yestravel

Gottravel and I have just returned from 25 days traveling around Istanbul and Western Turkey. As always I wanted to thank all the fodorites who helped me in planning our itinerary. I especially appreciated the great advice given by otherchelebi & Croesus, who both added some richness to our travels by suggesting some interesting places for us to visit. We were fortunate to meet otherchelebi & his wife and enjoyed time with them in Istanbul. Turkey is an incredibly scenic country with wonderful, hospitable people.

First the boring, but necessary logistics for this trip that I was typing up as we travelled.

HOW WE GOT THERE AND GOT AROUND
Flights – We flew roundtrip on Turkish Air on a direct flights from/to IAD to/from IST Ataturk Airport. Both flights were comfortable and left & arrived on time. Very good airfares are available from IAD to IST. Our hotel in IST, Dersaadent, picks you up if you are staying with them more than 3 days. It was nice to get off an overnight flight and be met at the very busy airport with a person holding up a card with your your name on it. It took about 30 minutes to get from the airport to Dersaadent that is in the Sultanahmet quarter.

Internal flights – We ended up with both our internal flights to/from IST to/from Izmir on Pegasus. I compared the one-way fares on the various budget airlines and Pegasus had the best times and prices. Fares were incredibly cheap. One important note is NOT to fly out of or into the airport on the Asian side, Sabiah Gokcen. I made that mistake on our outbound flight from IST to Izmir. I saved a few dollars on the air fare, but the distance to the airport (approximately 90 minutes) and the cost to get there via a private shuttle was ~ 60€ over twice the taxi fare to Ataturk.

For auto rental we used Auto Europe, the European site, which saved several $100’s versus using the Auto Europe US site. I have rented autos using AutoEurope sites other than the US one for sometime now and always save money on the auto rental. One enters all the correct information in terms of address, credit card, residence etc and I have not a problem with using the foreign sites. Our rental was with Budget. We had 4 doors, diesel fuel, Fiat Punto that served us well. As has been mentioned on Fodors fuel is very expensive, ~4.4 TL per litre, in Turkey. Primary roads are in excellent condition and well signed. Secondary roads, not so much. The conditions and signage varied once you left the main roads, but then for us getting lost can be half the fun of travelling! There are lots of gas stations everywhere. We never could get a very detailed road map of the country and the one we used was fine for the main roads. We used google maps on my iPad or iPhone a lot and it was correct maybe 75% of the time.

WHERE WE WENT AND WHERE WE STAYED
While having planned out an itinerary with both places to visit and stay and number of days, we found that we were constantly changing how long we stayed in many places. We changed for a variety of reasons. Fortunately the places where we stayed we were allowed these changes with no penalty and we appreciated the ability to be flexible.

Listed below are the towns where we stayed, number of nights and which hotel I have reviews of the hotels under dl on Trip Advisor. As a side note all the places we stayed offered very good to great breakfasts. The breakfasts were so varied and plentiful they kept us going to late evening for dinner.

IST – 5 nights on the front end at Dersaadent Hotel in the Sultanahmet area (http://www.dersaadethotel.com) – perfect location for visiting the touristic area. Nice staff, lovely rooftop with great views of the Blue Mosque and Bosphorous. Recommend
IST – 3 nights at the end of trip at Lasagrada Hotel http://www.lasagradahotel.com/sayfal...=2&cid=2&id=10
Absolutely loved this place. This was the perfect hotel for us to stay after close to three weeks of traveling. Our good rate on booking.com did not include breakfast, but lots of place to grab something nearby. Steps from the Osmabey Metro stop so easy to get around IST. Very happy not being near all the tourists in the historic district. Gave us a chance to see other parts of IST and glad we did. Highly Recommend

Bergama – 1 night + 1 night at the Hera Hotel Boutique http://bergama.hotelhera.com Cute little hotel with wonderful owners. This small hotel is on a hill and is about a five-minute walk into town. Nice room, small bathroom. Recommend

Assos -2 nights at Assos alarga http://www.assosalarga.com. Another place we loved and hated to leave, but it got very cold and windy so we cut our stay short here. Ece, the owner, and her helper are just terrific. We stayed in the Orsa room and it had a wonderful fireplace that we actually used one night. Highly recommend.

Parmukkale – 1 night was more than enough for us at the Ayapam Hotel http://www.ayapamboutiquehotel.com/?sayfa=main&dil=EN
Ugh! a charmless hotel in a charmless town. The original standard room we had booked was so small & for a few dollars more we moved to a larger room. But after staying at some lovely charming places, this was just a white cement building and didn’t offer much to us. FIND SOMEPLACE ELSE TO STAY

Kas – 5 nights in lovely Kas at the lovely Hotel Cachet Hotel in a superior room with a spectacular sea view http://www.hotelcachet.com/?a=1&lang=1&Cat=13. Hotel Cachet is another winner of a hotel. It is not right in Kas, but on the peninsula, which means it is VERY quiet – no commercial buildings (other than hotels & restaurants) including minarets are allowed on the peninsula according to the delightful owner. Probably need your own car to stay here unless you plan to pretty much stay at the hotel with its nice pool and small beach. It’s approximately a scenic 10 minute drive into town. There is a bus that runs every half hour. You would reach the bus by walking up a very steep incline. The restaurant in this hotel is excellent – one of the better dinners we had in Turkey. Highly Recommend

Datca/Mesudiye/Hayitbuku Bay – Serentiy Pansyion – 1 night
This was a very small place with small being the operative word. We travel very lightly each with a carry on, but we could not fit everything into this tiny room. Bathroom was the kind where you could sit on the toilet and brush your feeth and shower all at the same time. Owner was not around, but his mother was ever so helpful and took great care of us. Beautiful location on a bay on the Datca peninsula, but we had to move on – it was just too small. Don’t recommend unless you don’t mind tiny rooms & bath.

Datca harbor – 1 night at Konak Tuncel Efe http://www.kucukoteller.com.tr/konak-tuncel-efe Brand new hotel on the waterfront in Datca – We were the only people staying in the hotel. Nice room overlooking the harbor. Breakfast had quite the presentation – Recommend

Lake Bafa – 2 nights at Pensione Selenes http://selenespension.com Nice pension right on the lake. We stayed in a premium room with a balcony. This is a farm and we had half board – nice dinners. Okay place and recommend if you want to stay right at the lake in a pensione

Selcuk – 4 nights at Ephesus Suites Hotel http://www.ephesussuiteshotel.com Because of leaving early from a couple places we ended up with four nights here and it was a nice place to hang out. Our unreserved night was in a Family suite that was very comfortable with a separate area with a sofa and chairs. The other 3 nights were spent in the King suite which was a large room with two comfortable chairs. Fantastically helpful owner.

Stay tuned for our adventures exploring Turkey.

xyz99

Great start, looking forward for the details.

We just got back, too so this will be fun to compare notes and impressions. All I can say for now, we loved Turkey, even though we had less time than you to explore it.

yestravel

@ xyz, I remember reading your planing thread. Glad you had a good trip.

PegS

Thanks! Great, easy-to-read details should help many a traveler.

MarnieWDC

Yestravel, you and Gottravel come through again ! Your observations and descriptions, as well as your recommendations, are golden for those of us still (or back again) in the planning stages.

Looking forward to the next installment.

Teshekurederem.

otherchelebi

Glad you are both back home in good health.
Eser and I, we both hope you will be back.

gottravel

Istanbul Part One

In September, DC is seven time zones from Turkey. Despite sleeping in reclining chairs in Business Class on the ten-hour overnight Turkish Air flight, I arrived in Istanbul in the late afternoon in a state of dazed exhaustion, in large part due to the lingering end of a cold. YT, on the other hand, was feeling pretty perky. My first impression, on the taxi ride from the Ataturk airport to the Hotel Dersaadet, was that the minarets (usually in pairs) on mosques looked like missiles. The Dersaadet is on a side street of the tourist Sultanahmet neighborhood, almost (as we later found out) in the shadow of the Blue Mosque. We checked in, dragged our to suitcases to our nice, albeit small, ground floor room and headed out for some desultory wandering amid souvenir shops and tourist cafes. On the recommendation of the hotel, we had dinner at the improbably named “Little Havana” a couple of blocks away. The tables were set up in the street outside a narrow restaurant. The owner was an amusing character and the dinner – mezze, manti (a kind of Turkish ravioli with a yogurt sauce) and stuffed eggplant – was very good. Afterwards we shared some baklava at the nearby Tamara. The Tamara rooftop had a stunning view of the floodlight-lit Blue Mosque. Fantastic!

The next morning we had the buffet breakfast on the rooftop terrace. It was our introduction to the array of foodstuffs that comprise a Turkish breakfast: Slices of tomato, cucumber and pepper; several kinds of baked goods, including bread and simit; a selection of Turkish cheeses; a variety of olives; two kinds of butter; honey, yogurt, cereals, juices, fruit and a half-dozen jams and marmalades. The rooftop had a great view of the Bosporus as well as the Sea of Marmara, both filled with a countless number of boats and ships. The terrace had, as well, a partially blocked, but still superlative, view of the Blue Mosque.

After breakfast we headed to the Hagia Sophia Museum. Our walk introduced us to the scale of tourism in Istanbul. Many of the major sights – the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi, and the Archeological Museum - are located in close proximity in the Old Town that includes the Sultanahmet quarter. The result is a massive influx of tourists in busses and from cruise ships. The sheer volume made the streets close to impassable. The crowds overwhelmed the sites; the Hagia Sophia had at least half a dozen tour numbered tour groups being led by umbrella-wielding tour guides.

The Hagia Sophia had once been the largest church in the world – built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian; it had been the Saint Peter’s of the Sixth Century. It is now undergoing maintenance, and the entire left side, as one enters, is a mass of scaffolding. Nonetheless, the Hagia Sophia is simply overwhelming, stunning in its radiant majesty. The immense central dome seems to float unsupported. The surviving Byzantine mosaics are gorgeous. The stonework is radiant. Not even milling tour groups or the five or more levels of interior scaffolding could distract from its beauty. Few buildings have ever created this kind of impression on me.

After visiting Hagia Sophia, we did some wandering through the nearby Arasta Bazaar then headed to Mosaic Museum. The mosaic – it is all of one piece – had been part of the flooring of the Byzantine imperial palace. The work was exquisite, largely depicting hunting and pastoral scenes. The absence of Christian iconography was notable; stylistically, it is not different from other mosaic works of pagan antiquity. Like many Roman mosaics, it displayed a strong sense of artistic realism – these were depictions of real people and real animals doing recognizable things - that would disappear from human history in the early years of state Christianity and not reappear for a thousand or more years. We loved it, this last gasp of the old Roman world.

