Turkey

For the second time in my trip I was leaving the cozy, relatively familiar confines of Europefor a country that, for me, was a bit of an unknown. Turkey was a country I was always going to visit, but which I knew very little about. I had a faint idea that Istanbul was quite European, but apart from that I really had no clue what to expect. I'm slightly ashamed to say that once again I was mainly influenced by Hollywood cliches and I came to Turkey expecting much of the same hassling and hustling that I experienced while in Morocco. But I was shown that attempting to understand a culture without actually seeing it first hand will leave you with a very two dimensional perception, and that only once you've witnessed first hand the subtle complexities, can you really know what a place is like. And so despite what my western upbringing had told me, Turkey was nothing like the backward, rural, conservative place I had imagined, and that little bigoted part of my brain that was trying to inform me 'Dude, they might be terrorists' was clutching at straws because I can't imagine a more peaceful, modern, and secular example of an Islamic country.

OK, so maybe their game shows don't reflect that, but trust me, they're sound. I was traveling with my Peruvian/Swedish/American friend Mike, and we arrived in the port town of Marmaris in the late afternoon, with just a couple of hours to check out the town before catching a bus to Fethiye. A couple of hours was more than enough for Marmaris, as it was basically a town designed to flog a glossy DisneyTurkey experience to tourists on day trips from Greece. It was actually quite funny to see, because there was basically one massive main street with new pavements, bright neon signs, fountains, and other features to make westerners feel comfortable, with the inflated price tags to match, but once you went like one or two blocks back from this McStreet, the place turned into a regular Turkish city, which is still modern and attractive enough, just without the whole song and dance, and with prices about a quarter of that near the port.

It was a nice enough place to kill a couple of hours, but after snaring some cheap eats in the back streets, we were aboard our bus. Well, I say bus. Turkeyhas two main forms of transport for tourists. One is by bus, and the other is by dolmus, or mini bus. The big buses in Turkey are the best I've experienced anywhere. Not only are they all brand new, they also have tv screens in the back of the seat in front (a la airplanes), internet (sometimes, although they all say they have it), and most importantly, a guy dressed up in a butlers uniform, complete with bow tie, who serves you coffee and snacks (all for no extra cost) while you cruise around the country. Oh, and I almost forgot, you also get complementary lemon scented hand wash stuff at the beginning of the journey, which Mike and I originally refused, but then realised we weren't getting the full experience without. The smaller dolmus buses are where you get your real local experience. If these large modern buses are the arteries of the Turkish transports system, the dolmuses are the veins and capillaries, as they do all the shorter routes, and travel pretty much anywhere, with drop offs and pick ups anywhere along their routes, with people sometimes jumping on in locations so remote that you expect quite an entertaining back story to accompany their embarkment. It's on these dolmuses that you'll have your backpack shoved between some guys sack of potatoes, and another persons cooler full of cheese, and that you'll end up sitting wedged between any crazy mix of the local population, from primary school kids, to people born before a time where covering your mouth when you cough was a thing. Anyway, for our first trip we headed onto a dolmus and set off for Fethiye.

Fethiye was a cool first place to visit in Turkey. From my limited experience it seemed to be the archetypal Turkish southern coastal town, with a combination of modern stores, street markets, and European bars, all sandwiched amongst a few thousand kebab stores. The town was beautiful without being exceptional, but did have a few special attractions. One was its' own mini version of Petra, where some old guys had carved castles into the side of the cliff faces above the town. People back in those days must have been pretty shallow though, as it was purely aesthetic, with a grand facade backed by a single room barely large enough to house an Asian student studying in Sydney.

My other favourite place in Fethiye was an abandoned town about ten kilometres hike away. The town was once a Greek settlement, but at some point in the early 1900's, Greecesurrendered the land to the Ottomans, and in order to consolidate this land as Turkish, they drove out the Greek inhabitants and ordered some Turkish people to move in. Unfortunately the Turkish villages at the time were quite a lot better than the Greek settlements, and so the Turks who had been told to move in didn't fancy a downgrade, and town was left to rot. It's a bit of a shame for the poor Greek people who had move out, but it does make for a glimpse into a possible apocalyptic future, being able to see what happens to a town which goes untouched for one hundred years.

The old church, complete with quite intricate and well preserved tiled floor.

The old fort, sadly the town was conquered by bureaucracy, not force. They should've invested in red tape instead. 

