Monthly Archives: September 2013

Travelling for the Moment – Luke

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Travel is something which can inspire many emotions.

You might catch your breath as you round a corner to see a sweeping mountainous vista, ocean glittering in the sunlight. You might visit a small village and laugh as the local children play rambunctiously, demanding your attention, or hide behind their mother’s skirts, only to be coaxed out, shyly smiling, as you take their photo and show it to them on your camera. Or you might be solemnly stunned by war and genocide museums, by the images and stories that detail the depths to which humanity can sink, and realise that you will never, ever be able to comprehend the horror and atrocities some people have had to live through. You might get somewhere and find it’s not at all what you expected – happily, or disappointingly. You’ll meet people who will become life-long friends, and make your experience even better than it otherwise would have been. You’ll meet some people to whom you look forward to saying goodbye.

Through all this, there’s emotional modifiers working for and against you. You pick up a bad stomach bug. A stranger sees you in need and gives you a helping hand, taking them well out of their way, and asks for nothing in return. You have to take some uncomfortable overnight transport, and arrive at your destination tired, sore, and grumpy. You bump in to people you’ve met previously while travelling, and have a great time catching up with them. You have to lug your heavy backpacks in the hot sun trying to locate accommodation in a busy city. Somehow, all your travel plans line up beautifully, you never put a foot wrong, everything runs on time and you even arrive at your destination early. Or the complete opposite happens. But the delay means you end up finding a cosy little coffee shop with amazing décor and friendly staff that you otherwise never would have had the chance to enjoy.

The longer you travel, the easier it is to shrug off the bad and enjoy the good. Everything is part of the overall experience, and every experience is worth something, even if it’s just a story to tell, or some perspective on how things could be worse.

One of my favourite emotions to have while traveling is what I call “the moment”.

After you have spent so much physical and mental energy in getting to somewhere new, finding where you’re staying, and sorting everything out, you finally arrive at the point where you have nothing to think about except what you want to do next. You’re completely free. Those are the moments where I find myself sitting at a café, walking down a cobblestone street in the sun, sitting by a beautiful lake or even rugged up in a tent while it lashes down with rain – and the realisation suddenly hits me. “Wow. I am actually here. Travelling, in this country, on the other side of the world. This is AWESOME!”

Travel is one of the few things that can provide you with that kind of moment. There are many reasons to go travelling, and having those moments is high up on the list. 🙂

Turkey: Cappadocia, Pt 1

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Firstly, let me begin by saying it’s Cap-ah-doe-kee-ya. I hate reading words and not knowing how to say them. Like the town we’re staying in – Goreme. Which I’ve only just worked out is ‘Gor-eh-meh’, not Gore-eem or Gor-eh-may. Urgh. Turkish is not so easy. Fortunately, language aside, the country seems to be about as well set up for ignorant tourists as Thailand and people here speak many languages. Like our hotel manager who speaks Turkish, English and Japanese (and that’s just what I’ve heard) and our tour guide who spoke Korean as well as English and Turkish. Being monolingual overseas is always a bit embarrassing… I think I’ll start telling people I speak a bit of Swahili – they’ll never be able to test me!

But back to Cappadocia. I wanted to come because our friend, the delightful Ms Muppet, recommended it so highly and she was right – this place is like some kind  ‘Labrynth meets fairyland in the desert’ landscape. The photos will tell it best.

Pigeon Valley at sunset.

Unfortunately Luke has now come down with the same sickness I had and spent the day on the bus suffering greatly. I felt a bit sorry for everyone else.. there’s nothing like being forced into a confined space with people who are coughing and spluttering (I’m still a bit sick too) while you’re on holidays and really not wanting to get ill. I tried to save my great, honking, nose blowing for outside the bus but… well, it wasn’t pretty.

What else wasn’t pretty was me having a panic attack at our very first stop.

We were scheduled to visit an underground city and I didn’t really have any qualms. We lined up, went down a narrow flight of stairs, turned a corner and some part of my brain screamed ‘GET OUT OF HERE’ and I muttered ‘I can’t do this’ to Luke, back up and raced out towards the light, adrenalin racing, almost bursting into tears.

I have no idea where this comes from – I’ve never really enjoyed confined spaces or caves but I think the super-narrowness, and knowing we’d be going down 8 floors just triggered something primal and I could barely hold it together to get out. At least I know to avoid those situations in future! I spent half an hour sitting on some grass, patting a dog that, apart from being white rather than black, was the spitting image of my dog, and generally cursing myself for being a wuss.

Everything else we did was fine though. We went for a walk down and along a canyon, had a nice lunch by a river, climbed to some fairy chimneys and saw the landscape that inspired Tatooine in the first Star Wars movie (scenes eventually filmed in Tunisia because the Turkish government at the time was monumentally short-sighted and didn’t give them permission), saw some epic views over landscapes that have barely changed in centuries and just generally soaked up the foreign-ness of it all.