Afterwards, via the ministrations of a carpet tout while we walked the old Hippodrome, we visited the Blue Mosque. The exterior rivaled the grandeur of Hagia Sophia. The interior was covered with beautiful blue ceramic tiles from Iznik but it somehow seemed to lack the transcendent radiance of the Hagia Sophia. As we toured Turkey and visited various domed mosques, it seemed as if the Ottomans had tried to recapture the beauty and architectural audacity of the Hagia Sophia again and again. Afterwards, we visited a rug shop, talking to the owner and viewing various carpets for an hour; we learned that our taste ran to “tribal” (Kurdish) rugs. Although we didn’t buy anything, it was an educational experience that we were to repeat many more times over the course of our trip before we actually did buy a rug.

We napped after our carpet seminar; we had plans that evening for dinner with Istanbul Fodorite otherchelebi and his wife. We met up with them by taking the incredibly crowded tram from Sultanahmet to the end of the tramline at Kabataş on the other side of the Golden Horn just before the Dolmabahçe Palace. They picked us at the adjacent gas station and we drove north parallel to the Bosporus for a bit before pulling into a hotel/restaurant area along the strait. We had a nice dinner at a “fusion” restaurant very near the Bosporus Bridge – from our table we had a superb view and could see the beautiful ever-changing colored lights on the bridge high over the busy waters between the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The food was inventive, particularly a steak au poivre that used Szechuan peppercorns in lieu of the regular black peppercorns. We shared a bottle of delicious Turkish rosé. OC and his wife were charming. We spoke at length of American and Turkish politics, Turkish history, Chicago, our lives and our upcoming road trip through western Turkey. After dinner, we took a drive up to neighborhoods near Taksim Square; even on a weeknight the square and the neighboring streets were filled with young people. Then we went to their magnificent Bosporus-view apartment. We talked longer and it was as if talk took away our jet lag. It was midnight when we left, taking a cab across the Golden Horn via the Galata Bridge to our hotel.

The next morning we had another gigantic breakfast at the rooftop terrace and then set out by cab to the Church of Saint Savior in Chora. Located just inside Istanbul’s old city walls, the Chora contains some of the finest Byzantine mosaics extant. The murals cover such ecclesiastical topics as the genealogy of Christ from Adam to King David (an odd lineage for someone purported to be the son of God), the life of the Virgin Mary, and the infancy and ministry of Christ. In the nave, there are murals devoted to the Virgin Mary taking a nap surrounded by devoted on-lookers. Snarkiness aside, the mosaics are gorgeous, the church is splendid and the sight well worth seeing. We returned to our hotel by cab. While the cab out to the Chora had taken us along the shore of the Sea of Marmara and then along the road outside the old city walls, the return ride took us through the heart of the Fatih neighborhood. This is something of a fundamentalist neighborhood comprised of the government’s strongest supporters. It gave me an understanding of the fear and distrust – later expressed on numerous occasions by middle-class Turks whom we talked with over the course of our trip – of the increasingly authoritarian Erdoğan government and the Justice and Development Party.

Once back amid the tourists of the Sultanahmet neighborhood, we attended two more impromptu lectures at carpet shops – I drew some comfort from the fact that, no matter how outlandish or variable the prices, we were being told the same thing in each shop regarding the origins, weaves and dyes of various types of carpets. After our carpet seminars, we headed on foot to the spice market. The spice market has devolved into a general-purpose market; we found exactly two stores still devoted solely to selling spices. We bought some Persian saffron as gifts and then headed back to the hotel.

That evening, we went out to the Giritli Restaurant. I don’t think we would have made it without the mapping app on YT’s iPhone. Turkish cities and towns are pretty much devoid of street signs. Moreover, the Giritli was literally on the other side of the tracks – separated from our hotel by a train line that had few overhead crossings, only one of which was near us. We wandered and backtracked, wandered and backtracked, using the device to map our current position against the walking route. All the wandering and backtracking was worth it though. The Giritli was a nice outside courtyard restaurant with a fixed price menu and a half-dozen watchful cats. We started with eighteen mezze, all delectable. Then a second course of delicious grilled octopus, a spanikopita-type pastry and fried calamari. The third course was a choice between grilled sea bass and sea bream, with little in the way of seasonings other than lemon. The meal was wonderful, although we were full by the end of the second course and couldn’t finish the third. It had taken us the better part of half an hour to get to Giritli; it took us the lesser part of five minutes to return to the hotel.

The next day we ventured across the Golden Horn for the second time. We took the tram to the Kabataş stop, then the funicular up to Taksim Square, then the metro to Cevahir Mall. Our destination: A carpet store on the lower level that catered to a largely Turkish clientele; OC had had recommended it. We looked at carpets and identified a finely woven Afghan that we liked; in terms of pattern it looked not dissimilar to the Kurdish rugs that we’d become fond of, but was plusher and had a slightly more refined appearance. We added it to our catalog of photos on YT’s cellphone, noted the price and vowed to return at the end of the trip if we didn’t find anything more attractive in the next three weeks. We were spared a lengthy seminar because of the language barrier. (This was at least the seventh rug store/merchant we’d visited so far.) We hit the mall Starbucks (!) for an espresso and the bathrooms, and then returned via Metro to Taksim Square.

