Today was pretty much our last day of the tour. While we technically would all be finishing up tomorrow, the reality is that some of would be staying on, some would be heading out on another connecting tour, and others would be flying home. So today was the last day really being spent with each other.

It was fitting that the last day us Aussies would be spending together would be a visit to Gallipoli. We started the day in Canakkale, leaving the hotel nice and early so we could catch a ferry across to the other side of the water (technically back into Europe) and have the short drive to the Gallipoli peninsula. I wasn’t sure what to expect, since it is an important site for both the ANZACs and the Turks who were fighting each other.

We first arrived at the peninsula, and Ibo gave us another history lesson, this time much of which was know to many of us. We first saw the beach where the allied troops were supposed to land (a much more hospitable piece of land), before making our way up to ANZAC Cove, the site of the actual beach landing.

ANZAC Cove is exactly the opposite of the first beach… an unpleasant, steep climb up the side of rocky and tree-lined terrain. It is no wonder it was a bit of a doomed mission.

There are a number of memorials around the area, with about 5 or 6 cemeteries dedicated to the allied troops (predominantly ANZACs). The range from quite small, up to the main one at Lone Pine.

ANZAC Cove is the site of the ANZAC Day service here and has the serenity you would expect. All you hear is the water in the background, and you see a simple memorial recognising the site. It is touching and a but surreal all at once.

 

The Lone Pine cemetery is the largest to the ANZACs on the peninsula. A single tree surrounded by graves and a memorial marks the site. A few hundred ANZACs who lost their lives are buried. Even though the memorial is the largest of the ANZAC sites, it is still very modest, and a fitting tribute.

We kept making our way around the site. Still present were many of the trenches dug by both the ANZACs and the Turks. The ANZAC trenches were much more haphazard, owing to the nature of the circumstances under which they were being dug.

Near the top of the area is one of the only Turkish memorial sites. While this is of extreme significance to the ANZACs, it is also significant to the Turks who we were fighting against. There was much at stake, and this site was an arm wrestle for the 9 months or so in which battles were being waged.

The ubiquitous Ataturk was a major figure here, and was also very responsible for making this site as a place of respect to both sides. A landmark speech is commemorated on a monument here, indicating that regardless of what happened in the war, that this should be a place of mourning for all.

There was also a nice monument to some fallen Kiwis who took an important hill for a couple of days during the fighting. It was nice and also quite strange in that one monument recognised the Kiwis that took it (along with the nearby cemetery) while there was also recognition of the Turks that took it back. Fascinating to see two sides of the story sharing the same stage.

All the Aussies were pretty quiet when it came time to get back on the bus. Ahead of us was about 6 hours of driving, to get to our official end point, Istanbul. With a few ice cream stops in there, we arrived thick into the Istanbul traffic which was chaos. Lucky it was a quiet Saturday afternoon.

Our night was pretty low key. Most of us had one last group dinner, with a handful kicking on. However it seemed most people were either sick or exhausted (or both), so for many it was sad farewells in the hotel lobby. It is always a weird time at the end of the tour. There are those you are super sad to leave, others not quite as much. But we had all had some amazing experiences together, and for that they will always be part of our Turkish adventure.

It was dawning on us all that the end of the trip was fast approaching. In only a couple of days our two week Turkey adventure would be all over and we would all be going back to whatever normal lives awaited. Well, some were heading to the other side of Turkey on another G Adventures trip, but most were winding up their holidays and heading home.

But today, another major archeological site was on the itinerary… Troy. Yep, that Troy. No, it’s not in Greece as many think it is, but rather just near the coast, near the seaside city of Canakkale. So yet another slow morning (which was alright by us) meant that we reached our first stop about lunchtime.

Troy was a pretty exciting one for most of us, given it is such a famous story. Even those that didn’t know all the detail at least knew the general gist of things… beautiful woman, big horse, fighting, Brad Pitt. So we were all geared up to explore the site.

Ibo was our guide and spent the next hour showing us the site and telling us all the stories. It was great that we had him, as unlike the ruins of the past few days (especially Ephesus and Pammukale), this was quite sparse. in fact there wasn’t really a whole lot to see.

The main path takes you about the site, and points out ruins from different stages in Troy’s history. There was in fact 9 Troys that have existed, all built on top of each other. As you go, different ruins are showing from different periods, but it was nothing like the ruins of the other cities we had seen.

It wasn’t that it was a let down, more anti-climactic. For a site with such a rich story, there is actually not that much to see. It was great to go to the actual site, but in terms of spectacle, we had been spoiled by this point.

Of course there is a big horse though. What did you expect? Kate and I climbed to the top to get our cheesy photo.

