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 18th and 19th 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 18th 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!
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