Author: Sara

With Mum and Dad joining us for a couple of weeks, we didn’t want to slow our progress through Turkey (and they didn’t want to stay in one place either), so we had to consider how to coordinate getting from place to place. They were not very keen to join us on some of our less comfortable transport options (understandably) but equally we were still keen to avoid flying unless absolutely necessary. The answer was obvious: a Top Gear race!

Journey 1: Istanbul to Izmir (📌479km)

🐇 Team Hare (Helen and Mick) flew from Istanbul to Izmir on Turkish Airlines

🐢 Team Tortoise (Sara and Oli) took an evening ‘high speed’ train from Istanbul to Eskişehir and then an overnight train to Izmir

	Team Hare 🐇	Team Tortoise 🐢
Time	1 hour in the air (but 6.5 hours door to door)	17 hours (!) including a midnight layover in Eskişehir
Cost	£106.44	£23.24
Carbon	104 kgCO2e	40 kgCO2e
Comfort	6/10	4/10
Comments	“The hot cheese and sundried tomato roll had great potential but was (literally) thrown at us just before the wheels came down for landing and we had no drinks as they ran out of time. So nil points for cabin service. The trip involved many hours of hanging around.”	“Wow, those trains were slow! But it gave us a bonus day in Istanbul and saved a night’s accommodation, so no major regrets. Sadly no cheese sarnies for us – we stealthily drank wine from a decoy water bottle instead.”

Verdict: If only one of us had actually thought to check driving directions, we would have realised that we could do the journey by road in about five hours! Although Team 🐇’s flight was short, they still lost the best part of a day on transfers and waiting around, so this is pretty compelling. A car share between the four of us would have been similar in emissions to four seats on Team 🐢’s trains (we’re a bit surprised by this!) but more efficient than flying, so we would have saved 64 kgCO2e carbon overall.

Journey 2, 3 & 4: Izmir to Selçuk | Selçuk to Pamukkale | Pamukkale to Turkish Riviera (📌538km)

Team Hare 🐇 and Tortoise 🐢 combined efforts in a hire car, driven by Dad with navigation by Oli, playlist (and carsickness threats) by Sara and snacks by Mum.

	Team Hare 🐇 & Team Tortoise 🐢
Time	1 hour + 3 hours + 4 hours
Cost	£427.02 (hire car for 8 days) + £50.56 (diesel) = £477.58
Carbon	125 kgCO2e
Comfort	10/10 (what a team)

Verdict: This was a really comfortable way to travel for four people together. The Turkish roads were consistently good (with the obvious exception of the dirt road on which our villa near Çıralı was located, but we knew about this in advance). The same couldn’t always be said about the drivers on the Turkish roads, but isn’t that just the same anywhere?

Journey 5: Turkish Riviera to Cappadocia (📌633km)

🐇 Team Hare flew from Antalya to Kayseri via Istanbul on Pegasus Airlines, then hired a car to drive the remaining 75km to Göreme

🐢 Team Tortoise spent a bonus day exploring the old town of Antalya (ok, ok, we spent about four hours exploring and then the subsequent four hours sitting on a terrace, drinking beer, writing blog posts and watching the sunset). We then caught an overnight bus from Antalya to Göreme, arriving at 7.30am the following morning

	Team Hare 🐇	Team Tortoise 🐢
Time	Approx. 3 hours in the air (but 11 hours door to door)	9.5 hours
Cost	£230	£32.71
Carbon	368 kgCO2e	30 kgCO2e
Comfort	6/10	5/10
Comments	“The famous cheese and sundried rolls were nicely delivered to us in packaging with our names on. We had one on each sector! Living the dream. I only ate one and I was still digesting it a couple of days later. Our baggage was tagged all the way through and the stopover airport was quite pleasant.”	“An easy journey and about as comfortable as we could have hoped on an overnight bus. If only they didn’t keep turning the lights on at rest stops! Thankfully Oli’s invention of the Sensory Deprivator 3000 (eyemask + hood + noise cancelling headphones) tends to be pretty effective. The afternoon spent drinking beer might have helped, too.”

Verdict: Surely Team Tortoise 🐢 won this leg hands (hooves?) down!

Overall verdict

Would I do the above trips in the same way again? Absolutely not! I knew Turkish Civil Aviation was well developed but made an assumption that the road network was in poor condition. Wrong. The intercity road network is excellent and in very good condition. It would have been quicker, cheaper and more enjoyable to travel together and keep the same car for the entire trip. I don’t know why we did it the way we did. My excuse is that we only had a couple of days to make the hire car bookings and airline reservations. In the past I’ve always driven between points of less than around 500 miles. You see so much more.

Call Mick, representing Team Hare 🐇

On reflection, with four of us travelling, a car share would have been the best option, saving approximately 69% of emissions (largely through avoiding the three domestic flights). We also learnt a 17-hour lesson that there’s a good reason why trains are so much cheaper than buses in Turkey. In future, we’ll consider travelling by car as a viable alternative when there’s a group of us – we’d been avoiding it outright until now.

Oli, representing Team Tortoise 🐢

Cappadocia is a region in central Turkey that is famous for its arid landschape packed full of incredible rock formations, cave churches and underground dwellings. It’s also the subject of 2.7 million tagged photos on Instagram, many of them featuring the hot air balloons that fly almost every day of the year.

