Marrakech express

So I left you in the airport, right?

The flight was uneventful. We got into Casablanca about 7pm but missed the 8pm train so didn't actually reach the city until 9.30pm then a taxi to our hostel and sleep. The hostel was lovely, really pretty, but Casablanca was very meh. Ugly and smelly... not a great introduction to this country. We escaped on the 11am train, after seeing the third biggest mosque in the world, ooooh.

Made it to Marrakech and our hostel, again very pretty and cheap - Morocco is so cheap, I just want to go mad! We do have to learn to say no... Mum told me she had a feeling Morocco was where we would get robbed, and while we haven't been mugged or pick pocketed we've sort of been robbed by our own inability to say no forcefully. Yesterday we were watching a snake charmer (for real!) and got snakes wrapped around us and took photos. I was happy to give them some money but they kept pushing for more and more so I have no idea whether we gave them a fair amount. Then these super pushy women drew on us with henna without being asked and demanded money too and we couldn't just walk away (well, now we could because we're meaner than we were). It cast a bit of a pall on the city at first but we've seen so much amazing stuff that the magic is slowly winning us back. And I figured out that between the two of us we lost a total of nine euros... it's kind of like a game we lost rather than an actual fraud.

The souks are amazing! You really can buy anything but they're especially known here for ceramics, leatherwork and metalwork. It's great to see people actually making stuff in a shop - makes you believe them when they say it was all handmade here. Everyone keeps telling us things are "for good luck" and telling us they hope we get married soon to a rich man... Feminism hasn't really reached Marrakech yet, I think. Or if it has, it's not very loud.

Today we visited the Palais de la Bahia, Palais el-Badi and the Saadian Tombs. All very impressive, and very different from each other. The first is known as "the brilliant" the 19th century palace was intended to be the greatest of its time. It's ornate but not fussy, it's the kind of palace where you think "yeah, I could live here." Lots of courtyards and garden areas, carved stonework and tiled floors. Palais el-Badi is from the 1500s and most of it was taken in the 1700s to build stuff in Meknes so there's not a lot left but what's there is huge. You definitely get a sense of scale! The Saadian Tombs only recently opened to the public and were really beautiful, plus, kittens! Again, lots of tiles and carved stone. It's hard to describe the stonework. At first it looks like wood carvings with very intricated interlocking patterns but it's really carved into the stone of the building. Repeated geometric shapes and Koran verses are common.

Tonight we're getting a night bus to Fes (yay Fes, less yay night bus) so we have a whole day there to explore, and do laundry! We're running a bit low on essentials. We only have a few days in Morocco so we're really focusing on the Imperial Cities - Marrakesh, Fes and Meknes. Then Tangier and then on to Spain!

Goodbye Turkey

So... long time no update. Well. Five days? That's not so bad. Another long update I think.

Well we've shaken the Turkish dust off our Chucks and will soon replace it with Moroccan sand... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back a bit.

Thursday was the epic tour then Friday we intended to be up early to go to the Goreme Open Air Museum but were both tired so “early” ended up being 9am. We got there just before 10am, along with all the tour groups. Peggy was quite sick so there were a few moments of frustration but she persevered (she's pretty tough when she has to be) and we saw some truly amazing churches including the “buckle” church, with very well preserved frescoes in the windowless chapel. You're not meant to take photos but I took a couple sneaky ones (shhhh) because its being restored and that's not something you often see on postcards.

That evening we wanted to go for a sunset horse ride but the weather looked dubious so we decided to do that somewhere else if we can. Maybe it will be camels in Morocco! Instead we souvenir shopped (I got a lovely ring) and ate some dinner.

Saturday we were up early to see hundreds of hot air balloons take off for the sunrise tours. It's meant to be a don't-miss-it experience, but at 110 euros it was more of a ha-as-if on our budget. It was amazing to see all the balloons, but the weather was pretty overcast so I felt a bit sorry for people in the balloons. If we can't see them they definitely can't see the ground very well!

Then a 7am bus to Ankara for an afternoon there. Turned into a bit of a meh. We tried to find Ataturk's Mausoleum but got lost so we just ate lunch in a really nice park. It was fun anyway :) Ankara seemed like quite a nice city. Onto a 6pm bus to Safranbolu, which we had read great stuff about in Lonely Planet but lots of fellow travellers we talked to hadn't even heard of so our expectations were middling. We arrived after 9.30pm so there wasn't a lot to see, straight to our hostel and bed.

The next morning we headed out after breakfast and were blown away. It's an historic town centre of well-kept Ottoman houses from the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The houses are really beautiful and we went into one of the museum houses, set up like a traditional Ottoman home complete with creepy mannequins posed cooking, eating, sewing and talking.