As nice as Fethiye was, there was only so much to see and do in town, and so Mike and I were off to our next destinations. Mike was going scuba diving, and I was off to Olympos, and so we parted ways, planning to meet up in a few days time. Olympos ended up being a pleasant surprise for me. I only went there as an after thought, partly because I realised there wasn't much to do in Fethiye in the winter months, but mainly because I learnt that a mountain near Olympos is permanently on fire:

That mountain was Mount Chimaera, home of the fabled beast of the same name that was a combination of three animals (manbearpig?) and apparently spat fire. I didn't manage to find the Chimaera, but I did find the flames. You can see the flames from quite far away (apparently they were once clearly visible from sea), and once you get to the clearing where all the fire is emitted, you are greeted with an eerily lit rocky plain, where you can sit and admire the view of the ocean below. What really made it fun was that I had the whole place to myself, as this was now the beginning of December, and all the tourists had cleared out for the season. I ended up staying up there by myself for a few hours and eventually got a bit bored and tried playing with my cameras' long exposure setting trying to make ghost pictures, but then I sort of freaked myself out realising this is exactly what some cocky tourist would do in the first scene of a horror movie, and so decided to call it a night before I became Chimaera's latest victim.

Old Greek fort barely illuminated by the flames.

The flaming mountain was what initially drew me to the area, but it wasn't the only reason I loved Olympos. This has to be one of the most beautiful parts of the world. The place I stayed was a few hundred metres walk from the beach, nestled in a valley between two undulating cliff faced mountains. As you moved further inland, the land surged dramatically skyward, with bald peaked mountains just a few kilometres away from the seaside. There was also pretty much every type of flora encapsulated in this small area, with the coastal area bearing palms and all the fruit bearing trees you'd associate with the southern meditteranean (with free pomegranates the size of a babies head growing every few blocks), which then made way for rain forests that made their way up the mountains until the mountains got so high that nothing but the most hardy plants grew.

I've seen worse.

As if this natural beauty wasn't enough, between my hostel and the beach there was the ancient ruins of the town Olympos, which is one of my favourite archeological sites that I've seen on this trip. The reason I liked it so much was that it's only been partially dug up. The great thing about that is that instead of the usual 'this is how people used to live' thing, you get to feel a bit like Indiana Jones and actually see what it's like to stumble through the jungle onto what is left of an ancient civilisation. Variety is the spice of life, and this was a nice change from the usual refurbished archaeology lego sets that most ancient sites become. Also, I had a dog decide I was his best friend and accompany me for the day. I came to the conclusion that he was a good dog, and didn't mind that he insisted on photobombing half of my photos.

Sorry to go all Mechano-Geek, but god arches are amazing structures. This is the flimsiest looking thing in the world, and yet it's survived thousands of years. Go Science!

Squirrel!

It was really cool to be able to walk through the woods and just stumble upon massive sarcophagi hidden amongst the bush. Every so often you'd come across a partially uncovered room, or burial chamber, and while there might be something hidden within, the allure of not knowing I think provides far more fun than having it uncovered and placing a plinth in front that reads:

'This was a storage chamber. The people used it to store things'

I even managed to go for a swim, even though it was now December. This wasn't even a case of 'Ooh, I can probably tough out a swim just so I can have an example of why England's climate sucks when I get there', it was genuinely beautiful weather, and the water was still perfect (I still used it as an example of how rubbish England climate is though). It would be a great place to visit during summer, although I fear it may lose some of its' charm when it's crowded with thousands of locals. The place did have a bit of a deserted feel to it. I was staying at a hostel which had room for a few hundred people, which was one of about 50 different hostels in the area. The place looked a lot like it was set up for mayhem, with bars and hostels alternating all the way to the beach. But I'd be willing to give it a shot in summer, as even a swarm of German tourists surely couldn't hide the beauty of the place.

Bar, hostel, kebab shop, repeat

The one other discovery I made in Olympos was that the free breakfast I had received in Fethiye wasn't a speciality unique to that hostel, but the exact same breakfast that is served nation wide. This was in no way a bad thing, as for the rest of my trip every morning began with Turkish bread, Turkish cheese, olives, cucumbers, tomatoes, boiled eggs, devon (OK it wasn't all great), and Turkish nutella and jam. This was all washed down with an unhealthy amount of Nescafe coffee. You know how sometimes you travel somewhere and you realise that missionaries have beat you to the place and while some of the culture is left, it's now been whitewashed with Christianity. Nescafe must've done that to Turkey, because the country is addicted to it. You know how when you want a bandage, you ask for a band-aid, or how Americans ask for a Kleenex instead of a tissue? The same goes with Nescafe and coffee in Turkey, because with the occasional exception where you can get genuine Turkish coffee, all you get is Nescafe. Anyway, usually I had to wake up earlier than my preferred waking time to get my free breakfast, and so Nescafe became my saviour on many occasions, and I spent most of my time walking around Turkey double time, amped to the gills on strong sweet instant coffee.

