The Recap - Turkey

Turkey promised. Turkey delivered.

What We'll Miss

• Learning to play backgammon after being inspired by the Turkish men wiling away the hours over cups of çay
• Istanbul cats. So many of the little furry bastads. "Big boof heads" and "little meepers" make our day
• The people of Gaziantep are the best! The cheapest place we stayed in and also the best staff by far was at a cheapo hotel in Gaziantep. We even tipped!!
• The efficiency, logic and interconnectedness of transport is mental. Turkey is a massive country but with a combination of dolmus, busses and shuttles you can get to just about any corner of it. V impressive!
• Twisters. Nix's ice-cream of choice in Turkey. One a day makes your cavities go cray
• Pistachios are in everything! Woo!!

What We Won't Miss

• Turkey is the land of guidebooks and box tickers. Lonely Planet props itself up on the sale of its guidebooks for Turkey alone. Put the guidebook away, the only way to really find yourself sometimes is to get lost, you know?
• 4am starts and overnight bus rides. We have never seen so many sunrises in our lives
• You can't drink our water so we're going to inflate the shit out of the price of bottled water for you suckers
• A thirty minute walk is no longer "just a thirty minute walk" in thrifty five degree heat
• Breakfast with cucumber and tomato was novel at first. After a month straight of it I never want to see cucumber or tomato on my breakfast table
• I'd like to say the little sweaty hot boxes that we slept in in Olympos and Kaş but given we're heading to Asia soon we haven't seen the last of them... 
• Watermelon. Please, no more watermelon ever again

The Food

It goes without saying that there was a heap of good food and a heap of flavours and aromas that will forever transport us back to Turkey but it was the apricots and figs in Malatya that pulled us out of the depths of car hire horror and stand out as the best food memory. 

The Drink

Çay is ubiquitous and it can be nothing else however open ayran does give it a run for its money.

A dishonourable mention goes to the strange, black herbal thing that we bought on the streets of Antep. It had no flavour up front, a strange herbal sweetness as it went down and then just went about numbing your entire mouth.

The King of Cotton Castle

Pamukkale means Cotton Castle in Turkish. I prefer to refer to it as my marshmallow kingdom and imagined that we were walking around in an episode of Adventure Time for a while...

This natural phenomenon doesn't look real when you're up close to it or when you view it from a distance. It looks like some strange glacial landscape that's lost in the middle of Turkey.

In reality it's a heap of terraces that have been created by carbonate minerals left by the flowing water from a number of hot springs at the top of the mountain. Forget the reality for a second and just live in the fantasy land that this place transports you to.

Although we did our best to make it look as though we were the only people up there that's not entirely true.

That's what we in the blogging game like to call trick blogography.

Kaş, it's Turtley Awesome!!

I'd planned to go diving in Kaş to possibly, if I was lucky enough, swim with turtles. The mums and dads this time though, not the little dudes (link).

However, on our first evening in Kaş we walked down to a little public beach a couple of minutes walk from our accommodation and within ten minutes of being in the water a turtle popped its head out about ten metres from us and then another in about the same area. I quickly chucked my mask on and started a routine that continued for the following few days with Nix spotting from shore and me flapping about trying to find one of the ocean's most majestic creatures.

In total I swam with about seven and we spotted quite a few more. The best experience I had in the water was swimming with a big mumma while she mimicked my movements as I swam around and moved in for a closer look a couple of times before pulling off at the last second with her little fish pal in tow. Privileged is the word that I'm looking for.

No photo evidence, only a few snaps of the beautiful deep blue waters that we swam in for those handful of days.

After Kaş we moved on to dusty little Kabak. Do I need to say anything else other than we woke up to this view from our balcony each morning?

Post title naming rights go to this lady, avid UBanker, tipper extraordinaire and all round pain in my arse best mother in law ever.

Chasing Caretta Caretta in Çirali

Each year in June and July some very graceful mothers heave themselves up Çirali beach and lay a s load of eggs that 45-60 days later produce these little dudes.

We got up early one morning to witness one of nature's most beautiful spectacles and even though our pictures aren't much, the memories are extremely vivid.

Çirali puts on a decent sunrise too...

A word of advice if you do ever go to Çirali to see the hatchlings begin what is already one of the toughest introductions to the world - DON'T BE A F*CKING DICKHEAD. Stay out of their path as they make their way to the water and forget about your Instagram or Facebook post and the box that you're there to tick and enjoy the moment for what it is. Leave the turtles alone and take your photos from a distance. The number of times the poor little buggers almost got stepped on was horrifying.

Moving on. After yet another 4am start it was time for a bit of R&R just down the beach at Olympos. We literally walked along the beach to go from Çirali to Olympos.

This was our little hot box for four extremely sweaty nights sleep.

This was the beach.

This was lunch. Yes, that's ice-cream within a melon.

And this was where we spent the majority of our days, sprawled out reading, sleeping, eating and keeping you guys abreast of our latest escapades.

Welcome to Goreme...

land of epic balloon rides and fairy chimneys...

Another 4am start, another crazy good experience.

 

Other highlights of Goreme were the cave house that we stayed in and the views from breakfast each morning,

and a long, hot trek through Pigeon Valley complete with tortoise sighting, random tea spot stop where I won a prize for answering who the first president of Turkey was* and various action shots of me showing Nix how it's done.

*little did he know that the reason I know who the first president of Turkey was is because we'd like to own a Turkish breed of cat one day named Mustafa Atatürk.