Boats at the port of Dikili

We left the pansion and walked around the sleepy town. Two cops pulled up next to us on the side of the road and started asking us a bunch of questions. They wanted our passports and wanted to know what we were doing in Dikili. I start laughing and pointing to the huge pack on my back! They then told us to get in the back of the car so we did, wondering what kind of turn our night was taking…..

They flicked on the lights and took us on a ride around town at breakneck speed, trying to impress us I think! I tried to arrange with them to let us sleep at the police station – a quite excellent option I thought! – and although they laughed a lot, they wouldn’t go for it. They started driving us out into the middle of nowhere, with a lot of crumbling and deserted buildings and we’re starting to get a little sketchy…. Finally they pulled up at a dark and deserted apartment block and stopped the car. I was just starting to pray the rosary when they told us that it was a pansion owned by a friend of theirs, and they were trying to get us a free bed!! Unfortunately the place was closed for the winter, so we missed out on the second free sleep of the night.

So we drove back into town with them chatting all the time about where we could sleep for cheap. Eventually they took us to another pansion, which turned out to be owned by the same lady as the one we were at originally!!! She was extremely not impressed that we’d left because of her high price and then brought the cops back to make her give us a cheaper price! Of course we had no idea they were taking us back to the same place, and felt so bad for the lady, especially as we couldn’t explain it to her. They argued for us on the price and we got it for a solid 40 TL.

Ahhhhh …. excellent last memories in Turkey.

The ferry to take us across the sea to Greece

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Right now I’m sitting on a bus heading for Ayvalik, our last stop in Turkey. Tonight or tomorrow we jump on a ship bound for Greece. It’s the day after Christmas, and I couldn’t have guessed when I left on my trip that I’d be spending Christmas Day at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli. What an amazing place to visit, and such a strong symbol of the respect between the ANZAC nations and Turkey.We were in Izmir when we finally decided on our course of action to get to Gallipoli by Christmas. It was a mad dash through a good portion of the country in only three days, but we were sure we could do it.

At Selcuk we left our bags at a very friendly hotel, and started hitching down the highway to Ephesus. It seemed a lot further on the map than it really was, and before we even had a ride we’d walked all the way there. It was kind of interesting, but not as exciting as I thought. Although I did find out what it was like to use a real Roman toilet:

And I tried my hand at shooting some wedding photos:

From Selcuk we jumped on the night train, arriving in Denzili at 9pm. After a long and rainy walk around the city we finally secured a night’s accommodation for 40 TL. Nothing much to say about the city, as we were on a bus to Pamukkale first thing in the morning. In a brilliant stroke of luck, we walked out of the hotel, turned a corner, flagged down a bus that appeared right in front of us, and it was going to Pamukkale!

Now Pamukkale was a beautiful city, we could have much more happily stayed there than in Denzili, but alas, we didn’t know. The reason we came all the way out here was to see one of the wonders of the modern world – The White Terraces. For everyone back home that wished they had the chance to see the Pink & White Terraces before they blew up, check this out:

Worth it to go all that way to see them? Not sure. Worth it for bragging rights? DEFINITELY.

After the terraces, we jumped on a train and powered our way through Izmir, Bandirma, Gonen, Bagu, and finally Canakkale. Half starving and bleary eyed, we stumbled across the Anzac House Youth Hostel and booked ourselves two beds. The dorm was completely empty so we had the whole place to ourselves, and the beds were big and comfortable, and we went straight to sleep.

In the morning we decided to take the guided tour around Gallipoli. Good plan as it turned out because we didn’t have to worry about the directions or ferry timetables or anything. It was the first brilliant sunny day we’d had so far in Turkey, kind of an inappropriate setting for such a costly conflict.

We met up with another group of people on the peninsula who were joining our mighty group of two. They came from a much more … shall we say … privileged background than we did. It was funny after the type of traveling that I’ve done to hear the 5-Star group complaining about the “trials” that they’d faced.

The original trenches from WWI

The respect between the Turks and the ANZACs is evident everywhere you go on the peninsula. There are monuments to each of the three nations very close to each other, with no special extravagance or attention given to the Turkish memorial. The grounds were immaculately kept, and no picnicking or swimming is allowed at the beaches out of respect for the soldiers who fought there.

The original front-line trenches that the soldiers fought from are still there, only 8 metres apart on opposite sides of the road. Originally 3 metres deep and 2 metres wide, they’ve eroded and filled in a bit over time, but a terrible reminder of the conditions of the fighting.

One of the most important Turkish generals was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who became the first president of Turkey. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, he led the Turkish national movement in the Turkish War of Independence. We saw his amazing memorial in Ankara.

