What do we want? Hair gel! When do we want it? Now!

Mrs Johns is off to the Southeast for a few days to report on the escalation of Turkish/Kurdish (Turdish?) violence. Hopefully she won't be killed in an ambush. Or contract the shits, as we did last time we were there. Either would suck. I am looking at three days of sitting around the flat in my underpants drinking beer and watching war films in sympathy.

Turkey is gripped by a nationalist fervour after the PKK, the Kurdish separatist group, killed a dozen soldiers and kidnapped a few more. Today, like many days, there was a demonstration on Istiklal, this time by a metalworkers' union. They all had their union truckers' caps on and were milling about in front of Galatasaray high school up, confident that by waving very, very large Turkish flags the P.K.K. will lay down its arms and descend the hills into captivity.

A permit is required before a demonstration can be mounted on Istiklal. This gives the police ample time to take men away from real police work, like hurtling up and down Istiklal on mopeds blipping their sirens and telling taxis to get out of the way, to mass their riot ranks in preparation.

The other day the Communists held a modest rally of about 50 people outside their HQ on Istiklal. There were four coaches of fully armed riot police at both ends of the street, a water cannon, and, of course, an assortment of vintage small arms, at a ratio of four police to one demonstrator. Protesting mothers groups, farmers, and students get the same overwhelming police presence. Despite the British police's armour, if you pick up a dustbin lid and a stick the playing field is a bit more level. Not that I'd fancy my chances, especially if I was Brazilian.

The (nationalist) metalworkers' demo had no such police presence and presumably no permit. But this didn't seem to bother the law. They weren't demonstrating for equal pay or better conditions. They were showing the terrorists, 1500km away up on a mountain, precisely who has the moral high ground.

The riot brigades consist of twenty-year-olds who look and behave like other Turkish twenty-year-old men - smoking, walking arm-in-arm, and pawing at each other in a way that would raise eyebrows anywhere else - except they are dripping in Kevlar instead of sultan's slippers and polyester suits. Their gel-caked hair and slouching make them they look like a gang of, well, heavily armed gay men, by Brighton standards anyway. Until, of course, they mace you or beat the soles of your feet.

A few years ago, Istanbul's finest was ordered to refrain from using excessive force to meet European Union human-rights criteria. They are said to have implemented a work-to-rule to protest the ban on traditional methods for extracting information, and Istanbul was promptly hit by a petty-crime wave. That's political incorrectness gone mad!

Ramazan

Ramazan is over and the rich aroma of over-cooked lamb is evaporating from the streets, especially from the Konak restaurant on Istiklal. The demand for the sweating elephant's leg is less during Ramazan so they stay on the spit longer, emitting a gamy smell called "tail-butter". It resembles the smell of a rotting ewe's carcass found by a rambler laying in a ditch in the Peaks, bloated and maggot-ridden after a mauling by a feral dog that escaped from a local encampment.

Bulgistan-a-go-go

As is customary, every three months us yabancilar (foreigners) must exit Turkey then return at least the next calender day to get a new tourist visa if we intend to remain without going through the virtually impossible, lengthy, and hand-typed (Good Lord) residency permit procedure.

So Mrs Johns and I decided to hire a car and drive to the Bulgarian border, some three hours away, and simply hop over and back, spending the night in the nearest town Edirne - the Ottoman capital before they swept to Istanbul in the mid 15th Century - and perhaps do some sightseeing. (A kebab shop here, a pile of foetid rubbish there, a man with no legs somewhere else. Local charm in spades.)

We hadn't worked out how we were going to get over the border (one can't walk it), but reckoned we could get a cab or a dolmus (half bus, half taxi, all grotty) from Edirne. We couldn't take the hire car, too much red tape. Instead of parking there, we overshot the town and ended up a mile or so away from the border in a transport cafe-cum-hotel-cum-coach-park, like a Little Chef without more harrowing lighting. After sitting down to work out what to do (it was about 9 pm) over a glass of very bitter tea, Ayla asked a random, semi-official looking bloke if he knew how we could work the scam.

"I'll sort you out", he said and beckoned over a young woman seemingly, but not, in her mid-30s. She indicated that our plight was old hat and for 20 lira invited us on the coach she was "hosting". She also mumbled something about buying her cigarettes. An ethnic Turk from Bulgaria, she was a sort of handler for Bulgarians and Turks who want to travel over the border to take advantage of the amazingly cheap duty-free in the no man's land.

We boarded the coach at 10 p.m. and set off the mile or so to the Turkish-Bulgarian border. On the way we passed hundreds, if not thousands, of juggernauts waiting to go through. Most of Afghanistan's heroine and thousands of trafficked people come through this border so it takes a long time to search every lorry and receive a bribe from each driver.

I was feeling cagey: This trip was already on the odd side and I was about to come up against Turkish passport control who would instantly know why I'm here and what I'm trying to do. We disembarked from the bus (about 15 of us in total) so each passenger's passport could be scrutinized. I had a pee, we all smoked, and we waited. When the passports reappeared we got back on the bus and the first leg, though long, was over. Inexplicably we had a different bus driver for the few hundred yards to our next destination: duty-free. In fact, before every leg of the journey, however short, the drivers alternated. Everyone on the bus lit a cigarette.