From there, we walked down the long, crowded Istikal Caddesi pedestrian street, pausing to examine a couple of surviving churches and a record shop where I bought a CD. We had our first lunch of the trip – the breakfasts had been filling and we’d subsisted on the occasional simit until our 8:00 p.m. dinners – on Istikal Caddesi. I had köfte – Turkish meatballs – and a coke and we shared some sautéed stuffed grape leaves. Both were pretty tasty. The restaurant adjoined a bookstore and was book-themed. They even presented the check in a hollowed-out book – I was briefly tempted to pocket it as gift for a bookstore-owning friend back in DC. We took a second funicular – the “Tunel” – down to the Karakoy tram stop and crossed back over to Sultanahmet to briefly check out the Grand Bazaar. We had a couple more rug seminars there and then went on to the Topaki Palace where we toured the harem area and then the rest of the grounds. Some of the rooms had gorgeous tiles; others had fantastic views of the confluence of the Golden Horn and the Bosporus. The Topkapi is pretty spectacular. It was late afternoon by the time we returned to the hotel. It had been a long exhausting day. Much later, we decided to return to Little Havana for an al fresco streetside dinner of stuffed grape leaves, stuffed eggplant and lamb stew. I had a glass of wine, which was served in a colored water glass. I asked the effusive owner if he had ever been to Cuba. He said no, but that he and his wife planned to go there in 2014. He also told me that men in Turkey always have the last word in family discussions – and that it usually consisted of “yes, dear.” Bad humor is universal.

The next day, Sunday, was our first rug-free day other than the day we had arrived – the rug touts must have slept in. We took the tram from the Sultanahmet stop down to the stop near the Galata Bridge, found a boat tout and signed up for the morning Bosporus Cruise. There was a bus shuttle to the nearby departure point and we soon found ourselves on the water, motoring north near the west bank of the Bosporus. Istanbul is, if anything, more beautiful from sea than by land.

An hour and a half later we returned and docked and walked across the Galata Bridge – almost impossibly and impassibly crowded with fishermen – to the Tunel funicular and returned to the Galata neighborhood. There we checked out the Mevlevi Lodge near the Şişhane metro stop. The Mevlevi Lodge was a former a Dervish lodge that still had Sunday afternoon Dervish ceremonies. We thought we’d give it a whirl, but, unfortunately, that afternoon’s ceremony was already sold out. Nevertheless, we paid a small entrance fee and checked out the grounds. It had a shaded old Ottoman cemetery and a building that explained the history of the dervish sect. The grounds were quiet, with a peaceful contemplative aura - an oasis after the throngs on Istikal Caddesi and the Galata Bridge. I spent some time photographing old Ottoman headstones; the lettering was in pre-Ataturk Arabic and the headstones were topped with replications of various forms of headgear – fezzes and turbans of varied sizes - that had indicated one’s social status in life back in Ottoman days. (The bigger the turban, the higher the status, an Ottoman analog to Baltimore's "the higher the hair, the closer to God.") After our late lunch, we returned to our hotel via the funicular and tram and packed. We were flying to Izmir the next day.

That evening, we took a cab to the Hopjapasha Cultural Center for a whirling dervish performance that we’d arranged through the hotel that afternoon. It was visually spectacular, but on some level one recognized that this was devotion, not a tango show, spectacle or entertainment. Afterwards, we walked back up to our hotel, stopping at a likely looking restaurant for a snack of mezze. We went to bed early. We had a flight to Izmir – and the beginning of our Turkish road trip - the next morning.

MarnieWDC

Well, Gottravel, I just stopped laughing-and copying-long enough to thank you for this informative, and really enjoyable, post. Lots of good ideas and descriptions...and the history and commentary are invaluable.

I want to travel with you and Yestravel

otherchelebi

We would have been more careful if we even had an inkling of the depth of your memory.

Good writing, good narrative and useful detail and not appreciated mostly because you wrote well of us. -

Deserves everyone's stamps of approval.

gottravel

Marnie, OC - Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. Further posts forthcoming.

yestravel

Not so sure about the memory, but note-taking does wonders for it. Thanks for reading.

gottravel

Two addenda to the above:

Firstly, We’d bought an Istanbul Museum Pass in advance through our hotel. It cost 85 Turkish lira and covered our entry to the Chora, the Hagia Sophia (technically a museum), the Topkapi Museum/Harem Apartments and the Istanbul Mosaic Museum. The pass is valid for 72 hours after initial use. I’m not sure whether we had any net savings relative to purchasing individual admissions, but the card does allow one to bypass any admission lines, which can become quite long mid-day. By sheer happenstance, we’d visited the two most popular museums, the Hagia Sophia and Topkapi, immediately after opening and in the late after noon, respectively; there were no lines to bypass. On the down side, the Museum Pass will determine what you visit for 72 hours; the result for us was what seemed to be a very briskly paced three days of trying to fit in sites the pass covers.

Secondly, I omitted the Basilica Cistern, which we visited on our second full day in Istanbul. The Cistern is a vast underground reservoir dating to Justinian’s day. There are over 300 columns supporting the vaulted roof, most of which appear to have been looted from old Roman temples and reused. One walks on raised paths, listening to the sound of dripping water in the dim light. The effect is eerie. Not to be missed are the two Medusa heads in a remote corner far from the entrance. Both support columns, but one has been turned sideways and the other inverted, probably for religious reasons. As we headed to the exit, I thought I saw a group of monks, but it turned out to be people dressing in Ottoman costume for a photography booth, not unlike the period costume photo places one sees in the American West. I wish that they had been monks – there’s nothing quite like some brethren at the cistern.

gottravel

Bergama/Assos/Bergama

On our fifth morning, we awoke early, had a quick small breakfast at the terrace buffet – they were still setting up – and caught a 45€ shuttle to the Sabiha Gökçen Airport at 8:00 a.m. The Sabiha Gökçen Airport is on the Asian side of the Bosporus. We’d booked our Pegasus flight to Izmir out of this airport because the ticket was slightly cheaper. It turned out to be a false economy: The cab fare made the total price of the flight higher. Moreover, it was long, grueling drive through hellish traffic on crowded streets and highways to get to the distant airport. It took us an hour just to get from our hotel to the immense lofty span of the Bosporus Bridge.
The traffic thinned once we were on the Asian side, but the airport was still another half hour away. Paradoxically, we’d made good time as we’d scheduled two hours to get us the airport and our noonish flight. We learned our lesson; our return flight almost three weeks would take us back to the Ataturk Airport on the European side.

