ISTANBUL TO CANAKALLE, TURKEY—Sunday and Monday, May 5-6, 2013

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Grand Halic Hotel, Istanbul, Turkey--Sunday, May 5, 2013

Woke up and dressed to have breakfast by 9:00. As I dressed I realized that the heat and standing on my feet at the airports gave me the same rash around my ankles that I had in Moscow. It wasn’t as big a surface area nor as bright red, but I needed to keep my legs elevated. This condition is called golfer’s leg and is a circulation issue with the “rash” being tiny broken blood vessels.

We went downstairs for a breakfast buffet in a large dining room. Olives (4 kinds--2 black & 2 green) for breakfast is strange along with lentil soup, cucumbers, and tomatoes. The buffet had some of the usual European breakfast items like sliced cheeses and lunch meats, but instead of ham or bacon (no pork, of course), the meat looked like sliced liverwurst and processed meats of unknown origin.

Other cold fare included very liquid yogurt, 3-4 cold cereals, and 4 kinds of stewed fruit including hunks of quince. For hot food, there was wiener-like slices/chunks in a tomato sauce labeled as sausage, hard boiled and scrambled eggs, and a roll-like thing that turned out to have a wiener slice inside. Numerous types of bread were also available. None of the bread was the hard rolls I like, but they had a croissant-like round roll that was ok and lots of French-style sliced bread, but not as crusty.

The hot tea was British style whereby it is sooooo strong you need to cut it with hot milk, which they had. I don’t like it that way and spent the whole trip trying to use the hot water to weaken the tea enough for me to enjoy a “cupa,” without a bit of success.

After breakfast, Valerie went out to get some Turkish Lira and buy batteries, diet cokes, and canned tea as we would leave early the next day. She had to walk up two long flights of concrete steps to get to a major shopping street behind the hotel where she found a convenience store and further along an ATM. I went back to the room to get my feet up and rest. We both spent the day reading, napping, and checking our e-mail.

At 6:45pm we met with the rest of the people in the group and our tour guide from the Cosmos Tour Company and had a brief orientation to the tour and some general guidelines. He told us where several restaurants were in the area and Valerie and I headed up to one, The Big Chef, which was not far away. There we met with some of the other members of the group and had dinner together. Back in our hotel and asleep by 9:30 pm as we will have a 6:00 am wake up call. Suitcases have to be in the hall by 6:30 am.

Grand Halic Hotel, Istanbul to Canakkale, Turkey--Monday, May 6, 2013

The day started out as a foggy, foggy day and you could barely make out the other side of the Golden Horn from the hotel steps.

Istanbul is a city of 15 million people who mostly live in high rise apartments, but not as tall as the ones in Singapore. It is both old and modern depending on the area of the city you are in. It sits on 7 hills and is surrounded by water on all sides—The Golden Horn, the Bosphorus, and the Sea of Marmara.

We (41 of us + tour guide) boarded our bus and at 7:30 were off like a snail inching along in thick morning going-to-work-traffic. Even as we drove further east and then southeast out of town on modern freeways, the traffic was bumper to bumper. Wildflowers in bloom as well as neat planting along the freeways made the area very green and pleasing to the eye. Roadsides were clean and the city looks prosperous with new construction going on all over. Our guide, Aykut Gun, said that it takes about 2.5 hours to drive from east to the west side of city and almost the same time going north to the south side and vice versa.

Once we got out of Istanbul and its suburbs, the traffic became reasonable and there were farm lands on both sides of the roads. Every now and then, you could glimpse the sea to the east.

After a lunch at a roadside restaurant, we continued to drive along the Sea of Marmara then along the Dardanelles to the first major stop, which was at the Gallipolis Battle site. On 25 April 1915, a force of British Empire and French troops landed at multiple places along the Dardanelles on Gallipolis Peninsula in an attempt to capture what was then Constantinople (now Istanbul). However, some of the landings went wrong and troops were landed in the wrong positions about 1.5 miles off the mark against cliffs instead of the expected sand beaches. Most of the arriving armies were left on the beaches, which allowed the Ottomans to pour in reinforcements on the cliffs.

The battles over the next eight months saw high casualties on both sides due to the exposed terrain, weather, and closeness of the front lines to each other. One spot on the tour, you can see trenches dug in the dirt by both sides separated only by the width of the one lane road we were driving on. Bullets were firing so heavy at times that still today you can find melted bullets where they hit head on with each other.

The war has been called a Gentleman’s War as the troops on each side shared tinned milk, tobacco, and sultanas (raisins). There is a statue at one of the memorials to a Turkish man who carried a wounded Allied Commander, who was calling for help, back across to the British line.

In addition, many casualties resulted from an epidemic of dysentery, caused by poor sanitary conditions. A total of 1/2 million Aussies, New Zealanders, a few Brits, and Turks died fighting each other at this place. The subsequent Allied withdrawal by the ANZAC forces meant an end to the idea of their defeating the Ottoman Empire quickly.

This memorial park is the site of biggest defeat of WWI by the Allies. Both Australia and New Zealand still commemorate ANZAC Day and the Aussies on the tour were especially moved by this place. One of the couples from Australia even brought ANZAC cookies (a special type of cookie that was supposedly made by the wives to ship to the soldiers) to share with us. The Turks consider it a point of national pride as the 57^th Battalion won this battle, but because they had sided with Germany, ultimately lost WWI.

One of the most interesting sights was a hilltop with the New Zealand National Monument and a statue commemorating where Mustafa Kemel Ataturk was wounded with shrapnel. The place is surrounded by trenches and when you stand there you can see its strategic advantage--both the Aegean Sea and the Dardanelles are easily viewed.

We toured cemeteries and monuments of both sides and looked down from the cliffs at the now pretty blue bay and beaches where so many very young men died. There was still evidence of the ceremonies that took place on April 25^th commemorating the anniversary. For more information about this battle, consult: http://www.anzacsite.gov.au/

Growing among the pines and other evergreens was a grey-green olive looking tree with yellow blooms called a sary tree and a wild flower called the Gallipolis rose.

After driving around this site with a dozen other tour buses, we headed down off of the mountains to the beach town and sat in line to cross the Dardanelles by ferry. This narrow waterway between the Mediterranean and Mamara Seas has been extremely strategic throughout history. We watched as they loaded at least 9 big tour buses on this ferry. Several local teenaged girls, who spoke little English, tried to converse with Valerie during the crossing. Of course, the universal question is “where are you from?” They didn’t seem to know “USA,” but once you said America, they responded with “Obama.” Valerie wondered how many Americans know the name of the President of Turkey.

After about ½ hour ride, the ferry docked at the city of Canakkale and the bus then drove around by the water front to show everyone the “wooden” horse used when filming the recent Brad Pitt movie about the city of Troy. Canakkale is located at the narrowest part of the Dardanelles and you can see from the two fortresses on either side how easy it would be to defend this waterway. It seems to be a pleasant city and many people from Istanbul have summer homes here. We saw many of them as we drove to our hotel Tusan that sat near the shore with a view across the Dardanelles. Dinner was at 7:30. I had chicken and Valerie had beef kabobs. Checked e-mail and called it a night.

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