After a brief, but very enjoyable, time in Olympos, I was packing my bag into a Dolmus and getting ready to head to the heart of the country. For those reading this who remember my last blog, Mike and I have a habit of randomly bumping into each other. We'd run into each other at a trivia night in Athens and while staying at the same hotel in Rhodes. We'd agreed to try and meet up at the bus station in Antalya, before sharing an overnight bus to Cappadocia, but neither of us really knew how we would find one another once we got there. Luckily we never need to worry about that sort of thing. It was a Sunday night, and all the dolmuses were packed full of people coming back to the city to begin the next week. I ended up having 6 different dolmuses refuse me because there wasn't any room. When I finally found one with a spare seat, I got the shock of my life when I heard a knocking on the window and glanced up to see Mike laughing his ass off inside.

After a short ride up the coast, we some time to kill in Antalya bus station, but it ended up being a quite entertaining time. Like a lot of places in Turkey, the bus station had metal detectors to stop any would be terrorists from doing any terrorising. This is great in theory, except that invariably the metal detectors are operated by the most apathetic guards you've ever seen. Those things would go off for pretty much every person that went through, and the guards never even gave a second glance. All the metal detectors did was prevent bombs larger than the metal detector getting through.

The other thing we passed the time with was observing the local men showing a bit of man love for one another. It is one of the more bizarre contradictions I've witnessed while travelling, that in Muslim countries where homosexuality is pretty seriously frowned upon, the men are so damn touching feely with one another as to be one innocent misunderstanding away from becoming what they so seriously deplore. When a couple of Muslim men speak, they hold hands. I always thought this was just when they talked to tourists so we can't escape their sales pitch, but they do it to one another as well. Then there's the hugging. With conservative laws preventing many young lads from publicly snuggling with their beau's, they instead resort to a bit of man on man canoodling, One man leaning into another mans' shoulder when he's a bit tired is considered a perfectly acceptable thing for a heterosexual man to do, whereas, in the supposedly tolerant west, I’ve seen men choosing to walk along getting completely saturated, rather than share an umbrella with a mate, for fear of breaking the hetero man code. I don’t know which of these is a tad messed up, but I think it’s probably both, and heterosexual men are just a confused species in general. Anyway, Mike named this outpouring of mantouch 'Bro-ing out' and the name stuck, and we spent a large portion of the rest of our trip 'bro' spotting.

While Turkey's coasts are as beautiful as any of the coastal areas of the Mediterranean, the centre of the country is possibly an even better place to travel. The first place we checked out was Cappadocia national park. This place could've been straight out of Utah (except for its’ lack of Mormons) as it was an awesome mix of melted away canyons and multi coloured layers of rock. The place is perfect for hiking, and as this was low season, Mike and I were able to traipse through the whole park with only a couple of spots where we ran into another tourist (unfortunately one of those times happened to be while I was mid flow in a much needed toilet break). The place was really stunning, as the photos will hopefully show, and so, naturally, I introduced Mike to the concept of the jump shot:

What a lot of the trail looked like.

Luckily the weather on the right of the photo stayed away until the very end of the day.

The hike was quite long, something like 16km, and we almost stopped when we got to these curious structures:

I'm calling crane shenanigans

But luckily we decided to push on and finish the last four or five km's, as we were rewarded by coming down on top of my favourite part of the park, a massive single piece of rock which looked like it had been selectively eaten away by acid, leaving more 'chimney rocks' (like the ones above), but also a surreally smooth undulating rock face draped above sudden cliff faces below.

And of course I jumped on it

The only real downside of the whole day was that we decided to pay the exorbitant fee to go into the 'open air museum'. I thought this might have been where some of the above natural formations were found, but it turned out to be a whole bunch of man made caves that were once churches. This was pretty disappointing, but determined to get our moneys worth, Mike and I did our best anthropologist impersonations, and were able to bring you the following easter eggs from the open air museum.

Church, one of about 50 in this small area. Someone let out the secret of carving a hole and then putting a cross on it and then the market was instantly flooded.

Ye olde cavee tablee

Proof that religion once recognised evolution, as we see a picture of the Darwinian legged fish.

While they might have recognised evolution, they were still into molesting cute things, however this time is was turtles, not choirboys.

And they liked to rock.

The biggest disappointment about the open air museum was that the exact same kinds of caves and churches were littered throughout the rest of the park, plus they were much more fun to get to:

It was a great days’ hike, and as you can tell from the gloomy lighting, we reached the end of the trail just as night was falling. We managed to hitch hike our way back, which was lucky, as it started pouring just as we got into our second ride back (after our first ride only took us half way before asking if we would pay $50 to go the remaining 2km's). The one last memory I'll include from that day is one to show you that while jump photos may seem all fun and pretty, there is blood sweat and tears that goes into getting those photos for you guys (I take no pleasure in them, I swear), and sometimes the best spot is not always that easy to reach, especially to people lacking coordinated.