The flight itself to Izmir was brief – less than an hour. We located the Budget auto rental counter at the Izmir airport easily. Finding the lot with our rental car took a bit more effort. Our car was a five-speed Fiat Punto hatchback, a model that I’ve driven repeatedly on various European trips. Although we checked the car extensively for any pre-existing scratches or dents, we failed to notice that it lacked the shelf-like plastic piece that hid the contents of the hatchback compartment from view. (This made us reluctant to park in any but the most well-tended parking lots whenever we had our luggage in the car.) Soon we were on our way north to Bergama. The main roads were well marked and relatively uncrowded. Roadwork seemed to be ubiquitous everywhere we went; Turkish highways seem to be one large infrastructure project. Turkish drivers – once outside the pressure cooker of Istanbul traffic – were sensible and courteous. It was a little over a two hour drive.

We arrived at the town if Bergama without incident. Once there, finding our hotel (the Hera Hotel) proved a bit problematic. The Hera has good signage throughout Bergama and we made it most of the way through town without difficulty. There was a critical sign that had collapsed though. We then embarked on an extended comedy of errors. First, we took the riverside road out of town until it became apparent that we’d left Bergama. We returned on the same road to become stranded for twenty minutes behind a huge truck carrying an immense piece of poured concrete; the truck was so big that it had stopped traffic in both directions. (Traffic only started again following the temporary relocation of a stand selling melons.) Then we tried to take a Roman bridge into the old town, only to be foiled by the increasingly narrow streets once we’d crossed over the river. Since there was no room to turn around, I had to back out over the bridge to the riverside road, causing my own traffic jam as I attempted to back into the busy street. Eventually, we found the right bridge and navigated our way to the hotel by driving along the river and backtracking into the old town. The Hera is wonderful and comprises two buildings with some beautiful enclosed grounds between them. It’s located in the old part of Bergamo, on the lower slopes of the Pergamum acropolis beyond the new town and the river. The main part of the hotel had been a former upper class Greek home. The current owners had rehabbed the house and excavated the underlying wine cellar, which had once housed livestock. Like everyone we met, they were pleasant and extremely helpful in all matters great and small. Our room the Demeter - was in the newer section of the hotel and pleasant with a smallish bathroom and the tiniest sink I’ve ever seen. The Wi-Fi was spotty - but this was a minor issue, something to be expected in the thick stone-walled old houses we stayed in throughout this trip. We were beat and decided to postpone our visit to Pergamon acropolis above Bergama until the next day. I bought a bottle of wine – a good Turkish cabernet sauvignon (“Sevilen Parsel No. 9”) – from the owner’s cellar and had a glass in the open-air “lobby” while YT napped.

Later, based on the recommendation of the owner, we walked into town for an early dinner at the Bergama Sofrasi restaurant next to the old hamam. We had a stuffed eggplant starter, köfte and chicken shish kebab with Turkish rice and a salad, as well as a glass of wine, again served in a colored water glass. The eggplant and the köfte were good, the chicken a tad dry and the rice tasty, a bit like perfumed Mexican rice. The weather was perfect and we ate outside. Around nightfall, about halfway through the meal, the muezzin in the mosque across the street began the evening prayer call. For once, it was live, not pre-recorded and not being broadcast on tinny loudspeakers, and the man had a wonderful melodic voice. It was the only time that I actually enjoyed hearing the call to prayer during the trip.

After dinner we walked around town. We resumed our rug habit via visiting an antique store that sold rugs. We were shown a couple dozen and I began to develop an appreciation for the differences in design, technique and even color between the various types of regional Turkish rugs. We then walked to the nearby Kizil Avlu, an immense stack of floodlit red brick ruins that had served as a temple for an Egyptian religious cult, then as a church, and was now closed for repair. It also seemed to be bedding-down ground for all of the town’s dogs – there were half a dozen scattered, sleeping dogs on the nearby grass. They’d open an eye but otherwise pointedly ignore us as we walked by. We went back to our room and our bed via the old Roman bridge, this time on foot.

We slept comfortably and awoke the next morning to the drumming of rain, the first since our arrival. We had a late breakfast in the Hotel Hera’s incredible breakfast area – it has a floor-to-ceiling glass wall with a view of the entire lower city spread out below us. Breakfast was great, the usual immense array of goodies; by the time we finished eating, we knew that this day was destined to be another lunch-less day. After breakfast, we drove the winding, guardrail-less road up to the Acropolis. It was shrouded in fog and mist with eddies of recurrent light rain. We decided against entering; however atmospheric the site might be in the gray mid-morning, it was too chilly and wet.

We returned to our hotel and revised our plans. Assos – the next stop on our itinerary – had better weather. We called and found that our planned room was available that night. So we checked out of Bergama a day early and soon were on our way to Assos. Our hosts at Bergama were totally untroubled by our change in plans and premature departure, and wished us bon voyage. Our route – the same we’d mistakenly driven out of town on the previous day – took us first through suburbs and then sparsely populated tree-covered hills in near-constant rain, rain, rain. I mentally compiled a rain-themed mix tape as we drove. At one point, we arrived at a line of unusual conifers so perfectly rounded that they looked like topiary rather than natural vegetation. We were so struck that we stopped to take photographs. (We never identified the trees, but later discovered that we’d driven through a Turkish national park.)