Near the place that inspired Tatooine.

When we got back to the hotel Luke fell into bed and Lucas and I stayed up blogging, got some dinner and were serenaded by the sound of dozens of cars honking their horns because a wedding party arrived here and then left. We told the hotel owner that people only honk their horns in Australia when they’re angry and he laughed. “Cultural differences!” – yes, and thank god we live in a place where if you’re happy and you know it you don’t make a huge amount of noise. Apparently there are many weddings here on the weekends – it’d drive me mad!

The wedding car.

Speaking of our hotel, we’re staying in a fairy chimney – our room was carved out of a cone-shaped spire of rock. Pretty neat! This is what the hotel looks like. I think the first room photo that comes up on their header is our room. We had a big terrace in front of our room and one morning I counted 25 balloons in the sky. sometimes there’s over 60!

Turkey: Istanbul

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After six weeks in Africa on what I came to think of as the ‘plague truck’ and not getting ill, I was most dismayed to develop a cold and cough a couple of days into our stay in Istanbul. I didn’t really get the most out of the city, particularly since we stayed an extra two nights after Nikki and Leigh left, just to see more stuff. Still, we did make it to a few notable sights and the place certainly made a good impression.

The view from our first apartment.

The weather was pretty good – a trifle hot but it was August after all, and the nights were cooler. Our first apartment had 70 steps to climb (and me with 20kgs of luggage), so I was very happy that our second place was on the ground floor. We chose the ‘Cheers Hostel’, very close to the Aya Sofya and the Blue Mosque. Mosques in Istanbul were much quieter than Dar Es Salaam and provided more of a nice touch of  distant foreign flavour rather than a blare of tinny screeching at 4am.

In the ‘old city’ where we stayed at Cheers, there were some really beautiful buildings. Turkish people know how to go to town with colour and I’ve been totally inspired with regards to home furnishings and craft projects for when I get home.

If unicorns became architects they’d design houses like this.

At night all the lamp shops and bars with lamps and just general abundance of lamps made the place look magical. I may have even bought a few lamps myself, but about 97 less that I actually wanted.

Lucas, Luke and I decided to buy a ticket for a ‘hop on hop off’ bus to see more of the city. It was a bit rubbish, to be honest. The buses seemed to run in different directions each time we got on so there was some back tracking and the recorded commentary was dreadful. For a city with three thousand years of history you’d think there’d be something interesting to say but I can remember almost none of it – and usually trivia sticks in my mind. Heck, with an hour on the internet *I* could’ve done a better tour.

Every time I saw the Istanbul horizon I thought of football because of the pairs of minarets, which is ludicrous because I don’t even think about football when I see people playing football.

However the tour, for a small extra cost, came with a boat trip that we took in the evening. Despite looking like we were going to be crammed aboard a boat like sardines into a can (although that’s a bad simile, because if the can sank the sardines would’ve been fine, unlike us) it turned out that there were multiple boats and the view was great and the guide was ok too. Although I was feeling rather sorry for myself by this point and fell asleep for part of it, the boat did go under a bridge that was huge and did fantastic light displays every half hour with a huge number of LEDs. We’d seen it from our Taksim apartment but getting to get right up close to it was excellent.

This photo does it no justice at all.

Apart from that I basically slept most of the days away or dragged myself around like a snot-producing zombie. One of the things I did quite like was the Basilica Cistern, a huge cavern underneath the middle of Istanbul which was, as the name suggests, a water storage area.

About 1500 years old, it shows how we really don’t make things like we used to. Plus there were big fat fish swimming in the metre or so of water under the walkways. They were a bit creepy. Apparently the place was used in ‘From Russia With Love’, many years ago.

Apart from that Istanbul was notable for the vast number of cats everywhere, the fact that everyone’s brother/cousin/uncle’s-father’s-former-roomate-in-college had a carpet shop we should definitely visit, and the foooooooood. Turkish food is great – and dramatic. They do this thing called a ‘testes kebab’ (yes, I know what you’re thinking, but no!) which is a casserole cooked in a clay pot and then the pot is broken when served. We have also been loving the turkish delight and baklava. I’ve always thought baklava seemed like a good idea but never really had much of it. Until now!

On the topic of food, but only just, Lucas and Luke became addicted to something I dubbed the ‘squishy burger’. These were sold at street side kebab and sandwich vendors and would be stacked, pre-made in a bain-marie. They looked … well, you can see for yourself.

Bun, meat and tomato sauce, left to sit in a glass cabinet all day. It’s hard to believe nothing went wrong.

Not exactly appetising. But they were super cheap (the equivalent of $1 each I think) and I’m ashamed to say that I, too, thought they tasted alright. I limited myself to a single one but the boys had at least one a day, by my reckoning.

I’d like to assure all the parents out there reading this that we ate this kind of thing more frequently:


Farewell drinks with Nikki and Leigh.

Next stop: Cappadocia!