Wanderlust: Post #18

After spending two unbelievable weeks in Greece and REALLY not wanting to leave, I made my way to my final destination, Turkey. The overnight trip to Istanbul was surprisingly luxurious: a double-decker bus with individual TVs, complimentary snacks and drinks, and A/C pumping the whole way (brrrrrrr!).

Istanbul easily makes the cut for my top 3 cities of the whole trip. There is a ton of incredible food to try (I may need to rethink my priorities) and an unending amount of things to do and see. But luckily for me, I met Evren from Istanbul while I was in Croatia, and he offered to show me around Istanbul when I got there! He works during the day but was able to meet me for a few evenings and we had a great time zigzagging across the enormous city to see as much as possible, like:

This incredible view

This real, live whirling dervish:

This tower

which we climbed, and saw…

and

One evening we took a boatride along the Bosphorus, the river that separates the European and Asian sides of the city (only city in the world that spans two continents!) and joins the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, where we got right up close to the Maiden’s Tower:

It was tough to narrow down the food pictures, but the two favourites were Iskender Kebab, which is thinly cut grilled lamb basted with hot tomato sauce over pieces of pita bread and generously slathered with melted sheep butter and yogurt:

And alllll of the desserts! These are basically different versions of baklava, which is layers of phyllo pastry filled with chopped nuts and honey:

During the days, I had absolutely no shortage of things to do and see. My first stop was the Grand Bazaar, which happens to be the world’s largest covered bazaar with over 3000 shops:

And of course the very famous Blue Mosque, which is actually called the Sultan Ahmed Mosque:

And the Basilica Cistern, which is the largest of hundreds of ancient underground cisterns that lie beneath the city. (If you’re like me and don’t actually know what cisterns are, they are man-made, waterproof receptacles for holding liquids. They are often built to catch and store rainwater. They range in capacity from a few litres to thousands of cubic metres. Thank you, Wikipedia.)

And Topkapi Palace, which was the primary residence of the Ottoman Sultans for 400 years.

I also visited this super cool park called Miniaturk. It has over 100 of these miniature models (1/25^th of the original size) of buildings, mosques, palaces, natural phenomena, etc from all over Turkey. I think I took a picture of literally every model in the whole park. I really don’t know why.

After 5 days in Istanbul, I moved on to the coast to a town called Selcuk, which was another overnight bus ride away. The main nearby attraction was Ephesus, an ancient Greek city, and later a major Roman city, on the west coast of Asia Minor. Words can't express how impressive this place is. Again, I had a tough time narrowing down the photos so here are some of my favourites:

Another day I took a day trip to a natural park a few hours away called Pamukkale with a couple of awesome Australian girls that I met at the hostel, Georgie and Skye. This place has to be one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Pamukkale means "cotton castle" in Turkish, and is a natural site of hot springs and travertines, which are terraces of carbonate minerals left by the flowing water. From some angles it looks like a big white mountain with a giant staircase of shallow blue pools coming down the side. I don’t think my description makes much sense so here are some photos: