Travelogue - Highlights: Part 2

On either side of going to Gallipoli and Troy, my friend and I saw a few more things in Istanbul. Here are the highlights:


Topkapi Palace

Topkapi Palace was the official residence of the Ottoman sultans from 1465-1856. It was rather impressive. Unfortunately I can't give you much in the way of photos, because a lot of the best things to see were the collections of weapons, jewellery, and so on. Here are a couple of some of the outside, though:

The Cistern

The Basilica Cistern is the largest of hundreds lying underneath Istanbul. I wasn't really expecting very much, but it was one of those times when you're unexpectedly wowed. The lighting they'd used helped a lot, but I think it would've looked pretty impressive even without it.

This is referred to as the Peacock-eyed column, for reasons which should be obvious!

The cool column prize easily went to the two that had Medusa head blocks at the bottom of them. No-one knows exactly where the blocks came from, apparently, but they're thought to have belonged to a late Roman period building.

The several squillion fish they had down there also added to the atmosphere!

Istanbul University

I've mentioned the university already, and how beautiful the grounds were, but I didn't manage to get any photos when I first saw it. This time 'round however, I managed a quick, slightly blurry shot through the main gate:

Hagia Sophia

The Hagia Sophia is an old mosque now-turned museum. As much as we'd seen just about enough mosques to last a life time, we still wanted to go to this one, as it was meant to be impressive inside. It didn't disappoint. The only disappointing thing was having both my camera batteries go flat on me while I was inside: which was very strange at the time, given was that I was sure I'd charged both of them to near full! (It turned out later that there was a connection problem: there you go.)

Grand Bazaar

The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul was very big, and had just about any sort of souvenir or item you could probably think of. Of particular interest to me, however, were the glass Turkish lamps they had. I'd seen one I really loved at a restaurant in Goreme, and ended up deciding that it might be worth trying to get one home safely, after all. After going through a lot of shops, I actually managed to find one that was very close, which was pretty lucky. The post office, unsurprisingly, didn't want to know about it, and in the end I managed to carry it safely through the last 3 weeks of travelling, without any additional damage. Additional, because the person who wrapped it in bubble wrap at the store decided to leave the heavy metal bob at the end of its chain inside of it. I wasn't able to do anything about it for a day or so, but fortunately it's just crazed a bit, which isn't too obvious. Touch wood, it won't get any worse if I keep handling it carefully!

Travelogue - Highlights: Part 1

Selcuk

Selcuk was a nice little town we visited in Turkey. The town itself was rather pretty, as were a lot of the ruins that were dotted around it:

This is all that remains of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The column has been reconstructed, and most of the archaeological remains have been spirited away to the British museum, but it was rather cool to see, nonetheless.

Haircut

"Wait a minute Julian: I thought you said you were only going to do the highlights from now on?!" Believe it or not, this actually -was- a highlight. Bear with me for a moment and I'll explain. :) By the time we'd gotten to Selcuk, it was getting about time for another haircut, and, after some translation assistance from the hotel staff, I was ridden into town on the back of a motorbike (no helmet, of course!), and dropped at a hair salon. My usual experience of a haircut in Melbourne is that I go to my very cool hairdresser, get my hair washed, cut, have a nice chat, and that's about it. In Turkey, it's more like an all-in-one therapy treatment. I was given a haircut, wash, and a short head, neck, shoulder, arm and head massage. They also burn away all the hairs on and in your ears with a lit wick. It's actually not that bad, as long as you don't mind the smell of your own burning hair! I'd also deliberately not shaved that morning so I could see what getting shaved with a cut-throat razor would be like. It definitely does the job, and it wasn't too uncomfortable, except for the one little bit they didn't put enough foam on. The only really uncomfortable bit was the aftershave: yipe! All up, it was nice and relaxing. I wonder if I could talk my hairdresser over here into offering a similar service??


Ephesus

The ruins of Ephesus weren't far out of Selcuk, and were extensive and very impressive. I've already bombarded you with a lot of Roman ruin shots, so I'll just put in the ones that stood out for this place in particular:

Yes, this is what you think it is. Yes, I wanted a photo. Yes, we also had a group photo with several of us sitting down at once. :P

The library, which apparently also had a tunnel leading to the town's brothel, just opposite!

