I arrived in Uruguay after an uneventful 20 hours which took me from Melbourne to Sydney, Sydney to Santiago and then finally to Montevideo. As I stepped off the plane and collected my bags I almost had to pinch myself; I had only received confirmation that I would be travelling to Uruguay a week earlier. The opportunity to tack on a few extra days, one at the beginning and 3 at the end, was far too tempting to resist. Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, is home to about 1.3 million people. The city is situated on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, which forms part of the border between Uruguay and Argentina. The drive from the airport was quite enjoyable. As drove along the Rambla we passed through the fancier suburbs of Carrasco it ... read more

After checking out of our hotel in Selçuk we were dropped off at the station where we eventually boarded a train to Izmir Airport which is about an hour away. At the airport we found our way to the car rental area and picked up the car we’d booked before arriving in Turkey. This car was a whole lot nicer than the previous three we had hired so far in Turkey which was fortunate as we’d be driving from Izmir to Istanbul via Gallipoli; a total of about 700km (excluding wrong turns). We were supposed to be picking up our friends Kat and Rob along the way to Çanakkale and spending the rest of our holiday with them but unfortunately they had to cut their trip short due to illness. After checking the fuel tank was ... read more

We arrived in Denizli, the main city near Pamukkale, a little than expected. Along the way our bus stopped to pick up a guy on the side of the road; it looked like his whole village had come out to say farewell. There was lots of dancing, cheering and throwing him up in the air. Eventually he climbed onto the bus and we continued on our way towards Denizli…with a motorcade of his (drunk) friends driving in front of us very slowly, weaving in and out of each other and blocking entire width of the road so that we couldn’t overtake. After about 15 minutes of that they stopped in front of the bus and the guy got off the bus to dance with them for a while longer before he finally hopped back on and ... read more

Our trip to Çirali got off to a bit of an interesting start. On the way to the bus stop in Antalya our taxi driver asked us which hotel we were staying at in Çirali. After we missed one turn off to the bus station I started to suspect that he thought he was driving us all the way to Çirali which is about an hour and a half from Antalya. When we missed the next turn off we said “bus” and eventually managed to communicate that we only wanted to be driven to the bus station, not to Çirali (if only we spoke Turkish..). After the initial misunderstanding we were dropped off at the bus station. The taxi driver was probably sad he was missing out on an excellent fare (taxis are not cheap in ... read more

Our flight from Şanlıurfa to Istanbul landed on time so given all our other flights haven’t started boarding until the scheduled departure time we figured we had time to grab some dinner before heading to our gate for our second flight to Kayseri in Cappadocia. After finishing our gourmet dinner of McDonalds, we checked the status of our flight which read “Final Call” hmm… About 5 seconds later over the PA system we heard our flight number and the words “final call” so proceeded to run through the airport to our gate (using elbows to clear a path through all the mindless wanderers). We made it to the gate in time, hopped on the bus and the stood there for about 5 minutes before it ferried us over to the plane. The flight to Kayseri was ... read more