Team ColJen

These are a selection of photo's from the rest of our trip into the Eastern hinterland of Turkey. You definitely get a sense that you are in the East, especially as we were travelling on the actual Silk road which used to carry trade all the way from China to Europe. This part of Turkey is also very conservatively Muslim, and coupled with it being Ramadan while we were there, it made for a very interesting version of Turkey to experience, especially after coming from Istanbul and the coast, where tourism is the main industry. We had a great time in this part of Turkey, and we can recommend to anyone to get to this part of the country if you can. The Harran village, with its bee-hive homes was especially interesting, and surprising to see ... read more

http://www.kapadokyaballoons.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappadocia... read more

The highlight of getting back on the Fez Bus was being reunited with our original tour leader Kerry who had been with us on the first 2 sectors and was by far the best Fez leader on the circuit. A large part of her appeal was that she appeared completely scatterbrained - mainly because she said everything as she thought it so, where others would try to maintain an aura of calm regardless of what was going on inside, you always knew exactly what Kerry was thinking and feeling as it happened - but despite this things always worked out and everything got done correctly which is more that could be said for most of the other tour leaders we’d had. We had 2 brilliant examples of this within minutes of rejoining the Fez Bus - ... read more

After a couple of relaxing days in Fethiye we were on the road again - for a while at least. We had only just left Fethiye when the driver decided that the bus needed a quick service (it seemed to be running fine) so we pulled into a garage, the mechanic did his thing and the bus broke and would not start. 5 days on the Fez Bus now 2 breakdowns and 2 days with no aircon - we were starting to feel that we were the jinxes. After about half an hour of mechanics looking panicked it started up again although we were all a bit concerned about how far we would actually get before it broke down again. It held on though and we made it to Kaputas Beach a stunning little beach on ... read more

Fez Bus: Sector 3 - Selcuk to Koycegiz After 3 nights in Selcuk it was back on the Fez Bus for the journey to Koycegiz (pronounced Coogies, obviously). To be honest the first half of the day was a complete waste of time with us only actually travelling about 30 miles from Selcuk and instead visiting a variety of sales rooms. We started in a gorgeous little village called Sirence where we sampled the local fruit wines which come in a variety of flavours including mulberry, kiwi, peach and pomegranate of which Col’s favourite was the mulberry (I was still a bit under the weather so had a lovely glass of apple tea instead). Sirence had been a Greek village until the “population exchange” in the 1920s (when Greek communities in Turkey were sent back to ... read more