Oh hi there Duomo.

So hot, and so, so many stairs! We got so lost this morning.

Just chilling at the Colosseum.

If by chilling you mean dehydrating rapidly from all of the sweating we were doing. So hot!

Templin/Schwerin/Luebeck

Around eight we head to the downstairs restaurant for breakfast. In the last five weeks I have eaten a lot of complimentary hotel breakfasts, but I have never seen anything like this. There are about five two (or multi) sided buffet stations, a children's area, and (Yvonne and Dad will appreciate this) a huge waffle making station of about half a dozen waffle machines. It's totally mad. There are so many types of bread, fruit, cheese, meat, cereal, milk, juice, water, etcetera, etcetera, that it's super hard to decide what to eat! After breakfast we go for a walk to explore the grounds and end up on the private beach. There are lots of little mounds of dirt and we aren't sure what would make them. Willy hopes that they are made by gophers. Do they even have Gophers here?

We drive off at about ten and make our way to Schwerin to see the castle. It's super impressive from the outside. Apparently parliament uses the front of it, which seems a shame, so we head to the back, pay our money and go to see what we can see. The rooms that they have restored are stunningly beautiful, rich fabrics, heavenly wood, fantastic artwork... We stand in the library, wonderful wood paneling all around us, looking out over the lake... Yeah, what a terrible place to have to live. The next thing we know, we find ourselves at the end. It's very, very small - the part you can visit anyway. We walk around the grounds for a while, they are wonderful, I don't even like gardens that much and I can appreciate these, so they must be good.

During a bathroom break at a rest stop on the autobahn I go to grab a drink. It still cracks me up that you can buy beer (wine and rtd's) on the side of the autobahn and that it is literally cheaper for me to drink the beer than soda or water. How is this possible! It's the same at gas stations too. So bizarre!

Whenever we are on the road we have the radio on. There are so many stations playing music I know. It's like having Classic Hits! I swear that I can sing along to maybe one in three songs. Poor Willy. When it's in range I try to put on BBC World, it's the only channel that I have found where everything is in English. It's really interesting hearing the news from a different perspective - yes I know that I can do this at home, but I rarely listen to the radio normally and I don't clock up this much drive time in an average week. It's also nice to hear English! We haven't heard a huge amount since we left England and it's relaxing to be able to understand something easily for a while.

We continue on, and wind up at a wonderful little hotel in Luebeck. It's old, quaint, clean, and just feels good. Two minutes later we have dumped our bags and we hop back in the car to check out Old Town. Old Town is on an island in the middle of town. We park Heidi and walk over one of the foot bridges. There are gorgeous old boats moored in the canal (is it a canal? I don't know.) and we wander past them, down the cobbled street. It's a gorgeous town. After an hour or so of roaming, past churches, cute shops, and loads of red brick buildings, we stop for dinner. This is good as we are starting to get hangry at this point, breakfast was good but not enough to skip lunch. We eat at a Korean place while sitting in this gorgeous little German town. It seems a little wrong. The food is good though!

Berlin/Frankfurt/Slubice/Oranienburg/Templin

The morning rocks around again and once again we pack back into Heidi - I changed her name because she looks like a supermodel. We decide to attempt lunch in Poland just for the novelty, so off we go again! We drive through feilds, trees and wind turbines for a couple of hours. It sounds silly, but I really never thought of Germany as being so green - it seems way less built up than New Zealand. I guess it helps to have a bigger land area, less water, and autobahns that take you through the middle of nowhere.

Just before lunch we drive into the other Frankfurt. There are some lovely old red brick buildings, the rest is a bit rough, a bit of graffiti (it's becoming a theme), just across the river we can see lots of feilds and forests. The urban landscape stands in stark contrast to the nature that surrounds it. It's a really strange place. A little way up the river is a large bridge - when we cross it we will no longer in Germany, instead we will be in Slubice, Poland! We've never crossed between countries on foot, it's quite exciting. Over the bridge we go. Oh hi there Poland! We walk along the river and all of the signs are now in Polish. It's so funny that it's so close yet totally different. There are a lot of piercing and tattoo parlours on this side of the river. We spot some men picking a fight with some other (possibly homeless) men, we keep our heads down and continue up the street.

We are getting hungry by this stage and we spot some red umbrellas which turn out to house a fairly nice looking eatery. We sit down and everything looks super expensive, then we realise that they operate on their own currency - their exchange rate is better than Turkey, approx 0.25 euro. What a nice surprise. We order a pizza with shrimps, sour cream, and some other unimportant stuff on it. Willy has a coffee and I have a beer, I order Tyskie as that seems to be the local flavour. It's not as good as whatever we were drinking at Oktoberfest but it's nice enough. When the pizza comes out it has the deepest base ever and it's delicious. The whole bill including a decent tip comes to fifteen euro, in comparison to what we pay in Germany it's cheap as.

After lunch we head back to the car. We decide to make our way to Sachsenhousen, one of the concentration camps where personal from other camps were trained, political prisoners were held, thousands of people were killed, and was also used by the Soviets following its liberation from the Nazis. Just something light for the afternoon. We arrive shortly before four, and we have the place almost to ourselves. I grab an audio commentary, it's good, but I don't listen to it too much as the narrators sing song voice isn't a great match for the information she provides. We walk through the first gate, there is a clutch of trees off to our left and survivors voices/stories whisper through them. The second gate still bears the words Arbeit Macht Frei, which I understand translates to Work Sets You Free. We step into the main camp, the sheer size of the place blows my mind. Most of the barracks and buildings are gone, their footprints marked by gravel pits.

I won't go into much detail, but it's deeply moving and in a totally different way to anywhere else I have ever been. The feelings that swim around in your belly as you walk through the cellar under the kitchen, or as you make your way through the barracks are indescribable. They were intensified by being alone for a good portion of the trip, Willy was off exploring on his own (or reading his book), and there was hardly anyone else around. The sun gets low in the sky while we are roaming through the grounds, and we get kicked out at six. Not having any other plans, we decide to head to Templin.

Willy drives while I book us a hotel. We drive up and I am shocked to see that our hotel (which is in the middle of nowhere) is twelve stories! This place is like a cruise ship on land, everything you could ever need in one place - two restaurants, three bars (or more...), one beer garden, swimming pool, sauna, games room, shop, riveted beach, various sport courts, the list goes on and on. Most of it is closed. Our room is on the same level as the Seabar, which definitely isn't closed. There is a live band, dancing, and lot's of retirees having the time of their lives! Oh Willy... Sorry babe, I am sure am striking some great hotels! We head up to our room, then upto the restaurant on the top floor. It's our first candle lit dinner, and our meals are spectacular, it's all rather special.

Berlin

In the morning we pack up our stuff, eat a rubbish breakfast, hop in the car and drive into Berlin. We end up staying at a hostel, our first of the trip but it has wifi and parking so it's pretty good. It's also cleaner than a good portion of our hotels. The neighbourhood isn't the best, it's overgrown, covered in graffiti and when we arrive we are greeted by a man on the street yelling at two teenage girls... Meh, we've had worse.

We park the car and head to the S-Bahn. We work the machine with ease, having already used a lot of them by this point, until it comes time to pay... It won't take our bloody money. Stuff you ticket machine. We go to the next station and repeat the process with the same outcome. Oh dear. We are never going to get to Berlin. An older couple try to show us how to use the machine with the same result. At this point we all move to the last ticket machine and fortunately it works. We hop on a train and get swallowed up by Berlin.

