Driving Along the Mediterranean

The Gates to Heaven - down 455 steps to get here

From Sifilke castle

Anamur Castle

Alanya harbour

Castle at Alanya

Temple of Apollo at Side (pronounced Siddeh)

Turkey's best preserved amphitheatre - at Aspendos (concerts still held here)

We have spent the last 2 days driving nearly 500 km from Mersyn west to Antalya along the Mediterranean. The first day was like driving the Great Ocean Road non-stop, except not only did the road wind, it also went up and down. So we would wind up up up to a high point, and then wind down down down to the sea., over and over again. The views were amazing which made up for the long time behind the wheel – Graeme did not drive at all (except lots of back-seat driving) – he studied the guide book and worked out where we should stop to see things. We stopped at many places the key ones of which you can see in the above photos.

Our Renault has a nice feature of displaying its fuel consumption. Even with the many gear changes in this sort of driving, we are still getting under 7 litres/100 km which is good since petrol is over $3 per litre. So stop whingeing about Australia's petrol prices!!

More Ballooning Photos from Cappadocia

We're the farkawi

Summary to date: After 3 days in Istanbul we 'trained' it to Konya , drove to Cappadocia (Valley of the Fairy Chimneys) for three nights. then drove through the snow capped Taurus Mountains to Mersin on the South coast (above Cyprus). The rest of our journey is basically west along the Mediterranean to Bodrum and back up the west coast to Istanbul - see map above

Cappadocia – Land of the wounded Psychiatrists

Cappadocia is an area in the middle of Turkey with the towns of Goreme and Urgup at its centre. These towns are some 50 km from large volcanoes (eg Mt Erciyes – 4000 metres hgh) which 'created' the area a few years ago by depositing some 150 ft of ash, lava, and rock on the area. As the muck eroded it left many valleys and thousands of tall rock structures. Early Christians built many thousands of houses, churches and even vast underground cities (8 or more levels deep and holding up to 10,000 people living underground). Thousands of the rock/ash structures rise out of the ground up to 50 metres like fairy chimneys for the pure of mind – or like very realistic giant phalluses for the others.

But this is not the (only) reason it is the land of the wounded psychiatrists. It is one of the best areas in the world for ballooning over. An absolute must which many hundred people do per day. The many highly organised balloon companies have trouble meeting demand – and hence their charges are outrageous – up to 250 Euro (ca $ 400). They charge like wounded psychiatrists. Our flight was cheap (ha !) at 120 Euro, and was a second flight (missing sunrise) but was on a clear day and was quite superb. Be prepared for the 200 photos and 1 hour video of the flight !

Everyone likes charging in Euro in Turkey so they can hit you with two outrageous conversion rates and fees- first to Euro (which you don't have of course – then to Turkish lira. At the recent psychiatrist conference in Istanbul I heard there was a paper proposing that all Australian psychiatrists should similarly charge in Euros and set their own conversion rates.

OOPS, I seem to have lost communication with some of my audience – but Ruth L did ask me to be nicer to Kitty. Someone has to suffer.!

Overall Cappadocia is an area that you could see in half a day (seen one giant phallus – seen them all, ditto with cave dwellings), but you really need a week or two to explore and maybe a leisurely month would be better. True world heritage stuff.

Driving Miss Kitty

I must compliment Kitty on her driving. She may stall the manual car whenever she slows down, try changing gears without the clutch and indicate turns with the windscreen wipers but overall her driving is superb ,,,,,,, compared to her navigation. True the rough maps are hopeless but ....For me the crunch came after a day of her navigating when I could not read the compass whilst driving so I asked her to. Her reply ? " How do I read the compass ? Do I align the needle with the marker on the glass" - and then proceed to tell me I was going North when I was going South. That was the last time she navigated.

In fact that was almost the last time she did anything. We hired a guide to lead us through the Red Valley and Rose valley in Cappadocia. Great scenery but the guide and Kitty did not hit it off. Near the end a big dog came up close to Kitty. "Watch out", the guide said, "she bites !" "Oh, Does she ?", said Kitty. Guide - " I was talking to the dog !" Not nice, guide - but at least I stopped him from embedding her on a giant fairy chimney.

But her driving is improving - she coped well driving through the snow-capped mountains to Mersin on the Mediterranean (near Paul's home town of Tarsus). More trucks than you have ever seen on a road like the road up Hotham. If only she can learn to change gears and not stall she will surely be ready for her drivers licence test before we leave Turkey. (PS - Kitty wants it know that my driving is not perfect either !)

Driving in Turkey

In the dining car of the sleeper train
First driving experience in Turkey

Last night we took the overnight train from Istanbul to Konya, a largish city about 200 km west of Cappadocia, where we are now (photos and more info in next post). The train apparently broke down in the middle of the night (we were blissfully unaware as we slept through it on our reasonably comfortable beds) and hence arrived 3 hours late.

