I felt very stupid when approaching Karataş in the dolmuş. In my hometown Amsterdam I had been advised to pay it a visit, and only during the last kilometer I realized I’d done precisely that a year earlier. I decided not to visit the classical city, as it is miles from the centre, and would probably show hardly any extensions of the excavations. So I just strolled along the coast, enjoying some new sights, and then back to Adana.

This is not quite exceptional. After I spotted a shop with a bike like this in Adana and asked if it would be returned to a more motorbike-like vehicle, and was told "yes", I saw several similar ones within days. The man in this case told me he was waiting for spare parts he ordered in the same Adana, then it would become a bike once again.