Bananas Don't Travel Well

Kurdish boyWe finally moved on to Turkey after a few days toodling around Lattakia, Syria, an extraordinarily humid port city with not much else extraordinary except a very Western atmosphere and (for the first time in Syria) a decent Internet connection. There was no public transit to the border, so we hired a taxi. Everything was going well until we'd crossed into the no-man's-land between the two countries and it emerged that the taxi driver's companion didn't have the vehicle's paperwork in order. Fortunately for us, it didn't take long to talk another cabbie into taking us the rest of the way to Antakya, but our driver was clearly pissed at losing half his fare.