Julia and Eowyn woke up at 6 o'clock with a clear head and with big plans for the day. Niels and Stanley on the other hand enjoyed a great evening in Aleppo town. After so many non-alcoholic days in the Muslim world, the 6 beers pp attacked the brain cells as never before. Niels and Stanley thought that an additional viral infection must also have played a part although that illness remained only for the day. Without pity the NLL was mobilized to leave early as a long drive was ahead of us across the border into Turkey. After some moaning and pushing we left Aleppo at around 8 am. The drive to the border was quick and easy as most people in Syria don't make an early start and the road was relatively quiet. Niels was lucky as he got the backseat and managed to get an additional hour of sleep. Checking out on the Syrian side was friendly although we had to pay another 100 USD for driving a diesel engine car, same as on entry. In principal not strange to pay taxes, but on both entry and exit was a bit much, certainly if you realize that you can hardly buy diesel in Syria.
Entering Turkey was entering the first world: highly organized and luxurious buildings everywhere. The first language is Turkish, second seems to be Arabic and if they speak another language it is German. Almost no one spoke any English at all (bit of a bummer since Julia was doing the paperwork) but everyone was in love with Eowyn (who sat in the insurance office coloring and emptying the tissue box while all the smiling insurance guys looked on). Although it all went straightforward it still took us 2 hours to unpack everything including all boxes and unpacking the roofrack. At around 13:00 we finally left the border and still had to drive 600 km to our next destination in Cappadocia. At our slow "Landy-pace" this meant that we arrived at 22:30 in Goreme.