On our second day we decided to check out some of the surrounding area. Around Cappadocia are a whole bunch of underground cave towns and other natural attractions, as well as a whole bunch of local towns. We decided to rent a car, and were joined by a cool Japanese guy (whose name I’ve completely forgotten). It was a good choice to take the car this day, as it started snowing pretty heavily about an hour into our trip. 

We started the day out with the intention of see two of the underground cities, but after the first one we figured there's only so many caves you can see in one day, and that for the most part a cave is a cave. It was pretty tough for me to walk around the underground city, as I was about a foot taller than pretty much everyone else in the caves, and apparently about 2 feet taller than the original inhabitants, and I spent most of my time looking for holes going through two levels so I could finally stand up straight for a few seconds.

The Japanese guy demonstrating my patented back realigning technique.

This gets old very quickly

World's most confined jump shot.

From there we headed through the blizzard and checked out a crater lake, the mouth of a canyon, and the alleged spot where a scene from Star Wars was shot (upon conferring with Google, that turned out to be very creative marketing). At each destination we briefly got out of the car, froze our asses off, then hurried back in the car, always locking the Japanese guy out and driving away (he always fell for it). The highlight of the day was definitely getting in a snow ball fight with some guards at the 'Star Wars' site. We were just walking along looking for a good spot for a photo when all of a sudden a snow ball went whizzing between Mike and the Japanese guy. We looked across the road to see two guards cackling to themselves. Naturally we grabbed as much snow as we could and began pegging it back. That is one thing I loved about Turkey, and something that I found all over the country, the locals have a great sense of humour, and are really easy going and fun. 

There's a canyon in there somewhere.

Where we were ambushed by the Turks.

Not everyone survived the war in one piece.

The day was a lot of fun, but the cold weather did end up putting a kibosh on the next part of my trip. Mike and I had decided to ignore all the advice we were receiving, and head out east to a place called Mt. Nemrut. It sounded like an awesome place, a mountain with an artificial peak, and a bunch of huge stone heads near the summit, but apparently at this time of year the temperature at the peak was pretty chilly, and the mountain covered in snow. We were still keen on heading out there, right until we realised that the peak would be minus eight degrees celsius the day we were going, and that the temperature had only gotten as low as minus one that day while driving around. We decided to file Mt. Nemrut under 'next time' and instead headed west to Pamukkale.

Pamukkale is a massive carbonate structure formed by deposited minerals from the volcanically warmed water that flows down the mountain. It looks like it's a giant rolling hill covered in snow, but it's actually covered with rock hard minerals that house warm baths, which are especially nice in the winter months. As seems to be the Turkish way, they also threw in a massive archaeological park on the back side of the baths, and just in case that didn't mean there was something for everyone, they added puppies!

A little bit of a back story is needed here. The day I left for my European trip, here's what my parents diary must have looked like:

9am: Take favourite son to the airport
1pm: Lunch at Yum Cha
3pm: Buy puppy which Caedyn will never see in puppy form, to punish him for leaving us with only the back up child for 12 months.

In possibly the most hateful act ever engaged in, by what had up until that point been perfect parents, they bought a puppy! My parents aren't rash people, they understand the responsibilities, and the commitment required to bring an animal into the family, so this was without a doubt pre-meditated, which begs the question, couldn't the dog have been bought maybe one or two days earlier? Anyway, karma came around, as the dog they bought didn't really grow, and as far as my family is concerned is still puppy sized (we usually have Great Danes), and I met enough fluffy bouncy puppies at Pamukkale to forgive any wrongs that may have come my way! Unlike my parents, I am generous enough to share the puppy experience, and so here are three videos of puppy goodness.

Apart from walking around patting puppies, we also decided to make this day a grand send off. The following day Mike was off to Istanbul, while I was heading back to the west coast, and so we grabbed a whole bunch of beers, some Raki (drinking lighter fluid made it from the Balkans to Turkey), and proceeded to get drunk, jump in the just warm enough pools, and wiled the day away while giving the peace sign to the few thousand Japanese tourists who took our photos.

Greek Ampitheatre at the back of the archeological site. The white baths start just over the hill at the back of the photo.

