This book is volume one of two of the two week trip through Eastern Anatolia made by Fred Oosting and Charles Roffey in July 2016. This trip links up the trip we made to Karadeniz in 2009 to the one made to Van and surrounding areas two years later in 2011. Another major consideration was to visit Kars, setting of Orhan Pamuk's great novel, Snow, which I had finally got round to reading earlier in the year.