Day 63-66 - Touring Turkey with Fez Travel

The tour is proceeding according to this tour plan from Fez Bus. I have crossposted the entries to use as headings, using better descriptions where available.

Day 3: Istanbul to Gallipoli
An early start as we head down to the Gallipoli peninsula, the site of the ill-fated World War I campaign that shaped young commonwealth nations such as Australia and New Zealand. We take the tour at the Kabatepe Museum and partake in the tour of areas such as Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair Memorials, Anzac Cove, Johnston's Jolly, the Nek and Allied and Turkish trenches. After the tour, you cross the Dardenelles and stay in Çanakkale.

We left Istanbul early in the morning for the long drive via Tekirdag - not the most exciting bit of Turkey, to be honest - to the Gallipoli (Gelibolu) Peninsula. First stop was the Kabatepe museum, where in a fairly small, hushed room, we got the opportunity to view medals, coins, uniforms, bullets, guns, poignant letters and even some partial skeletons. The other sites are all fairly well-known, so I'll focus more on interpretation.

For those who don't know, the British and Anzac (Aust & NZ Army Corps) landed at Anzac Cove on the peninsula on 25 April 1915 in an attempt to capture the Dardanelles, which connect the Black Sea with the Mediterranean and hence were vital from a shipping perspective. To cut a long story short, the initiative failed, mainly because the choice of landing spot appears to have been a mistake. The Anzacs pulled out in late 1915-early 1916, having suffered massive casualties. To this day, Australia celebrates Anzac Day as its national war memorial day, starting with a dawn service in every capital and at Gallipoli itself. It was our first major loss in battle, and gave rise to a national spirit quite separate from our previous connections with Britain for perhaps the first time.

Within a few years of World War I, the Ottoman empire which had led Turkey for 7 centuries crumbled and Turkey, after a war of independence, became a republic in 1923 with war hero and independence leader, General Mustafa Kemal, as its first president. He believed Turkey needed to modernise, secularise and democratise - and achieved much towards this goal without sacrificing Turkey's independence to Western powers. He is revered as a national hero in every corner of Turkey, and has been given the title Ataturk - father of the Turks. He also normalised relations with Turkey's enemies in WWI, partly because of a strongly-held respect for British and Anzac forces he had himself fought, and facilitated the building of peace parks and international memorial sites.

As a "New Australian", it was a very weird experience for me - while I was born elsewhere, it is like growing up with an adopted parent. That culture has become my culture, and I was deeply moved by what I saw. Two of the most striking things for me were the gravesites, especially those believed to be of two 18-year-olds who had died in battle. Back in that day, people forged their ages to get into the fighting, so it's quite likely they were high-school-age kids. The other thing was just looking at some of the now eerily peaceful scenery that these guys had to negotiate during the fighting - it was sobering. As I look back over my photos tonight, I believe I have managed to accurately capture some of what I saw at least.

We finished by getting a ferry to Çanakkale, the city of about 500,000 where Turks talk with a broad Australian accent even though they really can't speak English - I find it amusing and the American tourists, by all web reports, find it irritating.

Day 4: Gallipoli to Kusadasi via Troy & Pergamon
Step back in time today as we head south and visit the ancient city of Troy, the site of the famed Trojan war, and its Trojan Horse. After Troy, we continue along the Aegean Coast for a lunch stop at Bergama. This afternoon sees us on a tour of the ruined Pergamon, a magnificent acropolis with one of the steepest amphitheatres in the world. Its impressive temples, library and medical facilities made it a renowned cultural and political centre in its time. We continue driving south for our night stop at Kusadasi.

Day 5: Ephesus Tour
Absorb yourself in history today with a guided tour of Ephesus. Walk down Marble Road towards the Celcus Library and Grand Theatre and immerse yourself into the mystical atmosphere of the city halls and stadium where chariot and horse races were once held. We also visit the site of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Also visit the former Greek village of Sirince, famous for it's fruit wines, before a leather goods show. Turkey produces some of the finest leather goods in the world and many are made here before branding in Italy.

While ancient cities of this kind are extremely fascinating, one thing that started to grate on me after a while is that the sheer dilapidation of most of the sites caused by millennia of wear and tear and earthquakes and the sorts of things that happen (and some measure of 19th-century treasure-hunting and looting) means that you basically walk from site to site with a few half-columns, pillars or scattered artefacts on levels of hilly, weed-covered earth, and have to basically use your imagination to try and reconstruct what was actually there based on the historical information. There are actually 9 cities of Troy, with the one of legend believed to be the 6th city standing on that site, and the others above or below it in layers. (The Trojan Horse, by the way, is basically a tourist trap, but is great for photographs.)

The Fez tour, in one respect, actually manages this extremely well - by going from Troy to Pergamon and then to Ephesus, one is going from worst- to best-preserved over the sequence - in Ephesus, many of the everyday parts of the city are still reasonably intact and you feel like you are walking around a city, and can get some idea for how the people of the time lived, even if only through the tour guide's commentary. Pergamon is more mixed in that some bits are excellently preserved (eg the theatre and its entrance, the agora etc) but most is not.

We stayed for two nights in Kusadasi (Kush-a-Dar-suh), a tourist town with a permanent population of about 50,000. The place is absolutely beautiful and great for shopping, although I didn't get to enjoy it much as my time there was marred by my various ailments.

Near Ephesus is a delightful bit of the country where one can wander around hillsides, see the alleged home of the Virgin Mary after Jesus's ascension to heaven and eat pancakes in a traditional Turkish pancake house sitting on cushions in a tent, surrounded by Turkish rugs and watching old women with headscarves rolling out and cooking your pancake to order on the hearth for about A$2. In the time I've been in Turkey, these pancakes (which you do find around the place) together with Turkish tea have become personal favourites.

Afterwards, we went to a leather shop and watched a fashion show, which two more flamboyant members of our group assisted wıth, and then we spent a couple of hours in the shop amusing ourselves and trying to avoid the nice but incredibly patient staff who wished to sell us stuff. I did, however, buy a really nice leather jacket.

Day 6: Kusadasi to Köycegiz
Tour the magnificent white calcium formations of Pamukkale, followed by the ancient city of Hierapolis and a dip in the hot springs, which were used in Roman times for their therapeutic powers.

Hierapolis is an interesting place compared to the other three in that it has been adopted by modernity for its original purpose. One can still see sarcophagi and ruins from the Roman period, as well as its excellently preserved theatre, but the attraction (and some might say tourist trap) is the thermal hot springs. While they were meant to cure everything from skin afflictions to flus to cancers, I wasn't actually game to go in and have a dip along with the thousands of Turkish and European tourists who were, but it was great all the same. The view from the bus from Kusadasi to Koycegiz (Koh-jiz, with a Queens English accent) through the mountains was actually the highlight of my day - I love this sort of nature stuff, with steep gorges and rivers and mountains and greenery, as Daniel can attest from my time in Western Canada. It was unexpected and it was great. Koycegiz is a mountain town of about 8,000 and so far is the friendliest place I've been in through all of Turkey.

This last day with the rest of the tour group was strangely emotional. This tour has two options - one which proceeds as follows, and the other spends the next 3 days (Friday to Sunday in this case) on a gulet cruising the Mediterranean. I was the only one who picked the land option in this particular group - and was given a number of chances to change my mind, but in the end didn't. The deciding factor in the end was my health - I felt I needed to recover, and I do that best by myself. But I probably would have done it anyway - I've always been a bit of a lone adventurer, and the thought of relaxing on a boat for 3 days actually sounded a bit boring to me.