Blogs from Turkey, Middle East - page 17

As we drive eastwards, away from the region of Cappadocia, we start to see an even more mountainous area emerge. The roads wind along narrow, twisting valleys between the mountains following the contours as we go. I've got the lucky front seat next to the driver (we swap seats in the bus every journey to make sure no-one ends up stuck at the back feeling sick the whole time). I start to see that all these mountains have terraces cut into the sides but they are not deep enough to grow crops. Instead they have been planted with tiny new trees. It's an incredible amount of work to have completed and I learn that it's to help prevent erosion. It must also be doing something towards balancing carbon emissions. We have a few stops at roadside ... read more

We are all on a high from our hot air balloon ride and find it odd to be arriving back at our hotel at what would be our normal breakfast time. It feels like we've had half a day already. We're heading off on more activities later, but we have a bit of time relaxing at our cave hotel reading, going for short walks in our little valley and round the top of the cliff, watching a couple having wedding photos with our hotel as a backdrop and generally soaking up this unique location before we go. In the afternoon our bus driver picks us up and takes us to the start of a walk through the alien landscape of Cappadocia in one of the valleys near Goreme. We stop at a particular rockface where Burak ... read more

This trip was a bit of a surprise to us. Our plans for Easter were to fly to Bangkok and then try to organise a trip to Myanmar, but for some reason the price of the flights to Bangkok never seemed to drop. I think we may have been spoiled by the £360 bargain we bagged last year with Oman Air, it’s set a precedent I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to match. This meant I was scouring the flight search engines for flights to ‘somewhere new’ which was the only guidance I’d been given by Faye. Jordan has always been somewhere we’ve wanted to visit but flights weren’t far off what we’ve paid to visit South East Asia, the cheapest being with Turkish Airlines, via Istanbul. The flights for the London-Turkey segment were ... read more

‘Best of the best’ is a pretty big claim for anything, but that's what we'll be seeing today according to Burak. Best of the best - Aspendos First attempt at being the bestest is the amphitheatre at Aspendos. We have to drive about 25 miles out of Antalya to find it and when we arrive we waft through the turnstile barriers with our trusty museum VIP card. The information board tells us this area was known as Pamphylia and that one of the most impressive cities in this area at the time was Aspendos. Ok, so what about the amphitheatre? We walk through a high ceilinged tunnel, niftily bypassing the museum gift shop, and enter stage right of the most imposing, and virtually complete Roman amphitheatre left in the world. It's truly amazing. The stage backdrop ... read more

I know my limits and boats rocking, swaying and turning while anchored up is definitely one of them. I'm not exactly feeling very 'Intrepid’ (my tour company's name) as we set off for our boat trip from the tiny fishing port of Ucagiz, near Kas, one of the most southerly parts of Turkey on the Turquoise Coast. The thought of being stuck on a boat feeling completely nauseous and not able to get off fills me with dread. It doesn't help when lots of kind people in the group try to reassure me 'You’ll be fine, no worries’. Obviously none of you have been stuck on a lobster dory waiting for the fisherman to haul up his pots and sort his catch whilst bobbing about and turning round and round on the anchor. OMG I wanted ... read more