The best part was the market. Handmade wooden and metal stuff, from pots and pans to toys and jewellery, were everywhere as well as clothing, textiles, lokum (Turkish delight) and tacky souvenirs. It was so much fun, all together I think we spent four or five hours there throughout the day. Peggy got a great jewellery box as a souvenir and we bought 300gm of lokum and ate most of it on the day.

The hostel we were in was an old house so it was very atmospheric, if a bit stuffy, and with somewhat antique plumbing! Our dorm was windowless, which was odd to wake up and not know if it was 3am, 8am or 1pm!

Monday we headed to Istanbul, it was basically just a travelling day. We left Safranbolu about 10am and got to our hostel at 9pm. Tuesday our flight left at 4.30pm so we spent the morning posting stuff and going to the Archaeological Museum. It's got a great Ancient Orient section, which was so well displayed with really detailed, well-kept items dating back to 18^th century bce – so very old and very cool. There were even legal decisions, love letters and contracts all written in pictograms on clay.

Now we're at the airport waiting for our flight, with free wifi, yay. Not sure the internet situation in Casablanca so we'll see how often this gets updated from there.

Turkey was beautiful, with Goreme and Safranbolu standing out as pretty, fun and friendly centres. I'm a third of the way through my trip and Peggy's barely even started hers – it's so exciting to not know what's next!

Photos

Not really an update, last couple days have been quiet but I'll write about them eventually. This is just to give anyone not on facebook a link to the pictures we've been posting. It's a public link so you should be able to see all the pics:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2337743050292.133853.1451350354&l=364a32f00b&type=1

I've put up about 30 so far and will keep adding one or two from each place as we go. I think that link should work permanently.

Rock and roll...

Warning: mega-blog. We had a couple quite big days so this is likely to be long.

So yesterday (Wednesday) after Peggy recovered we decided to walk to a place I picked on a map. It could have been quite the let down but instead it was amazing! We should follow all my whims...

Cavusin (with accents missing) is 4km from Goreme and has two famous churches. We walked there in about 40 minute, enjoying the view of coconut ice mountains and top heavy peaks. The colour lines are amazing, you can tell what is the softer rock because there are big red layers on top of very skinny green layers. At the town we got a bit turned around, browsed tacky souvenirs and ate ice cream before asking directions.

We found Cavusin Church, carved out of stone two stories up and painted with frescoes of bible stories. I found this youtube video of pictures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrCjbQRw5Lk. I didn't listen to the sound, it probably has some tacky music to go with it, but it shows you what we saw. It was really stunning, I wished we had a book of explanations to go with it - even Google hasn't been able to answer all my questions!

There were lots of labyrinthian places to climb and explore, many with great views so we were intrepid and climbed into places chiselled out of the rock by hand about 1500 years ago. One of the views was of the famous fairy chimneys (that's the polite name, there are some rude jokes about them too since they're longer than they are wide.) They were close enough to reach and touch so we got some pretty wicked pictures. I'll post some here, hopefully, and some are already on Facebook.

Today we signed up to an epic eight hour, 300km tour. It was the best way to see everything we wanted to see because the alternative was taking a hundred little buses. So we started at 9.30am with a drive to Derinkuyu, an underground city.

We spent about an hour wandering around up to (down to?) 100 metres underground. The city was started in 700bc and people just kept adding to it, including persecuted Christians in 200ad. It's very extensive, goes down 200 metres and has about 8 layers. The purpose was to hide from weather, animals and enemies so the tunnels were kept quite short, to slow them down. That all added up to some very narrow, very low twisty stairways. Bent in half, trying to see ahead of you and trying not to fall, thereby causing a massive domino down the entire pathway, was something of a challenge. At one point on the long-way-down we had to squish 18 people into a passing bay the size of a large closet to let a group going up past. We saw churches, stables, bedrooms and kitchens, all underground. I wanted to buy a proper map of the place to look at it better but they only sold cartoony ones.

After that we headed to Ihlara Valley for a 4km walk by a river at the bottom of a gorge. It too was a hiding place for early Christians, and later a pilgrimage/hermit site. There are a lot of old churches and paintings in the area and it was really lovely to explore. It was very wet and green, too, which was a big change from the dry Turkey we've been seeing. Lunch was at the end of the walk, but some sloooow people (Americans, pff.) held us up at least 20 minutes - quite a long time if you're waiting for lunch after a one hour walk!

