Istanbul, a Turkish delight

Apart from Gallipoli, since the last Turkish post we spent some time in Istanbul, which is quite frankly bloody outstanding. We both now want to write books, because that is the only career we think we can get a long term stay in Istanbul out of. Despite what the French will tell you, it is a distinctly European city (in a distinctly European country, for that matter), the gigantic mosques everywhere being the only major hint you are on the wrong side of Greece. The shopping is first rate, there is good food (and high-risk kebab) everywhere, and plenty to do. So here is what we did.

First, we walked. Despite what the Dutch would have you believe, tulips were invented in Turkey. The city was awash with them while we were there.


Like all self-respecting major cities, it has an Egyptian obelisk. Why not?

It also has a series of quite enormous and profoundly impressive mosques. This is the Blue Mosque, about 50m from our hotel, as was just about everything else for that matter. It was referred to by a young Australian guy we met on the Gallipoli trip, rather refreshingly, as "a big f#@k off mosque", which is undeniable.

Nearby is Aya Sofia, once a cathedral, then a mosque, now a museum.

Inside are the usual reminders of the greatness of Allah, but beneath those painted patterns is plaster, and beneath the plaster is the artwork of the previous cathedral, consisting largely of icons which are forbidden by Islam.

Now that it is a museum, however, the more attractive icons can be seen and books thereof purchased.

We also went to the Sultan's palace. It had some amazing stuff, like King David's sword, Mohammed's bow and arrow, four pieces of Mohammed's beard, the footprint of Mohammed (mud), daggars with precious stones the size of golf balls, and various other bits of Mohammed and his followers.

The palace is one of the reasons Turkey got into the First World War. Building it nearly bankrupted the empire, but great empires need battleships, but the money had been spent on tiles and gemstones, and commanderring various bits of Mohammed. The UK would not supply the battleships (although it took the Ottomans' money for them) but the Germans would, and the deaths of 250,000 Turks at Gallipoli are just a few short political steps away. If the Allied attack on the Dardanelles were successful, the British fleet would have made light work of the palace, so failure was not an option for the Turks.

Here is a bath in the palace. It would not have been pleasant in the Turkish winter.

And here the royal crapper.

There are rooms and rooms of beautiful tiles and art. Here is just one example.

This is the Beyoglu district if Istanbul, only a moderate walk from where we were staying. At the top of the hill is a Parisian style cluster of restaurants and stores, some of the best we have ever seen. As in Dubai, we were the obvious poor trolls who did not belong there. Security guards tailed us in the shops, watching as our grubby little fingers ruined their merchandise.

The area also has rows and rows of cafes catering to the Turkish obsession with sugar. You can buy sweets that are essentially 20cm long cylinders of sugar. Big burly men eat them on wharfs, although unlike Syrians (who Turks tend to laugh at whenever they are mentioned), the wharfies don't hold hands and sing pop ballads.

We opted for profiteroles drowned in chocolate.

These are the reserve elements of the profiterole army.

We thought we had seen it all, but just metres from Aya Sofia and underneath a bunch of office buildings is this, a Byzantine underground reservoir, 143m x about 90m. That is bloody huge, by the way. We were expecting a largish well. The roof leaks a bit but that can be forgiven after 1,500 years.

A couple of the colums are supported by inverted heads of Medusa, and no one quite knows why. This just adds to the intrigue of the place.

And we finished off our visit with some time in the Grand Bazaar.

You want it, they have it. T-shirts picturing beastiality, M-16's with telescopic sights, 1936 Vacheron Constantin watches (that may or may not work), fashionable and elegant fake Prada bags sold by big guys with bigger mullets, snow globes of the Taj Mahal just in case, the usual array of swords and lingerie shops, and glass light fittings - Westfield but catering more to the young male lager lout market.

And, like everything in Istanbul, within leisurely walking distance and with questionable kebabs in all directions.

When you sell that sort of gear, some forgiveness from above is needed, and ablution bays are conveniently located near the tea shop that is oddly the only supplier of envelopes in the whole place (not even the post office stocks them).

We are in New York now, and have been for a couple of days. We should have a post up soon, but just as a teaser, Matt has lice, the hotel lobby is full of slightly unhinged war vets and the couple in the next partition are mad rooters. It's on!!!

The Aussie Hajj

We had the very good fortune of being in the right part of the world for Anzac Day, and with 6,800 other people met at Aya Sofia in Istanbul around lunch the day before and rumbled off in convoys of white busses for the 5 hour journey down to Anzac Cove.

