I drove through the Brown Sea coast of Ordu in summer 1992. All I remember is thinking that Fatsa sounded like the name of a company set up by Sabancı to make diet foods.

Here’s a picture of Ordu from my 1955 edition of Hachette Turkey. Those lovely wooden houses are gone.

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I went to Samsun in the closing stages of the Round-Turkey-by-Fiat Odyssey. The car was in an awful state. My girlfriend was in a hurry to move on to Amasya where we planned to stay that night. Unfortunately, I saw a steam locomotive. My upbringing with trainspotter brothers compels me to examine and photograph any steam engine I see. I drove round the block and stopped at the railway yard. (It was a Nohab 2-8-0) When I tried to start the car again, it did nothing. I looked under the bonnet. The battery that had been punctured near Ağrı had been replaced in Trabzon. However, the roads had been rough and at some stage, my careful driving had done exactly the same thing to the new battery. A bump made it jump into the air and impale itself on one of the jagged parts of the metal construction that was supposed to hold it in place. It had leaked all over the engine bay, which by now looked like a discoloured model of the travertines at Pamukkale. My girlfriend sat in the car and steamed.

I hailed a taxi, asked a driver where I could buy a battery and did just that. I reinstalled the battery and wound electrical tape round and round everything so the battery could not possibly move. The car started and we went to Amasya. The tape was still in place when I got rid of the car a year later.

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All roads lead to Elbistan. That’s how it seemed driving from Kayseri to Malatya. So I went to see Elbistan. There was a big power station. And a nice river.

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On the first day of the summer holiday in 1994, I jumped into my little blue Ford Escort and drove from Istanbul to Malatya. I found a cheap hotel, then went to a restaurant. I was on my own so I got a table facing the television and sat down to eat and relax. The whole hour I was there, the TV played a series of stories about fatal road accidents near Malatya. There was no anonymity, no subtlety – the camera continually zoomed in on yet another mangled face, emphasising the true horror and hazard of road travel. It really set me up for the next day of furious driving.

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