A rather impressive ampitheatre:

Gozleme making

A Gozleme is the Turkish version of a pancake. It's basically a very thin, somewhat tough bread that you fill with cheese, meat, vegetables, fold into a thin parcel, then cook. I also had a chocolate one at one point, which was very nice! After our tour of Epehesus, we got a chance to try making them ourselves. This was one time when volunteering to go first (almost no-one ever wants to, esp. if it involves jumping off something!) was not as good an idea, though, as I hadn't had a chance to watch and see what I was supposed to be doing! We were supposed to try the rolling part of the process, which is actually somewhat different to handling bread dough, as you need to use a very light touch. I didn't exactly do a perfect job, but I didn't destroy it either, and one of the ladies finished it off for me. The pancake ends up being about the size of the tables you can see in these photos:

You then put your filling inside, fold it into a large parcel, and put it in to be cooked. When it comes to eating it, one is enough for most people!

Calcium Travertines

The calcium travertines at Pamukkale (which means "cotton castles" in Turkish) were rather cool. They're formed by hot, calcium-rich waters from mineral springs continually leaving deposits as they flow down the hills. Even if they weren't quite what I was expecting, they were still nice. You had to walk on them in bare feet, but this mostly didn't cause a problem, except for the occasional rougher part. In fact, the finely "rippled" texture of the ground actually made for a very good grip!

After sunset, I ended up walking back down in the dark with our tour leader, with our way only being lit by strategically placed floodlights. There was a very narrow water channel that ran down for quite some distance, and we opted to walk down in this, as it was quite warm, especially compared to the now-cool ground! We had to be careful though, as there was literally no space in the channel either side of your foot, and it was very uneven, both depth and breadth-wise! Walking back down in the semi-dark with our feet splashing through running warm water and chatting as we went had a nice feel to it, and really was a lot of fun.

Dinner in a Fairy Chimney House

You'll probably remember me talking about the Fairy Chimneys that we saw in Goreme the first time we were there, and me mentioning that people had made houses out of some of them. Thanks to a bit of overlap on our second trip we ended up back in Goreme, and also got a chance to have a dinner at a local's fairy chimney house. They were happy for us to walk around taking photos before dinner:

As you can see, it's really quite something! Dinner was very nice and I ended up next to the host, which gave me a chance to chat to him for a bit, even if his English was a little limited. It turned out that his family had  been living there for 5 generations. Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, these houses are worth a lot.

Hot air ballooning


The first time we were in Goreme, my travel buddy and I figured we'd see what our other group members thought of the hot air ballooning there, and do it ourselves when we came back, if they liked it. They did, so we booked ourselves in this time 'round, and got up before dawn (ack!) to make our way to the launch site. About the only times in my life that I've ever been up for dawn have involved some sort of exciting event. This one was no different, with the usual atmosphere of anticipation. We signed in at the store, were assigned a pilot, and then got driven to the site in a minibus, where we got off and waited for the crew to get our balloon ready. Watching a hot air balloon being inflated is quite cool (the first one was ours):

After clambering in and getting the "how to handle a rough landing without breaking something" briefing, we were released into the air by the crew. We'd been told that, unlike all other forms of flying, we wouldn't feel that we were moving over the ground, but that it was moving under us. This was absolutely true: it really felt as if we were hanging there motionless while the ground just rolled by underneath us, which was a rather unusual, but neat feeling.

As we drifted along, with our pilot seemingly enjoying getting us as close to the ground, trees, and rock formations as possible before pulling up the last minute, we saw a throng of other balloons in the distance, which really was a beautiful sight:

The problem with being up in a hot air balloon is that it's very hard to take a photo which would give anyone else the impression that you're actually in one, and not just standing on a cliff somewhere. Still, I did my best:

We were up for about an hour, and then started to make our descent. Impressively enough, the crew towed us in for a landing on the back of the vehicle the balloon had first been taken to the launch site on!

Back on the ground, we all had fun helping to tread the balloon flat so it could be packed up, with 3 of us stubbornly persisting even when we could see that it was going to come down over us. We ended up in our own little kindergarten cubbyhouse, which was kind of fun. :) Stuffing the balloon back into its container is pretty much like putting a sleeping bag away. We watched them do it, followed by several people taking flying leaps on to the top of it once it was done ("helping"??). The whole experience had been great, and as we got back on to the mini-bus to go back to our respective hotels, some of us started to feel quite tired, as the adrenaline began wearing off, and we remembered just exactly how early we'd gotten up.