Before we get into the meat of the post, just a quick shout out to the Turks. The Chinese can build anything, but if they are not available, ask the Turks. We were excited about Laos and its prospects because it had a lot going for it and we wanted them to succeed, but in Turkey you can feel that they are going to succeed because they really do have their act together. Everything works, much of it looks like Paris but with friendlier people, and right from central Turkey to Istanbul it just seems like it is well run. In particular, they know how to mount a security operation. There were companies of infantry at Gallipoli (not entirely inappropriately, we suppose, with a few thousand Aussies about) and the security measures were thorough and efficient. They even banned alcohol. But moving on.

We got on site around 8pm and then had about 10 hours to kill. The Aussie and Kiwi governments set up large stands around the main stage on the North Beach. We proceeded to spend the rest of the evening and wee hours braving the freezing wind in the stands. As it turned out we massively misjudged how cold this part of the trip would be. Not that we suffered anything near as much as the Anzacs did while there, but holy crap it was cold that night.

Just after these photos were taken we donned sleeping bags and, still feeling frost-bitten, bought blankets from a smiling assassin souvenir vendor. Only $35 for two disintegrating moth-ball odoured blankets which we promptly dumped at the end of the Dawn service. Bargain.

A bunch of people came in early and slept on the grass in front of the stage. Their cunning plan backfired when they had to stand up around 3am as streams more visitors arrived. Ha ha!

More people arrived throughout the night. There were lots of amazing things to see and listen to. There was a well organised entertainment package all night, with documentary exerpts, live interviews and military band performances. Teams of volunteers on site handed out brilliant show bags with books and postcards and bio-degradable rubbish bags. And most stunning of all, around midnight a young girl arrived, sat behind us, and managed to talk non-stop until 4am, without ever saying anything of any substance whatsoever. Fifteen seconds was the longest recorded silence, 7 seconds the average. Really erudite stuff like telling her friend twelve times his sleeping bag looks gay, the type of thing that makes you want to hurt small animals. But moving on.

As the sun came up you could see the coastline the Anzacs had to run up. Some did, and made it up the top in the morning, but those advance parties mostly did not come down again. Later in the morning we went up there and it is a really long way.

There were of course wreaths laid.

And here is the beach just north of Anzac Cove. Just to make things a bit harder for an amphibious assault, the beach is made of sharp stones and the water is freezing.

The hero of the Turkish forces at Gallipoli was Mustafa Khemal, later known as Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. He personally led the charge that put an end to the Anzacs' August offensive. He became a national hero after that battle. This is one of the most famous speeches he gave. Quickly after the war he tried to engender a spirit of goodwill between the Brits, French, Aussies, Kiwis and Turks. Aussies are frighteningly popular around here, despite the fact that the official Ottoman casualty figures were 88,000 dead, but unofficially 250,000 dead, and a couple of hundred thousand injured. About 8,700 Australians died here.

The national park has a number of cemetaries, filled mostly with Australian troops. Many of the cemetries are at the sites of individual engagements.

The festivities include 4 services: The Dawn Service, the Aussies service at Lone Pine (below), the Turkish service, then the New Zealand service. This is also the Turkish national week, and official festivities, particularly the military ones, focus on Gallipoli.

The Lone Pine cemetary is a couple of kilometres walk up some hills, then it is nearly 2 hours up hill to the New Zealand ceremony, past the Turkish ceremony which we missed. It was hard going. On the way up you can still see the trenches.

But up the top you get a great view of Suvla Bay, the site of another assault during the Gallipoli campaign.

If Matt's overtired memory serves, part of that assault included the Aussies and Kiwis pushing up to the high ground. This is the Nek, where about 300 Australians died in a few minutes, charging machine gun positions with bayonets. The piece of land is, as they say, the size of a tennis court. That charge is the final scene in the movie Gallipoli.

At the same time the New Zealanders were to assaullt the highest hill in the area, but the New Zealand colonel refused to follow the order to assault during daylight, and waited until conditions were more sensible. A battalion started up the hill, and 700 died, with the commander being killed by a British battleship's shell when he got to the top. A day or so later Ataturk led an Ottoman charge that dislodged them, leading to the inescapable view that all those young men did for very little.

Just to add to the carnage, the Turkish tactic for dislodging Anzacs holding the high ground was human wave, so their losses were extraordinary as well. Ataturk was hit by shrapnel, but in a Blackadder-esque moment it hit is pocket watch and just left a large bruise.

This is the walk up the Chanuk Bair, the New Zealand position referred to above.

This is a farily common choice of outfit on site.

The New Zealand ceremony was probably the best. Less prayers and more personal stories from diaries and post-war accounts. It was finished with an unscripted haka from a bunch of young visitors, whiche received loud applause.

