Category: Turkey

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had so much fun visiting some of western and central Turkey’s deservedly popular sights, made all the more special by sharing it with Mum and Dad. They don’t have their own blog on which to defend themselves, so I can tell you that the reason there was a pause in us publishing blog posts was because they kept encouraging us to drink beer 😉

However, we were also excited to explore the lesser-known places on our overland route. Mum and Dad waved us off on our afternoon bus to Sivas, and we were once again alone and heading into the unknown.

We’d only planned to stay overnight in Sivas before catching a (very) early train the next day, but after reading a bit more about the city, we decided it was worth a proper visit. We’re glad we did as the city had beautiful architecture and a really nice buzz to it. When we arrived, there was a honey festival underway. Just to explain, my posing cue in the photo below was to act like a bee (actually, I’m not sure if this explains my expression at all, but there we are).

The next morning, we explored some of Sivas’ incredible examples of Seljuk medrese (schools), with elaborate carvings and turquoise details.

We’d seen lots of Ottoman-period houses from the outside (for instance in Xanthi and Antalya) but had never been inside, so in the afternoon we headed to explore Abdiağa Konağı. Here, we met Mr Muhabbet, who kindly showed us around his family’s former home and, with the help of Google translate, gave us some details about daily life. He also directed us in a proper photoshoot so we have some great photos of us ‘living’ in the house – some highlights below!

We also had a go on the piano, which we understood was not typical in a house of this period. It was incredibly hard work, as you needed to pedal furiously on the bellows to make any sound. It’s a good job this clip doesn’t have audio – I was making a right racket.

After we’d toured the house, Mr Muhabbet invited us to share some tea in his kitchen. Again with the help of Google translate, we had a lovely chat and drank many cups of tea (although I think our definitions of ‘many’ might be different – Mr Muhabbet told us he drinks 50 cups a day!!) We tried to pay for our tour, but Mr Muhabbet told us a story about how he’d met some other travellers and gave them a lift from Alanya to Antalya and they offered some money so he threatened to drive them back to where they started! Suitably chastised, we instead asked his permission to write about him and his house on our blog. Mr Muhabbet, thanks so much for your friendly welcome – it was so lovely to meet you.

The next day, we travelled to Erzurum in eastern Turkey on the Doğu Ekspresi – more on this to come in the next post.

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’s bizarre landscape formed as a result of volcanic eruptions and millions of years of weathering. The result is a sea of fairy chimneys, mountains, and canyons. While our hot air balloon ride gave us an aerial view of Cappadocia’s rock formations, we also wanted to see them close up. We took a road trip to explore some of the churches that had been built into the rock further afield, as well as spending a day navigating the Rose Valley on foot.

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On our first day in Göreme, we set off for a road trip with Mick & Helen through a few of the villages south of the town. First up was a visit to an abandoned church attached to a rocky cliff in the extremely quiet town of Cemil.

I’m not sure what I was expecting to find inside, but I wasn’t expecting this.

The church was an eerie blend of vibrantly colourful columns, vandalised frescos, and modern graffiti. Slightly unsettlingly, the faces had been scratched from many of the frescos that adorned the walls. This place sent chills down my spine.

We continued on to a monastery complex just outside the village of Keşlik, containing two more churches, a wine cellar, a house and a monks’ refectory, carved entirely from caves. We were met by the site’s guardian, who listed the use of each cave in the monastery complex, and repeatedly insisted that a “complete visit is possible.”

Dutifully, we entered the first cave and were met with a dazzling array of colourful 9th-century frescos. In contrast, the 13th century cave-church appeared to have its ceiling painted black. That was until our guardian friend emerged out of the darkness with a torch, and helpfully pointed out Jesus and his disciples depicted in various biblical scenes across a number of faded frescos. These were all but invisible until he highlighted them with the beam of his torch.

As we continued to explore the monastery complex, we came across what looked like a giant millstone standing just inside the entrance to one of the cave rooms. Once again, the guardian popped up to demonstrate that it could be rolled across the room’s doorway sealing it against any intruders, therefore allowing the monks to make their escape down a tiny tunnel at the back of the cave. This level of foresight and preparation gave us a bit of insight into the fear of persecution under which these monks lived.

All this exploration was hungry work, so we drove on to the village of Soğanlı and came across this beautiful family-run restaurant in an apricot orchard. As per usual, we ordered a colossal amount of food (not pictured), and spent most of the mealtime trying to palm off our plates on to each other.

The main reason we’d driven as far as Soğanlı was explore a whole ancient city of cave dwellings. Below you can see Mick welcoming us to his cave church, while I’m demonstrating how the monks used to dine at long (and now very dusty) communal tables carved out of rock.

The return journey to Göreme was largely uneventful, save for a few cows unapologetically flaunting the no overtaking signage.

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We spent the best part of our second day in Göreme hiking through the Rose Valley. Sadly, Mick wasn’t feeling well, so we stole him some of the breakfast buffet and left him in the peace and quiet of our hotel, while Helen, Sara and I set off on foot into the Rose Valley. It didn’t take long before the landscape had turned lunar in its appearance.

The destination of this hike (besides experiencing the breathtaking landscape up close) was a trio of churches, this time cut out of the inside of some fairy chimneys.

These multi-storey rock-churches had some of the most impressive and colourful frescos we’d seen so far, although again, the faces had been disturbingly scratched off.

We’d only hiked 5 or so kilometres by this point but we were already struggling in the afternoon heat and relentless sun. But then, as if by some mirage in the desert, a cafe emerged at the top of a rocky climb just as we arrived at the second church. Exhausted and slightly dehydrated, we flopped into seats in the shade of an umbrella, and gladly accepted the offer of some freshly squeezed orange and pomegranate juice. If I didn’t have a photo to prove its existence, I’m not sure I would have trusted my own memory as this seemed such an unlikely refuge in the otherwise barren valley.

Helen became quite comfortable in the cafe, and was happy to sit tight while Sara and I continued toward the final church. However, we hadn’t gone far before Sara judged the descent too steep and decided to stop. I was determined to continue given how far we’d come, and proceeded to half-abseil, half-scramble down the path to the final church. Anticlimactically, the church was locked shut, and I returned to Sara bathed in sweat and out of breath, but with my need for completeness satisfied.

Sara took the following photo while she was waiting and is very proud of her new game of “Where’s W-Oli” (below). I should say that we think WordPress is compressing our images so this is probably virtually impossible!

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Sadly, this concluded our final day in Cappadocia, so we packed up and headed to the bus station. But then, out of the crowds popped Piotr, an old friend of mine from Hive. He and his girlfriend are on a similar journey east, also avoiding flying wherever possible. Our meeting was brief as their bus was due to depart imminently, but I hope our paths cross again for a little longer next time!

No sooner had I waved goodbye and good luck to Piotr, it was also time to say farewell to Mick & Helen. We parted ways for them to return to Istanbul, while we continued our journey east to Sivas, an important trading post along the silk road. It was lovely to travel with them for an action-packed fortnight through Turkey, and waving them them off from the bus window certainly brought a tear to the eye. We hope to see you both again soon!