With a little bit of a hangover, and a touch of sadness, I was once again on the solo backpacking trail. The problem was, it was now without a doubt the off season in Turkey, and I think there’s a chance I was the only tourist in my next stop, Kusadasi (with the exception of one Dutch guy who was on a sexual vacation with a Turkish girl he met on the net. Had to scrub myself very clean after my conversation with him about how often he's done that). While this was good in some ways, it was a tad boring, as I just didn’t share much in common with the locals. The Turkish people are great, and really good fun and good natured, but that's only enough for a shallow relationship, and I found it hard to find anyone who I could progress the conversation past either the fact I was from Australia, or from a misogynistic debasement of womankind. Luckily Kusadasi and it’s surrounds was enough to keep my attention and I spent a couple of laid back days in the town. It’s a quite pretty port town, and apparently one of the main stops on the cruiseline circuit (Jarrod and Helen had stopped here on their honeymoon cruise). This is mainly due to its’ proximity to the ruins of Ephesus, one of the most impressively well preserved Greek ruin sites in existence. It’s also near the alleged (I think there’s about 40 of them) birthplace of the (alleged) virgin Mary. While I had no interest in visiting the birthplace of the woman with historys’ best poker face, I was quite interested in the ruins of Ephesus.

Ephesus' main attraction

Ephesus' second main attraction: The first ever Starbucks.

To be honest, I was a tad overexposed to marble ruins by this stage, and while impressive, I spent most of my time at Ephesus mulling over the collective experience of my times visiting the remains of ancient Greece. Archaeology tends to fall into the category of study that can fall prey to the bogan-like thinking of ‘we spent ‘ow many farkin millions diggin’ dirt outta tha ground?’, but I really fall for the romance of it, and I think it is as worthy as any forward thinking research. I think more than anything else it shows us exactly how human we are, and how the societies that we can’t imagine life without, are something we should never take for granted. By studying the past for what caused societies that had governance, democracy, art, sports, and economies to fracture and disband, can help us look forward to how to improve our own flawed societies. I think there is a tendency to think that simply because we are sequentially more recent than earlier societies, we are by default the evolutionary superior to them, and while we may now possess the technology to sext, and tweet pictures of our every meal, there are still some technologies that we are yet to reach the levels of previous civilisations.

For example this road, even after weathering millennia of damage, and a few earthquakes, is still superior to anything produced by the Wingecaribee shire (my home town, sorry, in joke).

I think it also teaches us to value what is truly important in our society, and to prioritise the direction we want to move in. Too often we are stuck worrying about the minute and the inconsequential, with petty discussion consuming the popular thought. I think this comes from a tendency to ignore that not only are we mortal, but so in all likelihood is our society. We worry about what we’ll save should our house burn down and we only have a minute to escape, but what about when our civilisation runs out? What do we want the rabbitoid beings that succeed us to learn about us from the artifacts they so efficiently burrow from the ground? The way the mentality of the masses is running currently, they will just find crap. Plastic crap, which we bought with the tax reduction that we complained hard enough to get, at the expense of funding artists, creators, people who produce things that can span not just eras, but civilisations. I think that’s one of the things that I loved about Ephesus. They have a museum on site dedicated to stone tablets containing thousands of words of writing. Some of these just contain the laws of the time, but some include poetry and stories. I think that these, plus the murals that persist in some of the buildings give as great an insight into who our predecessors were as any of the physical structures that we unearth. The buildings we find give us an idea of the way society worked, but their art tells us who they were.

I can’t help but think that if more people thought as archaeologists do, and had more of a concept of how finite our existence is, we might be able to aim a little higher than we currently do, with our petty politics, and our lives spent accumulating crap. I think the lesson that history teaches us is that we need to preserve our ideas, culture, and our art, more than anything else. One of the greatest tragedies of the ancient world was the burning of the Library of Alexandria, which meant the world lost historical tomes from many of the greatest writers forever. And so with this in mind, I think it’s about time we chiseled Harry Potter and 50 Shades of Grey into stone as soon as is humanly possible, and as many times as we can!

That rock is responsible for that rant, so don't blame me, blame the rock.

All that high mindedness and romanticism aside, archaeological sites can tend to get a tad repetitious, and after my first few sites I found myself generally whacking in a pair of headphones, and strolling around amusing myself with the various oddities that are associated with these places. The thing that probably amused me more than anything is seeing people queuing to see the most innocuous things, like the ye olde public toilets.

'Oooh, people used to poop back then. Oo I feel just like a Gladiator now.'

The idea that someone would one day dig up my house and then sit around ogling my loo is pretty bizarre, but hey, different strokes for different folks.

Apart from my visit to Ephesus, I spent most of my time in Kusadasi just wandering around. The town was picturesque without being spectacular, and I had a pleasant enough stay, but I admit I was a tad bored. It also didn’t help that you only ever seem to see Turkish men out in public and in bars. Turkish women are pretty much non existent. Luckily my hotel didn't have hot water, so the two problems canceled each other out. I was definitely treading water killing time at this point, and did spend an inordinate amount of time in my hotel room watching the only two channels in English, which unfortunately were MSNBC Money, and Bloomberg. But on the bright side, I did learn that I have no interest in going into the finance world whatsoever, so at least I learnt something. 

