Turkey tour--Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT)
 

Has anyone taken the Turkey tour offered by Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT)? If so, I'd like to ask you some very specific questions about the nature of the walks. I'm trying to decide whether to cancel my trip (assuming that my trip insurance will cover, as I think it will) because I'm not sure whether I will be sufficiently recovered from a knee injury that I had just 3 weeks ago. (I was fine when I booked the tour in July, and ordinarily the tours basic walking and the optional hikes would be well within my walking ability.)

P.S. Occasional "topping" to keep this thread where it might be seen by people familiar with the tour would be nice, and welcome. Thanks.

No, I haven't. But, to top the post - I wish you a speedy recovery from the knee injury! :)

Karen

I'm not sure why you started this new thread. Your old one has some 25 responses to it. It does make some sense to "top" a thread to get additional information, but to start a new one all over again, is just asking people to repeat what they've already said, or else is eliminating posters from the benefit of knowing what other people have already said and responding to those specific thoughts.

To answer your question, Patrick, the other thread was not MY thread. It was someone else's thread asking for advice re companies that provide tours to Turkey. I just happened to take advantage of it by posting quewstions to meet my own needs, so my issue became a tangent within someone else's thread, arguably "hijacking" it and distracting people from the original poster's question. At the same time, people who read the original question might not noticed that I had questions, too. So I thought it would be good to start my own thread for my own question. However, I'll post a link to the other thread, too.

There are some previous helpful comments on this older thread, which I "hijacked": http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34505619

What I'd especially like to know about is people's experiences with the optional hikes on this OAT Turkey tour. I had planned top go on all of them, but now I'm not so sure I'll be ready.

Has anyone been on this?

ttt

I went. My knee improved, so I was able to handle all the walking, including all the optional hikes that interested me.

In case anyone's interested, for purposes of deciding whether to take this tour in the future, some of the hikes really were on difficult terrain, but the pace was slow--much slower than on the walking tours I've taken with regular walking tour companies. What made the terrain on a few of the walks difficult was that some of them were either very steep with little traction (in one part of Cappadocia) or steep rocky goat trails with a lot of loose stones in various places along the Mediterranean coast. Just two weeks earlier I would never have been able to do these hikes, but I was OK by the time I had to do them.

I would highly recommend this tour. The OAT tours are limited to small groups, and this one consisted of 10 people. This was my first time taking an OAT tour, and before the trip, I was rather leery, since I had so many problems reaching customer service, which had very limited hours and absurdly long hold times on the phone and very poorly informed and unhelpful people answering the customer service line. However, the tour itself was excellent, with a fascinating and varied itineray and an outstanding guide. If you decide to take this tour and you want to be safe and absolutely SURE of getting an excellent guide (maybe they're all very good, but I don't know), maybe you can try to request a date when Rana Erol will be guiding. She's the guide I had. She's a very bright young woman from Istanbul, with an impressive range and depth of knowledge about her country's history and culture and literature, and is especially nice and conscientious.

I'm glad you didn't have to cancel, Carol. Sounds like you had a great trip.

Was it your first visit to Turkey? I went for the first time this summer ... and loved it. Can't wait to go back ...

Steve

Hi Steve. Yes, it was my first trip and I loved it, too. I've wanted to go for so long. Interesting that we both took our first trips there around the same time. Did you go to Cappadocia at all? To the archeological sites along the Turquoise coast? I didn't get to eastern Turkey or to the Black Sea area at all. Did you?

cmt -

Glad to hear that the knee was in good enough shape to participate in the walking tours in which you were so interested. Do post a trip report what you get caught up. Would love to hear about those little coves along the Aegean, the port, the gulet and all the other stops of your itinerary. Welcome back, safe and with a good knee.

Hi Sandy! I spend my working life writing, and I write constantly for fun and social purposes, e.g., e-mails, but, would you believe, I don't do trip reports. However, I took ten rolls of photos, which I dropped of yesterday and will pick up some time next week. I'll try to get a lot of them scanned and will post them on Ofoto and send you the link. Thanis for all your pre-trip advice. I was right to be worried about this trip, because I really was NOT in condition to do this walking just two weeks before the trip. But it helped that we started in Istanbul, where I did a lot or routine walking and stair climbing--enough to rebuild strenght without aggravating the knee problem, so by the time I had to do the hard stuff, I was sufficiently recovered.

So glad it all worked out and I do look forward to the photos.

Steve: I said this was my first trip to Turkey. Not true, exactly. It was my first trip staying in and traveling around Turkey.

But about 31 years ago, during a vacation in Greece, while we were staying in Samos for a few days, a friend and I decided to take a day trip to visit Ephesus. I remember it was very easy. We just took a boat to Kusadasi (the first "s" should really have a cedille under it and is pronounced like the "sh" sound in English, as you know, but I can't figure out how to type that s-with-thecedille letter here. That frustrates me, because I'd like to spell the word correctly!). Then I think we found a taxi, or maybe it was a public bus, to Ephesus and toured it on our own for many hours.

At the time, Kusadasi was a sleepy little port. I just remember lots of taxis, I think a bus stand, a few aggressive vendors, a few shops selling pretty onyx bowls at very cheap prices, and some snack bars selling intensely flavorful and delicious cherry and apricot juices. What a change! Kusadasi is now this gigantic modern city with an ugly sprawl of new construction covering the once beautiful hills and monstrous cruise ships as big as city blocks at the port! Ephesus is still Ephesus, though, and still amazing, though a lot more crowded, in spite of our arrival during the supposedly slow time of day before the swarms of huge groups from the cruise ships.

So that, in 1973 (I think) had been my only previous experience in Turkey. This time I was there for nearly three weeks and saw places ranging from Istanbul to Cappadocia to Konya to a small village near Lake Beyehir to the Mediterranean coast and then finally back to familiar Ephesus on the Aegean.

As you can see my body clock is still all confused, and I'm awake at this weird (for east coast USA) way pre-dawn hour feeling like it's late morning and time to get up.

Hi Carol,

You saw a much bigger area than me! No, I didn't make it to Cappadocia - or Istanbul. Next time, perhaps ...

I was based for a fortnight in a small village - Patara - near Kalkan, and just did day-trips from there.

The main excursion of historical interest was to Xanthos and Tlos (- Lycian rock-tombs - amazing) - and nearby Saklikent Gorge.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/metasoma/...ent/Tlos06.jpg

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/metasoma/...ent/Tlos07.jpg

[No, - not my pictures, unfortunately ...]

Other trips I took were to Kalkan, Kas, Fethiye market & Oludeniz, and a couple of boat trips - one to Kekova (sunken city) and another along the coast from Kalkan. Oh - and a canoe trip.

I was so impressed with Turkey I'm in a hurry to go back!

Ti saluto
Steve

Hi, Steve. I missed this post of yours at the time. (I just did a search for the Turkey threads I'd posted on.) Our trips overlapped a little. For about a week we were on the Mediterranean coat, stopping at various archeological sites and occasionally at a town. Do you have any of your own pictures posted where they can be shared?

If you'd like to see my Turkey pics, I'll send you a link if you give me your new e-mail address. (I have yoiur old one that closed.) I don't want to post the link here, but I'll send it to anyone interested. I'm going to scan the Turkey photos this weekend and post them on Ofoto if I have time.

Would still like to send you a link to the pictures, Steve. (I haven't even scanned the photos yet, but I will.)