Anıtkabir – Mausoleum in Ankara

In 1934 he wrote a tribute to the ANZACs which is immortalised on a huge stone monument at the cove:

The quote reads:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives… You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours… You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

Incredible. It brought a tear to my eye when the tour guide recited it from memory in the bus on the way there.

Rest in peace.

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B. B. King – The Train Is Gone

It started off great with a quick dash down to the electric rail metro line. When we took the metro out of town earlier that day, we’d sneakily walked along the tracks to avoid the payment turnstyles, so we tried to get back into town the same way. Unfortunately this time there were security guards manning the gates, and they weren’t too impressed by our ignorant tourist routine. We naturally tried to resolve the situation by paying, but as far as I can gather from my working knowledge of Turkish (non-existent), you can only use a metro card which you have to buy from the market. A train arrived at this point but no amount of arguing would let us on, and we could only watch in horror as the doors closed on our hope of timely inter-city exodus.

We tried the next station, and the one after that, both with similar results. We then sensibly tried to board a city bus heading into the center of town. No dice, you must have a metro card for that too! We pleaded and begged, but it only fell on cold, heartless, Turkish ears. What about all the poor tourists and homeless people who only have small change? Finally we decided just to camp at the traffic lights and thumb a ride. After not very much waiting, a local guy pulled over and gave us a lift to the train station. If we hadn’t tried the public transport in the first place, we would have actually made it on time!

The next train to Ankara was in a couple of hours, so we bought two sleeper tickets and went for a wander to find some food. Sam grabbed a sad looking hamburger for 5TL, and I paid 7TL for what ended up being an enormous three-course feast. Score one to me. After dinner we wandered down the road to check out the mosque, lit up like a Christmas tree in the cold, winter air.

When our train arrived we eagerly jumped on, keen to get on our bunks and get some proper sleep. Funny, there didn’t seem to be any sleeping compartments on the carriage we were booked on. And on closer inspection there didn’t appear to be any on the entire train. The lousy, cheating ticket officer had misinterpreted my clear hand signals for “sleeping carriage” and booked us on an early train which didn’t have any! After an entirely sleepless night, we spent the day recovering in Ankara, and booked ourselves a ticket for Izmir.

The train from Tatvan to Kayseri was about 3/4 of this distance, and took us 24 hours, so we were budgeting around 30 hours for this trip. We found our bunks, dumped our stuff, and had a lovely dinner in the dining cart as the east of Turkey disappeared quietly past the window.

Heading west to try and find the sun again, somewhere in Eastern Turkey.

In the morning we had breakfast and I was settling down to do some photos on my laptop, when we arrived in Izmir.

WHAT?!

Apparently this train was a lot faster than the one that took us out of Tatvan. Probably something to do with the modernity of western Turkey vs eastern Turkey. Either way, some sort of magic happened and here we were.

At the coast.

On the very same sea as the Mediterranean.

AWESOME!!!

Naturally we went straight to Starbucks and stole their free internet. After some furious planning we decided to take the train on to Ephesus and Denizli. Probably could have caught the train straight down from Ankara and saved some time, but that’s not the point!

Here is a picture of a lovely park.

Ankara Central Park

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Hanging out with us the entire night were rotating platoons of Turkish soldiers. We had a chat with them and apparently they were on counter-terrorism patrols in the area. Tricksy terrorists, always hanging around train stations….. The army guys were pretty excited by our various bits of technology, and once we pulled up Google Translate, my laptop spent the whole night being passed from hand to hand as we had ridiculous conversations about life, love, and Turkey. One of the guys saw my portable speakers and brought out a memory card to plug into it. Now we had an awesome Turkish soundtrack to our night too!

I took some photos of Sam posing with them, and a little bit later the commander found out and furiously made us delete them all. Apparently due to the sensitive nature of their mission, we were under suspicion of spying for the Syrians, and he was taking no chances. What is he talking about, we didn’t even have guns!!

Sam rocking the latest in NZ offensive technology. Luckily I’d already copied this one off…

Finally the morning came around and I was greeted with this beautiful sight:

I’d love to say our journey was like that, but by the time our train got there, it looked like this:

On the plus side, we were both so incredibly tired that we wanted to go to sleep as soon as we got on the train. If it hadn’t been snowing, we might have missed some beautiful scenery

The one problem with the train that we didn’t foresee, is that there was absolutely no food. I was expecting a dining cart, or at least some sort of kebab stand at the various stations we passed. Nope, absolutely nothing. We survived the first 24 hours on potato chips and chocolate bars, and then finally we arrived in a town big enough to buy some bread, cheese, and boiled eggs. It was a feast to be envied.

