Blogs from Sinop, Black Sea, Turkey, Middle East

We slept well having eaten in the Hotel Restaurant the night before…. Woolly says – I liked it when we asked for the menu and the man went to fetch it. He came back nearly 10 minutes later with a plate with frozen kofte and frozen chicken on it, then pointed to each and said “Kofte….Pilic” in his best English……I mean Turkish. Of course this was a slight problem for Jo. After a phone call and a lot of head shaking it appeared that Jo was having breakfast until Ian stepped in and sorted out some fish, and the meal turned out to be rather good. The food was very good and the fish was perfectly cooked, unfortunately breakfast wasn’t available so we piled a moaning Mammoth into Ollie in the morning and headed off following ... read more

Sinop Accommodation and food Arriving from Samsun and catching the Metro Turizm servis shuttle to the town center, I was dropped off at the meydan Atatürk statue without any idea where I was or where I was going to stay. Another passenger was kind enough to help me find the tourist office by the dock that was only able to provide me a town map of dubious utility. When I asked about reservation assistance, all I got was a pointing in a general direction where hotels were purportedly located. I walked into the café of the first hotel I passed only to be denied while the next hotel was quite nice but asking 50 or 60TL and I thought I could find something cheaper. Plus, I did not want breakfast included (breakfast almost always part of ... read more

"Seek my part, devote myself. My small self. Like a book amongst the many on a shelf...." -Eddie Vedder We have read that the Black Sea is actually quite new in geologıc time. It seems that what is now the sea floor was perhaps once inhabited by homınids of some derevation before risıng sea levels following the last ice age flooded the vast basin. The interplay between legend and science is an interesting matrix as both fields essentially belie the existance of fact and thus maintain a wide catchment for interpretations and understandings. The current human population here on the Turkish north coast share such a wıde range of ideas, not only about the character of their fair sea, but of the future of their world at large...... "The sea turns black in winter", "fish ... read more

As so often happens in the Army a soldier gets married and his first assignment after the marriage is overseas unaccompanied. This is what happened with us. Robert and I traveled back across the country to CA one more time to drop me off while he served a year unaccompanied overseas. Well I was never one to back down from a challenge so a few short months into his tour we convinced my parents to pay for my plane ticket overseas. So I picked up my life and moved to a westernized Muslim country. A rural town on the Black Sea called Sinop. I lived there for nearly 6 months before the PKK terrorists made it unsafe for American's to be living in Turkey. Thankfully Robert's tour of duty was cut short as the base was ... read more

Welcome back readers! We're gettıng ınto our last few days ın Turkey, and thıngs are startıng to get hectıc as we work our way back to Istanbul to meet our traın (and pıck up our carpets). We moved on from Amasya yesterday to a small fıshıng town named Sınop on the Black Sea coast. The bus rıde was very excıtıng... Turkısh bus drıvers thınk nothıng of ploughıng down the mıddle of the road. The horn ıs used often to tell people to get out of the way, and I thınk the ındıcators are only paınted on because I've never seen a drıver use them. The bus wound around some faırly gnarly roads that weren't especıally flat. In fact a lot of the road looked very sımılar to the roads on the Coromandel Penınsula - very steep ... read more