Biggest Adventure Yet...

I've returned from a 15 day adventure in Turkey with my dear friend Christine. Here I will begin posting photographs and entries about the trip chronologically. This trip can certainly be defined as an adventure. It started as a week in Greece and a week in Turkey and three days before we boarded our flight, we nixed Greece completely due to the not-so-healthy political climate. We opted for two weeks in Turkey and figured, hey, we have the basics, we'll figure it out as we go along. Piece of cake.

Right.

Wrong.

Day One: What Were We Thinking...


We landed at Ataturk Airport at around noon...paid $20 for our visa to enter the country, which was far too simple...and hopped on an airport transfer bus to the area of Taksim in Istanbul (not sure why we decided that was where we wanted to go). We drive for 15 minutes, Christine dozes, and I'm wide-eyed and somewhat concerned as I have no idea what we are going to do once we reach Taksim. The bus makes a stop, we jump off, thinking we are in Taksim (in about a week we discover that we were not in Taksim). We see a ferry station and walk in asking to take a ferry to Canakkale. This was our plan. It was going to work.

Wrong.

There are no ferries to Canakkale. You must take a bus. Walk to the metro, take it to the Otogar (bus station), and take a bus to Canakkale.

These were the instructions, more or less, that we received from the ferry ticket-seller. So we walked in the general direction that he pointed searching for a metro station. We stop, needing a break from hauling our backpacks and I'm sure are looking pathetic. A kind guy walks up and asks where we are trying to go, hails us a cab, and sends us on our way to the metro station. We finally make it to the Otogar and walk in one of the bus companies (the most reputable one according to our book) and find that we missed the bus to Canakkale by 15 minutes and now have to wait until midnight. This sucks.

The Kamil Koc station:

We decide to make the most of the time and start better planning our trip, because I am not dealing with this every time we want to go somewhere. We try to buy tickets for other parts of our trip. This proves to be more difficult that we thought as the busses don't always leave at convenient times or perhaps don't even go to the cities you wish to reach. Problem. Around 8pm I'm trying not to panic and to come up with a logical plan. Then, another angel comes to our rescue. His name is Jay. He is a graduate student at Georgia Tech that has returned to Turkey to visit his family. He whips out his laptop and starts planning our trip. Magic. We purchase some bus tickets and make plans for the next few days and hop on our bus at midnight.

Here we are in the Kamil Koc station trying not to look like zombies & doing our best to stay optimistic.

On the bright side, thus far we have learned that Turkish people will go out of their way to help you. Thank goodness or we would have been seriously screwed, to put it bluntly. This is the hardest country I have every attempted to navigate. 

I assure you, the trip gets more exciting...and less depressing.