The morning we left Syria was an early one. We wanted to get to the Turkish border early, so we were on the truck before 6am, and were ready for one of the longest travel days of the trip. The border crossing didn’t take as long as getting into Syria, but we were still sitting there for well over an hour. After crossing the border we still had about 6 more hours on the truck, and didn’t get to Goreme until around 8pm. We spent time on the truck by reading, listening to music, and BSing with the other guys in our group. Once we finally got to Goerme, we quickly set up out tents and then the group went to a local Turkish rug shop in town. The shop owner provided an overview of Turkish rugs, how they were different from other rugs in the region, and gave the group dinner and tea. Rugs were available for sale, but, seeing as how we’re jobless, $2000 for a rug was a little out of our price range.
The next morning we had a tour around the Cappadocia region (the region of Turkey we were in). This region is characterized by large rock formation known as “fairy chimneys”. They are tall, skinny rock pillars that were formed millions of years ago by volcanoes and have eroded over the years to look the way they do now. Over the past 3000 years, the people of the region have used these rock formations to carve out caves to live in, so when looking at some of the formations you’ll see hundreds of little black dots that when you get closer are manmade caves. There are also churches, mosques, and small castles carved into these formations. The campsite we stayed at even had rooms which were carved out of the mountain. It was pretty cool. For the tour, out leader took us to a bunch of the best formations to view these formations/carvings and then to an underground city. The city was used by early Christians to escape persecution. It was hundreds of meters deep and with hundreds of rooms and about 15 levels. Apparently, the entire region was littered with these underground cities and many of them connected, but now there are only a handful which are still intact and open to the public. Going down into the maze of tunnels was really cool.
We got back to the campsite around 4 and had a few hours to relax and get cleaned up before we piled back into a minibus on our way to Turkish Night. Turkish Night is this big dinner theater type thing where you sit in stadium seating around a small stage and waiters dressed in traditional Turkish garb bring you all the drinks and traditional Turkish food you can eat for about 3 hours. While you are stuff your face with lamb, salads, veggies, and humus, there are a group of 10-15 dancers on the stage doing plays, dances, and knife throwing demonstrations. During breaks in the show they invite everyone down onto the dance floor to dance. You can definitely tell who was taking advantage of the unlimited supply of booze (we were the youngest people in the crowd of about 100 or so people, and some of the older European folks were really getting after it). The final set was a belly dancer who danced for about 10 minutes and then brought out guests from the audience to try their stuff. One of the guys from our group got selected and got to make a fool of himself. Later we found out it was a big set up and our tour leader made sure he was one of the people picked. It was great.
The plan for the next day was for everyone to just do their own thing and let the people who had a little too much fun the night before sleep it off (we didn’t see our tour guide until 4pm). I decided to take a crack at doing my laundry in the morning. It took me well over an hour to do very little laundry. I can do without TV, a car, and many of the other luxuries the States offers, but not having a washing machine suuuuuucks. Erin made sure to take pictures, so my mom will be proud that I am doing things for myself. Laundry is muuuch easier when all you have to do is take the hamper upstairs and shoot your mom the puppy dog face. Once all my socks and boxers were hung up in the tree next to our tent Erin and I decided to go for run in the hills around our campsite. Sure enough, as soon as we got about midway up a pretty high hill on our way to see a panoramic view of the town, the world’s biggest storm cloud appeared out of nowhere and threated to ruin my semidry laundry. We decided to just finish the run and hope people would be nice and pull my stuff down if it started to rain. We made it up to the top of the hill (not exactly the type of run you want to attempt having not ran for 4 weeks, but good nonetheless), got some pretty cool shots of the town, and sprinted back in time to pull down my clothes. As soon as I put the last of it in the tent, the sky opened up. Not only was it rain (I think the first rain we’d seen since the week before our wedding… we’ve had amazing luck) but there was grape sized hail that pounded us. Most of us (Erin and I included) were lucky enough to huddle in one of the cave rooms, but the cook group got pelted. They resorted to covering some of the food, letting most of the dinner get wet, putting pots over their heads, and running into the truck. After 30 or so minutes the weather cleared up and dinner turned out good, so everything turned out ok.