After lunch the Selime Monastery - yet another stunning location. Peggy and I loved exploring the caves and carved out rooms. We were quite intrepid and ended up high up in odd rooms and in a pitch-black area above the school. It was so much fun, we were all meant to only have 20 minutes (thanks to silly slow people) but we took about double that. Plus a million and a half photos. Just wait till I start posting those!

By this time we have climbed up and down countless stairs, hiked 4km and clambored all over a cliffside monastery so we were exhausted. A lot of people slept in the van for the ride back. We stopped briefly to look over Pigeon Valley, where people kept pigeons (surprise!) for messages, fertilizer and their eggs which were used as primer for cave paintings.

We were supposed to go to an onyx demonstration but our guide let us take a vote and we all voted home. It was an amazing day. We've got plans tomorrow for the Goreme Open Air Museum in the morning and a surprise for our viewers at home at sunset so hopefully we'll be looking at three for three.

Cappadocia has by far been my favourite location. I really think we could spend our whole two weeks here and not get bored. We've been spoiled for any less dramatic vistas, too. Show us a mountain and we'll just sneer.

Geology rocks...

Wednesday here, we're settled into our hostel in Goreme, which is stunning!

Monday we did basically nothing until 3.30 when we saw the Temple of Artemis in Selcuk and the local museum. The temple used to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but now it's barely even a pile of rocks. You do get a sense of scale from it but it also shows just how impressive it is when something survives 2500 years because so much doesn't survive. Museum was small but well put together. Saw a 2000 year old backgammon table and a lot of busts. Someone "christianised" a bunch of them by scraping crosses in their foreheads sometime in the last 1000 years. Classy.

Tuesday we got the bus to Pamukkale and we didn't really know what to expect but had heard good things. Those good things were so underplayed! Pamukkale was amazing - it's a stark white ridge line with water cascading down it into small terraced pools and across rock slopes. You walk up barefoot and can go into some of the pools. It was beautiful, a lot of the photos look like glaciers. If you put someone up there in ski gear it would look right, but they would probably die of heat stroke. I would love to go back one day and spend the entire day there, from sunrise onwards.

Night bus from there to Goreme, in Cappadocia. Cappadocia is famous for its "fairy chimneys" - huge rock towers across the region. It's all blah blah erosion/geology/magic but the end result is phenomenal. Goreme is built in amongst these outcrops with houses, including our hostel, built into the rock. Today we're going to do a walk of the area. Peggy didn't sleep well on the bus so she's napping in preparation for the snappy pace I'll set ;) Tomorrow we're doing a tour of some of the further away sites including an underground city and a valley where early Christians hid from... the bad guys. Whoever the bad guys were at the time.

All caught up here and in my journal and still on budget - one week in and I'm still passing for a grown up.

Troia, Gelibolu, Ephesus etc.

Sooo... Where was I? About to check out and head South? Basically Friday ended up being a write off thanks to a few choice pieces of bad information. I can't be bothered, but you can read about it on Peggy's blog, The Pegiad, if you want to know. The punchline is we arrive in Eceabat about 6pm without time to get to Troy. We got some food, hung out with some people and went to bed early to get Troy and Gallipoli done in a day.

Up early to catch the 8am ferry to Canakkale to get a dolmus (mini-bus) to Troy... Except more bad information means we have to wait 45 minutes for a bus and end up with less than an hour at Troy. Peggy studied the city and the history of its discovery so she was an excellent guide and I learned a lot on our speed tour :) We were worried about missing the ferry to make it to our Gallipoli tour so I pounced on an unsuspecting couple headed to Canakkale to ask for a lift. They spoke no English, we speak less than no Turkish (when I try to say thank you people just look baffled - that's anti-communication.) So the nice people took us back to the ferry and we were only a little late for our tour.

I was especially focused on seeing Gallipoli. It's such a huge part of our national history and identity, I knew it would mean a lot. As it turned out I was almost crying by the first stop. It was a moving, emotional experience on a beautiful coastline where thousands of young men died. I was especially shocked that a quarter of the Australians and New Zealanders who died were never found. Anyway, not so much a happy trip, but I'm glad we went and now I can really picture what we were taught in history class.

After that we had about three hours to kill before our bus. Our hostel (Hotel Crowded House) was great, they let us shower and hang out despite having checked out almost 12 hours earlier. We interneted, charged stuff, fixed my "f" key on my laptop, wrote postcards and updated diaries... and there was still more than an hour to go. Waiting sucks. Then we were told the bus would be late by about an hour. That turned out to be more like an hour and a half, and at that time ferries are only every hour so we finally left Canakkale two hours late, at 12.30am. Didn't bother us too much in the end because otherwise we would have reached Selcuk at 5am.

How long is this? How boring? If the answer to both those is "too" then you should have skipped ahead.