It also didn’t help that you only ever seem to see Turkish men out in public and in bars. Turkish women are pretty much non existent. Luckily most of Turkey also doesn’t have hot water, so the two problems tend to cancel each other out.

View of Kusadasi.

Double rainbow!

From Kusadasi, I was off on an Aussie pilgrimage to Gallipoli. For those of you who aren't Australian, Gallipoli was the location of a battle during WWI where Australia lost a massive amount of troops. The battle was remarkable for many reasons, but mainly because it's seen as where Australia gained consciousness as a nation, and finally began to move away from the influence of the British. This had a lot to do with the disregard shown for the lives of young Australians by their British superiors, and the date of the battle, 25 April, is still used to mark our rememberance day for the troops of Australia and New Zealand.

I ended up doing a guided tour of the Gallipoli sites as the weather was pretty cold, and the chance of rain high, which sort of made me feel a tad ashamed, as here I was worrying about a bit of rain, when my forefathers had fought through rain, snow, heat, and mortar attacks. But I consoled myself with the fact that they were fighting so that I could have the freedom to drive around in a heated bus with a nice Turkish tour guide. The tour ended up being worthwhile, and the guide really knew his stuff, and thanks to there only being Aussies and a few Germans on the tour (remember, it's not officially a tour unless there's a German), he really let the Brits have it, which was nice. I like to think that I've always had a quite healthy respect for our soldiers. I've always loved the bumper sticker phrase: 'Pacifism is a luxury paid for with the blood of warriors'. My birthday actually falls on the day before ANZAC day, and so I'm pretty much always awake for the dawn service. Sure, I'm drunk, and haven't yet gone to bed, but I still think it counts. (I also usually end up getting woken up by the sounds of jet fighters going overhead, which quite nicely snaps you out of a hangover with a huge shot of adrenalin). I expected visiting Gallipoli to effect me in some way, but I wasn't prepared for just how much. Finding out the night before that my great grandfather had fought there, and that he'd lost his best friend the moment they set foot on the beach, definitely added to this.

The whole area of the battle has been turned into a national park and you can walk along ANZAC beach, see the Sphinx (a landmark in the cliffs above ANCAC cove), see sniper's valley, and wander around the thousands of grave sites. It was a truly horrendous place to fight (the Australians spent their whole campaign fighting up hill), and the stories from both the Turkish and ANZAC sides were quite remarkable. Here were a few of my favourite ones:

One of the remarkable things about the battle was the closeness between the Turkish and Australian forces, despite the fact they were enemies. One of the reasons for this was because the trenches for each side were only about 8 metres apart. This led to the battle becoming essentially a 'gentleman's war', as due to the closeness of the two sides, chemical weapons, and mortars weren't able to be used. It also meant that the two sides could communicate freely with each other, and apparently they would swap rations with one another during cease fires, with the Aussies swapping bully beef for Turkish sweets.

On the right, I'm in the Aussie bunker, and on the left is a guy in the Turkish bunker.

One of the most remarkable events of the conflict was when an Australian soldier was left wounded, bleeding out, and unable to move in no man's land, with the Australian's unable to reach him as they would be fired upon. A Turkish soldier then raised a white flag on his rifle, climbed over the bunker, and carried the Australian soldier to the Aussie lines. What is even more remarkable, is that this Turkish soldier was in fact Richard Branson:

Either that or Charley Boorman.

We also visited the location of the siege immortalised in the movie 'Gallipoli', where the Australian soldiers were sent over the trench walls to be mown down by Turkish machine guns. Actually seeing where this occurred really brings home just how horrific this was, and just how incompetent the people in charge were. Apparently the Turkish soldiers were screaming for the Australian's to stop, as the Aussie's were charging along an area completely devoid of cover, which was on a narrow shelf on with a valley dropping away either side.

About 4 metres behind me it drops away. So they were running across open ground, being funneled into the width of a tennis court.

It would be remiss of me to not mention the Turkish brigade that essentially won the battle for the Turks. The ANZACS actually landed at the wrong location. If they had've landed correctly they would've walked straight up to the highest point on the island with little resistance, and the whole campaign would've ended very differently. Instead, they landed at ANZAC cove, where the Turkish army were able to fire down on them. However it was only one small unit. This unit initially retreated to find reinforcements, whereupon they were met by a senior officer who told them that they would fight until they were all dead, as only then would there be enough time for reinforcements to arrive. And sure enough this brigade was totally wiped out, but their sacrifice brought enough time for the ANZAC's to be prevented from capturing the peak. The Turkish army actually retired the Brigade number to commemorate the soldiers who sacrificed their lives.