I was a little worried that we wouldn’t be able to move for Instagrammers posing for OTT photoshoots, but thankfully it wasn’t like that at all (despite the fact that we really did see a shop in Göreme that had dresses for hire to use in photoshoots – it is obviously big business). But anyway, back to the other big business of the area: taking a flight in a hot air balloon. I had always assumed that it was such a popular activity here just because it gave a great view of the rock formations from the air, but apparently it is much more to do with the fact that the region has near-perfect weather conditions for ballooning.

It’s not a cheap activity but we’ve been underspending on our daily budget in Turkey and, putting this together with some birthday money, decided that this was not an opportunity to be missed. Mum also joined us, but Dad, perhaps sensibly, decided to keep his feet firmly on the ground and thus avoided the 4.45am alarm.

In darkness, we were taken to a rough field just outside Göreme that was to be the take-off zone for the day (it changes each day dependent on weather conditions). We watched as the balloons were prepared, and I had a surprise when three small hills right next to where we were standing suddenly started to grow and I realised that they were, in fact, more hot air balloons (to be fair, I was quite sleep-deprived). Each balloon is inflated on the ground while the basket lies on its side, and then the burners are used to bring the balloon above the basket and lift the basket upright.

At this point, we hopped in and were given a demonstration of the braced ‘landing position’, which thankfully we didn’t have to use. Then it was time for take-off! We dipped down again briefly without landing as the pilot decided he fancied some coffee so the ground crew reached up and passed him a cup – this was probably showboating, but I could sympathise with his need for caffeine!

We climbed up to a maximum height of 800m, but at other points we were only metres from the ground as we flew around the valleys, over view points and watched as the sun peeped over the horizon, all the while surrounded by countless other colourful balloons. It was pretty stunning, although I did get wobbly knees when I realised quite how high we were at times.

All too soon, it was time to land. We grazed several trees on the way down, but the pilot didn’t seem overly concerned! We landed directly on the basket trailer, which was very impressive, but then had a slightly surreal few minutes where we were towed along on the trailer with all the passengers still in the basket and the balloon still above our heads. I assume this is because the area where we landed didn’t have sufficient space to pack up the balloon (there were the aforementioned trees, after all).

Finally, it was time for the landing ceremony, where the crew opened (and sprayed much of) two bottles of bubbly and then shared the remainder between glasses of fruit juice for each of the 20 passengers on the flight. Mum, in particular, was not impressed with her measly helping of bubbly!

Overall, though, it was a great experience. It was certainly more money than we would have normally spent, but it was a brilliant belated birthday celebration and something we’ll remember for a long time to come.

Later that day, we climbed up to Göreme’s sunset viewpoint to (you guessed it) watch the sunset. This was a nice spot but I think we were probably less impressed because we’d already seen the spectacular sunrise from the balloon that morning. Instead, what really impressed Oli was the opportunity to finally get a close-up view of a solar water heater (sigh).

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There are a lot of balloon companies operating in Cappadocia, and with obvious safety (and value for money) considerations, it’s worth putting some thought into which company and which flight type to choose. We did quite a lot of reading beforehand to help us decide, but some things weren’t obvious to us until after our flight, so we thought it would be worth making some notes of what we learnt. We won’t bore you with the details here, but if you’re thinking of visiting, you might find our ramblings helpful.

After a peaceful few days in Selçuk, we hopped in Mum and Dad’s hire car again to travel the 384km to Pamukkale. This small town hosts what is surely one of the weirdest sights in the whole of Turkey, and I couldn’t wait! On the way, we passed through some really pretty villages filled with flowers and pomegranite-laden trees.

We first visited the ancient spa city of Hierapolis, which sits above the travertines that were the primary reason for our visit. Having spent several weeks in Greece and then having recently explored Ephesus, we were feeling a bit ruined for ruins, but Mum had developed a taste for seeing Roman theatres and this was supposed to be a great example. It was pretty spectacular – smaller but much steeper than at Ephesus, which added to an already dramatic setting with far-reaching views across the valley.

Next up was the main event – walking (and wallowing) down through the thermal terraced pools of Pamukkale, which translates as cotton castle.

As the mineral-filled water flows down the hill, it leaves deposits that build up to form terraces of travertine rock, which then hold shallow pools of the thermal waters. From some angles, the whole area looked like a slightly surreal, slushy ski slope.

But from others, it was absolutely stunning and other-worldly.

The pools weren’t deep enough to swim in properly, but I did a good amount of wallowing.

When out of the water, the rock underfoot alternated between feeling very scratchy and dry or slippery and clay-like, but under the water it felt like the softest, silkiest silt. It’s supposed to be quite good for your skin, and given I’d dredged up a good amount during my wallowing, I painted some on my face. There’s no photographic evidence because Mum, Dad and Oli were horrified by my appearance and refused to take a photo!

We watched the sunset from the terraces, and from these photos I still have a hard time convincing myself that this isn’t snow.

We then walked back through the ruins of Hieropolis after sunset, and it was quite a sight.

That evening, I arrived at dinner a bit late because I’d been resting (I’d been unwell for a few days at this point) and Oli recounted a dramatic story of how he’d wrestled with a huge white cat who had leapt on the dinner table. Apparently he very nearly did a table cloth trick with my parents’ dinner because the cat dug his claws in when he was being unceremoniously removed. The cat didn’t manage to get any seabass, but he did get his whiskers in a dish of Cacık (turkish tzatziki) and dispersed a full bread basket all over the floor. I arrived soon after and was a bit doubtful about Oli’s tale of heroism, but my parents assured me it was true. Then again, Mum subsequently identified the wrong cat in the feline police line-up presented by the waiter, so it’s hard to know who to believe.