The Turks are mostly overwhelmingly friendly to foreign visitors, the cuisine is frequently excellent, the cities are dotted with majestic old buildings and the countryside is often worth a good old-fashioned gasp. There's an enormous variety of things to see and do ranging from water sports to mountain trekking, archaeology to night-clubbing and river rafting to raki drinking. Whether you leave Turkey with magnificent carpets, amulets to ward off evil, belly-dancing tips, an appreciation of its history, or just a tan, you're likely to want to go back for more.

Things have calmed down since the turbulent and violent days of early 1999, when the PKK (Kurdistan Worker's Party) conducted furious guerrilla attacks on Turkish authorities over the capture and imprisonment of rebel leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Although a ceasefire is in effect, security is still an issue. Bomb attacks occur occasionally in Istanbul. Some provinces are considered PKK strongholds, in particular Hakkari, Sirnak, Tunceli and Diyarbakir. Check with your embassy or consulate for up-to-date information on travel in the southeastern and eastern part of the country, and if you decide to go stick to the main roads. Also, tensions between Turkey and neighboring Iraq make this border area a bit iffy, particularly since US airstrikes on Afghanistan begun in October 2001 have heightened security concerns throughout the region. Most areas of Turkey are very safe, however, provided travellers use common sense, keep a low profile in trouble-prone areas and avoid political gatherings and demonstrations.

Turkey's no footbridge between Europe and Asia. It's a 1700km (1050mi) drive from Edirne on the Bulgarian border to Kars on the Armenian border and a 1000km (620mi) hike from the Black Sea in the north to the Mediterranean in the south. Ticking clockwise from the northwest, Turkey shares borders with Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The country is no desert-and-palm-tree album either: mountains, rolling steppe, meandering rivers, rich agricultural valleys and a craggy, beachy 8400km (5200mi) coastline all muck in to keep Turkey interesting.

There are still considerable forests in northeastern Anatolia, the Black Sea area and along the Mediterranean coast, west of Antalya.Great swaths of wild flowers cover the steppes in spring making fine splashes of colour. The Aegean and Mediterranean coasts have mild, rainy winters and hot, dry summers.

In Istanbul, summer temperatures average around 28-30°C (82-86°F); the winters are chilly but usually above freezing, with rain and perhaps a dusting of snow. The Anatolian plateau is cooler in summer and quite cold in winter. The Black Sea coast is mild and rainy in summer, and chilly and rainy in winter. Mountainous eastern Turkey is very cold and snowy in winter and only pleasantly warm in high summer. The southeast is dry and mild in winter and very hot in summer, with temperatures above 45° C (113° F) not unusual.