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Published: August 6th 2007
Ruins of Ephesus
It was quite amazing just wandering around this ancient city ruins...We have made it to turkey and have spent the last 5 days here. The flight from Helsinki to London went well, the night spent at Luton airport while waiting to check in at 4am was pretty painful. Even worse was the end of the flight when we arrived in Istanbul, a little boy on the plane appeared to develop chicken pox marks during the flight over. There was a mini quarantine scare as we all had to wait in the plane on the tarmac as the boy was checked out.
We eventually made it and it was all worth it. Turkey is quite an interesting place to visit. The people are overly friendly and seem to love Aussie's and Kiwi's (especially in the cities around Gallipoli). The architecture of the buildings and mosques in the old town of Istanbul are also quite interesting and different from anything we have seen before.
We spent 2 days in Istanbul of which we saw the main sites; The Blue Mosque, Aya (Sancta) Sophia, The Grand Bazaar and the Old Town (Sultanamet). We actually stayed in the Old Town which was very convenient as we were literally around the corner from both
The Blue Mosque - Istanbul
Was quite amazingly huge... The Blue Mosque & Aya Sophia and could see them both from our balcony (2nd place we stayed). Also on our last night in Istanbul we went to a Turkish 1001 night show which was basically a lot of amazing belly dancing, folk dancing, Turkish music and some tasty Turkish food.
Our next stop was a tour of Gallipoli which was quite a moving section of our trip. It was amazing to actually stand on the beach looking up to the mountains where so many people lost their lives over. You relies that the whole Gallipoli campaign was such a pointless waste of human life. It was also a bit sad to see the road dissecting both the hillside at Anzac cove and the trenches (where the Turkish and Australian trenches were only 8m apart) but you could still image it all.
The next day we did a Troy tour. It was interesting to see all the different cities of Troy from the different periods of time, built on top of each other. It seems they would just fill in the previous city (whether it was destroyed by earthquake, fire or war) with dirt and build a new
Anzac Cove - Gallipoli
It was quite Errie to stand there looking at Anzac cove and remembering just what happened here. It was a shame about the road disecting it however... one on top of the ruins of the last city. The actual ruins however aren't that impressive and the reconstructed Trojan horse is more a child’s play equipment than the one written in legend. The Hollywood version of the horse sits on the ferry wharf at Cannakale and appears to be much more 'realistic'.
We are now in Selcuk staying at a backpacker’s resort that is pretty awesome. They have a pool and there is a very chilled yet happening atmosphere around the place. Today we went to a museum and St John's church (who supposedly looked after the Virgin Mary here). We followed that up with some lazing by the pool in 40+ degrees temperature waiting for it to get cooler. In the afternoon we went to the ancient ruins city of Ephesus which was pretty amazing. You could just walk through the ruins, some of which are 2000 years old. It was much more impressive than Troy but unfortunately the concrete 'filler' they used to fill in the missing gaps of certain ruins did reduce the general 'wow' factor of the place.
From here we head to Greece, tomorrow where we'll spend 6 nights in the
The Real Trojan Horse
Well as Hollywood belived. This is the actual prop used in the recent Troy movie with Brad Pitt. Greek islands (Mykonos, Ios and Santorini) and a few nights in Athens before flying back to the UK.
We're still both surviving. Holly's pink eye continues and add to that a sprained ankle, a grazed elbow & a wasp sting (from Ephesus) and you have one determined little trooper who's still seeing and doing as much as she can. It's also not all bad as I now get to use fun new nicknames like Limpy, Pinkeye and lucky... 😊
Cheers,
Lew and Holly
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