At Kayseri we dropped our bags off at the big bus terminal and caught a coach out to Avanos, heading for the Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia. We’d spent so much money already in the last two days that we were on a serious budget binge, so we decided to skip the taxi to Goreme, and just hitchhike instead. It was a pretty incredible sight walking down the road waiting for a ride:

It hardly took any time for someone to pick us up and they were just lovely. They had a shop in Goreme near all the sights, and dropped us off right in the thick of it. The light was fading fast so we just picked one of the destinations and beelined there.

The place we headed for was called the Fairy Chimneys. They are steeples of rock that have houses carved out from the inside. The cliffs are full of vertical villages, and the creativity of people to make a life for themselves in any terrain was astounding. I had heard that they were incredibly beautiful, but I think they lost a bit of their attraction in the cloudy soup of winter. The landscape however was stunning, proud mountains standing up defiantly against the stormy skies:

We thumbed a ride back to Avanos the same way we came, and our driver told us all about his city, and the local sights. He told us that before we left we absolutely had to head down to the river and watch the sunset.

Good advice, friendly Turkish guy!

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It’s COLD!! After our near-death experience at the border, I was thinking that things couldn’t get much worse. But being raised in a country where it’s the middle of summer at Christmas time, and it never snows, I was bitterly unprepared for the might of winter in Turkey.

I’m sure this is what everyone thinks of when they picture lovely Christmassy winters in their head:

View from by the ferry terminal

That is entirely incorrect. This is actually what winter looks like:

City Under Siege – Looking back towards Van.

We woke up in the city of Dogubeyazit to find the streets covered in lovely white powder. There’s not too much to do there except catch the bus on to your next destination so we set about sorting out a bus ride. Turns out transport in Turkey is quite expensive, as they have one of the highest petrol taxes of any country. We settled on taking a minibus to Van, and then from there we’d hopefully catch a train on to warmer destinations.

Even though the snow is bucketing down and the roads are covered with ice, no one uses chains, and it’s still standard practice to overtake trucks on blind corners. You have to respect driving skills like that – I don’t think I would have lasted 5 minutes on those roads!

It’s hard to see, but the entire windscreen is cracked.

When we got to Van we took a wander around to look for a bargain hotel. Now I’ve done this in every country so far and it’s been a piece of cake, but when your breath is freezing as it comes out your mouth, it definitely adds a bit of time-pressure to the whole process. Where in Vietnam I might have slept at the train station, there’s no possible option of doing that here, and it’s making it pretty hard to keep the daily costs low. The cheapest place we’ve stayed in so far has been about $13 each. Contrast that to the $4-5 a night I have been paying in every other country so far on this trip. It’s time to start Couchsurfing.

There was no way we were paying the $40 to catch the bus 5 hours to Mardin, so we decided to take the ferry 4 hours across the lake (for $3), and then catch the train on to Adana or Ankara.

The walk to catch the ferry was cold.

There was no one there when we arrived so we weren’t even sure if the ferry was going that day (and there is no one who speaks English to ask), so we just plodded inside and waited. Eventually some people turned up who indicated to us with hand signals that yes indeed, the ferry was coming in a few hours.

At the right departure time, a tiny little boat with room on the back for two cars and a very small cabin turned up. We shouldered up our bags and I was envisioning an extremely cold next four hours, until another lot of hand signals told us that this was not the ferry, and we should just keep waiting.

THIS was the ferry:

They docked, and spent the next hour unloading train carriages from the back. It was totally badass. We sat inside next to a lovely hot boiler, and taught the locals how to play some New Zealand card games.

Eventually we jumped on and spent a pleasant few hours surrounded by freezing cold and pitch blackness.

When we arrived at Tatvan, it was freezing cold and pitch black. We didn’t have a ride, so we hitched on our packs and trudged off for town. Once we got to the main road we started hitching and eventually a nice local guy picked us up and dropped us at a hotel.

It wasn’t much, but it had two beds and a heater, and we took it gratefully. The plan was to catch the train off to Ankara today, but we’d been told it left at 2pm, and we found out when we got there that it left at 6:30am.

Tomorrow we catch the train for Ankara!!

I’ve finally got onto the Couchsurfing thing, been messaging a whole bunch of people in the towns we’re going to, and got us some accommodation lined up for Istanbul. I’ve sent a bunch out to people living here, and hopefully someone has some floor for us to crash on tonight. No idea how long the train ride is to Ankara, but I’m looking forward to it, be nice to see some scenery going by while staying warm!!

Intrepid travelers, we.

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Day 1:

Arriving in Tehran, I made my way to the visa office. Getting the visa was no problem, but it cost double what I was expecting, both from my internet research and from what they told me at the New Delhi Embassy. This used up my one week’s reserve cash, which I didn’t think this would be much of a problem. Oh how wrong I was…….

