While we loved our time in Asia, I think the family did a collective sigh of relief upon landing in Turkey, our first country of Europe on this trip. Although the kids did remind me that Turkey is only partly in Europe, it generally feels more European than Asian and provided us with comforts we had missed, like tap water that is drinkable, safe fruit and salads to eat, sidewalks you can walk on, public transit that works (sort of) and, most importantly clean bathrooms with toilet paper.

Istanbul

Our first stop in Turkey was Istanbul. We had a long flight that connected via Dubai on Air Emirates and we had our first theft of our trip. While we travel with only small carry-on bags, we were forced to check them on Emirates because they were too heavy. All of our bags were all broken in by baggage handling somewhere along the journey. We lost about $500 in EUR and USD cash that we had forgotten was in the checked bags because we weren’t used to checking our bags. We are lucky that it’s the worst thing that has happened to us yet on the trip, but frustrating nonetheless. Boo to Air Emirates who won’t even respond to our complaint 😦 . I feel better now having a little vent about that. We will now be more strategic at check-in to make sure our carry-ons don’t get weighed.

So back to Istanbul with its super interesting history. It’s the 2nd largest city in Europe (Moscow is the first) which sprawls over a huge area, and it’s a great mix of new and very old. Its various empires and religions over the centuries each left their mark and you could spend weeks and weeks seeing the historical sites. We tried to learn as much as we could about it all, but our brains are getting pretty full of history!

As recommended by a Turkish friend, we stayed in a trendy neighbourhood north of the Bosphorus river to ensure that we were in a safe part of town. Overall Istanbul did fell very safe but we were warned that occasional uprisings do happen, and we wanted to be sure to be far from those. Our lovely Airbnb had a laundry machine, our first in 9 weeks, so we were in heaven!!

Mosques, Palaces and Museums, oh my!

We promised the kids we would only do one mosque, one palace and one museum in Istanbul. To their credit, they were definitely engaged in the visits that we did do, so we agreed that it was a better approach than to swamp them with historical sights, and we only broke the rule once by visiting two mosques. The Hagia Sofia is technically now a mosque, but used to be a church, so we claimed that it counted in the church category, and we did only visit that one church. We were blown away by the age of so many of the structures in the city. The Hagia Sofia for example dates back to the 6th century and has such sophisticated architecture.

We also had lots of fun seeing the various neighbourhoods and taking a couple of different boat trips to get a different view of the city. Lucas had a blast on the boat jumping between Asia and Europe as we crossed over that border. We fell in love with Turkish Delight and enjoyed eating so so much meat, doners and pitas. Good food is everywhere. While it was unseasonably hot in Istanbul (that’s a trend of our trip!!), we had promised that this would be the start of our fitness training to get the kids back into shape for their sports back in Canada in the Fall. Despite the heat, the full group of us got out every morning (I may or may not have skipped a morning or two) to run or do strength training in the nearby park – so great.

Cats in Istanbul

Warning: this section should be skipped by anyone who doesn’t like cats.

OK, so for the cat lovers here, this is your city. The city of Istanbul has 150,000 stray cats that are very well cared for by the community. Cats are sacred in the Muslim religion and also there are theories that in the Ottoman period cats were revered because they drove out the disease-carrying rats, but whatever the reason, it’s a pretty entertaining sight. They are everywhere, and most are super friendly and healthy. There are some paid city employees to care for the cats, including vets to spay/neuter them, but many of the locals also carry around cat food, and/or leave food/water outside of their home or business for the cats. There are little cat houses everywhere, and the cats act like the city is a giant living room built just for them. Some photos of cat sightings in this slideshow below (click arrows to scroll through photos):

Our vacation-in-a-vacation on the Mediterranean Coast

We are now just wrapping up a week in Çirali. It’s a small and remote town in the south of Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast. It’s a luxurious stop for us and we’ve been really enjoying the serenity of the place and some good down time, along with our splurge on a great apartment near the beach at the wonderful Azur Hotel Çirali. The cliffs reach right down to the water in most places along the coast here, and development has been limited in this area, so it’s quieter than other booming areas along this coast.

Beach and swimming time

This is the last of the beach time on our holiday so we really appreciated the time. The beach was busier than we would have liked, but that was our fault for booking here right smack on a big Turkish holiday (whoops). That being said, it wasn’t too bad and there was always lots of room. The beach is a pebble beach, so not as good on the feet as sand beaches, but great for finding rocks and skipping stones. The water was warm, but cool enough to be refreshing.

One day, to find a more peaceful beach, we hiked 3.5km along a path up and down the cliffs by the beach and came up a beautiful cove for a very needed refreshing swim after a very hot hike. It was a really gorgeous spot and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We also took a boat tour one day which stopped in various coves that were only accessible by the water so were were on and off the boat, swimming many times throughout the day.

Sights in the Çirali area

Of course we can’t just sit on a beach all week…. so we did lots of activities in the area as well. It’s an amazing place for interesting sights, as I understand most of Turkey is. Just a walk down the beach were the ruins of the ancient city of Olympus which dates back to the 4th century BC. The city was abandoned in the 15th century and only excavated starting in 1990. We were able to climb right up and through the ruins, very cool.

We also visited Mount Chimaera which is also a site of ancient ruins, and has continuous flames coming out of its rocks. The gas being emitted from the mountain is mainly methane and burns perpetually. They claim this site was the source of the Olympic flame tradition, but I didn’t find and corroborating sources, so I am doubtful. We hiked up at dusk to see the flames which were really striking on the mountain, and apparently in ancient times they burned so bright that sailors could navigate by the flames. If you block one burning area with rocks, flames will just pop up in another spot. Really wild.

The mountains in the area are beautiful and we took the cable car up Mt Tahtali to see the views at 2365m from sea level. We had hoped to hike around there but all trails were blocked due to fire risk, given the heat I can say that the kids didn’t complain.

Happy Birthday Nicholas

Now off to Europe

We are officially saying farewell to Asia and are looking forward to the European leg of our trip. Sweden is next! Thanks for reading this far 🙂

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