We went straight to the rental car place and after at least 30 minutes of paperwork with someone who spoke no English we were away in our Renault Symbol - a much nicer car with a much roomier boot than the Hyundai Getz we had ordered. I drove because Graeme's navigation is much better than mine. Before I got in the car I laid down some hard and fast rules for Graeme:
1. no matter what I do he mustn't get impatient or cross
2. he mustn't point left and say "turn right"
3. he mustn't point right and say turn left"

So off we went with rain and hail pouring down on us just as we started. I haven't driven on the right side of the road (except by mistake in the Grampians a few weeks ago) since Canada 6 years ago, and probably 20 years before that. Apart from driving on the right hand side I also had to change gears with my right hand, work out where all the controls were (especially windscreen wipers), and drive through giant puddles of water. When we got to the Mevlani museum, with G's great navigation, we had to drive through water 50 cm deep while looking for a parking spot. Fortunately the rain eased while we were in the museum and the signage out of Konya was quite good, so we made it to Cappadocia OK. It looks like we are the only ones obeying the 90 kph speed limit as we were constantly overtaken, often on double lines!

Lots of Turkey but no st......

Departing from Istanbul for Bosphorus cruise
from the boat

Entrance to the Black Sea - end of the Bosphorus

We are nearing Konya in Central Anatolia – the centre of Western Turkey. It is some 15 hours by train from Istanbul. The train is a little old but OK. Overall the Istanbul city buildings are not so attractive but it contains some of the world's most famous buildings in a beautiful setting – mostly in the area of Sultanahmet; the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia museum (ie disused mosque), the Sulymanyie mosque, the Grand Bazaar and the Topkapi Palace. The Topkaki Museum contains the world's best religious relics. I have now seen the rod that Moses used to part the Red Sea ! and have been converted to true believer status !! The Treasury contains magnificent treasures such a the Topkapi dagger – the base ingredient in the film Topkapi. I did ask Kitty to ask where the famous huge diamond was that when held up displays an image of a Pink Panther. However she was not sure whether she could believe me. I will get Clouseau to straighten her out.

The Sultanahmet mosques are huge (but fairly simple inside). With their towering minarets they dominate the landscape. Carpet salesmen dominate the ground – after 3 hours of strong resistance from the spiel of an increasingly desperate salesman Kitty collapsed and bought a carpet (I usually find it takes about 3 hours of hard sell before she gives in !).

Dinner with the Lowens at the spectacular 360 restaurant on our last night was a success as was the 6 hour boat cruise down the Bosphorus – apart from the array of finger-pointing when we discovered all our Turkey guidebooks had been left at a restaurant far from Istanbul after one of our group argued with the owner over 2 lira on the bill. Such is life. Ruth Lowen deserves an honorable mention for surviving a quick race up a steep hill straight after lunch – we all lost money by betting she would not survive

And so to Konya and Cappodocia – land of the giant phalluses..

Photos from Istanbul

The Blue Mosque

The Hagia Sofia at night

The Spice market

View from Galata tower

The Galata Tower

Singapore Slings

The Singapore Airlines flight was good. on time, good movies, lots of drinks and no lost luggage ( I did lose Kitty however when I found the luggage). The only downside of the flight was they put me next to two beautiful women and put Kitty 4 rows back. 10 minutes after we landed we bought a $600 ultralight Asus Eee PC 900 laptop - which is to be released today in Australia. This - with free wireless access - saved us $1 per minute in our hotel or $2 an hour in Little India.

Most of day one was walking around Little India and Chinatown plus visiting Raffles hotel (and skipping the $31 Singapore Sling with complimentary glass) and the 71 story Swissotel hotel - the world's tallest hotel building - and visiting shopping malls. Singapore is neat and well organised. In many ways it has the appearance and pace of a large country town. The underground metro must be world's best standard. Super efficient (average wait was 1.5 minutes), very cheap (about $1.20 to the airport), excellent ticketing system (no-one throws away used tickets !) and super modern.

Overall a great place for a lazy 1-3 day stopover.

Case for the defence

One of my traveling companions – lets call her TC – travels as badly as a crate of guiness. I am writing a separate blog about TC - not to put her down, Dr Lowen – but for evidence for the defence after I do put her down. Take the camera, I control the camera and TC controls the video – and inexplicably the memory cards for the camera. TC says we dont need a spare memory card but I sneakily borrow one and buy another in Singapore. TC takes control of them. In the next two days TC's standard card fills up twice (despite her deleting 'all images' ) and when I do put a new card in to retake the pictures I may have lost TC plays with the card and loses the lot. Maybe next trip will get some photos.

And then there was the incident when TC incorrectly discovered the 20G PC we bought in Singapore only had 4G and caused chaos at the airport when she tried and failed to call the shop and our hotel 5 minutes before our plane flew out of Singapore. And then after being told 3 times that F41 was the our airport gate number for the flight out she ejected the passenger in seat F41 telling him it was ours (to make it worse he was actually in A41 not F41) Her few remaining neurones have not been working well. and at times have almost sputtered to a halt. All the above is in the first two days and omits TC's problems with clocks, finding places, finding luggage, finding me, currency problems etc, etc, etc. They are in Volumes 2 and 3 of my book.

And so members of the jury my plea will remain as justifiable homicide.