Island hopping to Turkey

A view in Syros

After Naxos, we took a ferry to Kos via Syros. The latter turned out to be quite dead - we arrived during siesta time and everything didn't really open in the afternoon, 'cos it is wednesday', according to the waitress at the bar we decided to spend our afternoon in! A walk around the town didn't reveal much else and by the 10:30pm ferry time, which eventuated at 11:45pm, we were ready to leave!

The overnight ferry was huge, a cruise liner in size and it was filled with sleeping bodies, particularly a large contingent of young guys in uniform off to do their compulsory service. Our allotted seats had been taken by people stretching out so three of us ended up sleeping on the floor for the eight or so hours of our journey - it wasn't the best sleep, but our necks got over it the next day!

Once we arrived in Kos, we took a taxi out to our little beach town, Mastichari, and the girls settled in for another few hours of sleep while I went for a wander. It was a little peninsula of beach town really, with the pointed end of land filled with accommodation, restaurants and convenience stores. I took the girls back to a restaurant I liked for breakfast as the sky clouded over, the waiter's dog decided he liked Sibel and spent the next two hours lying in amusing positions under her chair - the waiter's response, 'of course he would choose this table, he's not silly....'

Max!

Because we were keeping his dog occupied (and not roaming the streets and being run over like usual), he encouraged us to stay at the restaurant, bringing us a pack of cards, some drinks (alcohol before 12?!) and we left after about four hours with breakfast and lunch under our waistbands - but at least the sun was out! It is a very pretty little area, and the sunsets on the beach were quite a treat.

Sunset on Kos beach (taken from our seat at the restaurant!)

Pretty church in Kos town

The next few days were taken up with time on the beach, sampling the restaurants around, my walks to explore the coastline with Colleen and a night out where we ended up at a popular little local's bar. Our travel agent in Ios told us we had to collect tickets for the next ferry from the office in Kos, so one day we ventured in only to be told we couldn't collect our tickets (angriness), and had a quick look around the town which turned out to be particularly tourist centric to the extent that the markets had the dali mosaic trinkets from spain. We were unsuspectingly cajoled into a juice shop by a lady who was ..... very strange and made some interesting comments about Greek men before giving us 'gifts' that were so outrageously phallic that we paid our bill and cut and run without them!


On leaving, we had a pretty hilarious trip on the local bus. The driver wasn't in his uniform, was ten minutes late, spoke on his phone for most of the trip, sms'd, ran some pretty bad red lights, struggled with control of the wheel as he opened his bag of breakfast and even stopped at the local building supplies store to pick up ten bags of fertilizer! It was pretty amusing, especially  when the lady in the front seat started berating him for every misstep! We hopped on a quick ferry to Bodrum, Turkey and were met at the other side by Sibel and Selen's aunt, Hale, who has a time share holiday house here.

Bodrum port is beautiful, the marina is crammed full of expensive boats, it took us fifteen minutes of idling to wait for a traffic jam of boats to clear like a logic puzzle; one moves this way so another can get out of the way of a third, enabling the fourth to duck through, etc! There is a castle right on the waterfront and a crazy hillside filled with white houses, my photos don't do it justice, google images 'bodrum' for some better ones. Bodrum is a very well known holiday location in Turkey and I can see why, if I could get around without knowing Turkish, I would definitely come back.

Bodrum marina

We relaxed by the pool for the first afternoon, and ate an amazing home cooked dinner of Hale's, with eggplant and zucchini sweet dolmas (stuffed with rice and pine nuts), pasta with a lovely ragout sauce, sweetened beans, yoghurt with dill and a great salad - yum!

The next day we headed into the town of Bodrum to have a look around. Tuesday is market day, so the place was quite full. It is obviously a tourist town, with strips of well known shops and a lot of restaurants and cafes. We had a good day wandering around and enjoying the area and had a few drinks at a local bar with an amusing host, Sha-hin (pronounced as shine apparently!) and danced until we had to leave to catch the last bus home.

Not too shabby a bar location for a night of drinks and dancing!

