Highly Recommended: Travels in Turkey

 

Writing from the night ferry between Kos and Athens here in Greece, but would be remiss if i did not do a full post on the wonderful country of Turkey. Many of our friends seem to have visited the country within the last couple of years, it is a decidedly hot travel spot and the nearly two weeks we spent verified why this is the case. I already wrote on the cosmopolitan culture (but not political) capital of Istanbul and so i will pick up after we left the city of nearly 20 million people, somewhat surprisingly the largest city in Europe when all residents are counted as such, even though half of the city technically resides in Asia.

Cappadoccia

Anyway, enough geogrpahy and time for a travel update. As i wrote in a previous post, we really took advatage of the highly effeciove night bus system that connects the country, taking 3 night buses in total. These were needed, as Turkey is a pretty massive country, for example our first two night buses both coverd over 600 kms of road, and that left a ton of space to the east of the country.

Our first two night buses were used to do a quick hit visit to Cappadoccia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappadocia). Many of our hip friends who visited Turkey recommended this as a highlight of their trip and we took their advice to heart and made our way there. This large area is located in the middle of Turkey that has a highly eroded landscape, which leaves deep valleys and stark cliffs. This would be enough to make it a worthwhile destination, but then there are thousands of caves carved into the cliffs, some which are still used for houses today and while some caves/churches contain frescos and other religious remnants that date back to as early as the 6th or so century AD.

Fresco from 8th or so AD

We spent our day hiking, probably covering 14-15 (hot) miles along a number of pretty canyon and cliff trails. We got back to the town at the center of the area and mu posted up to watch the sunset and i rented a Huffy equivalent mountain bike and hit out on the trails around sunset. The riding was quite nice, but seemed a bit more technical than the bike could handle without rear shocks or anything. Still, it was fun and i thought of the rides i got to take this year with Biebs, Tote and Dan and knew how much they would enjoy ripping these trails.



Antalya

Our next destination was the large coast city of Antalya, on the Med coast near the center of Turkey. We spent a week here, rock climbing and loved pretty much every minute. The climbing is stellar (mu covered this well in her posts), highly recommended for all our climbing friends, and the setting in a tranquil valley was a nice location to both push ourselves on the rock and recharge a bit from the somewhat relentless schedule we had been keeping those first couple of weeks.

In addition to the climbing, we took a day trip to the chilled out beach town of Olympus, which is a about 80km from the center of Antalya. During this rest day trip we discovered the joys of hitching in Turkey, covering nearly half of the journey with rides. These rides not only were the right price (read=free) but also proved to be quite interesting. We got rides from a number of professionals (vets and a doctor) as well as one guy who spoke almost no english but really enjoyed rocking out with a sub woofer in the trunk that got my heart's attention. Not sure how much we will be replicating this technique (my mom is probably reading this and thinking that the answer is zero), but for turkey it really worked well and was a cool point of connection to the warm and welcoming Turkish people that were helpful throughout our time there.

Beyond the fun we had along the way, Olympus was simply stunning. It has Roman ruins, meandering paths that are over 2 centuries old and functioning aqueducts. We hiked to a small crop of ruins overlooking the entire valley and the beach, giving us expansive views across both and the views took our breath away. Then we got in a few swims in the Med and had a feast with our bare feet playing in the sand and fresh, hot pita direct from the oven, before heading back tanner, happier and refreshed



After another several days climbing it was on to Greece, which has been great and will be covered soon in a separate post or two. Much love, i am off to check out the stars and nearly full moon as we cruise through the Aegean Sea.

On the ferry between Turkey and Greece