Red and Rose Valleys

As we'd already been around Goreme a bit before, my travel buddy and I opted to go for a walk around a different area to the group when we got back. We went to the Red and Rose Valleys, which were definitely worth it. The walk was nice, with beautiful scenery:

One of the things I really loved was the way some formations almost looked liked marshmallow peaks, complete with pink-white colouring! (You may have to look at the enlarged versions of these two to see what I'm talking about.)

And that was pretty much it for Goreme. I'm going to step slightly out of sequence now, and wrap up all of Istanbul in the next post, even though Gallipoli and Troy came in between two parts of it.

Travelogue - Part 9: Bursa

Bursa


At this point, I'm realising that the odds of me actually getting my entire trip chronicled are probably somewhat small, esp. so close to Xmas. After this post, what I'm going to do instead is finish it all up with some "Highlights" posts, where I'll show you the things that stood out most for me in the rest of Turkey and Egypt. Stay tuned! Anyway, back to Bursa (sorry, only 1 photo for this one!).

After a multi-stage journey involving a taxi, a ferry, a tour bus and a local bus (which had pretty much the same amount of squash you'd expect from any other packed bus, even if it was a little warm), we arrived in Bursa, which looked like a really nice place. After settling in, we went to a place our leader had recommended, and tried something they were apparently very good at: an Iskender Kebab. It was basically thinly sliced lamb with a tomato-y sauce on top of pide (a kind of flat bread), with melted butter and yoghurt. It was absolutely delicious, and definitely one of the best things I ended up having in Turkey.

After lunch, we had a bit of an orientation walk before being left to our own devices until the evening. I'd decided that I'd like to see what a Turkish bath was like, esp. compared to the one I'd had in Syria, and headed off to a place with a couple of my tour group. It looked a lot nicer, with a gloriously hot pool for the Caldarium, and marble slabs where you lay down to get scrubbed and massaged. Despite the fact that one of the two scrub and massage attendants pointed at the one I had and made throat-cutting gestures, I seemed to have ended up with the more gentle one, judging by the grunts and exclamations coming from the tour group member next to me! The massage was better than the one I'd had last time, too. The only thing about the whole experience that had me a little worried was the thick wooden clogs we were given to wear around the (tiled) bath house. You definitely wouldn't have wanted to move around at any kind of speed!

After the bath, we headed back to the hotel for what sounded like a busy, good evening. We were going to a tea house to hear some local music, followed by dinner at a local's place, and finishing with a Whirling Dervish performance. When we got back, we met up with our guide for the evening, who was carrying a musical instrument case with him. We weren't quite sure what was in it. After a short tour of some local sites he took us to a tea house, where we were led into a tiny back room with wooden benches around the walls. It was clear from the way he greeted the people outside and the musicians in the back room that he knew them well already.

The people started playing, with one of them singing. The whole atmosphere was very easy and relaxed, and you really got the feeling that this was just a bunch of friends showing up to have fun together. We couldn't understand any of the words, but that didn't really matter as it still sounded nice, and the music that was being played had a very infectious beat to it. You couldn't help but start to keep time with it after a while. Every now and then a guy would step into the middle of the small floor and invite one of the girls in our group up to dance. It was really simple, but fun to watch, and do, by the looks of it. I started to wish that the guys'd get a chance at some point, too! I got my wish close to the end, and had a really great time dancing around with plenty of smiles, laughter, and some goofing off thrown in. When we left, I was on a high, with music running through my head, and wanting to dance some more!

Dinner was at our guide's house, and was delicious. A few of us needed to sit at a low table on the floor  away from our host and the rest of the group, but that was okay, because we ended up having our own entertainment in the form of our host's younger son who was 4 years old and definitely enjoyed running around and being paid attention to! We had to eat dinner somewhat quickly because we were running a bit behind time, and needed to get to the Dervish performance.

We'd been told that what we would be seeing was a proper, traditional Dervish dance instead of the less authentic touristy ones that you were more likely to see, which sounded good to me. When we got to the place we had what we were about to see explained to us, which was quite interesting. It's hard to describe the show itself, really, but it was good to watch, and it had a real feel to it. We couldn't really use flash, so about the only good shot I ended up getting was this one before the performance (too much blur otherwise, I figured!):

After the performance, we sat around with our guide, who'd been one of the musicians for the show and chatted for a while. We also tried to play his flutes, but only one of us managed to get a sound out of one them, and then couldn't again! All I succeeded in doing was getting slightly light-headed. :) All up, we'd had a great evening, and I was glad to get back to the hotel and collapse into a pleasantly exhausted sleep afterwards.

