Nearly Neutral Travel – Page 57 – Sara and Oli's attempt to travel net carbon zero

Istanbul, city of cats

We crossed into Turkey by bus – our first ‘proper’ border crossing since leaving the UK. With the border formalities completed in about an hour and a half, we passed fields and fields (and fields, and fields) of sunflowers on the four hours between the border and Istanbul. We were expecting a strong cat showing in Turkey and the count steadily ticked upwards even from the bus window. We also saw lots of minarets and I suggested to Oli that we might like to count these too. Perhaps it’s for the best that he flatly refused!

We were very excited to be in Istanbul for a couple of reasons: it’s a city that’s been high on our list for a while, it marks us crossing into Asia on our overland journey (which feels like a pretty big milestone), and most importantly, my parents were coming to visit! This was much needed – it’s only been a month and we’ve already started telling identical jokes simultaneously. They weren’t even funny when only one of us was telling them, so it was high time for some outside company.

We had a day and a half in Istanbul before my parents arrived, and then one full day together in which we did some serious sightseeing.

Stop 1: Hagia Sophia

Over its 1485-year history, the Hagia Sophia has been a church, a mosque and a museum. Most recently, it was converted back to a mosque in 2020, and this meant that we couldn’t visit all parts of the building that were previously open. Despite this, it was a pretty amazing space.

Stop 2: The Blue Mosque

Our next stop was just across the Sultanahmet Park from the Hagia Sophia: the iconic Sultanahmet Camii, better known as the Blue Mosque.

Sadly, the interior of the Blue Mosque is currently undergoing restoration work and so we didn’t get the full effect of the spectacular interior. None of us could quite work out how Mum managed to take this photo (below right), which seemed to circumvent all the scaffolding across the interior of the dome! I’m assuming she didn’t climb up, but to be honest I wouldn’t rule it out.

Stop 3: Basilica Cistern

We didn’t have the best start when Oli managed to book tickets to visit an entirely different cistern on the extremely confusing website (you do have to wonder how many tourist-attraction cisterns one city really needs) but despite the crowds, this stop was a bit of a highlight. Built in 532 to provide the city with fresh water, it was a cavernous underground space supported by columns that had been salvaged (or pinched) from ancient temples. It was then somehow entirely forgotten and wasn’t rediscovered until 1545. We wandered around the space on raised walkways searching for fish (we didn’t spot any) and admired the art installations set between the columns.

Stop 4: Lunch at Sultanbahti Köftecisi

It was a bit of a challenge in the well touristed area of Sultanahmet to find somewhere decent for lunch, but we were lucky to find Sultanbahti Köftecisi recommended on a blog post. It was tucked away up some stairs and had a reassuringly small menu (normally a good sign) so we ordered nearly all of the dishes on offer. We shared lentil soup, köfte, bean salad, rice and chips, and demolished it all.

Stop 5: Topkapı Palace

Our final sightseeing stop of the day was a biggie – the Topkapı Palace. We could probably have spent all day here exploring the four courts and all of their constituent buildings, containing treasures such as the Spoonmaker’s Diamond (which weighs a casual 86 carats!)

By this point we were seriously flagging, so we kept saying we would stop and then proceeded to explore a whole new part of the palace. It turns out that with four of us, it’s much harder to enforce the only look at two things in each room rule! Our favourite part of all was probably the gorgeous tiles in the Harem.

If they look a bit stiff it’s because I told them to pose like Victorians so that I could take a vertical panorama of the tiles

Stop 6: Dinner at Antiochia

In the evening, we treated ourselves to a delicious meal at Antiochia, where we faced the age-old problem that Dad wanted to order his own food, while Mum, Oli and I all wanted to share (to be fair, it was a meze restaurant). So, we compromised and Dad ordered his own and we all ate it for him. He made a great choice!

The next day, we parted ways so that Mum and Dad could catch a flight to Izmir. Oli and I were booked onto an overnight train (more on that later), so we had a full day to fill and headed for the Anatolian (Asian) side of the city – we’d visited briefly a few days ago but wanted to explore the Kadıköy and Moda neighbourhoods. It was worth the trip – without any big-hitting tourist sites, there were fewer foreign visitors and it felt much less international and more like a real working city. We really liked the laid back vibe and spent the day wandering, watching ferries, fighting a bull, counting many cats, admiring the street art, riding the tram and stocking up on dinner to eat on the train at the beautiful produce market.

Greece roundup

Time for a quick review of our journey through Greece…

Carbon

We travelled the majority of distance in Greece by modern, comfortable and quick coaches. I say the majority, since the bus that took us over the border from Xanthi to Istanbul was none of the above. Still, that’ll teach me to book a bus connection with a company called “Crazy Holidays.”

Our two week itinerary from Bari to Xanthi emitted 96 kgCO2. That’s slightly less than our first two weeks through Italy, although to be fair we travelled less distance in Greece, since I’ve included the journey across France in Italy’s total.

Surprisingly, our travel through Greece only emitted 7% more carbon per kilometre traveled than our travel through Italy (and France). I’d expected our buses and ferries in Greece to be much less efficient than Italy’s trains, but according to the UK government data, coaches are actually more carbon-efficient than typical national rail trains. I’m unsure how accurately these UK-based efficiencies extend to Italy and Greece, but it’s certainly good enough to alleviate the guilt of travelling by petrol-powered vehicles.

Costs

It wasn’t a problem at all in Greece to stick to our daily budget as we found it excellent value for money. Even though we ate out more regularly than in Italy, we spent less money overall, and Sara is dreaming of a world where she can get a carafe of half-decent wine for €3.50 in every restaurant! Despite including the cost of our travel to Italy (across France) in the Italy column, the proportion of our expenditure across transport, food and accommodation remained similar for both countries. We’re interested to see how this will pan out in other parts of the world.

Sustainability

Towards the end of our journey across Greece, we started to notice these panels and barrels on the roof of almost every building. They turned out to be solar water heaters, and according to wikipedia, they typically work by heating a “working fluid” using the sun’s rays, and circulating this fluid through a tank of water. If only the UK got enough sun to make these worthwhile!

Although we didn’t buy a single plastic bottle of water from any shops in Greece, we did end up with one on our table with pretty much every restaurant meal. Hopefully the restaurants had better access to recycling facilities than we did!

Cats

We saw a grand total of 257 cats during our time in Greece, completely blowing Italy’s total of 27 out of the water. Sara’s noticed that just counting cats per country might not be the fairest comparison, given that we’ll spend different amounts of time in different countries. For this reason, we’re going to introduce a new metric of cats per day. Greece still comes out on top, with 19.8 cats per day, compared to Italy’s 1.8 cats per day. Spoiler alert: Turkey is going to be wild.

Hospitality

It would be wrong not to mention how welcome we felt just about everywhere in Greece. Hotels were friendly, Airbnb hosts seemed genuinely glad to have us to stay, and restaurants appeared to open their doors during most waking hours. On top of that, the quality of food and drink (barrel wine, I’m looking at you) that can be purchased for very affordable prices made Greece a highly enjoyable place to spend time.

While we had a lovely time on Thasos, visiting one island was hardly the island-hopping adventure of our travel dreams. Clearly another trip to Greece is on the cards, but we’ll definitely need more time and we’ll also ideally avoid peak season next time.

East meets West in Xanthi

Our final stop on our northern Greek adventure was Xanthi, a town halfway between Thessaloniki and the Turkish border. We’d read that this was an interesting melting pot of Greek, Turkish and Pomak culture, and indeed we started to notice more eastern elements in the architecture and food, as well as people in Islamic dress and most exciting of all, we could hear the evocative call to prayer from our apartment. It’s been a while!

This trip is really bringing home the fact that international borders are artificial constructs and that communities are normally better understood in terms of the region in which they sit. In this case, the region of Thrace sits across southern Bulgaria, north-eastern Greece and north-western Turkey, and the shift between what we associate with Greek and Turkish culture is happening gradually as we move across the region. We really liked Xanthi for this – and it definitely felt much further from home than anywhere we had visited so far, in the best possible way.

On a smaller (but more personally important) scale, we noticed the transition from Italian stovetop Moka pots to a Greek/Turkish coffee maker in our apartment. Oli surprised me at the beginning of the trip by announcing that he already knew how to make Italian-style coffee (despite not being much of a coffee drinker – perks of his multi-cultural PhD lab), thus immediately earning himself the privilege of making me coffee every morning. I wasn’t about to let this new tradition slip, so he dutifully watched an extremely long YouTube video to learn the Turkish method. Early attempts were not promising – he exploded the first batch all over the kitchen (he even got a bit inside the fridge) and then spilled the second batch all over him, the floor, the bed, the sofa and the balcony doors. Turns out he has an impressive coffee-hurling range.

Xanthi delivered on food, and we had our first experience of being given menus entirely written in the Greek alphabet. We were delighted – this is normally a good sign that the area is relatively un-touristed and also gave us a good laugh because Google Translate delivered its most hilarious and surely inaccurate translation yet.

On our second afternoon, we were undecided about what to eat when we saw an enormous queue stretching down the street. After checking that it was indeed for a food joint, we joined the queue and were presented with a whole roast chicken, potatoes and rice – it sounds simple but it looked and smelt incredible. We knew that to do it justice we needed the privacy (and cutlery) that our apartment could provide. It didn’t disappoint!

We also tried karioka, a local speciality sweet. This was a flat, round disc of chocolate and walnut fudge, dipped in more chocolate. We had high hopes so bought two to share; we enjoyed the first accompanied by coffee while sitting on our balcony, and the second we inadvertently left in the fridge after checking out of our apartment (most unlike me; quite like Oli). It was so good that we actually ran back to retrieve it when we realised! It made for a great bus snack.

We had hoped to visit Thermes – a tiny village 40km to the north of Xanthi that has thermal springs. Our research suggested that there was almost no infrastructure surrounding the springs so it wouldn’t have been a luxury experience (check this out in the only photo I found online!), but we were intrigued all the same. Unfortunately, the only way to reach it by public transport was by taking advantage of the reverse journey of a school bus that departed Xanthi at 5.15am and would then bring children from these small Pomak communities into Xanthi for school. Unsurprisingly, the bus wasn’t running during the school holidays, but we weren’t too sad to have an excuse to skip the early start. Perhaps we should have hired a car instead, but we’re still trying to find the right balance between cost, carbon and fun.

In any case, we liked Xanthi and were happy to spend some time exploring the old town, which was full of grand Ottoman merchant residences in various states of repair. Some were beautifully restored but others were in need of a little love.

We also wandered along the river, where we felt the first hints of autumn in the air and saw our 250th Greek cat! Seeing as it was so popular last time (ok, ok, we had a couple of texts), here’s another Where’s Wally? style challenge. Can you spot her?

Our time in Xanthi felt like the perfect farewell to Greece and we’re very excited to be travelling further east. Next stop: Istanbul!