Once, we rejoined the larger and busier coastal roads, we somehow lost our way in the Edremit sprawl and drove through side streets for half an hour. Frustratingly, we could see our highway, elevated, and a block or two off to our right. What we didn’t see was an entrance to it until we’d driven all the way through Edremit. The drive was otherwise uneventful and the weather slowly cleared. We made it to Assos mid-afternoon ad found Assosalarga without difficulty, driving the last bit on a small coastal road past farmers selling honey and nuts at roadside stands. Assosalarga was another lovely old stone building with a walled garden area. It had a fantastic setting in an abandoned quarry right off a road into town. Our room, the Orsa, was huge and wonderfully decorated, and had great views across a valley. Best of all, it had a king-size bed, the first we’d had since arriving in Turkey. The owner, Ece, was delightful, as was her one female staff person. She gave us all kinds of tips about what to see in the area.

Assos, aka Behramkale, is actually two towns. One, where we were staying, is spread out over a small hill under an old Greek acropolis. The other is down the hill on a beautiful small harbor, a picturesque small stone warren of homes, hotels and restaurants. We explored both towns a bit, checked out the immense ancient stone walls around the area and then returned to our wonderful room. We later had dinner in the hilltop town, on the balcony of a restaurant with beautiful sunset views. The staff were nice, all the fellow diners were British tourists, but the food was non-descript: A mezze of cold stuffed squash (“courgette”) blossoms; a tasty but oily veal casserole with peppers, onions and tomatoes; a chicken shish – dry – and an Efes beer. We skipped dessert and made our way back through the tiny town to our room and a great night’s sleep behind drawn shutters with a howling wind outside.

The next morning’s breakfast was lavish – and superb - even by generous Turkish standards. We spoke to length to Ece about local sights and places to dine. She gave us all kinds of tips about what to see in the area, even guiding us – she was driving to Çanakkale on business and guided to a rug cooperative in near Ayvacik ; en route she stopped and pointed out a drive that was supposed to take us near an award-winning modernist house. It turned out the rug collective had just received a visit by a dealer. He’d purchased a two foot high stack of rugs that were pushed aside in a corner. The remaining selection was nice but nothing fit our needs. We then tried to find the modernist house but couldn’t identify anything specific amid the new development that covered the slopes down to the sea. The route did take us through some charming little villages above the sea.

We ended by driving to Babakale, a fishing port south of Gülpinar and the westernmost point in Anatolia. Babakale is so small that it’s not even on my detailed 1:1,100,000 road map of western Turkey, although it does show a coast road looping south of Gülpinar in the general direction of where Babakale was. Ece had recommended a restaurant there. We followed her directions west towards Gülpinar, but made a premature left turn when we spotted a “Babakale” sign five or six kilometers outside Gülpinar. We soon found ourselves on the worst road we’d ever driven. Once paved, time, the occasional gravel patching and the recent heavy rains had converted the road into a cross between a grandiose goat trail, a broken washboard and what resembled a broken upturned ice floe of rock and old asphalt. By the time we decided it best to turn around, the road was too narrow to permit it. So we proceeded onward at perhaps five kph, moving back and forth across the rutted ruins of the former road to avoid scraping bottom. It took us the better part of an hour to descend to Babakale. As we neared the town, we spotted the fine new two-lane coastal road between Babakale and Gülpinar. The final stretch of our drive took us on a rugged near-vertical descent into Babakale before we finally joined the other road just inside town. Babakale was a sweet town, small, with a crenellated fortress facing the sea front and an immense, nearly empty parking lot. Per Ece’s suggestion, we had a superb small lunch at the Uron restaurant: Fried calamari, grilled octopus and a nerve-soothing chilled Efes beer in a small sea-view dining room. It was so good that it was almost worth the bone-rattling drive. Afterwards, we explored the old fort, circumnavigated the parking lot on foot, examined our car for loose or missing parts and took the sea road back towards Gülpinar. For much of the way, it ran along cliff-tops and we had superb views of the deep blue Aegean.

Back in Assos, I walked up to the Assos acropolis, pausing to photograph a turkey on the way. Passing by the immense walls, I paid a small admission and entered the acropolis area. Little of the acropolis remains after twenty-five centuries, just a platform and handful of upright Doric columns (Assos has the only surviving Doric-style architecture in Anatolia) from the Temple of Athena. It did have an incredible view of the countryside, the sea and the nearby Greek island of Lesbos.

That evening, initially in pursuit of a sunset view, we went to the Okin Motel – another Ece recommendation - for dinner. This involved driving twelve kilometers in the direction of Gülpinar, taking a left at the “Okun Hotel” sign, then driving down towards sea level. Immediately before reaching the sea, there’s a road – again signed Okun Motel – that went off to the left. By the time we arrived it was dark, and the motel didn’t have a single light on. However, there’s a drive-through through the building that then turns immediately to the left and a sea-side parking lot. About a hundred meters down a dirt trail there was a brightly lit dining-room. We had arrived! As we approached, the lights on the trail were turned on and we could actually see. The dining room was small and homey, and we took our place on cushions propped up against a wall behind a table. The meal that we had restored our flagging faith in Turkish cuisine. We had an eggplant mezze, fried eggplant rounds, stuffed courgettes, a yogurt/mint/garlic sauce/dip, a huge salad, good bread, grilled sea bass (YT) and grilled kofte (GT). This was followed by delicious slices of melon and some tea. It had been a dark drive into a dark parking lot - and the best meal of our trip to date. We returned to Assosalarga and another night in the wonderful bed as the night wind again howled around the building.

The next morning, we cut our stay short at Assosalarga. (We’d originally been scheduled for only two days, but had arrived a day early.) The weather had cleared back in Bergama and we wanted to see legendary Pergamum acropolis. So we called the Hera. Yes, they had vacancies; we could even stay in our old room. And we had a long drive the day thereafter to Pamukkale, and starting in Bergama instead of Assosalarga promised to cut hours off the trip. We called the Hera. Yes, they had vacancies; we could even stay in our old room. So, we had another great breakfast and hit the road. Ece and the female staff person (I’ve forgotten her name) tossed water at our car as we left, a traditional Turkish custom indicating that they wished that we’d return.

We chose another route for the return trip. Instead of turning right and driving the coast road after Edremit, we would continue onward to the interior and drop down and approach Bergama from the north as opposed to from the West. Unfortunately, one of the by-products of the ever-present road construction is that both paper maps and Google maps are never entirely up-to-date. Coupled with the fact that Turkey rarely has street signs and secondary roads have minimal road signs and no route numbers, driving the back roads can be an adventure and a challenge. In our case, we were flummoxed between a non-existent road on Google Maps and missing place names and roads on our big western Turkey map. We eventually wandered narrow roads with sparse signage through hilly Turkish farm country, passing countless roadside stands selling a variety of produce, nuts, honey, home-bottled fruit juices and home-canned items. We picked up some dried apricots, grapes and almonds – variations of this were going to be our “on the road” lunch until we returned to Izmir two weeks hence. Our wanderings took us through numerous small towns; the women’s head scarf quotient increased the further we got from the sea. Cafes filled entirely with men stared at us blankly as we drove by. We eventually made it back to the Hotel Hera in Bergama, threw our luggage into our room and immediately headed off to the acropolis. The acropolis was spectacular. The highlights were the Trajan Terrace, the amphitheater and the walls. The Roman-era ruins were much larger and in much better condition that those of Assos and, like Assos, had spectacular views.

Back at the Hera Hotel, as we checked our emails and the days’ photos, we met some fellow American travelers, the first that we’d met since leaving Istanbul. They were ending their trip of eight weeks – their last destination was Assosalarga and then they were on to Istanbul, then Barcelona and then home. They gave us some tips about our upcoming destinations and we gave them the details of our culinary quests in Assosalarga. They also turned me on to menomen, a Turkish scrambled egg/tomato/pepper mixture that would become a breakfast staple for the rest of the trip. We talked for an hour and agreed to stay in contact by email going forward. We had different dinner plans, so we bade farewell. It had been cold since we left Istanbul, so YT and I went into town to buy some socks (YT) and a scarf (me). We had a quick and early dinner of a meat/cheese pide (a Turkish pizza), a coke and a bottle of water for the princely sum of 12 Turkish lira. The owner watched with some amazement as I put spoon after spoon of mild Turkish hot pepper powder on my portion of pide. Then it was back to the hotel. We had what promised to be a long day on the road the next morning.

Note: Because of our split stay in Bergama, we didn’t have the time to visit either the Archaeological Museum or the Asklepeion, which I regret. I also would have liked to have done some more walking in the old part of town where the Hera is located; there were some beautiful old houses there and the area had the feel of a Greek village.

otherchelebi

In some Terry Pratchett novels of the Disk World there are little imps which can be carried along to record everything. I bet you had one with you.

but I caught one error. The flight from Istanbul to Izmir is actually not less than one hour but about 65 minutes. Hah!

gottravel

I guess Poe's 'Imp of the Perverse' had a hand in this!

YankyGal

Just catching up on your wonderful TR - thanks for posting, YT and GT. Sounds like it was quite an adventure! Nice that you were able to be so flexible, too.

I hope we will get to see pictures of THE rug at some point.

Looking forward to more...

yestravel

Hi YG -- thanks for following along. Funny about the photos of rugs. At some point during this process I realized there was no why I could keep straight all that we were seeing that we liked. I started taking photos. For the rug we finally bought for some reason I took the worst photo--distorted colors and bad angle. I didn't notice this until after we had bought the rug and gotten it all folded and packed for travel. Consequently when I looked at he photo of the purchased rug I pretty near hated it. I went the last week or two of the trip fretting that once home the rug wouldn't work.

gottravel

Two days on the Road

We had a quick breakfast at the Hera. As we were leaving, we again ran into the American couple. They had recommended that we visit Aphrodisias in addition to the Hierapolis ruins at Pamukkale – reinforcing our plans to somehow add this site to our trip. We were on the road by 9:30. Where earlier drives had taken us past farm stands with an array of produce, we were now on the melon route: no nuts, no dried apricots, no raisins, no honey. Just melons, stand after stand of spotted or striped yellow melons. At some stands they appeared to have been deposited via dump truck; at others, they were as carefully stacked as 19th Century cannonballs.

It was a longish drive on mostly narrow roads through beautiful countryside. We saw no signage for Pamukkale en route, even as we approached our destination. We instead headed for the nearby city of Denizli. As we approached Pamukkale via a road in a wide valley, we saw it off to the left, a distant white patch in dun hills. We thought for a while that our GPS routing was off. It showed us driving down a major road for ten or more kilometers and then doubling back on the same road to exit. The GPS was correct; it was a divided highway with some road work on the other side of the barrier. We did indeed have to exit and then reenter the highway going the other direction before exiting towards Denizli. A quick conference with the attendants at a gas station pointed us towards Pamukkale and we were on our way.