The first station we stop at is Alexanderplatz, we head across the road and visit their Oktoberfest, there's not much going on so we get back on the train and go to the central station. We buy a map from the info desk and head off in search of Checkpoint Charlie. The first thing of note that we bump into is the Berlin Marathon. Holy hell there were so many people. All of the ones who had completed the race were lying around wrapped in see through plastic yellow sheets with cups of beer. Apparently it's good for rehydration. The second place we stumble across is the memorial for all of the Jews murdered in the holocaust, it's huge, apparently the size of a football feild but I don't know. It consists of lots of concrete blocks in varying sizes all set into neat rows. 

We roam around for a while longer, then start passing a bunch of hawkers selling soviet themed souvenirs. That's how we know we are closing in on the check point. The next thing we know we are standing by the largest remaining section of the wall, looking at The Topography of Terror. It's mostly about the Nazi's and we are a bit bummed as we were hoping to find out more about the wall. I grab a couple of quick photo's before we continue on our way and reach Checkpoint Charlie. There's a checkpoint in the middle of the road and two men in uniform posing with female tourists. Willy asked if I would like my photo with them... Um no... Thanks... We head across the road to the museum.

Oh my gosh. Bad move. I love museums. I love reading. I love finding out more wars, or social situations, or daring escapes. So how on earth could I not fall in love with this museum? Easily. This was one of the worst museums that I have ever been to and we both found it to be so, so, so dry. Argh. We were there for about an hour and it was so difficult to read anything because there was just so much writing - in four languages. The audio tours are just so much more effective.

After a while we bail on the museum we go and grab a beer in an inner city beach bar. We are both a little down on Berlin by this point. We miss Munich a lot. In a last ditch attempt, we look up a bar in the Lonely Planet, but while trying to locate it we end up in a rough looking neighbourhood that we aren't happy to look like tourists in... It's just so depressing here. So, so depressing. We've been to a bunch of places that are filthy, with beggars everywhere, yet Berlin is one of the few places that I have felt unsafe in. We don't hate it but it is really disappointing.

We decide not to stay a second night.

On the road to Berlin.

We pack all of our ever expanding collection of stuff back into the car and drive until we get to a truck stop. Deciding to get some breakfast, we head across the car park and into a similar but not as good food hall as the one we ate in two nights ago. Willy has some delicious BK and I have a giant pretzel with my coffee. Willy also has coffee, but that should go without saying.

Most of today we drive, or rather Willy drives. He does an amazing job on the autobahn and we get up to almost 200km's at one stage. We drive through picture book villages, through rows of solar panels, through patches of all sorts of vegetables, the odd (very few) herd/flock of animals (they don't farm like we do at home), and through a heap of wind turbines. During the Southern end of our trip everything is very precise and picture book perfect. The same cannot be said for the landscape as we draw nearer to Berlin. Gradually the little towns look slightly newer, less well maintained, and not as charming. The gardens become overgrown, there's more rubbish, more graffiti, and more boarded up buildings. It's a lot like our introduction to Rome.

There was no accomodation that we could afford in Berlin that night so we end up in a town in the outskirts called Zossen. We pull up at our hotel, directly opposite there is a large stone building that was boarded up and through it's windows we can see trees growing towards where the roof once was. During our post check in walk we discover that there is literally nothing of note in our surrounding area, not even anything for dinner or a pub. The only thing to do in Zossen is get out of Zossen. We are so stoked to have a car.

We drive up the road (a long way) to the mall. The pet shop is super cool. There are tortoises, large turtles, hamsters, snakes, spiders, lizards, and more. I love it until I see the containers of live crickets. Um no. No thank you. There is no cold beer in the supermarket, so we drive to the other supermarket and liquor store that we saw on our way to the mall. Having decided to have dinner in our room, we amass armfuls of delicious treats in the supermarket, including meats, cheeses, rolls, and salad - yum! Then we try to buy cold beer from the liquor shop. There is a walk in fridge the size of a toilet cubicle under lock and key with the tiniest amount and selection of beer you've ever seen. It's really fascinating because in NZ if you can buy beer, you can buy cold beer, and no liquor store would be without an industrial size fridge with a mountain of beer inside. It's not the same here at all, we wonder if it's to curb drink driving/drinking in public/alcoholism.

The rest of the evening is spent eating and drinking in our hotel room. We are such party animals.

Nuremburg

About eight am we wake up - I can't seem to sleep through the night at the moment, always waking at two am and not sleeping again until about four or five. We have a GREAT shower, it's fitted with a tap that you can control both the temperature and the pressure with. So very good. We head downstairs for our first German buffet breakfast, and find a sumptuous feast awaiting us. There are several kinds of rolls/bread, lots of cold cuts, several very flash cheeses, fruit, cereal, eggs, little white sausages, tea, juice, and decent coffee. Same idea as Turkey but even better! Did I mention how much we love this place?

We pack the car, Willy changes the GPS TO English and sets Olga (my name for our GPS lady). I have a minor freak out about a lost cord so head back to the room and find it caught up in the blankets, then we hop back onto the Autobahn. It doesn't take long to reach Nuremberg and we head to the museum at Reichsparteitagsgelande (we think, we really only have a limited idea of where we are) which documents both the development of the Nazi party but also Nurembergs involvement. We pay our entry fee which includes the audio guide and then proceed upstairs to the start.

Having now been to war museums in NZ, England, Turkey, and now Germany, I have to say that I think the Germans have produced one of, if not the best. This is the only one where your primary language doesn't provide you any more or less opportunity to engage with the information at hand, the place is silent as both Germans and foreigners alike listen intently to their handsets, and the narration given is extremely in depth, factual, and doesn't shy away from the horrors of the Nazi regime.

Nuremberg was heavily involved with the Nazis, it contains a lot of Romanesque structures that Hitler commissioned during his time in power, it was where the massive fanatical rallies took place, where the  horrendous Nuremburg Laws outlawing Jewish citizenship were enacted, and where the Nazi leaders were tried at the conclusion of WW2. As you can expect it is a very heavy experience, alot of the imagery and information is new to me, and just before the end of the exhibition I am particularly surprised to see photographs of the executed Nazi's. At the conclusion, we step out onto a viewing platform which allows us a view over the vast courtyard of one of Hitlers mammoth buildings. It's a lot like viewing the Colloseum, it stands empty, damaged, and witness to one of humanities darkest regimes.

We leave the museum and circumnavigate the enormous structure as I dwell on the similarities between the Nazis and the Romans. It's impossible not to. The buildings, the road/parade ground, how they used the rallies a lot like the Romans used the games... It's all very interesting and my brain is still processing at a million miles an hour.

After a while we hop back in the car and drive to Hauptmarkt which is super cool, different to the market in Munich, but I like it almost as much. We wander through the cobbled streets, are wooed by the centuries old dwellings, ancient churches, and when I see an antique shop with a dollhouse in the window I drag Willy inside. I cast my eye over a variety of interesting trinkets, and I spot a commemorative book from the 1936 Olympics which of course took place under the Nazis - I continue around the corner and instead of an antique shop, we find ourselves in a WW2 collectors shop. Oops. It's quite unnerving and after some awkward conversation with the owner we excuse ourselves.

We walk through an arch in one of the cities giant medieval walls, and then return to our car. Parking costs less than four euro which is much cheaper than I expected, then we take the (very) scenic route to a hotel that I book while we are driving. We end up in a tiny village near Rothenburg where we stay in a very basic, seemingly empty guest house opposite the Franconian hotel that we thought we were staying in. Our host literally hands us a key with number four on it, walks us into the middle of the lane and points at the building - there are half a dozen doors and the number on our key doesn't relate to any of them. Thankfully we work it out without having to ask our man and we spend the last hour or so of daylight walking around this charming little village before eating at a restaurant next to the little one way stone bridge that we entered the town via.

Willy has the venison and I have the pork, both are really tasty, but not stupidly big and we head to bed happy - even though I am a little freaked out by the apparent emptiness of both the guesthouse and the town. It's very, very dark and quiet.

Munich - Day Three

It's another grey day in Munich, although there is a little splash of blue in the sky. We pack our bags, say our goodbyes, and venture back out into the world with very little idea what the day will bring. The only option is to hop on the S-Bahn and head to the Central Station where all of the car rental companies have offices. It takes us a while to locate the rental co's, I leave Willy with the bags and do a scout, eventually locating them on the upper floor around the corner - about as out of the way as possible. We go upstairs and talk to them. "Hi there, we'd like to hire a car please." we say, smattered with poorly pronounced German. There are no cars in Munich they say. 

Oh dear.

It was a poorly thought out plan, but it's not meant to end like this... We slink back downstairs, find a luggage locker, play Tetris with our bags, then head off to buy a SIM card, and wander the streets in search of breakfast. We find this bizarre little cafe, I think it must belong to a hotel, it's just tucked around the corner in a concrete cage but has a really nice outdoor setup and we decide to chance it. We order coffee and pizza, both are very, very good. The coffee is the best we have had since we left New Zealand, and the pizza, made with shrimps and salmon, is excellent too.

We try to make a plan B. Could we catch a train and pick up a car at the next station? Which direction should we go? There are so many choices. Finally I make a call and a girl answers the phone in German. I ask (plead) if she speaks any English as my German is not good - it's barely enough to order a coffee so if we have to rely on it to rent a car we are in serious poo. Fortunately the lovely lady switches to fluent English, I pass her to Willy when she starts discussing car spec's but it turns out that there IS a car in Munich that is available today! We just have to catch the train like an hour out of town, but who cares, we have a car!!! Our spirits are greatly lifted with this information, we finish our brunch and head off to locate the Oktoberfest Museum.

The museum is closed today, and we are pretty sure that it's closed for the whole of Oktoberfest. Oh well. We make our way to the market again so I can grab a juice (papaya, lemon and orange I think) cry over the amount of cheese/meat we can't eat, and I follow it up by almost buying a pair of boots (I stopped wearing my other shoes as soon as we left England, and now I pretty much only wear my jandals). We stop in at one of the churches (its name escapes me) and when we step inside I am struck once again by the magnificence of these buildings. This is our first church for a while as Turkey is predominantly Muslim, and it's every bit as gorgeous as the churches we saw in Italy. Not the same as Italy by any stretch, but just as beautiful. 

It's three in the afternoon by this point so we retrieve our bags, hop on the train, make the walk, and pick up our car! I was expecting a less flash car, instead we get a little Audi. Our bags barely fit, but we squeeze in and we are off! So much nicer than a bus! Oh yeah, the guy at the rental place thought it was hilarious that we were driving aimlessly, I am pretty sure he thinks we're mad - we probably are.

The GPS is tricky and in German so we use my phone to get us out of Munich. Before we know it, we are on the Autobahn! Willy does an awesome job. We decide to stop in one of the rest stop hotels just before it gets dark. It's VERY flash. There's a seal of cleanliness on the toilet! And boxes of matches! We grab dinner across the car park in a truck stop diner. It's the second biggest dinner I have ever seen, closely trailing the previous night. We drink beer, discuss the next day, then disappear to our room to sleep.

Munich - Day Two

Day two in Munich we wake to a very grey day, it rained last night and the world is still covered in rain drops. We shower in the best shower of our entire trip, dress in a bunch of layers, say goodbye to Freda the cat, and slip out of the apartment. Down at the station we buy another day pass, hop on the S-Bahn and head to town.

We get off the tube and emerge from its depths. We are looking for the Residenz and as there are still a couple of hours before it's due to open we decide to go for a wander. We end up at a permanent market and it's like we have died and gone to heaven. Beautiful fruit and vegetables, Hughes wheels of every kind of cheese, cured meats, high quality fresh meats, it's some of the best looking food that I have ever seen. It's incredible! There are also stalls with arts and crafts, wonderful things to decorate your home - I want to buy everything and take it home. We don't think that any of it would get through customs. As we continue down the road we notice that you can't go anywhere without seeing shops full of goat skin shorts and dirdles. It's so good. The more expensive shops have some beautiful sets and I really, really want one, but at five hundred euros... That's a lot of accomodation money to blow on a dress. I do eventually get a less expensive one, it's cool but I will always love the others - they are works of art. 

It doesn't take long before we locate the Residenz, almost by mistake. The problem is that we have no idea how to get in. We walk, and walk, and walk. No obvious entry. We end up in the park at the back for a while before almost giving up on the idea. Fortunately we don't, and we try to navigate the far side where we do eventually locate the entrance. The place is HUGE. We pay our admission fee, collect our audio tour handsets, and begin our trip through history.

Now the Residenz was home to Germany's ruling family from 1385 until 1918 and is the largest city palace in Germany. There's just one small thing that I didn't know, it's almost entirely rebuilt. It suffered badly in WW2 and the mammoth building with 23,000 square meters of roofing was reduced to just 50. It's a mind blowingly massive waste of history, but we have seen a lot of that during our trip. Due to the major reconstruction, a lot of it has been rebuilt in more simple styles which is disappointing as one can only imagine what once stood in its place. There is however one hall in particular that is original - the Antiquarium, which almost takes your breath away with its opulence. Goodness knows how I will cope at Versailles. We spend a couple of hours weaving through room after room - there are 130 odd plus 10 courtyards, before excusing ourselves back out into the world.

We end up at Hofbrauhaus which is one of Germany's most famous beer halls. It's a heaving, beautiful beast. There's no chance of a seat inside, so we sit in the courtyard which is only just off full anyway. It's a bizarre, but really neat experience to sit in such a historic place with our steins of beer and lunch as people have done since 1589. When the live band start up, playing traditional music, it's just epic.

We are in the middle of a love affair with Munich.

Eventually that afternoon we end up back at Oktoberfest, because how can you not. We have the most massive dinner - it comes out on a platter that's bigger than a baking tray. 2 Pork Knuckles, 2 Balls of Potato, 2 Balls of Something Else (like a meatloaf type of thing maybe), and a Mountain of Saurkraut. Each of the balls is the size of a cricket ball. Holy shit that is a lot of food. The Aussies at the table next to us crack up at our huge dinner and we end up chatting and drinking with them until it's time for the beer garden to close. We drag our bloated bodies back to the S-Bahn and make our way home. I am pleased that my dirdle is the equivalent of fat pants. Would hate to wear a belt right now. I share my gummy bears with a police officer while waiting for the train.

At the apartment we get to meet the second of our hosts! Adriana and Sebastian both arrive home shortly after us and we sit in the lounge chatting for a long time. Adriana even takes a Polaroid of us! They are such cool people, I am sorry to have to leave Munich so soon, but they have other guests arriving tomorrow and accomodation in Munich is too expensive for us during Oktoberfest. We head off to bed still unsure of what will become of us tomorrow.

Munich - Day One

We wake up at three am, drag our butts out of bed around three thirty, and creep down the stairs at four. Our shuttle should arrive any second. We wait, sitting surrounded by our bags in reception. Four fifteen rolls around. No shuttle. Four thirty strikes. No shuttle. By this stage both of us are getting nervous. Willy talks with the receptionist who proceeds to make half a dozen phone calls. Twenty to five and there is still no sign of the shuttle. We demand a taxi, to be paid for by the hotel as a replacement for the shuttle service that we paid them for. Five to five our taxi shows up. We pack our bags into the boot. The receptionist and taxi driver start arguing. I tell them that they can argue later, we have been waiting an hour and we have a plane to catch. That goes down like a lead balloon. Oops, forgot that as a woman here you should be seen and not heard. Oh it makes me so mad.

The taxi drives off at five. Willy and I sit in the back, relieved that we always build in a lot of spare time. Upon our arrival at the airport we go through two security checks, Willy gets a pat down, we check in fairly easily, and we eat the very worst Burger King known to man. Honestly the BK in Istanbul makes the BK at home look like fine dining, and it's SO expensive. Not that there are many options when it comes to airport food, and it's doubtful that any would be much better. There is a man three tables down from us who starts practicing his recorder. Who does that? At six am in a crowded airport food court. Eventually the guy who serves the Turkish ice cream tells him to cease and desist. I feel like hugging him.

The airport is teeming with people. Frustratingly all of their flight info boards are down. Unlike other airports who have staff members roaming the place to help poor confused tourists, there is none of that here and the only option is to stand in the nightmarishly long queue at the help desk. At this stage I leave Willy to visit the bathroom, there I enter hell. They are the single worst toilets of our entire trip, so, so filthy, and none have any paper. It's a testing morning.

We eventually get to our gate, get on the plane, and I watch an education doco on our way to Munich. The documentary is great, it's called Waiting for Superman and talks about the problems in America's education system. I really enjoy it. I also love looking out the window at the tiny villages next to the massive mountains. So pretty.

Finally we land and Willy and I give each other a high five - we made it! We clear the airport, grab our pass, and hop on the metro. We navigate the U-Bahn and S-Bahn with ease, the public transport in the Northern Hemisphere is just so good. Once we get to our stop we hop off, find the apartment building where we are due to meet our man at two, then grab some lunch. Willy is extremely happy to return to more European food, I am in two minds, but we both enjoy our pulled pork sandwiches. No pork in Turkey obviously.

At two pm we meet our man, get our key, and he tells us to go to Oktoberfest. Don't need to tell us twice. We hop back on the tube in search of the great, the mythical, Oktoberfest. Even in Central Station people everywhere are dressed in their traditional clothing. Men, women, children - even infants are dressed up, it's incredible. We locate the festival with little difficulty... It's huge! There are rows and rows of rides, food stall, souvenir stands, epic beer halls, chilled out beer gardens and much more. I love that the age range is so diverse, zero to one hundred, everyone is here and having a great time.

We walk around in a daze, have a beer in the gardens, stumble through the halls, then grab some dinner. I investigate the Currywurst and Willy gets to sate his craving for pork knuckle. We love Munich and we love Oktoberfest. I have so much more fun than I even thought that I could. Eventually we leave, I am shivering pretty hard at this point even with my jacket on, Willy is freezing too (we have just come from the med after all), and we make our way home through the tube.

What a weird but amazing day.

Back in Istanbul - The Only Day

The sound of people getting ready for the day rouses us from our sleep. We ignore them for a bit before venturing out to find the hotels restaurant for breakfast. Up seems the logical direction as a lot of the other hotels have been structured this way and we didn't see anything at ground level when we arrived last night. Upon climbing to the fourth floor we decide that we just must have been blind the night before, there are no breakfasts to be found on the higher floors, in fact there isn't much of anything up there. Nothing except for scodey hallways and sad looking apartments anyway. We come to the conclusion that our hotel only occupies the bottom of the building, so back down the stairs we trudge.

The man at the reception desk leads us to breakfast. We are taken out of the hotels front door, around the corner, back inside the same building, and down some stairs. Not entirely sure how we were meant to find that on our own. Oh well. We eat our last Turkish Breakfast, I will miss the olives, cheese, and cucumber, but Willy is a bit over it and is looking forward to getting back to something a little more Western.

We pack up our bags and make the sixty meter walk to our other hotel. Our room is so nice. I think that might be our nicest hotel in Turkey, if not Europe. It's not super flash but it's clean and tidy which hasn't been a given in some of them. Pammukale was very nice too.

Our day is spent exploring streets we missed in round one. We see the Spice Bazaar, get dragged into another carpet shop (argh), wander through the Basilica Cistern, stand outside the palace, and lose ourselves briefly in an English bookstore. 

The Basilica Cistern is really cool. I was concerned that it might have been really crowded as there was a line out the front that got pushed in pretty quick and a tour group was entering at literally the same time as us. I shouldn't have worried, it's huge down there and with the exception of a few bottle necks, you lose most of the crowd in the dark. There are rows and rows of huge marble columns, it's fascinating to walk around. The bottom of the room is filled with water, I don't think it's very deep, maybe a foot or so, but it's teeming with fish. Some of the fish are the size of a small dog, they are grey, and they have huge mouths. Not particularly attractive fishies. The sound inside of the Cistern is pretty trippy too. Between the water, marble, concrete, and sheer size of the space, it creates a fascinating reverberation unlike anything I have heard before. Once we see the two Medusa heads (major bottle neck there) we make our way back to the daylight.

Just outside the Cistern Willy spots a cookbook that I regretted not buying in Pammukale. It's about a third of the price of the one we originally looked at. Sold! I am going to make ALL of the scrummy food when we get home. We eat ice cream as we wander through the streets. We miss Canakkales temperatures, Istanbul is hot today. 

The streets are teeming with older European tourists, a cruise ship landed this morning. It makes me mad how rude some of them are to the locals. When people try to sell me crap or make us sit down in their restaurant I always say no thank you. I have walked down streets where I almost can't keep up with the number of no thank yous. The rude tourists make me try twice as hard to be nice.

We find ourselves standing outside of the Palace. Briefly we discuss whether or not we should go inside, but at 30TL each, a massive line, and with half of the exhibits reading as closed, we decide not to. However we do spend some time wandering through the gift shop and garden.

On the way back to our hotel Willy spots a kitten. It's very small and obviously unwell. The strays make me so sad, and there's nothing you can do for them. The next thing to upset me is close to our hotel. On our way out that morning we had seen cattle being held in a small concrete yard... I should have known what I would see on our return trip... Willy says that he thinks they were alive. The one I saw before I looked away definitely wasn't. 

We have a nice dinner opposite the mosque, outside a building that they had previously used as a school. Afterwards we head back to our hotel to pack our bags and try to get some sleep - the alarms are set for 3am. Yuck.

London - Day One (a handful of photo's)

This is a small taste of what we saw on our first day. We missed a lot of outdoor photo op's because of the rain but we had heaps of fun and spent the day feeling very small in these huge, amazing, old spaces. Oh we also did Harrods but I was to scared/overwhelmed to take photo's!

Canakkale - Istanbul

Well... There's not much to write for today. We played the old "pack our bags" game (it's getting a bit old now), before showering, breakfasting, and checking out. Once again we dragged our bags down the street, but we dumped them at the travel agency so that we were free to roam the streets more easily.

From there we made our way the the naval museum. We didn't go inside because it was so lovely out, and there were a lot of things to look at in their outdoor area, including mines, machine guns, torpedos, a periscope, and the wreck of a submarine.

The wrecked submarine was pretty bizarre to see. They had only been able to find half of it after it was destroyed by a mine (or torpedo, we can't quite remember) and what they recovered was looming over it's surroundings towards the back of the park. All crew perished on board so again it almost didn't seem right that it was on display.

We sat in the shade surround by weapons and gazed out over the harbour. A long time passed as we chilled out watching the boats. I still can't get over how so many people lot their lives while trying to capture the expanse of water just in front of us.

Most of the rest of the day is passed much like this. We go and grab drinks on the waterfront at a cafe, we have a late lunch/early dinner at an eatery that doesn't see many tourists (the ceiling is amazing, and Willy accidentally orders kidney which neither of us can stomach - it's really strong), we grab a couple of bags of msg laden spicy peanuts, and eventually hop on the ferry which takes us to the tour agency's bus that will take us to Istanbul.

The bus driver doesn't win many friends as he spends the entire ride with his window wide open, half in the other lane, stopping for smokes,txting, and talking loudly on his cellphone... We eventually arrive in Istanbul an hour late. When we arrive they drop of the first few people then transfer us to a mini bus. There's a problem though... There are fifteen seats for seventeen people, and nowhere near enough space to fit all of the luggage.

Willy and I look at each other. Stuff it, we think. We hop in a taxi and ten minutes later are delivered to the door of our hotel. As we drive off, the mini van is still trying to sort out luggage and people, everyone is getting frustrated, and it's just so much easier to not be a part of that at half past midnight.

We step into our room. It's... Ok. Air con, good bed, good pillows, seems quiet - no external windows, but the bathroom smells of damp - I can't see any mold to explain the smell, and despite the bathroom being large the toilet is in the shower. It's as good a place as any for a night but I am pleased that we are moving to our old hotel tomorrow.

Canakkale and Gallipoli - Day Two

Another slow morning - we are on holiday after all, we grab some breakfast from the hotel buffet (damn I love the breakfasts here, the waistline likes them less. It's ok though, when we get home we'll be so poor that I will have to do the "I have $5 till Friday diet" and lose it all again), and browse the shops for a while before meeting our group.

Once again we cram into a mini bus with a bunch of Australians, and catch the ferry over to the Gallipoli Peninsula. We eat a tasty lunch at Maydos and get treated to the same delicious soup from the day before. I really need to learn how to recreate it at home. They split the group up and we head across to the simulation centre and museum.

The simulation centre is different... We are given headsets to hear the English version but the Turk version is super loud so we have to turn our headsets right up and pay close attention to understand what's being said. We are led through close to a dozen rooms, each telling a different piece of the Battle of Canakkale story. Of course it's totally from the Turkish point of view and there are a few historically dubious points... Some average writing/direction/acting... Some interesting use of various techniques, including 3D missiles, CG, etc... But over all it is very good and they are very sensitive re the ANZACs, I wish that we would acknowledge their soldiers in a similar way. 

There's one quote that makes me bloody tear up every time I hear/read it. I will find and share it later when I am not sitting on a bus.

We go through the museum once we finish up in the simulation centre. There are uniforms from all sides, as well as weapons, and models, it's interesting but we don't spend too long as we had seen similar objects in the Imperial War Museum only a few weeks prior.

Our mini van packs back up and carries us all down to the port where we are dropped off at a small boat. We climb on and motor up the coast. It's a gorgeous day without much in the way of wind. We take photo's as we pass Brighton Beach and Anzac Cove - the steep terrain is even more pronounced from the water and it's very clear that they never stood a chance. As one of the men exclaimed "An old lady and her cat could defend this place."

We kill the engine at North Beach, right next to the wrecked warship. Most is us strip down to our bathers (although only one of the other ladies join me) and I dive into the water with my mask and snorkel in hand. The water is beautiful, just cool enough to not feel like you are in a bath, but there's no chance that you'll get cold. Unfortunately it is a little murky - we're used to crystal clear now, and it's a little hard to see much of the ship from the surface or on the camera.

Willy swims up and down, checking the ship out. I balk a little bit, it feels wrong to be swimming so close to where so many people lost their lives. It just freaks me out. We get a few photo's of varying quality and paddle about for a bit before hopping back on board and heading to shore. Our group have a few beers before returning to Cannakale and going our seperate ways.

After last nights debacle, I refuse to decide on a restaurant and make Willy choose where to go for dinner. He struggles initially but we eventually end up at a little eatery with a sea view. We order fairly mainstream European dishes as that's all that any of those waterfront places seem to do but our food is very nice. We leave with full bellies and smiles on our faces.

Canakkale and Gallipoli - Day One

We hung out in the hotel room for a while this morning, just chilling out before we took advantage of the breakfast buffet in the hotel. The coffee was crap, but olives, cheese, and eggs for breakfast will never get old. Not sure how I will cope following leaving Turkey on Tuesday - it's so close now! I'm sad,  now we have to go and learn another country! See you soon Germany...

Following breakfast we roamed the streets for a while. I really like Canakkale, it's so easy in comparison to most of the places we have been - this is probably due to slowly learning that we should attempt to be in the middle of things and that a nice place on the outskirts is actually probably a pain in the butt. Yes Antalya, you were definitely the worst. It's also much, much cooler here, sitting in the mid twenties to early thirties which is enjoyable rather than claustrophobic. 

At eleven fifteen we meet our group for the day, hop on a mini bus, drive onto a ferry, and then hang out at a restaurant until the larger group arrives from Istanbul. Lunch is provided for us, the stand out being an amazing white soup which apparently was created with rice, meat, yogurt and mint - it was so strange but ridiculously tasty. We chat with a young Australian woman with Turkish heritage who is over here on a tourist visa but has been working in hostels and getting screwed over. There are two older Australian women sitting with us as well and despite their polite participation in our conversation I can almost hear the eye rolling. All three of them are very nice, and it's nice to be in a room full of native English speaking people for a while. The make up of our tour is as follows: 2 Brit's, 2 Fin's, a handful of Kiwis, and the rest (most of the big bus) are Aussies.

After lunch our bus departs the restaurant and takes us across the peninsula to the Brighton Beach, which of course is where the ANZACs were meant to land and it's easy to see why. The beach is beautiful, gently sloped, with easy access to that crucial second ridge. Our guide gives us a detailed history sing the map at the beach. It's very interesting and throughout the day I become increasingly impressed with the young mans ability to both be sensitive to all of the involved parties but also to give us a good sense of the Turkish history at the same time. I feel like the Turkish side is never discussed at home, that they are another group of faceless baddies, but what we learn feels like another piece of the puzzle and helps us understand the situation a little better.

During the day we visit half a dozen cemetaries, Australian, Kiwi, and Turk. Seeing the rows and rows (and rows and rows and rows) of plaques, some for soldiers buried there and others for soldiers believed to be buried somewhere nearby, is incredibly moving. The plaques are mostly much the same,  the soldiers rank, name, contingent, sometimes a message from their family or quotation, and about one in four lists their age. 20, 23, 21, 18, on and on down the rows. Few are as old as Willy and most are younger than me. The most extreme ages listed for Commonwealth countries are a man in his fifties and a boy of not yet fifteen. It would be heartbreaking even if there was just a single grave, but the sheer scale is overwhelming. When we visit one of the Turkish cemetaries we learn something interesting. During WW1 the Turks were not yet using surnames, instead going by their fathers name then their name. This means that while we can look up the name of a relative killed in Gallipoli, find out where they are buried and make our way there to pay our respects, the families of those killed on the opposite side do not have that same opportunity. It also appears that many (not all by any stretch) of the ANZAC soldiers were buried in these plots, however the Turkish graveyards are virtually empty with most of their men being buried in the valleys that cover the peninsula. In fact the Turkish cemetery that we visited contained just one body despite the many plaques. There are a number of Turkish flags fluttering above the trees in many locations throughout the battlefield, these, we are told, mark the sites of known mass graves.

Of course there are Kiwis and Australians buried all over as well, and during a stop at some of the trenches we were cautioned that many soldiers were buried within them. Our guide even mentioned that a colleague of his had discovered a bone just a few weeks before. It's quite strange to walk through the trenches, and it's even stranger to see how close the trenches of the two sides actually were - there's just room for the road to squeeze in between them. We hear about the truce to bury the dead, because in mid summer with the bodies are piling up, high temperatures and flies, something needed to be done.

We visit ANZAC Cove with its steep cliffs and North Beach where they later landed. We see the site where 10,000 guests were crammed for this years ANZAC service - it's the size of a handkerchief. We visit the Australian Memorial which is located at Lone Pine (a battlefield turned cemetery) and we finish up at the New Zealand Memorial on top of Chunuk Bair - which was the main objective and we succeeded in capturing before being pushed back to our trenches a couple of days later.

Our guide gives wonderful insight into missed opportunities, tragedy, history from both sides, and why he is thankful that the Gallipoli Campaign took place despite the massive, needless, loss of life. I had no idea that Gallipoli was the Ottoman Empires one victory in the entirety of WW1, I also had no idea that without it Turkey's civil war may have never taken place, and that their history could be very different now. I had never stopped to think about how different everything could be if Turkey had lost at Gallipoli...

After a very busy day, full of information and emotion, we drive back to the restaurant, change vehicles, and head back to Canakkale on the ferry.

We get back to the hotel, change, and head to dinner. Willy is unimpressed by my "restaurant" of choice but my Turkish Ravioli is really tasty. He gets to choose tomorrow. We grab a beer and return to our hotel to watch cartoons - we are such party animals.

Still Loving Balloon Pic's

Pammukale to Canakale

I wake up early and stuff around trying to fix iCloud. I hate iCloud by the way - just putting it out there. We pack our bags and head outside where the owner of the hotel is unexpectedly waiting for us. "Where are you going?" he asks. We settled the bill the night before, already alerting our hosts to our early departure. We respond to his question, saying that we are trying to catch to bus to Canakkale. He looks at us suspiciously. He says that we are very early, we respond by saying that we don't have tickets, he says tickets take five minutes and that he will drive us. He gets out his phone and calls the bus company (presumably), I look at Willy, not concerned but slightly agitated - why won't he let us leave? One of the hardest things in Turkey for me has been how very friendly and helpful they are. I lack the skills to be able to read any subtext and you are always rather wary of trusting someone that you have just met. Our host gets off the phone and rehashes the previous points that we have already discussed. Eventually he offers to drive us now. It seems to be less of an offer more of a demand, one that we accept graciously as there doesn't seem to be much of a polite alternative. We climb in and I hear the locks click.

Once again I cross my fingers that I haven't just been locked in a car to be driven to a small hut in the desert where my organs will be harvested.

Fortunately, once again we escape with our organs. The young man at the bus company looks at us like we are crazy. We are about thirty minutes early, which he seems to translate into an eternity. We're like, dude, you should see us when we catch planes. We loll about on the red chairs for a while. None of the appropriate eateries are open, so breakfast is not an option. I love breakfasts here and I am now accustomed to eating in the morning so my tummy is pretty angry at me for not feeding it eggs, olives, and cheese.

The minibus pulls up and we clamber into its mostly full depths. We make several stops on the way into Denzili and by the time we get there the van is bursting at the seams. Willy gives up his seat to a young lady and I hope that no elderly, pregnant, or disabled people get on as I have done my fair share of giving up seats on this trip and I really don't want to forfeit my seat this morning. I get to keep my seat and as we pull in to the station the driver makes some aggressive manoeuvre which throws myself and the guy next to me into the backs of the chairs in front of us. Another good display of safe driving.

I meant to say before, seat belts are in a similar category to unicorns, helmets, and recycling here. They are all fictional entities. Seat belts may as well not exist and I have never seen anyone wearing one, even in the few cases where they have been fitted. It's all super safe, I mean, how could that go wrong?

We grab some breakfast (a roll and a can of iced tea) at the station and wait for our bus to pull in. When it does I am disappointed that it's not as flash as our last one. It does have a power socket and USB port though so it's still a million times better than our overnight bus. They bring us a tiny sandwich and a plastic cup of soda too, so it's quite good really. It's already twenty five degrees at eight am when we board. I love aircon! Actually Pammukale was so much better than Antalya temperature wise. It was actually possible to function which was such a relief, I don't know if I could have coped even another day under that thick humidity blanket.

I would like to add that I have now reached the stage where, despite not looking forward to the rapidly approaching end of our holiday, where we will be thrust back into caravan building, home renovating, and wedding planning (not to mention the mild panic that grips me every time I think about whether or not I will have any work to pay for all of the above...), I am really looking forward to eating my own cooking, always having access to a great shower, being able to wash our clothes, and not constantly re packing suitcases or having to find our way around a new city/town/place every 1-3 days. Man that was a long sentence. It's the closest thing to home sickness I have ever experienced, and that first shower, first sleep and first mouthful of cauliflower cheese are all going to be so, so good.

Argh. We do almost seven hours on the bus before we get a toilet stop, and when we do it's literally five minutes and there is nowhere to buy food. We have a few snacks with us, left over from our lunch in Pammukale, olives, cookies, roasted chickpeas, but they were only ever designed to be snacks, not our food for the entire day. The last round of snacks courtesy of the bus company goes around before twelve and by mid afternoon Willy and I are fairly unimpressed. Things are made worse by the twisty roads, curving their way over the hills, and our drivers apparent lack of skill when navigating them (revving up, braking heavily/for no reason, weaving all over the place, and total lack of consistent speed during the straights, OH MY GOD IF YOU CAN'T DO IT PROPERLY, DON'T!)... If either of us was ever going to succumb to car sickness it would be now. Ten hours of this is going to drive us bananas. Seriously considering never setting foot on a bus ever again. We are sitting here tossing up whether or not this is worse than the overnight bus... And it looks like this ride might win, particularly as we are now convinced the driver is either super tired or under the influence and there are still TWO HOURS to go. Deep breaths.

We make it to the Otogar in Canakkale. It's in the middle of nowhere. No one speaks English but we are offered a taxi or the mini van. We get bundled into the mini van before we can really make any sort of decision or buy food. We drive down motorways and squeeze through streets. Neither Willy nor I have any idea where we are headed. Then the wharf comes into view. Oh thank the gods.

Grabbing our pile of belongings (crap is too strong a word) we fall over ourselves in our haste to exit the vehicle.

After a couple of false turns we find our hotel. It's lovely, easily ranks in the top five of the trip. We then head back down the road (100 meters) to the ANZAC travel agency, where we accidentally book two days of day tours. Oops. The first is by land, we do a circuit that takes us the the memorials, battle grounds, etc. The second is by boat, we tour the coast, snorkel a sixty foot wreck, then head to the new simulation centre/museum. I am going to cry so much.

We find a great restaurant for dinner. You know it's good when nothing is in English and you just point randomly at things on the menu. I have no idea what I ate (Willy had a burger) but it was choice. One of the better meals of the trip - especially as we hadn't eaten for most of the day! We finished the day with a walk along the waterfront, then a beer in bed watching Rick and Morty. It was a pretty good end to an interesting day.

Pammukale - Day Two

We cruise around in the morning, eating breakfast by the pool, sorting washing for the laundry service, and trying to figure out where the heck we are going to go the next day. As usual we succeed at two of the three - deciding where to go is too much like commitment and I have developed some sort of phobia re ending up at a resort. I don't like them at all! I also try Kiwi tea for the first time. It's ok but I prefer the Apple, Pomegranate and Rosehip flavours - so by ok I actually mean it's the least tasty out of the ones I have tried. 

Just before noon we make our way up to the Pamukkale Tavertines and the Ruins. We stop on the way to buy Willy a hat and I end up getting over excited and buying a dress. It's blue and can only ever be worn over togs because man the slits in the skirt come up way higher than I initially thought. It's almost a peepshow. Just joking Mum. It's definitely a beach dress though.

We pay our entry fee to the site and proceed up to the beautiful white hill we saw yesterday. Shoes are not allowed on the Tavertines so we walk up most of the incline bare foot. The feeling underfoot was unexpected, I don't know what I did expect but the dry, dusty, rough ground was not it. Slowly we ascended, passing pool after stunning pool. It's otherworldly, and so very pretty. Even at the end of the day I couldn't really process it properly - my brain kept telling me it was snow, but of course it's not.

At the summit we are thrust into a bizarre juxtaposition of lush manicured gardens, ancient ruins, and dust bowl. We roam the gardens and the ruins for a couple of hours but while we are in the theatre (incredible acoustics by the way) I get all nauseous and fainty. This level of heat doesn't agree with me and I seem to do this every other day. Poor Willy. We head back to the Tavertines and I chill out in one of the pools for a little while before we decide to suck up the extra charge and go for a wallow in the Antique Pool aka Cleopatras Pool. 

Gosh I am so pleased that we didn't miss that. Well and truly one of the highlights of our trip. It's quite different to pool complexes at home because they give you a ticket which gets taken off you at a turnstile right on the steps into the pool. It's so weird. Once you are in you literally cannot re enter the water without paying another admission. It must work though as the numbers in the pool are not overly large, there are no children, and most bathers cycle through fairly quickly.

Being water babies we obviously hang out in the pool for a long time. The temperature is perfect, not hot, not cold, just perfect. I play a very convincing Little Mermaid on the submerged columns, Willy doesn't think that game is as much fun as I do though! We investigate the roped off section of the pool and discover that the depth increases dramatically. Demonstrating our best doggy paddling skills we paddle our way under the bridge to as close as we can get the the origins of the spring. I hear another tourist talking about how she tried to dive down and touch the bottom but it was too deep. Rubbish, I think as I hand Willy my sunglasses and take a deep breath. I dive down to the bottom. It's further than I had anticipated, but my pride is at stake and I push on. Eventually I get down to its pebbley bottom and push off, erupting through the surface and freaking out a Russian lady.

We laze around on the ruins for well over an hour, being ridiculously sappy and enjoying the water. The water is crystal clear and being so close to something so ancient, in such unique circumstances is truely quite surreal, not to mention very, very special.

Eventually we decide to push on and exit the pool. We make our way West, down an ancient Roman road. Either side of us we can see a huge amount of debris and moderately large ruins, most of which can be roamed freely. The sun is starting to get lower in the sky, creating a beautiful reddish glow through the haze. We are the only ones there. Eat your heart out Italy, with your long lines and many cordons, this place is unreal. We finally decide that we need to turn around if we want to make it back to the Tavertines by sunset, so we meander our way back along the top of many that had dried up. The white and grey dusty bowls, bathed in the soft red glow, really do make us feel like we are on Mars. Totally spectacular.

As we return to the gate I grab a couple more photo's and paddle once again in the Tavertines. Knowing how easily we could have skipped them, I am so happy that we had the chance to bathe in their magnificence. I still can't get over how empty the park felt today, had it been located in Italy it would have been teeming, absolutely seething with people. 

We eat at Mehmets Heaven, where Mehmet himself had excitedly shown us the menu just the night before. Another man shows us to our table and takes our order before Mehmet spots us, waving happily from another table. Most people here seem so happy, Mehmet and his wife have run this restaurant for literally decades and yet he still meets and greets like you are his very first guest. It's really lovely, and a strategy that works well. In a town full of empty restaurants, Mehmets Heaven is fairly well patronised.

Returning to our hotel we stop in at the bus company. We walk away still not knowing what bus to take or what our destination might be. Man we sure are indecisive.

We lie on our bed with the aircon blaring. A repeat of Antalya. Canakale is ten hours by bus. Do we really want to do another ten hour bus ride? If we do, do we want to do it during the day (maybe get some sightseeing in) or save a night of accomodation, plus retaining the freedom to see some other parts of Pamukkale. We are getting tired and crunch time is quickly approaching. We resolve to take the earliest bus to Canakale. Setting our alarms for half past five, we plant our heads on our pillows and quickly disappear into dreamland.

Cappadocia - Hot Air Balloons

Antalya-Pammukale

We lie in bed enjoying the aircon, trying to decide which way we want to go today. Pammukale or Olympus... It's a tough decision and we agonise over it, throwing the pro's and cons back and forth like a tennis match. I am worried that we will end up in a resort, just another beach with rows and rows of umbrellas, and weather too hot to do anything but lie on the beach. Not that that's all bad mind you, but feeling like that's all we've done for days makes you feel like you should be moving on.

Eventually we make the call. Pammukale here we come.

We get a shuttle to the Otogar and board our bus only twenty minutes later. Boy is this a nicer bus than our overnight one! There's wifi, electricity to charge your devices, and as soon as we drive off they bring us all an ice cream, quickly followed by a drink and snack! Luxury. None of the movies or TV shows are in English, but who cares. I work on the blog and skim photo's while Willy reads his book taking time to peer out the window at the hilly, rocky, pale desert and odd patch of trees.

At Denzili we navigate the bus station and find our mini bus which takes us out to Pamukkale. We arrive it the late afternoon and before we can find accomodation we get picked up by some random (but very nice) guy. Fortunately neither of us lose a kidney and we arrive at our hotel unscathed - although his 400 meters turns out to be more like a ten minute walk. We are shown the room, it smells like soap, is spotlessly clean, and has aircon! There is also a pool, also spotless, and a restaurant on site - best of all there's a laundry service!!! So we are winning at this stage.

We are invited down to join our hosts for a welcome drink, as this is Turkey, that drink is obviously tea. It's really good, we are developing a slight addiction to fruit teas right now, and we wing a conversation re the All Blacks. This is the second time that we have heard that Kiwi tourists are dropping off, I wonder if it's because it's too close to Syria, whether Turkey is no longer the "it" place with Kiwis preferring to hit up new hot spots like Croatia, or whether there are other factors at play. I love Turkey, I am forever grateful that we included it in our itinerary.

We have a swim then wander into town just in time to catch the sunset and check out the pools. The limestone covered hills are insanely beautiful, you just can't do the justice through a lens. It looks for all intents and purposes that the hills are covered in snow, it is totally surreal. We are going to enter the park tomorrow - I am so excited!

After wandering back to the hotel we order some dinner, it's a family run operation and mum cooks us the most incredible feed. We go to bed happy, full, and excited for tomorrow.

Antalya - Day Two

Upon eventually waking up (we had a very good sleep) we decide to have a quick swim and then make our way to Mount Olympus. There's just one problem. We have no idea how to get there. This doesn't seem like such a problem and Willy goes into a flash hotel to ask directions - the kids running our hotel speak very little and this is the first time that we have come up against this. With our slightly vague directions from the lovely lady at the fancy hotel we make our way back to the main road where we meet another lovely lady with average English who puts us on a bus to Kemer.

When we get to Kemer we realise that it's not really where we wanted to go, but it's another beach so it must be ok. We head down to the water and quickly realise that it's like Antalya but if Antalya had a credit check to access the beach. Yikes. Loads and loads of private beaches everywhere. Heaps of old, fat, rich tourists and their attractive, toned, tanned toy boys and girls. Wow. Sure is a educational at the very least. We sneak into one of the private beaches because there is literally no obvious alternative and we are dying in the heat.

Once we have cooled down we go for a wander and discover another area full of rich people, umbrellas, and sun loungers. This one is better though because there are trees for shade and we get invited onto the beach. We swim in balmy water next to pirate ships, listening to popular western music, and with only a fraction of the people. It's quite lovely, a little later in the day and it might have almost classed as romantic... Maybe. We still feel pretty crowded though.

We catch us bus back to Antalya, then a taxi to the Sefa Hamam Turkish Bath. We stand outside, looking at each other, slightly afraid of what's coming next... The manager grabs us and pulls us in - no turning back now. After stripping off our salty, sweaty clothes, we wrap in towels and get taken downstairs to a sauna. We lie on a slab of grey marble and stare up to the dome above us, it's so cool to think that we are in a six hundred year old bath! It's very quiet except for the dripping of a tap, and we almost go to sleep by the time they signal for us to come into the next room.

With fear and trepidation we proceed into the next grey marble space, this time confronted by two large men who proceed to drown us with bowls of water that they tip all over us, before getting us to lie down and scrubbing us all over with exfoliating gloves. I lose so much skin, it's great. I sneak a peek over to Willy - I can hardly see him under the mountain of bubbles he has been covered in. Soon after, I find myself also covered in bubbles. It's the weirdest thing, they cover you in suds then massage you. We get rinsed off and are then shepherded upstairs where apple tea and fresh fruit awaits us.

It's a relaxing wait before we are led into the last room for our olive oil massage. It's just as good as the previous parts although my legs are very, very tense and the poor masseuse doesn't have it easy! We eventually return to our room to change into our clothes. It's at this point that I am super happy that I thought to bring fresh clothes. It's pretty great. I highly, highly recommend anyone traveling to Turkey tries out the Turkish Bath. Willy even agreed that we might go again before we leave, so it must be good!

We head back out into the world, wandering through Old Town in Antalya. It's much more our scene than where we have been staying. Much, much more our scene. Making our way through the streets, we end up on a cliff overlooking the ocean, marina, and mountains. For one of the first times on the trip we are actually alone, and it's quite special getting to watch the sunset from there.

Upon rejoining civilisation we have a beer in a rooftop bar before ending up in a dodgy looking, food courtesque restaurant. Never judge a book by the cover, it's some of the best food that we have had the pleasure of eating. It's great. Also no food poisoning, so yay!

We hop in another taxi and head back to the hotel. The taxi doesn't know where our hotel is, so we hop out and walk the last few hundred meters. It's been a lovely day.

Bus Trip and Antalya - Day One.

Holy heck. I don't think that we are cut out for ten hour bus rides. We do manage some sleep, but it's super uncomfortable so by the time we get to Antaya we are pretty tired, sore, and grumpy. Good start! We almost attempt to bus to our hotel, fortunately we decide not to and catch a cab instead. 

Our room isn't ready which we had expected, it was not yet nine am, but they invite us to have some breakfast and relax by the pool. Breakfast is ok, this is the first hotel to cover the food in the buffet line up to stop the flies crawling all over it, the pool on the other hand is slightly less appealing. We've been around enough pools to know that the water shouldn't be creamy... After eating our breakfast we head down to the beach instead.

At the beach comes a small culture shock. The couple of kilometres in either direction from where we start is lined with permanent sun loungers, umbrellas, food/drink kiosks, and more. There are public swimming areas as well, which are also full of umbrellas and stuff. The coast is split into lots and lots of "beaches" (a small section of the larger beach, cordoned off to become its own little entity) which are pretty much coastal businesses. We walk East and pass several beautiful "beaches" which look like they have emerged straight from a film set - think brush stick roofing, beds on the beach with soft fabric curtains fluttering in the breeze, toned attractive people serving drinks, that kind of thing. In our travels we also see several which have closed down, their buildings falling into disrepair, decks crumpling, etc. Then there's a beach named something like Relaxation Beach which is quite ironic as they have a full dance floor where a foam party is currently trying to start (at midday) and the DJ is playing some terrible music so loudly that you can hear it a couple of beaches away. It's really odd and we don't like it much.

I feel like I need to mention somewhere that the water temperature is around 28 degrees Celsius. It's incredible. The air temperature feels hotter than anywhere we have been previously, and the humidity makes it almost claustrophobic. I also find Antaya disappointing, I'm slightly upset that we have two nights booked here, this wasn't what we were expecting.

We return to our room in the late afternoon for a nap, then head out for some dinner. The area in which we are staying does not appear to see many English speaking tourists, and when we finally find a restaurant with aircon they ask us if we speak Russian or English. The food is great - it's the first steak and lamb that we have eaten since leaving NZ. We fill ourselves up before returning to our hotel to drink a beer and watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on YouTube. It's pretty good.

Cappadocia - Day Two

We wake up early and go for a walk specifically to try to see the hot air balloons that are so famous in Cappadocia. As soon as we walked out of the hotel they were easy to see. Scores of them filled the sky and in the pre dawn haze they were particularly beautiful and other worldly. I dragged Willy around for an hour or so, taking photo's of the phenomenon that we were witnessing. Willy counted eighty-six - several had landed by this point, so it would have been close to one hundred at it's busiest. Insane!

On our return journey we stopped in at one of the bus company offices and bought our onward tickets. We chose a ten pm trip to Antalya - a ten hour ride. It was cheap, much, much cheaper than an airfare and saved us a night in a hotel so ya know, we figured that we could suck it up.

We got back to our hotel absolutely knackered, climbed back into bed for a quick nap... And woke up at four minutes to ten am - our check out time. Shit! As we raced through re packing our bags Willy tried to brush his teeth and discovered that there was no water. Odd. Oh well, wasn't like we had time anyway. At three minutes past ten (we are super fast) we emerge into the lobby/lounge/dining area where a male guest is going out of his mind, yelling at our hosts because he wants a shower. They hand him a bottle of water, telling him he's too late, all of the hotels turn off their water during the day (lesson relearned re showering at night). It gets worse. We grab our breakfast an disappear off to the rooftop garden thing to eat where I spend half of breakfast fending off a stray cat. By the time we re enter the main area things have cooled off dramatically. We arrange to leave our bags there for the day and head off to find adventure.

Any idea of adventure gets abandoned fairly quickly as the temperature climbs steeply. The idea of walking in forty something degrees makes us want to cry (following yesterday's efforts I have developed a minor heat rash - so gross) and we instead make a beeline for the only (?!) pool in town. It's at another hotel and we pay a huge amount to utilise it - we don't care though, we need to submerge ourselves in water for a while, and we are a looong way from the beach.

We hang out poolside for hours, ordering water and hamburgers from the hotel kitchen, reading books,  etc. Then the sky opens and our forty something degree day becomes a washout with a huge amount of rain. A few minutes later the HAIL starts - where did that even come from?! I get changed and on our way out we get nabbed by a man who works for the hotel, he is very nice and we can't say no when he invites us in for coffee and cake. We sit chatting with him for a long time, and before we leave he gifts us a little Cappadocia snow globe. It's all rather lovely. After retrieving our bags from the hotel, we return to gift him several little greenstone necklaces for himself and his girls.

There's nothing we can face doing in the insane heat, so we end up in a restaurant where we have good internet for the first time in Cappadocia and some shade. There's also really good food and beer, we're pretty happy with this and hang out there until it's time to get the bus.