Anyway, I could wax lyrical about Gallipoli until my voice was hoarse and my back covered in southern cross tattoos, but it was a great experience. I also managed to get down to the south of the harbour to where the British landed, and to where the Turkish monuments are. The whole place is really moving, but also staggeringly beautiful, and it's hard to conceive that so much pain and sadness could occur somewhere so paradisically tranquil. But as terrible as the war was, it does leave you feeling proud of not just the Australian forces, but of the humanity shown by the Turkish soldiers, not just during the war, but after, in acknowledging all the members of the conflict with equal grace and decorum.

The southern point of the west bank of the Dardenelles, where the British forces landed.

Turkish grave site.

Turkish memorial

Where the ANZAC's were supposed to land (turret is from WWII)

The Sphinx

ANZAC cove

While I was in the area, I also checked out the location of another quite famous battle, Troy. To be honest Ephesus had sated my desire for archaeological sites, but this was Troy, and Brad Pitt fought there, so I thought I'd check it out.I started off my visit standing out front of the site screaming 'HECTOR!!' repeatedly,  but they told me to either leave or buy a ticket. The site is nowhere near as sexy as Hollywood portrayed it to be, and it's only partially excavated. There wasn't much to see, plus the trojan horse replica they had was pretty bloody tacky. The one in the town was far better.

Troy

By this stage, I had well and truly had enough of Turkey's smaller towns, and was ready to check out the nations' Metropolis: Istanbul. I was lucky enough to be joined for this part of my stay by my friend from Berlin, Ronja, who was flying down for a long weekend away from work. It was great to finally have someone to chat to, and I think she might have regretted coming at first, as I talked her ear off unloading a weeks worth of inane, oddball, observations onto her, but she seemed to take it in her stride and not mind too much.

Istanbul was a cool city, and there was quite a lot going on. In the interest of brevity I'll revert to point form recantation, as this post is probably already testing even my most interested friend.

*The food: Ohhhhh the food. Actually the food all over Turkey was amazing.  While their savoury selections are quite good, where they really shine are the desserts. I spent most of my time in Turkey having one meal that included boring things like 'vegetables', and 'nutrients', and then the rest of my meals composed of various delectable sugary concoctions. First there's the Turkish delight, which tastes nothing like the crap we get in the west. It's stuffed with pistachio's and almonds and peanuts and is really mouthwateringly delicious. Then there are the chocolate sauced profiteroles, which are rich, dark, and thick, with light pastry and creme acting as a counterpoint to the decadent sauce. Oh, and halva. This is ground up sesame seed, mixed with honey and sugar and I assume cocaine, as I've been addicted to the stuff since I was a kid. They also have freshly made soft candy, which is so good that even someone who doesn't normally go for lolly like sweets, like myself, will gladly gobble it up. But the thing I loved the most were their crazily coloured assortment of puddings. They combined some of the weirdest flavours and colours into a layered pudding spectacular, that I ended up scoffing until I could barely walk.

Dinner

Lunch

* The Mosques:

Istanbul contains somewhere around one mosque for every ten inhabitants. But a few are particularly impressive, especially the Blue Mosque and its’ neighbour, the Hagia Sofia. I’m not actually sure what the Hagia Sofia is exactly, as it started off as a Christian monument, and still bears many frescos and paintings of Jesus flipping the shocker sign.

See? Told you.

Even as a kid!

Whatever it is, it’s a beautiful building. The Blue mosque is also quite spectacular, especially from the outside.

However, as with most Islamic buildings, the inside is more functional than overbearing. I think religious buildings say a lot about their religions. Christian churches tend to have lots of grand paintings and frescos painted by famous painters, because their church is rich, but their sermons are boring, and you kind of need something to look at to pass the time. Islamic places of worship on the other hand tend to have lots of intricate repeated patterns inside them, which is quite representative of the attention to detail that their religion partakes in, with 6 calls to prayer a day, and lots of ritual accompanying every part of their lives. They usually are much more functional, as they all represent a functional place of worship, as opposed to the tourist attractions that many famous Christian churches have become. The Anglican churches tend to be drab and boring, because they’re English, and because their religion was invented so a King could get a divorce. The churches were just an afterthought. And Buddhist and Hindu temples look like giant fluoro kids birthday cakes with ten thousand figurines stuck on the side, because they have to represent all of their hundreds of Gods and they’re located in nations that house billions of people, so they need to stand out, or nobody would ever find them. I have no idea about Orthodox churches, but I’m guessing they all have kick ass liquor cabinets.

Anyway, the Blue mosque is a perfect example of this, and while not awe inspiringly grand, it is a nice place to be…well at least for the men. The women get chucked up the back in stalls. Yay, religion!

The man prayer area.

The women's stall, right up back.

