Day 6 The second day in Göreme I went out for some 17 km hike with two women from Canada and California. Directly north of the town there is a rock massif consisting of several small and compact valleys, each of which is a little bit different from the others in terms of landscape and rock formations. I can tell you that you hike really slowly in this landscape - about every 100-200m you have to stop to take a picture of the rocks! Actually those valleys have been populated by several thousand people until the 14th century. The inhabitants were [View Full Entry]

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Day 5 Before sunrise I arrived in Göreme, a small but known town in Cappadocia. Cappadocia is a spectacular region I have been dreaming to go to probably for years already. It is known for its amazing rock formations and early Christian heritage. Unfortunately, at 6:00 a.m. in the morning there was nobody in the hostel reception, but the entrance was open, so I spent the 2nd half of the night in my sleeping bag on a terrace couch, seeing the sunrise and some balloons going in the air (1st half was on the night bus). After checking in I first [View Full Entry]

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Day 4 Arriving with the night train from Istanbul at dawn I reached Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. Welcome to Anatolia! As you will see in the images, this place is already quite different from Istanbul. I stored my backpack at the station and went into the city getting awake, bought some fresh bread and cheese for breakfast and after that basically just walked through the centre. Ankara was a very small settlement when it was declared capital by Atatürk in the 1920ies and since then grew to a population of almost 4 million. Thus the architecture is mostly modern [View Full Entry]

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Day 3 The third day started with even better weather than the second one. However, Topkapı Sarayı (Topkapı palace), the residence of the Sultans, is a must-see, so I did not change my plans to visit it. First I had some nice baklava and a çay for breakfast, though. I missed it in the hostel because of the late walk back from Beyoğlu the day before. Topkapı was the centre of power of the Osman Empire, so basically something like the White House and the Pentagon / Kremlin for several hundred years, before the empire declined. It is really a huge [View Full Entry]

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Day 2 On my 2nd day in Istanbul the weather was very promising before noon. So I decided to spend the day with visiting some of the city's various quarters instead of going into a museum. First I walked around a little bit in Sultanahmet (where my hostel was located), which is today considered the old town of İstanbul. Then I took the ferry to Üsküdar on the Asian side of the city. Üsküdar is pretty much a "normal" lower and middle class quarter, so I could observe "usual" life ın Istanbul here. While I was on the ship it actually [View Full Entry]

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Welcome to Tomek's Turkey Trip As some of you already might know I took the late plane from Amsterdam at 20:50 after work. I was in the hostel in Istanbul around 2:30 a.m. and very tired, so I just went to sleep of course. Before dawn still I was waked up by the Muezzin - thats probably one of the best ways to start the day in Istanbul! After that I never heared him again - maybe got already used to it. One warning beforehead: On the Turkish keyboard there have the Turkish "ı" in place of the English, and also [View Full Entry]

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