5 days in the sun

It seems quite a while ago now, but this time last week I was still in Turkey. I had arrived on a Saturday in the late afternoon, but early enough to check into my hotel and take an hour’s walk around the city. Istanbul is a city that envelops you immediately. Its myriad of tiny streets are easy to get lost in (as I found out a few days later trying to find my parent’s hotel) but in Sultanahmet they are lined with shops and cafes as they sweep around Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.

I wandered back to my hotel and, with an early start the next day had dinner in the hotel, and went to bed.

6:30am found me sitting in the stuffy hotel lobby waiting for a tour bus to pick me up, and by 6:45 I was on my way through the suburbs of Istanbul to Gallipoli - the required Turkish pilgrimage for Australians and new Zealanders. Gallipoli is a 5 hour drive over some rather average roads. Thankfully the 12 seater tour bus was air-conditioned and quite comfortable. After a brief stop for breakfast and a half hour for lunch we rolled into the Gallipoli Battlefields National Park.

I was slightly unprepared for the beauty of the Gallipoli Peninsular. It is harsh and rugged country covered mostly in pine forests but those hills offer spectacular views of the Aegean Sea and the Dardanelles and the water itself, particularly at Anzac Cove, is crystal clear.

My tour took me to all the poignant places, Anzac Cove, Lone Pine, The Nek, Chanuck Blair and a handful of cemeteries as well as the Turkish Cemetery.

As my tour was two days, I had an overnight in Canakkale, a town on the Asia side of the Dardanelles. I hadn’t been told the name of my hotel, and based on my Istanbul accommodation, was expecting a facility of modest quality. I was pleasantly surprised when the tour guide dropped me off at a rather pleasant beach resort about 20min out of town. My room had a nice view to the Gallipoli Peninsular I had just visited across a white sandy beach dotted with umbrellas. Arriving about 5pm I had plenty of time for a swim and some time in the sun (a real luxury living in London).

The next morning saw me again in a stuffy lobby waiting for the tour bus. This time I was off to Troy. People had told me there wasn’t much to see of the city, and to some degree they were right. There are no standing buildings and the excavations are quite complicated as there are actually 9 cities built on one top of the other (The city made famous by the Iliad and Helen of Troy is the 6th apparently) most destroyed by earthquakes, but you do start to get a feel for the city and if someone bothered to mow the grass a little more often it would make for a great attraction. If nothing else it’s quite nice to walk where legends were made and to stand in what’s left of a temple built by Alexander the Great.

And so, I started my long bus ride back to Istanbul to catch up with my parents who were arriving the same day.

Arriving back in town about 5pm was not the greatest idea as the traffic was atrocious and I finally got to my hotel about 7. A quick shower and I was off to meet the parents at their hotel, a tram ride and lots of wandering about small streets later, I made it.

We saw a few sights together over the next 2 days. We started with Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, shopped and haggled at the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Bazaar (although haggling was much less productive here) and spent half a day at the Topkapi Palace. Saying good-bye to my parents, they were off to do a cruise on the Bospherus and I had to catch a flight back to London, I had just enough time to descend into the Basilica Cistern, an amazing Roman water reservoir under the plaza between Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. The space is incredible and is home to some very large fish. It was apparently undiscovered until the 1960s - I would recommend a visit to anyone! Well the whole city is worth a visit…