Since we left Syria a day early, we were able to check out Egirdir in Turkey’s Lake District for a day. The drive there was beautiful. We were in a valley for much of the drive surrounded by snowcapped mountains. Erin says it looked like Switzerland (I’m not sure if she’s ever been to Switzerland, but she’s been pretty much everywhere so I’ll just take her word for it). When we got to Egirdir it was kind of rainy, but we set up our tent quickly about 20 meters from the edge of Lake Egirdir. The landscape was beautiful. There were large islands in the lake across from us and mountains behind us. Due to the rain, we hung out in the hostel next to our tents for most of the day. It was then when we discover what would take up most of our time for the rest of the trip… hearts. We hadn’t really been playing cards since Egypt because no one could come up with a game that was the right mix of easy, fun, and interesting, but hearts was all of it. By the time our tour ended we were all pros, but this first night it was a lot of trying to remember how to play, teaching everyone new that would join, and figuring out strategy. For dinner, Erin and I walked to the local shawarma stand (shocker) then went to bed early. We had until noon to explore the town the next morning, so Erin and I trekked up one of the large hills to get a good view of the town and lake. About 45 minutes in the rain started, and about 46 minutes in I was extremely bitter we had decided to make the trek. We got back just in time for us to jump on the truck with a bunch of wet clothes, but it all worked out. We got some good pictures before the sky opened up at least.
The next morning we piled back into the overlanding truck and drove to Olympos, a small town cut out of the mountains on the shore of the Mediterranean. We got there late in the afternoon and were staying at a place with a bunch of huts and tree houses spread out around a central dining/relaxing area, so after we checked into our tree house (a small little cottage with electricity, AC, and our own bathroom) we just hung out. A few of us in the group had passed around our computers and external hard drives over the past few days in order to trade music, movies, and TV shows, so Erin and I decided to watch one of the TV shows we had just got on our laptop, Breaking Bad. I don’t know if it was a good idea or a bad idea to get TV shows, but I think we finished watching all three seasons before we left Turkey (about a week and a half). I’m not sure if it’s because we haven’t watched anything for so long or what but we loved the show.
The next day we had all morning to explore Olympos. We walked about 5 minutes from where we were staying, paid the entrance fee and were surrounded by old Roman ruins which were spread out long both sides of a pretty big stream. There was a necropolis, baths, ruins of one of the oldest Christian churches in the world, a Roman temple, and a house with intact mosaic floors. It was awesome. The coolest part, I thought, was Olympos is surrounded by forests and very green, so the ruins were like nothing we had seen yet on the trip (mostly desert). You would have to push branches out of the way to go along the paths and move vines and leaves to see everything. That and there was no one around so it felt like we were discovering everything for the first time. Once we got to where the stream meets the Mediterranean we could see the remains of an old castle in the distance sitting about halfway up the mountain. I think Olympos was one of my favorite places on the entire trip. After our walk we went back to the campgrounds for dinner. Dinner consisted of traditional Turkish fare (potatoes, veggies, and a whole fish (everything but the head)) which was amazing! The next morning I woke up early to see if I could stream the NCAA championship game. I woke up at 4am and was able to watch the entire game and talk to my mom and sister, Jackie, via Facebook. I was tired the rest of the day, but it was great to talk to them and watch the game. It was a good taste of back home.
The next day we drove over to Oludeniz which is a beach resort town on the Mediterranean which is consistently voted one of the top 5 nicest beaches in the world. The water is crazy shades of blue, turquoise, and aquamarine. Just gorgeous. We set up shop at a campsite about a 10 minute walk from town. Once we got our tents set up we went into town for bowling night!!! We ate dinner at the restaurant above the bowling alley then went downstairs for some fun. It was a small little 6 lane alley and we were the only ones there. It wasn’t the nicest bowling alley in the world (we could just wear our regular shoes, flip flops, or go barefoot), but the bowling was fun and there was plenty of beer for everyone. The next day everyone just took it easy, walked around the town, hung out along the beach, and took pictures. It was very relaxing.
Next we drove to Pamukkale. When the tour leader was explaining what we were about to see I wasn’t very impressed. It was a big mountain that was covered in calcium carbonate, so it looked white, with a hot spring at the top. Once we got there and walk up to the entrance of the site I found out that it was a lot cooler than it sounds. It is this huge mountain that looks like a glacier from all of the calcium. And the hot springs run over all of it, so you have to take off your shoes when you walk up it. The water pools into these pools along the walk up that are all filled to about knee high with really warm water. The water in the white pools has a light blue look to it. It’s really amazing. At the top of the mountain is the ancient city of Hierapolis. There are a bunch of ruins at the top which you can walk through including city walls, and old street with archways, and an amazing theater. The view of the whole town from up there was pretty sweet too. For some reason Pamukkale attracts a lot of Korean tourists (we didn’t notice any really in any of the other places we went but nearly every restaurant had Korean writing on it as well), so we had some AMAZING ramen for dinner. Kind of random, but really good nonetheless.
