Turkey

19th - 26th November (Kilis - Kahramanmaras - Goreme - Istanbul - Ipsala)

by Kathy



In some respects Turkey was like being back on familiar territory but in other ways things had changed since either Alex or I had visited. The main difference was the money, having conveniently dropped 6 of its zeros off the notes some years back. At the same time, however, prices had substantially increased giving us a bit of a shock. On the first night I thought I'd found budget accommodation for about 8 USD but I soon found out I was out by a factor of 10. And that was one of the cheaper options in town.

There was little time to linger and enjoy the off-cold shower of our 40 USD lodgings (most hotels use solar panels which isn't the best for November) because we had a rendez-vous in Goreme with my mum and David. The drive north from Kahramanmaras through autumnal forested mountains was really pretty, if a little baltic.



Goreme is one of the larger towns in the ancient Cappodoccia region, central Turkey and a bit of a tourist trap to say the least. We took to getting carry out beers and hanging around bus stops waiting for my mum to arrive, which is an activity I haven't done for a long time but do secretly enjoy...

When all reunited we spent a brilliant full day exploring the region, with its quite unique rock formations, dwelllings and churches. Not for the first time on the trip we explored underground cities and rock-hewn churches, these ones built by Christians from the 14th century to hide away from maurauding arabs. All quite a sight, and some of it not for the claustrophobic.

Onwards to Istanbul (and Europe) which has gone and got itself all upmarket. The souq wasn't quite the warren of streets filled with local goods for local markets that Alex and I remembered. It was endless rows of plate, tile and fabric shops aimed only at the tourist market. I didn't see many locals shopping there any more, and only 1 local tea shop for the shopkeepers hidden well away should a tourist dare to look for a local priced chai. It was not the nicest place to browse for souvenirs, where window shopping feels a bit like going into battle. We were even hilariously chased from 2 art galleries when browsing some painting, apparently not taking the 'art' seriously enough. Istanbul is no longer a place for waifs or strays to be seen...

In saying that it is still a beautiful city to walk around, with such striking landmarks as the 15th century Blue Mosque. On the day of my birthday we took a stroll down a quieter tourist market and bargained hard, and enjoyed the sights of the historical centre.

Enough now of these middle Eastern shinnigans. Onwards to Greece.

Syria

15th - 19th November (Damascus, Crac de Chevalier, Aleppo)

By Alex

My last post (Egypt) was quite negative, so I was hoping that Syria would give me some positive experiences to write about. Thankfully, it delivered in spades. Syria was one of my favourite countries on the trip, despite only having spent 5 days here. We were stunned at how welcoming the Syrian people are. Everywhere we went people helped us find, organise and buy what we needed.

The border crossing into Syria, however, was one of our more stressful to date. The branch of the Syrian Central Bank at the border refused to accept our LAST 100 dollar bill, owing to the tiniest of tears in the top corner. This meant that we didn't have enough foreign exchange to enter Syria, and were stuck in no-man's land between Jordan and Syria. I started to have visions about camping in no-man's land waiting for something to change. After a couple of hours of negotiations, a friendly policeman (never far away) convinced the banker to take our dodgy note, and we were on our way, albeit with no forex left and no firm indication as to whether we would be able to use our VISA cards.

As soon as we arrived in the capital, Damascus, we were assisted by the wonderful Ahmed. We had been driving around aimlessly searching for a VISA cash machine, and had stopped next to a bank when Ahmed pulled up alongside and offered to assist us. Only being a week out of Egypt, we were still a little weary of offers of help from stranger, but our fears soon subsided. Ahmed proceeded to guide us around the city for an hour, eventually locating one of the few VISA cash machines, then continued the tour helping us to find a hotel. As we parted, he even gave us a gift which completely changed the way we would be able to enjoy our stay in Syria. Ahmed - we will not forget your generosity - Thank you!

Damascus may well be my favourite city that we have visisted on this trip. It has the most relaxed vibe of all the middle eastern cities, a modern vibrant feel in a city littered with ancient historical sites. It is also muc more liberal than the capitals of Syria's neighbours. Alcohol is more readily available and I saw women's hair for the first time in 3,000kms. The souq (covered market) is wonderful to explore and the Umaya mosque exquisite. I really am struggling for superlatives. Oh, and Jordanian beer is cheaper here than in Jordan.



We spent a couple of great nights in Damascus, wandering the markets, eating the best 1 dollar food to date - flat bread wrapped sesame-encrusted falafel with friend cauliflower, chips, pickles, tomatos and a cabbage and parsley salad, coasted in lemon juice and tahini. If your mouth isn't watering after reading the description then you don't deserve to eat one.

Next up, we visited an enormous hill top crusader castle, Crac de Chevalier. Leaving behind the olive groves and winter wheat in the arid south, we climbed steadily out of Damascus and entered the evergreen forests in the hills to the north of capital. Barring the narrow tropical banks of the Nile, it was the first time we had been surrounded by greenery since Ethiopia more than a month before. Crac is easily the most impressive castle I have visited - almost completely preserved, there is no need to close your eyes to be able to imagine how it once looked. There are no barriers and only a few plaques. You can wander freely around the cavernous complex of walls and towers which once housed up to 4,000 soldiers.

Our last stop in Syria was Aleppo, the northern city. Once again, as soon as we arrived in the city adn got out of the car clutching an upside down map, a passerby kindly offered to help us and spent an hour guiding us around the city helping us find parking and accommodation. Aleppo is great to wander around - there's a hill top citadel, anohter great souq to get lost in, and a bizarre christian quarter; but the notable experience was my first real taste of European winter in 2 years. Temperatures plummeted to about 5 degrees and we struggled to find enough warm/clean clothes to keep out the weather. I realised that my body had acclimatised for Malawi - for the next 2 weeks I would seriously struggle to keep warm in temperatures of around 10 degrees despite wearing numerous layers, a weather proof jacket and a beanie. I felt cold morning, noon and night, except for the brief 10 minute post-shower period, in the rare cases that we found a place with hot water.

Syria has so many things going for tourism that it's difficult to write a blog post that doesn't gush with positive comments. But the quality which stood out for me, as you may have already guessed, is the interactions with the lovely Syrian people (and the excellent falafel). I would love to visit this country again sometime, one could easily spend a week exploring Damasucs alone. But time was not our most plentiful asset - we had a date to make in Turkey, where we would take on 2 new passengers for the Journey from Asia to Europe...

Jordan

11th - 15th November (Aqaba - Petra - Dead Sea - Jerash - Irbid)

by Kathy



Short but sweet. It was an enormous relief to leave Egypt, which was probably my most unpleasant travel experience ever. Clearly the Jordanian border staff are used to wild-eyed, half-crazed overlanders breaking free of Egypt's bureacratic extremism, as they welcomed us off the boat in Aqaba with open arms, comparatively low red tape and a sympathetic ear.

We camped just outside of Aqaba and enjoyed some snorkelling in the Red Sea the next morning. The beach was deserted and the coral gardens great to explore. I think we would have hung around a bit longer if things hadn't started to take a bit of a chilly turn weather wise.

Onward then to the long anticipated Petra! Petra is a quite spectacular hidden city built by the Nabataens, expanded by the Romans. You spend a good 20 minutes accessing the city through a steep-sided gorge, and then get lost for hours or days in the warren of small paths, rock formations and ancient streets and buildings around the city. Alex and I, in our usual speed tourist mode did some serious walking that day, bagging only a few of the most famous sights, before totally exhausted ourselves. Despite our increasing travel fatigue, not to mention calf muscle fatigue, it was one of the highlights of the entire trip.







We then headed north to the Dead Sea, finding an awesome bush camp overlooking the sea with the lights of Jerusalem on the other side, only 40km away. It is pretty difficult to get lost in the wild in Jordan however, as a truck of locals turned up late to party the night away, and then a second car turned up with a group of tourists even later into the evening. It was the most bizarre camp ever, and we woke up bleary eyed to a litany of grafitti, food waste and beer bottles strewn around us.

After this, in dire need of a cleansing experience for so many reasons, we plunged down a canyon to 500m below sea level and enjoyed a fantastic hot spring and waterfall experience, bathing in 60 degree heat water in rock pools and caves. Arriving at 8am to 'Jordan's Best Kept Secret' meant we had the place totally to ourselves, but by 10am on the weekend word had clearly got round and we escaped just in time as the hordes descended, feeling completely rejuvenated.



We then promptly undid all the good work by swimming in the Dead Sea, the world's saltiest body of water, to experience the feeling of floating high in the water. The beach and everything about it was totally grotesque. Alex loved it, I hated it. The photos speak for themselves.

Again, time was not on our side and we pushed on to Irbid in the north in preparation for crossing into Syria.

Egypt

30th October - 10th November (Aswan, Luxor, Giza, Hurgada, Nuweiba)

by Alex

It wasn't until we disembarked our ferry boat at the Jordanian port of Aqaba, and I once again heard long forgotten common courtesies, that I realised just how much I had disliked Egypt. Tourists have been coming here for so long that the ingrained dual pricing (or state sponsored racism, in my opinion) and hassle make it a fairly tough country for the independent traveller.

Thinking back, we got of on the wrong foot from the start. The only border crossing between Sudan and Egypt is a passenger ferry along Lake Nasser, vehicles are shipped separately on river barges. The ferry boat was pleasant enough, taking 17 hours, but unfortunately Andi the Landi was lost at sea for 7 days, rather than the 36 hours for which we had prepared to be apart. This meant surviving on VERY limited supplies of clothes, underwear etc. After a few days waiting in the Egyptian port town of Aswan it became clear that we were going to be apart for some time, the barge having broken down and a tug dispatched from Egypt to fetch the stricken vessel. Kathy and I, fed up with constant hassle for boat rides, desert trips, taxis, alabaster etc decided to break out for a few days and wait for an arrival date for the car - so we took the bus to Luxor to see the temples of Karnak. This is when we discovered that traveling around Egypt as an independent is kind of like being in the Truman Show. Throughout our week long stay in southern Egypt (the terrorist bit) we continually came up against barriers whenever we tried to leave a city. The ever present Tourist police are on hand to stop foreigners from travelling on selected modes of public transport. This is ostensibly for security, but it quickly became clear that it is really a sanitisation exercise designed to fool tourists into thinking that they are not actually in Africa. We were refused access to local minibuses, but allowed to take the more expensive inter city coach (neither of which travel in the foreigners' convoy). We could take the train, but only 1st or 2nd class. Once the landi turned up we were able to drive, but only in a ridiculous convoy that travels at break neck speeds stopping only in tourist spots.

Eventually we made it to Luxor, and saw the awesomely impressive temple of Karnak. Definitely a contender for the prize of "most impressive man made thing" that we have seen on the trip. Its hard to capture the scale of the monuments and buildings, but here are some pictures anyway (Kathy included for purposes of scale - she is 5ft 8in at time of writing)

We planned to leave luxor and travel through the white desert, slipping beneath the radar of the omnipresent tourist police for a few days. Unfortunately it was not to be. At the first road block we were turned back, being told that it was too late to start the drive out from the city. This led to our most spontaneous decision of the trip so far. As we wandered back into the city of luxor, desperate to get out somehow, we found ourselves in a traffic jam of coaches. After a few minutes we worked our way to the front, and a police roadblock. "Hurgada?" yelled the policeman. We had somehow found our way into the evening convoy between Luxor and Hurgada that was in the process of setting off. The resort of Hurgada lies about 300km North East from Luxor, the opposite direction from the white desert, but it was the only way we going to leave Luxor that night, so we joined the convoy of some 300 coaches, winding through the pitch black eastern desert to the Red Sea coast, and started to rethink our Egypt action plan.





In other Egyptian news, the pyramids are really big, Sinai has been overrun by package holiday makers, and in general we were quite pleased to leave the country. The only thing I'll miss about the place is filling up all 100 litres of diesel for a tenner. The boat trip to Jordan marked my departure from Africa after 20 months unbroken on the continent, but this was no time for tears - still 2 more continents before christmas. We would have liked to simply drive into Israel, which borders the Sinai peninsula, but this would have precluded us from entering [sworn enemy] Syria. Not being able to enter Syria would mean having to drive through Iraq. With all the border politics coming into play, we could only be entering one region... The Middle East.