The last time I was in Turkey was 20-odd years ago as a member of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, when the frigate in which I served as a ship's electrician, HMS Rothesy, anchored outside the port of Bodrum, on the Aegean shores. At this time, Bodrum was a tourist resort in mind only: a beautiful small coastal town that welcomed casually-dressed matelots with open arms.
It was teeming with people who generated a type of curiosity that stemmed from disconnection with the outside world: our fair hair and skin would be stared at, our requests for anything other than a beer (or two) quizzically ignored, our eyes looked into for fear of hostility. I didn't get to see Bodrum again when I visited Turkey in early June. Instead, as a guest of the Turkish Ministry of Tourism, I and 39 journalists from around the world were flown first to Istanbul and then into the Eastern Anatolian region.
Ostensibly, we were there to cover the extremely impressive 3rd Handicrafts Festival of the Eastern Anatolian region, but as time went on (and as our time at the festival was allotted about six hours in a six-day trip) we witnessed rather more than we bargained for.
Istanbul - the former capital of Turkey until the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in the early 1920s and once described as the "capital of the Empires" - is at the meeting point of Europe and Asia and is located on both sides of the Bosphorus. It existed for hundreds of years as the capital of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Today, it is Turkey's most important tourism, trade and industrial city, an historical peninsula that reminds one of an open air museum. Its city hills sprout more than 500 mosques, but it is the Sultanahmet Mosque, with its six minarets, that is the all pervasive symbol of the city.
Before we decamp for Eastern Anatolia, I make a flying visit to the Kapali Karsi (covered bazaar). Dating back to the 15th century, this boasts over 4,000 shops and spills over with both locals and tourists. sixties 60s who has been part-funding archaeological digs at Dogubayazit, close to Turkey's most scenic natural monument, Mount Ararat, for the past 15 years. It is here that the Australian altruist and his team of scientists and archaeologists search for definite signs of Noah's Ark.
Eastern Anatolia is a region not known for a healthy influx of tourists; or any tourists, for that matter. On the remainder of our trip, the only other Western faces we saw were those of professional people on business - no pairs of backpackers, no spritely elderly couples or young honeymooners, and most definitely no one travelling solo.
From the moment we set foot on Erzurum soil to the moment we flew back to Istanbul four days later, our group was escorted everywhere by Turkish police. Initially, the more self-important among us presumed we were escorted because we were perceived to be a bunch of VIPs. Quite soon, however, we realised that our safety was more important than our status. (As if proof was needed, I quietly nipped away from the group as they were being brought to see yet another mosque. As I made my way across a street to look at a sports shop window, the hand of a plain clothes policeman rested on my shoulder. He accompanied me into and out of the shop before handing me back to the group.)
We travelled the remaining part of the journey - from Erzurum to Van, which sits between the Iranian and Iraqi borders - by bus. The journey brings us into contact with a different world: breathtaking, mountainous countryside swollen with military bases, trucks crammed with children sitting on mounds of vegetables, groups of men dancing in the grounds of a disused petrol station, women and children washing clothes in a stream, camouflaged tractors, shepherds tending dirty-brown sheep, old men drinking thin glasses of hot cay (tea) while thumbing their worry beads, tanks on main streets and - the most surreal sight of all - row after row of domestic mud huts with satellite dishes sticking out of their grassed roofs.
We reach Van, one of the furthermost Eastern towns of Turkey, to find it a place of contradictions. The nearest thing this region has to a recognisable thriving, urban centre, it is a frontier town full of soldiers, busy people rushing from one end of the street to the other, and many staring children. Yet there are distinctly likeable Dennis Wheatley/Graham Greene touches about the town: dissolute men and disreputable women struggling with moral decisions and weaknesses; the mystifying gesture of a supposedly welcoming bowl of rotting fruit in the hotel room; the presence of US military top brass at the breakfast table; and the tourist guide with an English-speaking accent that mixes Elvis Presley's Las Vegas "ladeeez n' gennulmen" tones with a sergeant-major bark.
We leave Van for a flight to Istanbul and then back to Heathrow. Six days in Turkey, five in the Eastern region, and not a dull day experienced. You wouldn't want to go alone and you wouldn't want to go with young children. You wouldn't want to go expecting to be waited on hand-and-foot (even if you are in a nominal four-star hotel), and you wouldn't want to go for the nightlife.
You would want to go, however, to see a part of the world that has not yet opened its portals to thoroughly modern living, to witness a country with a historical past that is mind-boggling, and to experience an evolving community that is clearly betwixt and between the insurgent tendencies of old - and the willing acceptance of the new.