August 1, 2000

Entering Turkey from greece was not as bad as we thought except that they both get you with "port entry/exit taxes and visa fees" a kind of a low level swipe at each other but in the end the traveller always pays. We stayed at a cheerful and extremly friendly pension in selcuk, which is situated out side the ruins of Efes. efes is an interesting ruins site as it is almost a complete greco-roman city complete with libraries, public bathrooms and a brothel. It also had one of the largest roman theaters in the ancient world. Unfortunatly the site can get alittle over run these days with the masses from the cruise tours. Another place that we visited was the town of Pammukkale, this ancient town was a sort of a spa resort for the greeks and romans. we swam up there over the roman colums in the hot springs and there was also an amazing ruins site called Metropolis, that had supurb views and a very complete greek theater. Another site we saw was the St.John Basillica, which was built by the emperor Justinian. Selcuk was also a good introduction to the whole Turkish carpet store scene, which we fell into when our dolmus driver took us into one on our way to Efes! Not what we had planned, ended up explaining that we could not carry one with us and we had not made any"appointment" to buy. quite a trip!

ASSOS

We left for Assos, which is up on the north-west coast and is another ancient site with a small fishing town that has a great view of the island of Lesvos. we ended up camping by default since the rooms were alot more than we expected, we meet Cuneyt, who ran the Can Dostum campsite and was extremly friendy in that "Turkish Hospitality" way which we were beginning to get quite familar with. We ended up camping for 3 days up there, chilling,playing chess,tromping through more ruins. The campsite had great home-cooked turkish food and this old man who kept walking around, mumbling something in turkish with a tooth-less smile and then carrying on his way. We meet a couple from Australia who were staying there for a week or two while they waited for a friend to meet up with them. Everyone was quite friendly and it was a hard place to leave. In the end we sold our tent to Cuneyt and exchanged email addresses, hopefully we will be able to meet again.

CHANAKKLE

Chanakkle was on the way to Istanbul and we decided to check out the gallipoli battlefield memorial. We took the tour to the sites and found it to be quite peaceful and intriguing as a memorial to one of the biggest diasters of WWI. Spent the rest of the time exploring some of the old part of town and checking out the huge Ottoman castles that line this part of the Dardenelles.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

August 12, 2000

Istanbul is an crossroads of a city, teetering between the ultra-western secular world with clearly a past steeped deep in the Islamic glory of the Ottomans. We stayed in the Sultanahmet quarter nestled between the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sophia. This was a prime spot as the major sites are all in the area. We spent several hours in the Blue mosque, listening to the call to prays (which we agreed were the loudest we ever heard!) and watching people pray and just tool around at the beauty of the architecture. The Aya Sophia, which was built by emperor constantine to be the largest (at that time) church in the world, was also one of our favorites as it feels so old in that musty byzintine way...the mosaics were still there except for those that were scratched out by some of the more puratanical early Christians. We caught up with a couple of Australian woman that we had met in chanakkale and caught the campy blue mosque light and sound show and then later headed over to see the whirling dervishes dance in their Islamic trance, quite fascinating to watch. The next day we headed over to the Taksim bazzar to look for a Sas and Darbouka, which we found just as it was about to rain. We ate the best stuffed grape leaves and peppers ever in this bazzar and drooled over the fresh fish and veggies for sale. This one had much more of a local flair than the touristy famous Covered Bazzar.

We ended up finishing our stay by visiting the Topkai Imerial Palace, which was used by the Turkish sultans untill the 19th century. The best part was the haram which was quite richly decorated with every inch covered in tilework and intricate designs. One of our main reasons for coming to Istanbul was to get a Syrian visa. After a tram ride, bus over the bridge, and a mile walk, we arrived at the hot office with a bunch of others doing the same. It cost US citizens the most to enter, which seemed like the theme for buying things too. We got a Japanese greeting of "Konichiwa" more often than we got "do you want to buy a carpet". Once i put a scarf around my head, and had sunglasses on, it lessened. We treated ourselves with a Turkish bath in one of the oldest hammams in the city. Jon got the air squeezed out of him during his massage and I slipped and slidded all over the marble while being scrubbed. It is very traditonal to lay on the marble in the sauna room with a huge marble dome with holes for the sunlight to stream in.