We also took the opportunity to dress up in Roman garb and get some more cheesy tourist photos. Alas I don’t have them handy to show you sorry readers. You will just have to wait.

From Troy, we made our way into the city of Canakkale, what would be our gateway back to Istanbul tomorrow. But for the rest of the day we had time to relax and explore. Canakkale is a university town mostly, as well as location for ferries and more beach. Kate and I just wandered the waterside, looking for ice cream.

Also on the water is another wooden horse, this one actually a gift of Warner Brothers. Yep, it was the wooden horse used in the film. This one looked much cooler than the one on the actual site, although you couldn’t climb in it. I guess we are to assume the soldiers are still hiding in there.

Dinner time had arrived, so it was time for some more seafood, especially since it would be back to the city tomorrow. Many of us continued to hang out for the evening, heading to a live music bar called Hayal Kahvesi. It seemed everyone (except us) knew all the words to all the songs. But it didn’t matter, we all rocked out for a bit, enjoying our penultimate night together and then calling it a night in preparation for a long, busy, and emotional day tomorrow.

Hi everyone! A couple of smaller, quieter, posts for you all.

By this time we are on the home stretch of our trip around Turkey. Having just done the big historical sites, it is time to wind our way back toward Istanbul. Today was very much just a day of taking a step toward our final destinations of Troy, Gallipoli, and finally Istanbul. So all we really did today was spend a fe hours driving along the coast to the seaside town of Ayvalik.

Ayvalik is not really known for much, mostly just as a nice seaside village. So after a lazy start to the day, we arrived in mid afternoon at our nice little hotel, which was a converted family house. With small, share, bedrooms and communal areas, it was going to be the perfect place to just have a relaxing evening.

Rather than sit around, a bunch of us decided to head to the nearby beach. So we braved the public transport (reminiscent of some buses in Central America, where it is just “squeeze! squeeze!” to get on) and spent a sweaty 20 minutes on a crowded bus to arrive.

The beach was at Sarim Sakli, and I can’t say it was the greatest I have ever been to, especially with the spoils of the past few days. The beach area almost looks desert, with large expanses of dirty brown sand. The waterfront area was packed, and we secured some chairs and umbrellas and proceeded to hang out for the next couple of hours, swimming and relaxing.

The water was much colder than I was used to from the previous days, and the colour certainly wasn’t what we had on the boat. But I was swimming in a foreign country, so who was I to complain?

When we were done, we all headed back into town to visit the Farmers Markets to get some food for our dinner spread. Rather than head out to a restaurant, since we had our own kitchen we decided to go with bread, cheese, mezzes, baclava, wine, beer… all the essentials.

We had an awesome array of food and the rest of the night was spent nice and relaxed… eating and drinking into the night.

 

We thought we had seen a ruined Roman city yesterday? We hadn’t really seen anything yet. For today we were heading to one of the biggest and most well preserved, the ancient city of Ephesus.

On our trip from Pamukkale to Selcuk (our base for the night) we stopped in the small town of Sirince. This was a tiny little town in the hills, in part known for their wine. During our wandering of the town we tried some of the local wine, which most of us agreed really wasn’t that great. Turkey does a lot of things right, but not so much their wine.

One thing we found about the area is that it was a home of St John, and as a result there are some churches that are in his name. One small one is located in the town, and was quite quaint, although in not a very good state and even a bit vandalised, which was quite out of the norm for what we had seen around the country.

The rest of our brief time we spent wandering the small streets. It seemed to be quite the small tourist town as all the vendors tried to lure us into their stores. But we weren’t too interested, rather happy to have some lunch (mmm… turkish pancakes) before heading into Selcuk.

Selcuk is also home to a large church of St John, as well as a large well preserved castle. We only had an hour, but a few of us decided to visit these sites, knowing we wouldn’t have too much time to explore. The church site was quite huge. Sadly there wasn’t a real church building to explore, but the ruins were quite cool to wander through.

The castle in particular looked fantastic up on the hill. Castles like this were few and far between in Turkey, and Kate was obviously super excited to visit another castle (I think she had been having castle withdrawals since the UK).

We only had an hour as it was time to head to the main stop for the day, the huge ancient city of Ephesus. Ephesus was a huge Roman city that became quite large and powerful back in the day given its proximity to the sea and subsequent power in goods trading. The city is huge and we spent the best part of 3 hours exploring, with Ibo filling us in on all the history.

As we wandered we saw more amazing marble columns, ancient paved roads, huge facades, and beautiful tiled mosaics. For me, the most impressive areas were an amazingly well preserved collection of houses, still with mosaics in tact.

