After a few long hauls in the last 18 months, and looking at various ancient places, it dawned on us that there were big chunks of history and adventure closer to home that we had not explored yet.
In particular, we were thinking of Jordan and Egypt, but with old Trumpy encouraging people the lob missiles around we decided Turkey was a safer bet this year. In fact Turkey has some of the most interesting history of anywhere.
At the crossroads to Europe and Asia it has been a cradle of history and hosted most of the empires that shaped our European culture, where the Greeks met the Persian, where the Mongolians raided from the east, where the Crusaders from England came with their religious fervous and the Silk Road runs straight through, it even has it’s own continent, Asia Minor.
The original plan was to try out an organised tour, but when I showed Wooksie the various itineraries she pointed out that we were supposed to having a holiday not some of archaeological expedition, so once again we ended up travelling independently and organising the whole thing ourselves.
As with other trips our plan is to got to the key centres, then organise visiting the places of interest using Tripadvisor or Get Your Guide, which has worked well in the past.
We had been to Turkey 32 years ago, and remembered it being a very cheap place to live, travel and it was full of cheap, rip off, designer goods so we could get our Xmas shopping in early,
We decided to start in Istanbul, otherwise known and Constantinople and Byzantium, with all those names, Sultans and invaders it was bound to be fun, where east meets west and all that.
I was intrigued by the stories of underground cities where ancient people hid underground from invading armies. So this was top of my list of things to do, a lot of them are built around Goreme in the Cappadocia region, fortunately this was also the place famous for balloon rides, to Cappadocia was added to the list.
To keep Wooksie happy, we included a 7 day holiday break in the seaside resort of Antalya. It also had the benefit of having a lot of history in it’s own right, with various relics of the Roman and other empires, it meant we could keep up our historical theme, as well as finding a nice place to settle for a week.
So, all the flights and hotels are booked, Turkey here we come, show us what you’ve got!
Here is our plan
Leave a Reply