The next morning we drove to Selcek which probably had the nicest hostel we stayed at in Turkey. We still were camping, but there was a nice pool and hang out area with a covered pool table. A few people upgraded to stay in the hostel, but we were fine with the tent. In town we were able to check out the Basilica of St. John which is the ruins of a church built in like the 600’s and has the grave of St. John the Apostle in the middle of it. I was on cook group that night and my group made some chicken risotto which, surprisingly turned out pretty good. The next morning we woke up early to check out the ruins Ephesus. These were some of the coolest ruins we saw. Ephesus was the second largest city in the world, behind Rome around the year 100AD, so there were a ton of ruins. There is a library there that is huge and really cool. There were tons of statues around as well. Many were missing their heads and we did the obvious thing and stood behind them and took their picture with our heads (internet sucks here, but we’ll def post pics soon). Also, there was the largest Roman theater we’ve seen there. We were there for a few hours and then went back into Selcuk for lunch. After lunch we walked around the market (it was market day) and picked out a few snacks (Turkish delights, pistachios, corn nut thingys) to eat for the car ride the next day… most of them didn’t make it that far however.
The next day we drove to Gallipoli, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of World War I. Our “campsite” here was the back of a bar called the Boomerang Bar. There was a beach behind the bar overlooking the Dardanelles Strait. The beach was pretty grimy, but the ground was soft so it made camping pretty nice. Erin’s cook group was up the first night there and made spaghetti with meat sauce which was really good. It was freezing in Gallipoli so a hot meal was nice. The next morning we drove through the site of the battle. The battle consisted primarily of Australian, New Zealand, British, and French soldiers against the Turks. Over 90,000 soldiers died in a few square miles here over the course of the 8 month campaign. Since our group was made up primarily of Aussies and Kiwis, visiting this site was very important. It would be the same as an American visiting Normandy. It was very interesting and we had an excellent guide who was a former history professor and is a world renowned Gallipoli historian.
The next morning we headed for Istanbul which would be the end of our organized tour. Most of the people from the group stayed at the same hostel for a few days, but we really only saw them in passing the week we were there. Our hostel was awesome. It was the cleanest and nicest place we stayed since Paris. It was right on the main tourist drag too which was good and bad, but we really liked it. The only bad part was we would have to walk a little ways to get food for a cheaper price (most of the time we were lazy and just ate close by however). The first night we walked along our street and checked out a few of the restaurants and shops. Istanbul was a mix between a European city and a Middle Eastern city, so things were very interesting. We would see one place that looked like it could be in Paris right next to a place that looked straight out of Cairo or Damascus. We ate dinner at a place that was a few spots down from our hostel. The food was really good and the owner loved us. When we got there the place wasn’t that busy, so we got to talking with the manager. Throughout the night he would keep coming over to talk and joke with us. At one point he gave Erin a guitar and told her to play. She told him she had no idea how to play the guitar to which he just told her to hold it and pretend. Erin strummed the guitar for about an hour. I guess the place also got new menus recently and the prices weren’t written next to all of the items yet on some of the newer menus. He gave us each a filled in menu and a blank menu and a pen. After we helped him out by writing in a few prices he brought out a few free rounds of drinks. He was a really cool guy and pretty good representation of the people we met in Turkey.
The next few days were spent exploring the city. We walked around in the Blue Mosque, one of the most beautiful and largest mosques in Islam. We also went into the Hagia Sophia, was a huge church built over 1000 years ago which was turned into a mosque and is now a museum. When it became a mosque, beautiful mosaics were plastered over with Islamic decorations. These mosaics were preserved by the plaster and are now exposed. They were amazing. We also walked through the Grand Bazaar which is kind of like the souks in Syria or other parts of Turkey, but much more like a shopping mall. It was much more organized than other souks or bazaars, but still pretty chaotic. During down time at the hostel Erin and I discovered that we loved backgammon, so our mission in the bazaar was to find a nice board we could use in Africa and back home. After a few attempts to negotiate with some shop keepers failed (one guy even threw out an “F America” which had me laughing and Erin shocked) we finally found a nice one which I can take Erin to school on (Erin will claim she’s better, but just ask her what the current score is). We also walked around the old aqueducts in the city and Topkapi Palace where most of the Ottoman Sultans lived. Overall our stay in Istanbul was really great.
Well that brings us to the end of our Middle Eastern adventure. I was pretty skeptical about traveling in the Middle East when Erin brought it up a few months before the wedding. Why would I want to go there? Isn’t all that’s there suicide bombers and camels? I was totally wrong. I had a blast here and I would totally recommend anyone to check it out. I think Americans (including me) take what the media says as the total truth when it isn’t always the case. I’m so glad we made this a part of our yearlong adventure and I’m ready for the next leg. Next stop Uganda!!
P.S. the beard is coming in nicely!! 2months down… 2 more to go!