The other was the entrance to the city Library. A towering grand entrance if ever there was one.

 

 

 

We kept wandering about soaking it all up. The last stop was actually the church of Mary, yep THE Mary. Given St John’s prominence in the area, it was of no surprise, and there was the ruins of quite a huge church in the grounds of Ephesus.

By this time it had approached 7:30pm and the sun was dipping down the and the temperature becoming glorious. We made our way back to the hotel, and with a little time to freshen up, we went out exploring Selcuk a little more as a group and off to enjoy some dinner. The town certainly had a pretty cool vibe to it, with everybody out having dinner and fun in the bars and restaurants.

A few of us continued on for a bit after dinner. We crossed paths with another G Adventures tour group which is always fascinating. We where have 8 Aussies, only 1 was in that group, with it being dominated by Americans. It is always interesting to see how groups can be so different from tour to tour.

Kate and I hit the wall about midnight, leaving the last diehards to continue on. We were happy to hit the hotel and have a sleep in before our next fairly easy day of travel.

Sadly it was time to say goodbye to the coast for the time being and head back inland. But that was OK as it was time to visit some of the key geological and historic sites that Turkey has to offer.

We left delightful Kas on our way to the town of Pamukkale. Pamukkale is renowned for three key things: natural hot springs, amazing white cliffs, and ancient roman ruins. Oh, and roosters apparently.

After a few hours of driving, we arrived into town. Since it was the middle of the afternoon and as a result super hot and bustling with tourists, we had an hour or so to relax before heading to the sites to check everything out.

It is quite remarkable to see everything all together in the one site, almost like a big amazing coincidence. We started at the far end of the site to work our way through the ancient site of Hierapolis. They sure knew where to build the city back in early BC, as they had the luxury of having a site founded on natural hot water, and as a result being able to have some amazing hot roman baths.

Ibo gave us an orientation walk to let us know the main features of the site. It was quite a big area, and was split into a number of smaller areas, with nice warm pools scattered around to relax. We made our way to the cemetery to see many sarcophagi scattered about the landscape. It was pretty crazy to see so many columns still standing and so many ruins about that we were able to explore.

Given it was still super hot, Kate was keen for a bit of time to relax rather than keep running around. So what did she get up to? Why not have a bunch of tiny fish nibble at your feet for a while? Hhhmmm….

Not being my cup of tea, I decided to continue exploring. I made my way up the hill to the huge amphitheatre that sat atop the hill. Part of the the main stage had seemed to have been restored and looked quite amazing. Even though it was so hot it was quite relaxing to sit up above Pamukkale and stare out over the ancient ruins.

By this time Kate’s feet were nice and nibbled and we had just a little time so we popped into the museum part of the site. Much of the very well preserved statues and sarcophagi were taken from off the site and placed in the museum. This seemed like a good move as they were in immaculate condition. We even got to see some more Medusa.

Time was disappearing, as was the sun, so we decided to start heading back to our hotel. By heading back, we made our way slowly down the incredible white cliffs that tower over the town. We were able to walk right down them, as long as shoes were off. Even though there was warm water flowing all over the place, it wasn’t particularly slippery.

The cliffs are formed by hardened calcium carbonate, so they are always changing a bit. With the amount of water running down them, and the amount of tourists climbing the cliffs, I imagine they are always in a bit of a state of flux.

As we made our way down larger pools would be there to soak the feet. Some tourists took the opportunity to completely submerge in the pools, but Kate and I just did a bit of casual splashing about.

The white walls and dropping sun gave an opportunity for some more wacky photos. My shadow puppet skills were pretty lacking, so we just decided to strike some classy poses.

After an hour we reached the bottom, our feet feeling nice and supple from walking on cliffs and soaking in the water. After a quick bit of dinner, we had the opportunity to visit an actual real Whirling Dervish ceremony. Only about half the group decided to take part, but Kate and I were super keen.

Rather than a tourist show, this was an actual ceremony that is conducted each day. We took some seats in a dedicated space (that was pretty sparsely populated) and let it unfold.

We weren’t able to take photos during the actual ceremony, but it was actually really haunting. Two musicians played music and sung, and were then joined by 4 others, 3 of whom were performing the “whirling” part of the ceremony. One guy in particular had an amazing ability to have his dress soar around him.

After about an hour the ceremony wound to a close. We were all quite spellbound by it. To conclude the 3 whirlers came back to do a quick final bit where we could take photos. Sadly the pictures can’t capture the grace of it all.

And with that another day in Turkey came to a close. It seemed we were all now very sleepy and tired and looked forward to a good nights rest before our next day of adventure.