After an early start from Santorini, our connecting flight from Athens landed us into Istanbul about midday. A slight hiccup with the transfer to the hotel had us chilling in the airport for an hour or so longer than needed but no harm done. Our hotel was located in a nice part of the city, and within easy walking distance of a lot of the major attractions. Which in a city of 14,000,000 people, this is a nice thing to have! The hotel was called the Golden Horn, and it was certainly living up to its name. Gold paint, gold carvings, gold wallpaper and gold pretty much everything else made you feel like a millionaire! We have been very lucky this trip to have had nice accomodation which was safe and clean and tidy. Magically the towels got washed and the beds got made too. Quite convenient really!
We set out to find some dinner later in the day, and with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in progress, the majority of the population are fasting during daylight hours. So as soon as some hungry looking tourist stop in front of a menu board you are pounced upon before you know it! We ended up in the roof top restaurant of a neighbouring hotel and by crikey we had the works laid on! Chairs pulled out, napkins laid onto laps and the glasses kept refilling themselves. Our newest Turkish friend, Salian our waiter was certainly after his 10% service tip for the night because he was busting out all the stops. Mickey ordered a lamb dish and it came out under a shiny copper lid on a big platter. Salian the waiter took great delight in crashing together silver spoons, banging lids onto plates and serving the meat and vegetables with much pomp and ceremony. The restaurant wasn’t overly full but the other people who were there had a front row seat to Mickey and Jess’s meal! Wish I got a picture with him – it would have made his day I reckon.
Next morning with some form of agenda we wandered off in the direction of the Blue Mosque and the Basilica Cistern. We had been through a reasonable number of churches on this trip and it was of course different to all the rest to enter a mosque. Jess had to cover her hair, shoulder and legs, and I had to either wear pants or cover my legs too. Shoes off at the door and into a little plastic bag to be carried through.
Blue Mosque
The Basilica Cistern is one of several hundred Roman cisterns under the ground in Istanbul, built in the 6th century. Historical records say that over 7000 slaves were used in the construction of it. The cistern is capable of holding over 80,000m3 of water, but is virtually empty today apart from a light covering to keep the ugly fish residents happy. Water came from a river over 19I’m away, through water channels made by the Roman Emperor Justinian. Another amazing piece of historical engineering.
Another thing to achieve while in Istanbul is to take a boat ride on the Bosphorous. Istanbul is a unique city, in the fact that it is spread over two continents. Asia is on one side of the Bosphorous Strait and Europe is on the other. It is a crazy busy passage of water that leads to the Black Seam and the oil fields of the East. Overall length is 31km, and it gets down to 700m wide at one skinny point. Even with the number of vessels in one area they sure don’t hang around, and I guess the attitude of small boat gives way to big boat is in practice. There are several bridges over the Bosphorous, with the largest being a shade under 1000 metres in length. We opted for a Government run ferry instead of all the local ‘options’ of hawkers on the street trying to sell you a trip in a rusty old bath tub with no plug in it. Neither of us have any knowledge of shipping, but it was quite cool to see huge oil tankers and cargo vessels (Nigel informed us they are vessels, not ships or boats!) passing very close to us. There is a fancy palace right down by the shoreline and lots of other nice houses. This is where the wealthy have lived for many many years.
Nigel is this yours??
Large swing bridge
The Grand Bazaar is a grand mess. A huge market place of over 3000 shops, but they probably only sell 50 different products over all of them! But unless you wanted imitation clothing of all description, handbags, shoes or jewellery it wasn’t for us. Massive crowds of people, with apparantly 300,000 to 400,000 people visiting each day! Again one of those places some would love but didn’t hold too much attraction for us. The spice market is a smaller version of the Grand Bazaar but sells spices obviously, tea sets, boxes of tea, Turkish delight, scarves, nuts, towels, vases, plates and probably kitchen sinks! We enjoyed this market more and some Turkish retailers went home with less than they expected after the bargaining powers of Jess!
One night after dinner, and another explanation that we were in fact Kiwis and not flipping Australians, we went to the top floor of our hotel to try get some pictures of the city lights and have a bit of dessert. The lights were cool, Jess got some nice pictures but we were let down by the hot chocolate and tea that we paid $5NZ for as it was the exact same drink from the machine we use for breakfast for free! The “Turkish dessert plate” was leftover cakes from the breakfast table that morning too. Ahhh well I guess they can go and buy some more gold paint with our tourist dollars!
After visiting so many cities over the last 6 weeks it was a bit difficult to get excited and charge around Istanbul like madmen, but the parts we did see we were very impressed with. For a huge place, there were alot of workers sweeping streets and tidying rubbish and lots of nice flower plots and garden areas. I think we can safely say we both have reached city saturation point and it will be nice to have quiet Gore again!
It’s been an awesome, jam packed six weeks full of sights, sounds, people, places, foods and hotel rooms and we’ve loved it all. We are still married, we have all our finger and toes and hopefully our bags when we get to Invercargill but home will be amazing!
See you soon!!!
mickeyandjess 