Travelogue - Part 8: Istanbul

Istanbul

Once we'd arrived at our new hotel, we decided to use the rest of the afternoon to look around Istanbul a bit, before meeting our new group in the evening. We decided to go to what was called the Blue Mosque, which we'd been told about, and really was impossible to miss! It was just as impressive inside as out, although mini-shots like these don't really do it justice:

After that, we wandered around a bit more. There was one random little section of street with multi-coloured houses which caught our eye (and reminded me of La Boca in Buenos Aires):

Temporary Insanity (or complete absence of brain, at the very least)

It was shortly after we'd left the Blue Mosque, and were wandering through a strip of shops, that I suddenly realised I didn't have my camera with me. Given that I'd never left my camera anywhere in my life, this was very unusual, not to mention somewhat disturbing! I hurried back to the mosque, and found that I had indeed left it on a bench when I was putting my shoes back on. *phew* It was later on that I recalled seeing something blue on the bench as well when I was grabbing my camera. This is relevant, because it was a little while afterwards that I noticed something extremely obvious that I'd missed: I wasn't wearing my entire backpack! Yes, that flash of blue I'd noticed was most likely the backpack that hadn't left either my back or my hotel room for three consecutive world trips. Saying a quick "see you back at the hotel" to my travel buddy and running back to the mosque, I discovered that it had been put away into lost property, and after signing a piece of paper that (presumably) said I'd gotten it back, I headed back to the hotel, feeling somewhat relieved and more than a little bemused. I knew that I was extremely tired from the recent trip, capped off by the overnight train, but I hadn't realised I was -that- out of it. The dazed feeling I instantly became aware of when I lay down to try and sleep after I'd gotten some lunch put it all into perspective, though!

Journey's Beginning

Unfortunately I never actually managed to get any sleep, but I did get enough rest to feel (and appear) sufficiently human for our group meeting that evening. It turned out that there were 14 of us plus the tour guide (whom we'd already met on the overnight train, as previously mentioned). They all seemed nice enough, and once we'd gone through all the necessary details, we headed off to dinner at a rather nice restaurant not that far away and had fun getting to know one another a little. Fortunately, everyone else was tired as well, which meant that they were happy to go straight back to the hotel after dinner instead of doing something else (I would've felt like a bit of a piker if I'd had to say no to doing something else on the first night!).

The next morning, we went on a little tour of Istanbul for several hours. It was on foot, and we (re)visited the Blue Mosque, as well as going to a couple of other smaller ones. We saw the university, which had really lovely grounds (unfortunately the gates and walls made it rather hard to take any actual photos), and a few other bits and pieces. After that, we had the afternoon to ourselves to see whatever we wanted. I decided that my first priority was to find some good Turkish Delight, and, after quizzing our leader, we headed off to find the shop she'd recommended. It had just about every flavour you could imagine; from the traditional rose, to nuts, fruits, and mint. We both bought some boxes for later, and then had a bit of a browse around some shops, keeping an eye out for an All-seeing Eye charm that my travel buddy had seen used as a keyring at the hotel in Goreme, and really liked. While we didn't have any luck finding anything even close to it, we did enjoy having a browse through everything that was on offer.

After lunch, we had a wander through a park, as the Topkapi Palace museum was closed, despite us being told it was open that day (they'd mixed two attractions up). As this was the first park I'd seen since leaving Melbourne, I was glad to have a chance to wander through it, along with all the local families. It was a nice little bit of very green serenity, made even nicer because it reminded me of home a bit:

There was a rather cool fountain, too, which was nice to look at, and also gave me an idea for a fun perspective shot or two:

I also got a chance at some point during the afternoon to see a few things I'd missed when I went back to the hotel early. This is the German Fountain, which was apparently constructed to commemorate the second anniversary of German emperor Wilhelm II's visit to Istanbul in 1898. They built the pieces in Germany and transported them to Istanbul, where they put it all together. History aside, it looked rather nice:

I've seen obelisks like this in a number of different countries now. This one was originally raised in Egypt by Thutmosis III in honour of the sun god Amon Ra back in the 16th century BC, and was brought to Istanbul in 390 AD as a decoration for the hippodrome:

There were plenty of other things to see in Istanbul, but that was all we had time for that day, and we were going to have more time to see things at the end of the tour. The next day, we headed off to Bursa, which I'll tell you all about in my next instalment.