We arrived at Pamukkale around 2:00 and managed to find our hotel, the Ayapam, after ten minutes’ search. Pamukkale gave the impression of a town devoted to tourism: hotels, tour buses, souvenir stands, groups of Japanese burdened with multiple cameras per person. A line of tourists threaded their way up the face of the white cliff and its travertine pools. I’ll be the first to agree that authenticity in the historic sense is extinct in the modern era of mass travel. That said, neither of us are particularly fans of the hyperbolic artificiality of tourist towns – and Pamukkale reminded us of a summer beach town…Ocean City transplanted to the hills of Turkey.

The Ayapam hotel was modern, white, empty and a tad antiseptic. The staff were cheery and helpful. After examining the room we’d booked, we opted to switch for a larger room with a king-size bed. Even the larger room was a relative bargain at 90€ a night. We dropped our luggage off, plugged in our devices for recharging, played around with the Wi-Fi a bit, and then drove to the entrance to the ruins of Hierapolis above the pools.

In a sense, Pamukkale has been a tourist town since antiquity. In Roman days, people had come here to “take the waters” at the travertine pools. A temple/spa complex had grown up on the hilltop above the cascading series of pools. The resulting ruins cover a vast area. The site also offered superb views of the valley and hills as well as of the highest levels of the travertine pools. By careful maneuvering, I was able to get some nice shots of the pools that excluded the tourist hordes.
The impression the pools gave was at almost that of an arctic landscape, the pools and the white stone appearing from some angles like banks of melting snow.

The ruins themselves were impressive as was the surviving statuary in the museum. Several of the major streets had been uncovered, so one felt like one was walking in the footsteps of the Romans. (You actually enter the town through an old Roman gate.) A number of buildings were well-preserved, notably the public latrines. We watched with some bemusement as a Turkish bridal couple posed for photographs outside the old Roman “latrina” on an ancient street lined with two rows of columns. We actually were a bit overwhelmed by the size. We spent over two hours there and covered perhaps half the site, forgoing the far gate as well as the amphitheater. We also skipped on the healing pool near the museum, having neither urgent health requirements or swim suits at the moment.

We drove back though touristy Pamukkale to our hotel. The Ayapam is on a “half board” basis – we would eat dinner there as well as breakfast. Dinner started serving at 7:00 and we arrived promptly. However, dinner at the Ayapam was a bit like dinner in an assisted care facility. The waiter waved us to a table with two saran-wrapped plastic plates with small portions of salad, melon slices and a larger plate with a selection of cold bland mezze. The meal itself consisted of a combination of chicken, köfte and rice, none of it particularly bad.

We had a quick breakfast and left early – before nine - the next morning so we could visit Aphrodisias en route to our ultimate destination of Kaş. The route to Aphrodisias turned out to be much easier than it looked on the map and we made it in perhaps 90 minutes, stopping in route to buy a memorably tasty simit from a man with a cart at a gas station. Once at Aphrodisias, we parked the car in a parking lot across the road from the entrance and took a shuttle (you can also walk) into the grounds. The admission was inexpensive – a mere ten Turkish lira per person for magnificent ruins that rivaled those of Ephesus. Our walk inside the grounds took us first to the Sebasteion, with its wondrous outside statuary. After that we veered left and visited the amphitheater, the remains of the baths, the portico of Tiberius and baths of Hadrian. We then walked past the temple of Aphrodite – now just a few standing columns – to the gigantic stadium. The scale of the stadium is simply jaw-dropping, larger than some modern football stadiums. Then we backtracked to the temple of Aphrodite to view it from another angle, moved on to the Odeon (a small outdoor amphitheater) and finished at the Tetrapylon. The Tetrapylon served as a ceremonial gateway into the grounds of the temple of Aphrodite. It is in very good condition – almost all of the roofing is intact - and stands as a representative of Roman architecture at the peak of the Roman Empire’s power. It is, in a word, fabulous. Our next destination was the museum. It housed a fine collection of Roman statuary and bas-relief and we spent almost as much time there as we had on the grounds. Overall, I would rate Aphrodisias, in all its Greco-Roman glory, as one of the high points of our trip.

The ride on to Kaş required some backtracking – via Tavas to a large highway – but was both easy and enjoyable. (YT particularly enjoyed the mountain scenery on the drive as I had to concentrate on driving.) We made it in about four hours after leaving Aphrodisias in the early afternoon. There are no signs for Kaş; instead we followed the signs for Fethiye until it came time to turn east towards Kaş. After the Kaş turn-off, the road winds down to a cliff-top drive cut into a rugged coastline that somewhat resembles the Amalfi Coast (without cars or tour busses). We stopped occasionally for cliffside views of the lapis-colored sea. Eventually, we turned around a headland and there before us was the new marina on the west end of Kaş. We had arrived at another of the highlights of our trip and what was to be our home for the next five days.

HappyTrvlr

Your report is so helpful. Looking forward to Kas!

otherchelebi

You obviously missed the gate to the underworld at Hieropolis. It was discovered recently by Italian archeologists that many used to believe that this was the place because of the sulphourous fumes escaping out of the large hole among the rocks.

You would not have been in any danger though. The Roman beliefs, unlike the Semitic ones, do not involve Satan and his minions pulling innocent people in to their own domain.