I jumped in a taxi and went to meet up with Sam (my good friend from NZ), who had arrived at 4am that morning and booked us a hotel for the princely sum of US$30 a night. After some high-fives we went out in search of food.

Ahhhh…. now this is what I’m talking about – Iranian food is AWESOME!!! Goodbye horrible ultra-spicy India, I’ve already forgotten everything about you. Iranian food is just what you’d expect – lots of meat and vegetables, well seasoned, not spicy; perfect.

I jumped on the laptop when we got back to the room and was surprised to find that Facebook was blocked. Luckily, the VPN I set up for China was still working, so no problem!

We were both pretty shattered, so turned in early for the night, after planning a rough 2 week itinerary to see a good chunk of Iran.

Day 2:

The Great Bazaar in Tehran

Apart from the little bit of cash I had after paying my high-priced visa, we had no money on us and went to the bank to get some out. I knew that Iranian ATMs didn’t allow international cards due to the U.S. banking sanctions, but I was under the impression that banks would let you buy prepaid gift cards with your credit card, and then use them on ATMs all around the country.

This was wrong.

It turns out that there is no way at all to get money inside Iran thanks to the United States government, except for some very shady dealings with some very suspect locals we met down at the carpet bazaar. Sounded like a good plan to me, so off we went!!

The bazaar was amazing, well worth the walk, and one of the only few sights we’d end up seeing in Iran.

We managed to find some agreeable carpet merchants, but both agreed that the situation was beyond dodgy and we’d be better off not doing the deal.

This still wouldn’t have been too much of a problem, except that I spent US$100 more than I thought I would just getting into the country, and Sam had no money at all. I had enough Iranian Rials on me to get us to the border and into Turkey, but not to pay for the room and Sam’s airport pickup. Not even close.

Enter this guy:

He was a Chinese business traveller staying at the same hotel we were. He overheard our predicament and offered to loan us some cash. He pulled out a US$100 note (the smallest he had!), and said we could just transfer him the money at a later stage. I asked if Paypal would work, and he said that would be ideal. The only thing he took off us was my email address, and wished us a happy trip. What a legend!!

Minus $50 to the hotel later, we had cash in our pockets and were on the move. We took a shared taxi to the Arzjantin bus terminal and booked ourselves a ticket for Tabriz, heading for the Turkish border. It was probably the most comfortable bus I’ve even been in, even more comfortable than the sleeper buses in Vietnam. Each seat was like an individual lazyboy, and I drifted off to a great night’s sleep.

Day 3:

In the morning we woke up to find ourselves in Tabriz. I’d planned to do a bit of sightseeing around the city, but I was bleary-eyed and still tired, and managed to book us straight on a taxi to the border crossing at Bazargan.

Oh well, sorry Iran, I gave it a good shot!

The border crossing – colder than it looks….

The taxi dropped us at the border crossing, we got our passports stamped for our Iranian exit, and then the fun started.

The long, cold road into Turkey

We left the warmth and safety of the Iranian border building, and stepped out into some of the coldest temperatures I can remember experiencing for a long time, probably about 4 degrees. We got in the queue for the border control and waited.

And waited.

And kept waiting.

Since we had no money, we hadn’t eaten since lunchtime the day before, and were getting pretty cold. After two hours of standing in the freezing cold I was starting to lose sensation in my toes. We had been walking/jogging up and down the little courtyard we were stuck in, and put on every bit of clothing we had on us. After all the things I’ve been through, ironic to die of exposure within throwing distance of warm, dry, buildings filled with food vendors.

The road into Turkey

I asked what the holdup was, and was told that it was a “system error”. Eventually we managed to convince one of the guards that we were actually going to die, and he let us stand in his little guard hut. Sweet salvation! – this 2x3m box had a heater, and I can’t even describe what a relief it was to get in there. Finally after waiting 3 hours, the line started moving and we left the box.

Big mistake. I think one or two people got through and we went back to waiting. But now I could feel my toes so I was pretty happy. Just when we were getting back to freezing to death again, the line started moving at an excruciatingly slow pace. By the time I got to the window my teeth couldn’t stop chattering. Blessed relief was only a stamp away, and then the guy told us he couldn’t process our passports, and we’d need to go to the other passport window.

You have got to be kidding me!!!

Finally we get through and run straight for the duty-free shops on the Turkish side. I buy us some overpriced sandwiches and we just sit there just thankful to be somewhere warm.

We take the minibus to Doğubeyazıt, and waste no time finding somewhere warm to stay and a lot of food to eat.

Turkey, it’s good to meet you.

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