I was up early the next day and wanted to go for a walk, so set off from the holiday house down the street - in a general direction that I hoped was the beach! I found it and it was really beautiful, with all sorts of hotels and resorts lining the water, and pontoons of beach chairs snaking out from the sand. A local dog decided to chaperone my walk along the waterfront, coming to sit beside me when I stopped and trotting along in front or behind as I strolled!

Nice view of the coast!

The water here is impossibly even clearer than in the Greek islands, with pebble beaches providing no murkiness, I could see the fronds of seagrass moving back and forth with the waves as I took in the view back to Torba. I came back with the girls for a nice lunch in the area and then returned to pack up for the next leg of our trip before enjoying another of Hale's dinners - home-made falafel is amazing!






From Bodrum we took an overnight bus (no toilet, only toilet stops and dirt roads in many places (construction, I hope!)) to Istanbul. It... wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been and we all got varying amounts of sleep - although, I was quite impressed with our bus 'hostie' who served drinks and biscuits in a bow tie and managed to hold onto the cart most of the time through all the bumps and jolts!

On arrival in Istanbul and after transferring to another bus, we trekked up the hill to Sibel and Selen's gorgeous little apartment that their parents own, with their grandma one floor above, aunt and uncle on the top with an amazing view of Istanbul and a cousin and her husband below - it's quite a family affair! After such little sleep we didn't feel like doing much, so we just went to the supermarket, watched a movie and then headed down to the local market to pick up veg for the delicious dolmades we were to make.

We cored out white zucchini, long eggplants and tomatoes and filled them all with a special rice mixture that had brilliant fresh herbs of parsley, mint and dill and many other ingredients. These were boiled standing upright until the rice was cooked, yum! Another recipe favourite! It is definitely a communal dish though, coring forty pieces or so of eggplant and zucchini could get pretty repetitive if you were on your own!

People everywhere and the blue mosque in the background!

The next day Sibel took Colleen and I out to see the big blue mosque and Hagia Sofia, an ex-Christian church, then mosque, and now a museum. But the line for the latter was huge and the blue mosque was shut for three hours with Friday prayers, so we continued on to the grand bazaar, which was incredible. We spent a few hours in there looking at ceramics, jewellery, souvenirs and bags. It is a busy market but it is so well set out with really wide aisles that it's not nearly as stressful an experience as Chatuchak market in Bangkok is.

Inside the grand bazaar

Not too busy in the grand bazaar!

We made it to the mosques the next day, after visiting the spice market and being overwhelmed at the varied choices of Turkish delight, spices and tea. I bought a few pieces to have later and the smell they pick up from neighboring spices and the aroma of the market was just incredible - such an imagery evoking smell! Hagia Sofia was really beautiful and worth the entry for anyone heading to Istanbul, the architecture is pretty spectacular.

Inside Hagia Sophia

We headed back to the Asian side of Istanbul (they have an 'Asian' continent and European continent sides of the city separated by the Bosphorous river) and walked up in the direction of Taksim Square, had dinner and a drink and caught the funicular and then ferry back to the apartment.

View of Istanbul across the Bosphorous from Sibel and Selen's Aunt and Uncle's house

The Sunday fresh food market was our next stop, but they were only just setting up as we arrived because the nearby school was hosting exams and the market stalls are too noisy to have operational nearby so they were shut down until the exam finished! We bought lots of fresh food and went to Sibel's Aunt's favourite pastry man for the vital ingredient for Sibel's spinach borek, which was incredibly tasty - another recipe to bring home! We were joined by Mandy as we finished our late lunch, who is travelling on her way home after a uni exchange in Canada, and then met up with another two pegs'ers, Kathryn and Greg, who were on their final stop of their Europe exploration, for a lovely kebab dinner near Taksim square.

Our last day was spent on a nice shopping area and we had manti for lunch, little turkish ravioli I guess, topped with natural yoghurt and a spicy sauce and then Selen made her favourite kofte's for dinner. We certainly weren't going hungry this trip - home-made food was such a treat after three months of eating out!

Colleen and I headed off for the airport the next day, leaving plenty of time for the unpredictable Istanbul traffic - Colleen headed back to Aus and I to London to see Lauren, Sam and Jess before returning home!