So today (Sunday) we arrived in Selcuk at 7am, got picked up by our hostel and got to check in about 8am, totally unheard of usually but I guess the room was already clean. We decided to hit Ephesus, an ancient city. It's huge, and fairly well preserved. It's not far from our hostel so we walked over the hill. It took about an hour but I really enjoyed getting off my arse and being active. There's been a lot of sitting lately!

Spent almost three hours walking around Ephesus. It's amazing to sit somewhere and think that 1000 years ago someone probably sat in the exact same place. The signs were really good so we didn't miss having a guide. Instead we went our own pace, resting frequently in the shade so Peggy's thermostat didn't overload. Ice cream, a dolmus back to town, some grocery shopping and a shuttle back to our hostel. Rock and roll.

Now we're deciding what to do tomorrow between nothing and Aqua Fantasy water park. I'll let you know what we pick

Boats, dried avocado and the sumptuous palace...

Thought I'd get one more update in before Peggy and I check out... But now I've forgotten where I finished on Wednesday. Before the Grand Bazaar or after?

Before. So we hung out in the cool for a while and worked out our next steps. Emailed some queries, checked some details. About 3pm we headed towards the Grand Bazaar. It was easy to find because it's well signposted so we got there easily enough. For those that haven't been there it's basically a huge indoor market that's like a rabbit warren with lanes, alleyways, twisting paths and a lot of people shouting at you. The best interchange I had went like this:

Seller: "Buy one for your mother-in-law!"
Me: *smirk*
Seller: "Or for my mother."

Points to him for making me laugh - most people just shout "Ladies! Ladies!"

We knew we wanted to buy pashminas here, there's no shortage of stalls but a lot are owned by the same people. We looked for ones that specified their scarves were 100% cashmere or described the blend and ended up in a little shop looking at hundreds of scarves.

The seller there kept calling me "babyface" which did not go over well... so he switched to "crazy girl", which I somehow preferred. He tried to tell us the scarves would be 120 lira each... we laughed and laughed. Eventually we got them for 50 lira for both. Certainly a lot less than he said but its hard to know if that's really a fair price. Regardless, I enjoyed the bargaining and the final cost was something we were happy with. Unfortunately it's so hot we can't wear them! Peg got a lovely 100% cashmere blue-grey one and I got a teal cashmere/silk scarf.

We wandered a lot then got lost trying to get home. We decided to just walk in a circle around the bazaar, which worked eventually but we ended up in a lot of areas that were obviously where Turkish people shopped. It was cool to see the "real" Istanbul and no one shouted at us on those streets. The thing that stood out was the extreme dresses! They would make those Big Fat Gypsy Weddings proud. Plus heaps of shiny fur lined capes for little boys. Maybe there's some kind of occasion where little boys where big capes?

Eventually made it away from there and decided to hit the Spice Bazaar, which is very close to our hostel. It was super crowded so we didn't meander, just walked through and goggled at things like circus tea and dried avocado (yuck? Stay tuned to find out...)

Home again home again we relaxed, cooked some dinner... what else? Not much. I fell asleep about 9.30 on Peggy's bed but she made me wake up and get ready for bed properly so I stayed up until the respectable hour of 10pm. Take that jetlag!

Yesterday we headed to the ferry to see the Asian side of the city. It turned out to be a bit boring, a bit dirty and quite crowded. On our way back on the ferry we were debating what to do. We still had Topkapi Palace and the Archaeological Museum to see but neither of us felt much like walking. We considered just going to the hostel or a cafe to hang out but that sounded a bit boring... what to do? Spontaneously jump on a cruise, of course!

You can take 2 to 6 hour cruises of the Bosphorus so we took a two hour cruise for 10 lira and got to sit in the sun (or the shade if you're Peggy), enjoy the views and relax on the water. I loved it. Took heaps of pictures but they're probably rubbish.

Then back to the hostel for lunch/internet, But on our way we decided, when else would we be able to try dried avocado? Never! So we got some free samples, took a bite and thought "Hey, that's not so bad..." Then the aftertaste hit and we got this lasting wave of bitter metallic taste. Yuck. Some free samples of turkish delight helped :) So no, we don't suggest drying your avocado. I think it still had the skin on too...

That afternoon we hit Topkapi Palace. It. Was. Epic.

Huge, ornate and spacious - you could easily spend all day there with no issues. We had about three hours there and saw the harem, too. That was pretty spectacular. All the concubines, eunuchs and most of the royal family lived there and never really got to leave. Sultans used to kill all their brothers so they would plot to steal the throne, but by the 1500s they decided locking them in the "golden cage" was a good alternative. It was very beautiful and ornate, with some amazing views, but I can imagine it would start to feel more cage-like than golden after a while, especially for the concubines who would ever have known differently.