We arrived at duty free, disembarked, lit a cigarette, and headed to a duty-free hut with our fixer, the young Bulgarian Turkish woman. Ayla and I bought a carton of fags (€13), a bottle of Campari (€6), and eight bottles of French wine - clearly stolen as they were in-flight-meal sized - for €2 each. You take what you can get. Our companion bought at least 10 cartons of cigs then asked if she could borrow our passports so she could buy more.

We got back on the bus, they all lit up, switched drivers, and drove another few hundred yards to Bulgarian customs. The bus moved slowly to give our hostess, her mate, the two drivers, and just about every other passenger enough time to stuff packets of cigarettes into just about everything. Socks, tights, luggage, waistbands, shoes, wash bags, blankets, the driver's seat. The two women were taping them to their backs and legs and throwing the empty cartons left, right, and centre. Our fixer foisted one carton onto Ayla.

Great, we had cadged a ride with smugglers. If my nerves weren't jangling enough already, we had to get a seat on the Midnight Express. Everyone was smoking like chimneys, casting doubt for a moment on our suspicion they were smugglers - perhaps they made this run everyday strictly for personal consumption. But it turned out to be fear.

Mrs Johns pointed out that the Communist regime in Bulgaria had expelled the Muslim Turkish population in the late 1980s, which went some way to explaining why the fixer and the rest of the passengers were so palpably nervous around authority figures. Customs boarded the bus and turned it inside out searching the entire vehicle by torchlight. Despite their best efforts, the stash went undiscovered. Bag searches were cursory and reserved for the male passengers (except me) who were also searched for handguns. Once searched they all lit cigarettes.

Proceeding to Bulgarian passport control, we got out again and all wandered over to a small neon-lit kiosk staffed by a young, hyper-blonde female Bulgarian border guard with a crisp green uniform.

"Where are you going?" she asked me.
"Er ..." I said.
"We're going to ... " Ayla said
"I asked him!", she said, cutting Ayla off and pointing at me.
"Er ..." again.

My brain froze under the pressure of either deportation or a stretch at the president's pleasure. There was no destination, there was just the task at hand. I wracked my brains trying to come up with a name, any name. Sofia? No, an obvious lie. There was a town over the border I saw in the Lonely Planet section on this very venture.

"Stal- Slav- Stanislav- rmdnergrad?" I spluttered, massacring the Slavic.
An immobile face produced the words, "When are you coming back?"
"Er...." my heart pounding.
"Soon?" Steely blue eyes penetrated my soul, searching for the untruths, waiting to pounce, call the guards and kick my backside all the way back to Blighty.
"Yes, very soon."
"You may go."

So it was. What did she care as long as I was leaving again? She just fancied watching another stupid foreigner shit bricks to relieve her boredom. Make them sweat for their pork products.

And off we went again to another, even grottier transport cafe a mile away from the border on the Bulgarian side. The fixer and her mate offloaded their contraband onto their cig pimp, we ate pork (for the first time in a good while), bought biscuits, and waited to be taken back again. I was driving so resisted the overwhelming urge to down a couple of bottles of Bulgarian beer during the wait. The first chance to drink something that wasn't bloody Efes was just out of reach.

The rest of the passengers disappeared, the glow from their freshly lit cigs fading into the darkness. That left the two smugglers, the two drivers, an old bloke, and us. Back through the Bulgarian border, back into no-man's-land, back to duty-free. The two women did the whole thing all over again - carrier bags of cigs removed from their cartons, stuffed in every orifice! They had a cig pimp on the other side as well.

Next was passport control where it could all go very wrong. What I was attempting to do had been done by many before me, daily. But there was nothing to stop them fining me, deporting me, or worse. Especially as there ad been a shake-down of corrupt officials at this border only last year. But the new guards seemed to have slumped back into the old routines nicely. With only a query about Ayla's passport's validity, I got a new visa. By this time I was too tired to be nervous and reckoned if I got into a scrape I'd grass on the smugglers to divert attention from my own crime.

The last hurdle, Turkish customs, also came off hitch-free as the fixer was clearly bribing the martinet with bananas and booze. He was king of his little hill (which resembled Auschwitz) and didn't hesitate telling me he played the saz after querying me about my occupation.

The fixer, only 28, does this at the same time every single day. Her official job is stewardess for the bus line. The journey, about two miles cafe-to-cafe, takes five and a half hours punctuated by two sessions of frenetic stuffing and by two long waits that could result in a heavy penalty on either side. All that for a 25% profit margin on a commodity that is already dirt cheap. They love to smoke up there.

We parted ways with our partners in crime when they dropped us off on the side of the highway and hightailed it into the darkness. It was 2 a.m. and the truck stop was still hopping. Ayla and I looked at each other, silently agreed we had had enough of this neck of the woods, got back into the hired car and drove uninterrupted to Istanbul in two and a half hours flat listening to volume three of the British Nuggets boxed set.