*Underground Cistern

The underground cistern, is a cistern that is underground. I don’t really know much more about it. I think the Greeks built it. Anyway, it’s eerily beautiful, has a couple of foundation stones that are carved into Medusa, which are laid on their side and upside down (which apparently has some meaning), and is a really nice, cool, and still, place to escape the chaos of the city above. Oh, and they have the most inappropriate café in the world located down here, which almost (but not quite) ruins the whole charm of the place.

Medusa, mid hand stand?

Having a nap?

Even McDonalds thought it was too crass, so they had to make their own place.

*The Grand Bazaar Markets

The markets here are quite impressive. A big, beautiful, indoor building with a wide range of products ranging from the from the upscale, (jewellery stores and fine silks and carpets) to the budget (mainly fez’s and knockoff sneakers). I’m not really in the habit of buying souvenirs, but luckily I got to try out my haggling skills when buying a pair of shoes to replace my now completely destroyed Vans that had started the trip with me (it’s weird, but it was really emotional throwing them away). I also got to try my haggling while buying a Christmas present for Ronja. She’d decided to buy me an iPhone cover to replace my broken one  so I, thoughtfully, went and bought her something to take back on the plane with her.

What a thoughtful present.

In fairness, this was the iPhone cover I got. 

*The Worlds’ greatest ever apathetic employee of the month photo

The answer apparently is 'No, making me employee of the month DOESN'T excuse you from the sexual harassment case I filed'.

* The Centre of the world

The Ottomans originally had a giant monument at the point that they considered to be the centre of the world. All that now remains is part of one of the columns.

The centre of the world, and centre of the universe align.

*Going to Asia for the day.

Istanbul has a foot in both the continents of Europe and Asia, and so as a novelty, you can visit both continents in one day. I tried to walk from one to the other, but the bridge I tried to cross didn’t have a pedestrian lane (and Turkish drivers don’t do sharing). But luckily there’s a short ferry from one continent to the other. I was really excited about the idea of setting foot in Asia, right up to point that I realised that I’d actually been in Asia for most of the time I was in Turkey, and had only crossed over to the European continent when visiting Gallipoli.

As close as I got to having a foot in two continents.

*Hustling and Hassling

Istanbul struck me as a pretty safe place. I walked around the city at all hours of the night, and all I ever encountered were friendly people. But apparently that’s not always the case. I met quite a few people who got scammed in the cities' bars. Most of the poor bastards were Asians, but it usually went: pretty young girls come sit with guy, order drinks, disappear, massive bouncers appear and demand payment of girls' drink, which apparently contained pure saffron, as it cost $200. It happened to quite a few people I met, so there’s a travelers tip, never buy Turkish girls drinks! But that was nothing compared to the announcement on the tram which said:

‘In the likely event of larceny, please notify a policeman immediately’. At least they don’t sugar coat it.

As far as the hassling goes, it’s nothing compared to Morocco, but you do tend to get pretty much every food proprietor telling you how much you want to eat there, and Ronja’s favourite, the perfume sellers who always had the same spiel. In fact it was so identical, and we heard it so many times, that we started messing with them, and the moment they presented the perfume we’d say:

‘We only want it if it’s good quality, black market, and for good price’. The momentary glee in their eyes when they thought ‘that’s what I was going to say, this sale will be easy!’ was totally worth bearing the glare we’d get when it’d hit home we were messing with them.

Apart from that, Istanbul is just a beautiful energetic town to walk around. I managed to catch a free football game from the hill above a stadium, watch the thousands of guys fishing off one of the main bridges, climb Galata Tower at sunset and watch as the city lit up, and generally had a really great time. Once again the people were a large part of what made the place so enjoyable. They had their shortcomings, for sure. They didn’t really understand the concept of personal space, and when getting on the tram they’d push and shove their way on before anyone had a chance to get off, and then grab a handle and stop right in the middle of the doorway, essentially shutting off the flow in both directions. But apart from that they were quite nice. You knew they wanted your money, but it wasn’t the be all and end all, and they were ectremely generous when you did end up buying things from them.

Stolen Egyptian obelisk. Very bizarre, but these are everywhere in Europe.

Ye Olde aqueducts, but also a study on Turkish drivers ability to stay in their lane (in Germany you'd have six perfect white lines on ze left)

Free seats, right behind the riot police that accompany every single Turkish football game (they average more casualties than goals I think)

24/7 fishing

View from Galata tower.

One of the many, many markets.

And that was Turkey. Ronja grabbed her male torso and crammed it and herself into her economy class seat and headed back to Germany, and I headed to the civilised civilisation and uncivilised temperatures of England, ready to celebrate Christmas, and relax in London for a month and recharge my batteries for my assault on Asia.

So Merry Xmas everyone, and a happy new year!!! (I really need to keep more up to date on this blog don’t I).