The rest of the palace is equally stunning, but tomes have been written on it so I won't describe it poorly here. We had an audioguide so learned that the kitchens cooked for up to 15000 people.

Mostly everyone was spread out but in some of the smaller rooms the queues got hugely backed up. In one such queue we couldn't figure out what people wanted to see and I noticed some people kissing the cabinet (and getting yelled at by the guards) we got out of the queue to a different space in the room and discovered it was the beard hair of Mohammed. Also on display: Moses' staff, a cup Mohammed once drank from and Mohammed's signet ring. Gotta love holy leftovers.

We got home tired and overheated. Our hostel runs a restaurant that delivers so with another guy in our dorm we got platters and dessert. It was delicious and nice to relax on the rooftop with views over the city and eat traditional food. Altogether a lovely day.

Now we have to check out so we can make our way to Canakkale and Troy, then Eceabat and Gallipoli tomorrow.

I love the sun

Haha to all of you - it is 28 degrees, beautifully sunny with a light breeze so it's not too humid. That's right, I am in paradise and you're not. Sorry, had to get my gloat over with. Peggy and I are staying at Second Home Hostel in Istanbul and have made good use of our first morning in the city. We explored Sultahnamet, which is the older part of the city. We saw Hagia Sophia (1500 year old church converted to mosque converted to museum) which was stunning. Some really detailed frescoes and mosaics on the ceiling, 50 metres up. How did they do that in 500ad? A couple of the mosaics are of Jesus with emperors and leaders of the time, it reminded me of people who put up pictures of themselves with famous people. "This is that time I met that guy off Shortland Street in the supermarket and made him pose for a photo." Since I guess the only guy bigger than Constantine at the time was Jesus a detailed mosaic was the best alternative to a camera phone picture.

Then the Blue Mosque, oooh, where we had to cover our legs and shoulders but not heads. The Basilica Cistern, still the closest to a holy place I've been but it's just designed for water storage. The Hippodrome which has neither horses nor race course but some big pillars stolen from Egypt and erected in honour of whoever was emperor in 400ad. Because why build your own when you can steal something cool from someone else? That's always been my philosophy! (Disclaimer for future potential employers: this is a joke.)

Now we're escaping the heat of the day (Peggy has a low melting point) to update this, read some books and plan the next bit.

This afternoon we'll probably head to the Grand Bazaar or the Spice Bazaar and over to the Asian part of the city on the ferry.

Still no postcards but that's on the list of things to do.

Hope you're all healthy and happy. Or as happy as its possible to be when you're not in paradise ;)

Made it - finally

Hello! First official update from not-New-Zealand.


It took Peggy and I 43 hours from the front door of Mum's house to the door of our hostel. That included about 24 hours of flight time, 17 hours in airports and a couple hours of travel time. We were tired, sore and a bit smelly but very excited to arrive. Istanbul is such a busy, bustling city with cars and trucks trying to squeeze down narrow winding streets, which are really glorified alleyways. We've spent a fair amount of our first few hours dodging traffic :)


We met a German guy, Stefan, as we signed in and all went for a walk to find a grocery store and tour the water front. A visit to the roof-top social area completed our socialisation for the evening. With exhaustion setting in our brains are functioning well below par, but I did still manage a conversation about the dominance of English as the language of travellers (lucky for Peggy and me.)


Free internet gave us a chance to look at the next few days of our trip - a couple days here in Istanbul and then on to Troy, Gallipoli and Ephesus over the weekend.


So far all happy and healthy (other than side effects of sleep deprivation) and so thrilled to be in Turkey. And no more planes/airports for a whole two weeks!

I feel like I'm digging out an old diary, blowing the dust off the top and starting a new entry... which is pretty much what's happening here!

Peggy and I fly out tomorrow for our next adventure - Turkey, Morocco, Spain, Portugal. I'm mostly packed, my room is a disaster and I am sure I'll forget something important but I'm finally getting really excited about the trip!

The itinerary is two weeks Turkey, about 6 days in Morocco and then 16 days around Spain and Portugal. Then in Barcelona I fly to London and Peggy starts the next leg of her trip. I have four days in London, a day and a half in Reykjavik (Iceland) then to Toronto where I start my new life as a Big City Reporter. That last bit's not for sure - I'll probably take whatever job comes along, but ideally I'd like to be Lois Lane.

That's undoubtedly enough for a post where we haven't even done anything yet. If you want a postcard email me (catienobes@gmail.com) your address. No guarantees, but I'll do my best.