Just what every person dreams of doing on their vacation...staying on a farm! Right. But for whatever crazy hobo was possessing my body that day, I signed up for a week long stay at a small farm near Datca, a teensy local hideaway about two hours from Marmaris. My partner and I looked long and hard at the farm descriptions listed through WWOOF's website (the World Wide Organization of Organic Farms), which offer free room and board in exchange for about 6 hours of work a day. Dairy farm, herbal medicine harvesting, apple orchard, wine and olive oil making farm, orang....wait, [View Full Entry]

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Don't get me wrong....Lonely Planet has treated me pretty right over the years. It's useful, applicable to all different lifestyles, and much more tolerant than, say, Rick Steves' guides that refer to Paris' Marais District as a place where "leather straps and dildos abound." Hmmm. HowEVER, I have found that a serious reading between the lines is needed to figure out just what the hell LP means by "the historic atmosphere will flavor your meal." I'm not sure I want any sprinkles of history in my meal. I'd prefer fresh local produce only, thank you very much. So my travel companion [View Full Entry]

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By the time I left Turkey after 6 weeks of travel, I was proud to boast on its behalf that I had seen only 3 homeless people or beggars during my entire journey, and all three were in Istanbul. (On the other hand, I was a bit confused by the fact that I had also seen only one Indian and one African, and they were both clearly tourists.) During the first leg of my journey, spent haunting around Istanbul, I was still in San Francisco mode when it came to street generosity -- that there would be many, many people asking [View Full Entry]

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My first day in Istanbul, I climbed the spiral, multi-colored stairs to the rooftop terrace of the Chill Out Hostel to join the morning in its half-baked daze. In the impatient congestion of horns and traffic below, the city lulled, choked -- as if, in the heat, it had no appetite for itself. The milky sprawl of Istanbul splashed like thick paint against the blue of the Bosporus below, buildings crammed together with such disregard for organization, the brier patch network of roads below all but disappeared from view. Mosque minarets, two pointed turrets that looked like tiny castles in the [View Full Entry]

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Turkey’s identity is easily mismanaged by stereotypes of a vast Middle Eastern desert populated by an unforgiving Muslim crowd and the media’s parade of imminent- disaster stories. Before I departed for a six-week trek around this mysterious country, a relative had asked, “why Turkey? Aren’t there a lot of Muslims there?” as if my life and decision to go might depend on this well known fact that had somehow slipped past me. But if it was jihaddish intolerance for Americans he had feared, then he had pinpointed the exact opposite of Turkey’s only really con [View Full Entry]

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