Istanbul

As I mentioned in my previous post, Chris and I booked a trip through Turkey during the first full week of May. Prior to leaving for this trip, we had booked only our flights and lodging, with little planning for what we'd actually be doing on the trip. I bought a tour book in Heathrow on the way out of town on Saturday morning, knowing Chris also had the Lonely Planet Turkey book. Between those books, we figured we'd have everything we needed to make the trip happen.

The H1N1 flu scare began about a week before we left for this trip. As of when we began our travels, there had been several confirmed cases in Western Europe, including the UK, but none in Turkey. All of the ground crew at IST had masks. Granted, as you can see in the photo, not many of them were using these masks particularly carefully.


Shortly after taking this photo, I got a text message from Chris. I'd booked us into a two-single bed ensuite room at a hostel in Sultanahmet, but they didn't have a room available. He was at a hostel down the street, where he'd been able to find us a place for the night. As we found out later, the hostel's reservations system was, um, lacking. I'd initially made a reservation online for four nights. However, when I realized we only wanted to be there for three nights, I tried to modify the reservation. The only way I could do so online was to cancel the existing one and create a new one. I'd done this several weeks before the trip and thought nothing of it. Apparently their reservation system was keyed off of arrival date and last name, not a unique reservation, so they ended up cancelling both of my reservations for arrival (the three-night and the four-night ones). Oops.

We ended up spending that first night in a 30-person dorm at the other hostel... not quite what we'd expected or hoped for, but I at least got a few hours of sleep. The following two nights in a two-bed, two-person room were MUCH better, though!

During our three days we spent in Istanbul, we walked all through the touristy areas, saw the Blue Mosque, Ayasofya and the other normally crowded tourist destinations.

Ayasofya Cami

Blue Mosque

The night before I left London, a friend here had told me "I know some guys who were in Istanbul earlier this spring. They said you absolutely HAVE to go to the Roman Sewers... they're unbelievable!" As I'd done little substantial research of the sites to see in Istanbul, I took the pointer and figured I'd look them up online at the airport or when we got to Istanbul. Needless to say, I couldn't find anything about them, anywhere. However, on our second day there, we did go into the Roman Cisterns. These were absolutely huge underground structures used to store drinking water for the city millennia ago. Slightly different term than originally expected, but definitely a good recommendation!


On our last full day there, we started thinking about logistics for getting ourselves to Canakkale, our next destination. According to Lonely Planet, the best bet was to just go to the bus station outside of Istanbul and find one of the bus companies that has multiple trips per hour. Before doing this, we decided to stop by a travel agency next to our hostel and see what they recommended. After a few minutes of discussion, we signed up for a two-day trip that included the bus to Canakkale, tours of ANZAC beach and other sites in Gallopoli, then also a tour of Troy.

These photos and a few others I'd taken on the trip are posted to http://picasaweb.google.com/trenshaw/turkey/. If you want full-res copies of any of these or want to see the full set of 600 or so photos from the trip, email me!