It was warm and sunny. I took a ferry from Haydarpaşa to Eminönü, and walked back over the hill to Sultanahmet. My main aim for the day was to buy a nargileh in the Grand Bazaar.
It was blazing hot by the time I got there, so it was nice to be under cover. [...]

It had been a long day, starting as it had at 5am in Aydin. I was tired as I boarded the train, and would have loved to go to sleep straight away. But just as we pulled out of Denizli, my carriage filled up with boisterous young Turks. The three in my [...]

From Denizli I could see a striking patch of white on a distant hillside, and this turned out to be Pamukkale. A spring here spouts amazingly mineral-rich waters, and over thousands of years a huge terrace of travertine has built up. The Greeks built the city of Heirapolis here 2200 years ago, and [...]

We got a taxi to Manavgat, and got a bus from there to Denizli. My guide book had said that if there was ever a choice, you should get buses instead of trains in Turkey, but this was definitely a lie. Sleep was limited as tinny Turkish pop played all night, and the [...]

I got up before dawn on eclipse day, and walked down to the Temple of Apollo to watch the sun rise. I listened to ‘Mute’, by Porcupine Tree - I’d done the same seven years before on a hilltop in Cornwall, and two years after that by the Zambezi in Africa. We’d decided [...]

For the eclipse, we’d decided to go to Side, almost dead on the centre line on the Mediterranean coast. So after a couple of days in Istanbul we got an overnight bus from there to Antalya, a tiring journey in part because overnight bus journeys always are uncomfortable, but also on this occasion because [...]

It was cold and grey in Istanbul. I walked from the surprisingly quiet Sirkeci station to Sultanahmet, and spent the afternoon having a look at some of the city’s famous places like the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofia. In the evening I met John at the hostel we were staying at, and [...]

As the sun was setting I walked north to the train station, to catch the train to Istanbul. At the station there seemed to be an organised scam operating, with people latching onto unsuspecting travellers, saying there were ‘tourist information’ and then demanding money for ‘help’ given. One of them spotted me looking [...]

I had got back from South America on the first of February, and had spend a very excellent six weeks seeing out the winter at my parent’s house, the first time I’d been at home for that long for about ten years. While I’d been away, I’d spoken to John about possibly going to [...]