People say that this is a kind of pilgrimage, and that's what our tour T-shirts said that is what it was, hence the reference to the Hajj in the title. It's something that really helps you understand Turkey (because it created the personality cult that allowed Ataturk to completely change the country), and something that is worth doing once. Visiting Gallipoli has also made us appreciate just how incredibly difficult the conditions would have been for the Anzacs, and how futile and disastrous the entire campaign was. They were truly courageous and inspirational men.

The only downside on the brilliant organisation on site was that our bus driver tried to pick us up 10km away from where the group was waiting, so we didn't leave the site until 4pm and got back to Istanbul around 11. Those of you who have seen us tired and emotional (Sal ...) would be amazed at how we coped after 40 hours awake. We are still married, just.

Southern Turkey

Greetings from southern Turkey. You may be familiar with the Evil Eye, a ubiquitous Turkish traditional piece of glassware which is meant to reflect evil back to the wrongdoer, thus protecting minibuses, souvenir shops and the like from harm. This is what Turkey looks like through the Evil Eyes.


The wine list does not look great, we have to say. Penny has become quite the connesieur of undrinkable wine, and Matt managed to get a coffee flavoured beer, which was slightly worse than it sounds.

The bread has been epic.

The olive selection is just showing off.

But it is good to find a country that really understands cheese.

And there is no shortage of oregano for the spaghetti and pizzas that discerning tourists turn to when day 5 of a stomach upset beckons.

We have been roughing it, if you can call airconditioned bussess and small hotels roughing it, around south-western Turkey. One of the stops was Ephesus, said to be the best preserved Roman ruin town in this part of the world.

It had plenty of cats...

And the artistry under the awnings of this building were pretty good ...

But it frankly had nothing on Palmyra or Jerash, in Syria and Jordan respectively. Epheses was, however, full of European tour groups, so maybe its perceived accessibility and smaller numbers of crazy Bedu are its big drawcard.

The other big drawcard of Ephesus is the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. This is what it used to look like (and note the little man indicating some of the finer details, because it would not be a Roadshow blog without a picture of a penis) ...

And this is what it looks like now.

It is suggested by promoters that a column remains, but it seems to have been hastily erected to provide a tourist attraction and now serves as one of the world's most expensive homes for a birds nest. The stones of the temple was pilfered to build a Christian fortress just up the hill.

Just to press a cultural point, the Turks in Germany (the largest population of Turks outside of their home country in the world) behave in a certain way. Everyone who has spent some time there knows it. It involves a lot of hair gel, body building and the like. It is not just an integration problem.

The next stop after Ephesus was Pamukkale, another ancient Roman ruin, but this time with crazy limestone pools.

It is a major tourist attraction, and the area just in front of the ampitheatre has been turned into a restaurant for (mainly) German tourists. Some of the columns and the like have been submerged into a heated pool to provide a lovely paddling experience for only $23 per person, plus $6 for a bottle of water. Emperor Hadrian would be choking on his olive oil if he could see what the Huns are doing to his temples now, but he might have taken some comfort in the extortionate prices they are paying.

Then it was down to Kas, on the south coast. Note the sleeping man in the mountain.

It really is a stunning little resort town. The German crowds migrate here in summer when it is 51 degrees.

On our first full day there we went sea kayaking around one of the islands. Earthquakes have submerged a Byzantine town to just below the water line, so you can paddle over houses and see bits of pottery in the shallow water.

And the area was also home to the pre-Greek civilisation of the Lycians, who were responsible for these tombs. They were repeatedly invaded by the Persians, and repeatedly thrashed, history tells us, and there are hundreds of these tombs scattered around the area. One of the villages, Xanthos, even rates a special mention in the annals for fearlessly fighting vastly superior Persian armies on two occasions hundreds of years apart down to the very last man, so that both times the population had to be regenerated thanks to the men who happened to be out shopping at the time. Twice - unbelievable.

As always there is a crusader castle on the small island where we went kayaking.

And here is a nice little view over Kas from one of the hiking trails overlooking the city. If you look closely and use some imagination you will see a catamaran steaming over to the next island, which apparently belongs to Greece.

It wouldn't be a blog post without some cats - these ones found us at a restaurant where we were talking to some musician who is apparently famous, but we were sufficiently oblivious to just chat to him ...

And while walking around this bay one day down to the small restaurant way, way down there underneath a cliff ...

This helpful young guy showed us the way.

We are Istanbul now. We arrived late at night only to discover we didn't have a hostel booking afterall. So much for successfully travelling without a tour guide to hold our hands. We are in some emergency accommodation tonight, which looks frighteningly like Matt's place in Fortitude Valley, and we are off to Gallipoli tomorrow. Look for us in the news. We should be in about row 533 on the left.