FETHIYE, TURKEY

August 17, 2000

We decided to make a dash for the south coast and for one last dip into the Mediterrean to go diving. We took a 16 hour overnight bus trip complete with the extremely loud crying baby right behind us and stops every 15 min to pick up somebody on the side of the road. Our diving hilight was seeing a huge turtle swim 5 feet from us! We did a 12 island boat tour and visited the island of Saint Nicholos (aka Santa Claus) and Butterfly Valley with treehouses just off the beach. We also saw Saklikent gorge made of smooth marble. Beautiful site and trechorous hikes that could go on for miles. (Davi even took a spill and dinged her chin). On the return dolmus trip, we were invited to have dinner by a man and his sweet son who worked in Saklikent. We had a delicous meal of rice and seasoned lamb stuffed into eggplant, zuccinis and hot pepper that was quite spicy and pancakes (maybe egg and flour?) and raki (anise flavoured liquor). We stayed there till midnight exchanging english phrases for turkish ones, before catching the last dolmus into town.

CAPPADOCIA, TURKEY

August 20, 2000

Anther overnight bus dropped us at 5:30AM in this geologically bizzare region in the central part of turkey. The area is covered with thousands of cave cities carved in the soft tufa rocks that were used by the early Christians. Each valley has it's own style - rounded cones with large holders on top known as Fairy Chimneys. The mountain ranges are layered with multi colors, very similar to painted desert in Arizona. There are several underground cities.too, that the Christians used to hide from the Romans with fully self supporting environments. One morning we were awoken by a hot air ballon that landed right in front of our pension waiting for a serving of his morning chay tea in a small glass. After several minutes they were back on their way. This is something we have seen everywhere in Turkey, as many places have small intercoms outside their windows where they can callup there morning tea from the local kids with the tea trays. Another day we walked to Zelvie valley (a cave-tufa monastary city) with some friends we met from the day before and got a ride from two kids with a horse cart, who were only too kind (with a little bargaining) to cart us off to Zelvie. This was great as the walk turned out to be several miles over a very hot and rough landscape, that remined us of Joshua Tree, probably why we like it here so much.

KATHA/NEMRUT/SANILURFA, TURKEY

August 24, 2000

Since we entered turkey we wanted to get out to the east since that was the most logical route down into Syria and Isreal. We went out from Cappadocia to Mt.Nemrut near Katha southeastern Turkey. We climbed up there to watch the sunrise in the midst of the giant heads of King Arachnos and the greek pantheon of gods, all minus their bodies. The view was supurb and we shared the site with a French film crew and a Canadien who had been there 13 years prior to watch the sunset from the other side. After Nemrut we headed south toward the city of Sanilurfa, which is famed for its "Cave of Abraham", where abraham was consumed by fire and this created a sacred pool of carp fish. This city had a very definite Arab feel to it, (the erratic traffic.noisy markets,it was all there!) as we immediatly noticed after getting out of the dolmus we created a stir amounst the children who followed us everywhere through the souks. Everyone greeted us with"hello" or "welcome" and spent the day there wandering and sipping tea in 15th century Ottoman khans with old men playing cards, and children chasing each other between the tables. We ended our Turkish soujorn from a town called Harran, where they have these incredible beehive houses that remind one of southeastern adobe huts that people still live in there. We were greeted by plenty of childern, selling beads made out of dried peas and drank tea with the locals. Later, to Dagi Nabet where we caught a series of dolmus, complete with a couple of childern throwing up in the backseat with stifling 100 F+ temp., to the the city of Antayka (Antioch) where we took the bus over to Aleppo, Syria.