A trip to south-west Turkey, March 2024 The opportunity arose for me to join my friend Marc Verbeek on an orchid-hunting trip to Turkey in late March, one I was more than happy to take up when I discovered my friend Hamza Nobes was going to join too. In the end the decision was made for the Belgian and UK teams of two to do the trip independently, so that more stuff could be found, we could update each other as we went to different sites, and - oh yes - I could do some birding, since I had two big targets....more of which later Turkey was the country I visited on my first ever trip out of the UK, as a young lad back in 1985, when a team of us did a three week birding trip covering the whole of the centre and east of the country. I was enraptured by the landscape, the rich wildlife, and also how different the wildlife was to our own in terms of species. The completely different culture and music really grabbed me, and created a deep-set wanderlust inside me for exploring new places and