We were both a bit nervous to be heading off to Turkey, in fact Laurence had mentioned that if we felt unsafe at any point we would just take the next available flight out to our next destination. The travel warning was on high alert, and we were advised that only essential travel should be completed in this area. Admittedly, most of the extreme risk was in areas of Turkey that we were not visiting, but Istanbul was pretty high up there. Now that we are safe and have completed this portion of our trip, I am very glad that we did it. Not once did we feel unsafe and the country itself is awesome. We both agree that we would like to go back in the future.
Our first afternoon in Istanbul was just filler, we had booked a tour out to Gallipoli and Troy and had been advised to wait until the next day in case there were delays with our flight. We wandered around the old town a little bit, but mainly just went out to find some food. We found a little Kebab place which was very tasty and quite cheap. That afternoon we did not see any other foreigners walking around.
The next morning, I am not sure you can call it morning as it was so early and still dark, we were picked up by a shuttle service out to Gallipoli. After 5 ½ hours of driving, and a very strange breakfast (olives, boiled egg, bread and butter, some slices of cucumber, a slice of tomato, and some sort of strange feta like cheese), we arrived at Canakkale our entry point to Gallipoli. We spent the afternoon in the battlefields and at the monuments. If anyone hasn’t been before, it is a pretty sobering experience. The ridgeline that they had to climb up to take over the set strategic positions was steep (I wouldn’t have liked to do it on a slow hike let alone with army gear, armed, and being shot at), the lines of trenches were so close that only a one-way road is between them now, and the beauty of the area now – where such devastation took place. It was nice to see the Turkish students and visitors attending both their memorials and the ANZAC memorials, we certainly visited both. There seems to be a mutual respect for all who fought on this peninsula, and I am glad.
We spent the night in Canakkale, taking a look round the Asian part of Turkey. It is a nice little town, loads of fresh fish which we had fried on sandwiches for dinner. The next day we explored the town a little more and took photos of the horse that they used in the Troy movie. But we were seeing the real thing that afternoon. The site itself is on the smaller side (we had been to huge Mayan sites in Mexico), but not a lot of it has been excavated. Apparently, people come for excavations for a few months each summer, it is not a full-time job. The parts of the site we could see were great. The walls of the city, so wide and they would have been so tall. The different layers from the different Troy cities. The temple. It was a great visit, but I think the guides knowledge and enthusiasm were what made the visit. We were passed by 5 or 6 bus loads of Asian tourists, just quickly going through the site and taking photographs. We had time for discussions about what the place would have been like during the different cities. Which Troy was the one the book was written about? Theories about where the story was likely to have been exaggerated and where history (books) corroborates the story.
Back to Istanbul, another 5 ½ hours driving.
The next day our second tour started, a food tour of Istanbul! That evening we walked through the city stopping to try the tea, the coffee, some coffee made from nuts (so not coffee, more like a hot chocolate), mezze (small plates of food with drinks), raki (their very strong alcohol which you mix with water), stuffed mussels, empanada type things and much more. By the end of the evening we couldn’t fit anything else in!
On the second day of the tour we experienced some of the sites of Istanbul, whilst eating along the way. We saw the Hagia Sophia, a church that was turned into a mosque and then a museum,
the Blue Mosque,
the Spice Market,
and the Suleymanie Mosque.
That evening we went to a local family’s place for dinner – kind of like a social outreach/responsible travel tour. It was interesting to see how the family was living, but it was a bit of an eye opener. The family moved to Istanbul 13 years ago from the eastern part of Turkey in order to be safer and to be able to earn a little bit more money. They have three children, all in school, and the husband works nights as a chef. They live in a 2-bedroom apartment in an okay area in town where the children live in one room and the parents live in the other. The parents room doubles as the living room during the day. Until recently, they had shared the apartment with a separate family – each family had had one room each.
The food that was served was on large platters and we were encouraged to eat as much as we wanted. To start there were salads; a tomato salsa, a yoghurt salsa/salad/sauce thing, and bread. Our main course was kidney beans (a Turkish version of baked beans). In Laurence and my plates of beans there were 2-3 small pieces of chicken, but not in our hosts. Our suspicion was that the family was eating whatever remained of the meal. We were really glad that we went, but we are incredibly lucky to be travelling and doing what we are doing right now.
Our last few days in Istanbul were free for us to explore. We explored the gardens, the Topkapi Palace, the Underground Cistern, and went to a wine tasting bar. We had an amazing time here, the people were friendly, the food was awesome, and we are sure there is a lot more to see here.
