We’ve been doing ‘couchsurfing’, where you basically stay with people for free. It’s a ‘hospitality exchange’. It works really well. You actually meet and stay with locals. Couchsurfing dominates the moods and stories of the last week. And in medieval times, pilgrims would stay for free at monasteries or mosque complexes, so perhaps couchsurfing is the modern equivalent…

In Afyon (a city meaning ‘Opium’ but with no bars, for religious reasons, and where all the students are very bored) we stayed at a student house where everyone had nicknames. There was a Kurdish boxer built like Apollo, ‘Elephant Man’, ‘Napoleon’ and ‘Caveman’, who ran out to us delightedly saying, ‘I am Caveman!’ while pointing to his luxurious upper arm hair. They couldn’t pronounce the names of my friend Tihomir or I so we were ‘Timur’ and ‘Arthur’. Tourists were so rare some high school boys saw us from the school window and ran out to chase us up onto a mountaintop castle.

In Konya, outside the tomb of Rumi, we met some girls who were just supposed to see us for coffee but ended up taking us in like stray puppies. They spent all afternoon finding a place for us to stay (they wanted us to stay with them but Konya is the most religious city in Turkey and their other housemate was worried about what the neighbours would think), took us to a very moving free Dervish show and soon we were sitting in their friend’s house, eating home cooked food, with a room full of Turkish students saying, ‘We love you! We love both of you!’

They were ridiculously sweet and went out of their way to help us. I asked one of our new friends, a small statured girl with a headscarf, how to say, ‘I am a stupid dirty tourist’ in Turkish. She promptly protested, very earnestly, ‘Oh no! It is not true! You are not stupid! Don’t say that! You are not stupid at all! Dirty, maybe, but not stupid!’

The other, who doesn’t wear a headscarf and looks for all the world like any designer- conscious nineteen year old, still does not drink and would not even enter a shop selling alcohol. I felt bad after that buying a bottle of Raki to share with the boys we ended up staying with, so in the end I just left it in their fridge, unopened.

Later the girls declared that it would be too boring for us to get a bus from Konya to our next destination five hours away, so they proposed that together we hire a car and go on a roadtrip. That would be much more fun than the bus, we agreed, so off we went.

While stopped at traffic lights a boy sold one of our friends a postcard with a Quran verse on it. I asked her what it said. She told me she could not read it without washing her hands first. The postcard was right there, in her hand, but she could not read it. Later she sang along to ‘Losing My Religion’ by REM with another travelling companion and she knew all the words in English.

We stopped at an extinct volcano I had described in my book from pictures on Google Earth and went to a Byzantine cave monastery from the era of the First Crusade. We ended up in Cappadocia.

We were meant to stay with other couchsurfing hosts there, but there was a mix-up; the guy we were meant to stay with had palmed us off to friends, they were a little creepy and looked like stoners and all of us were a little uncomfortable. First one of our new friends fought, in Turkish, for them to provide us better accommodation because we were her friends, and then helped us escape the whole situation and find a hostel. The drama meant that the girls wouldn’t get home until 1:30 am.

Even living in Iceland and Hungary I never got to know a huge amount of locals. But, like in Iceland, where after a few days in a dorm the other exchange students felt like family, I feel like I am getting a big Turkish family now. I have two Turkish sisters who saved my life twice. People have been so ridiculously nice. For my book of course and from the Crusader’s perspective the Turks are all enemies. It’s going to be hard to write like that now.

The photo shows us all at the end of our trip, in Cappadocia.