And so I am off on my travels again. My journey actually began in the wonderful town of Luton. Myself and Phil, my travel companion for this journey, decided to spend a night here since our flight was at 6am next day. I can't say much for Luton other than I was glad I only had to spend no more than 8 hours there. After a very early start and an uneventful flight we made it to Istanbul. What should have been a quick 50 minute bus ride into town from the airport turned into about 2 hours when we got stuck in traffic waiting to cross the Bosphorus to get to the European side of Istanbul. When we finally did make it over the bridge it was a pretty impressive sight. The Bosphorus is a wide strait connecting the Black Sea to the north with the Sea of Marmara to the south. As you cross, on what I'm told is the fourth largest suspension bridge in the world, you can see huge mosques and minarets on both banks of the strait. We arrived in Taksim square and after unsuccessfully attempting to get a bus down Sultanahmet, where we are staying, jumped in a cab and took the easy option.
We've spent about a week here and just been doing the tourist things. The highlights would have to be Haga Sophia a huge building that started life as a church, later on becoming a mosque and is now open the public. The building is immense, it's hard to explain how impressive it is. It is quite strange though to see stone glass windows depicting Mary and Jesus alongside Islamic symbols. The Basilica Cistern was also great to see. Anyone who has played tombraider will enjoy this place - an underground cavern with tall columns all very moodily lit.
I was persuaded, by Phil, to go to a Turkish bath and get a massage. This involved getting covered in loads of soap and then being contorted and pushed around by a big fat Turkish man - lots of fun I can tell you.
We've also done a few boat trips, the first southwards to Princes Islands. These are some islands where a Sultan exiled all but one of his sons, so that they would not kill the son he had chosen to succeed him. Although they were exiled they still lived in large palaces and has a pretty good life. We stopped at one of the islands and hired bikes there, spending the afternoon cycling round the island. The other tour we did was up the Bosphorus to the mouth of the Black Sea. It took a couple of hours to get there, we stopped at small village called Anadalou Kavagi and walked up quite a steep hill to some castle ruins. We then had a seafood lunch at the top of the hill overlooking the Bosphorus. The food was great but we got attacked a by a loads of wasps and the largest hornet I have ever seen in my life. The two boat trips we did really gave us an impression of how big Istanbul is, it seems to stretch out endlessly in all directions.
Well Istanbul has been great if a little expensive; the weather hasn't been too great - it's rained a bit which has made Phil really happy - so we're now heading south along Aegean coast in the hope of chasing the better weather.
I am uploading photos as I go along. I'm just been posting on facebook at the moment as smugmug has been too slow to upload to, but don't worry you don't need a facebook account to see them. Below are the links to the Istanbul galleries - sorry I've been too lazy caption to them. I may get round to it due course...
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment