of it is quite different to what we have encountered elsewhere in Turkey, and very different from what you would expect from any so called Turkish food in Melbourne. This is a distinctly regional cuisine offering the most unusual foods that somehow work against the odds. Yoghurt soup anyone?
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