05.22.04
Arrival in the UK (via fabulous Turkey)
We have landed on our feet in London with a cheap flat in Kennington, between Elephant and Castle and Brixton. It’s only a studio but it’s light and airy, close to the shops and a nice park and the tube. It’s perfect for at least the next few months until we decide we need something bigger and better and are prepared to spend the money on it.
We spent the first week in the UK at my aunt and uncle’s place just outside of Cardiff. They have two boys, aged 8 and 14, and they have a large block of land with a chicken run and fruit trees and a big vegetable garden. The house was always full and lively and we were made very welcome. It was nice to have family to stay with when we first arrived but it’s also nice to have our own space again and we are enjoying setting up our little flat. It’s also been glorious weather – sunny and warm – and not a bit like the weather I’d been led to expect.
Although it was quite rural where we stayed in Cardiff, it’s not a very big place so it only took 15 minutes by train into the centre of town. We had fun touring Cardiff Castle, which has a Roman wall, a Norman keep and a castle. The castle was redecorated in the 19th century by the Marquis of Bute, who was one of the richest men in the world at the time because he owned all the coal mines in Wales. It was completely over the top, with an Arab room even more overwrought than Topkaki Palace in Istanbul, a medieval-style banquet hall that took 10 years to build because of all the carved wooden panelling, a Victorian children’s nursery with a painted frieze of nursery rhyme and fairytale characters and so on.
Cardiff Castle – note the mish-mash of styles 
Roman fort inside grounds of Cardiff Castle
Our two weeks in Turkey were absolutely fantastic. I enjoyed it much more than I ever expected and it’s hard to say what the highlight was. Probably Cappadocia because it was so utterly different to anything any of us had seen before. It’s a landscape of weird rock formations made out of volcanic ash. The rock is perfect for tunnelling and thus most houses are built into manmade caves, while higher in the hills there are smaller holes to attract pigeons (they harvest the guano for fertiliser and the soil is surprisingly fertile because of it). The area was one of the centres of Christian learning for many centuries and we went to a huge church and monastic complex in the town of Goreme. The mosaics in the cave churches were stunning, although many of them had the faces scratched off because of Muslim strictures prohibiting representational art. (This was avoided at Hagia Sophia in Istanbul because they simply plastered over the mosaics instead). We also saw a massive underground city built by the Christians in an earlier era as a refuge from raiding parties. They only lived there for a day or two at a time but it was at least four storeys deep (they think there are another four storeys unexcavated below that) and could house about 5000 people. The livestock slept in the first room and as you descend, you see bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, storerooms and of course, churches. Each level could be sealed off by sliding a rock in front of the door.
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Two village children in Uchisar near our hotel
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Goreme Open-Air Museum – church and monastery complex built into rock
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Sunset in Cappadocia
In Cappadocia we also went hot-air ballooning at dawn, which was an absolutely amazing experience. It was totally unscary because you float with the wind and don’t feel any breeze or sensation of movement at all – the opposite to flying in a plane. With most hot-air balloon rides, you go up, float along, and then land. This was quite special because they took us up and then down into valleys – at some points only centimetres from the ground – so you got the full impact of the landscape. We were in the air for an hour and a half and then had champagne and cake upon landing.
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Preparing for our hot air balloon ride in Cappadocia
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Hot-air ballooning over Cappadocia
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Fairy chimneys in Cappadocia
We went to Gallipoli for Anzac Day with my boyfriend’s family, who also travelled with us for some of the remaining time in Turkey. That was a pretty intense experience. It seemed like numbers would be well down – our tour group had about 14 people and usually it’s more like 40 – but it was packed when we got there and they were saying it was a record crowd. It seems that there were a lot of cheap tours based out of Istanbul that helped make up the difference. I don’t think there was much chance of a terrorist attack – the road in and out was lined with Jandarma (gendarmerie), the hills were crawling with military police and everyone was scanned with a metal detector. To make it to the Dawn Service, the coach had to be in the queue at 10pm the night before and the closest we managed to park was 3km away. The crowd was generally happy and well behaved and the military band kept everyone entertained with classic Aussie pub rock! We went to both the Dawn Service at Anzac Cove and then walked up to Lone Pine for the Australian Service. It was more moving than I expected it to be and also more beautiful – the battle fields are in the middle of a national park with some stunning views. I felt a real sense of shared history with the Turks – they too join in the Dawn Service and make Australians and New Zealanders very welcome.
Lone Pine the day before Anzac Day
The Dawn Service at Anzac Cove
On the boat over to Canakkale, where we stayed the night before Gallipoli, I ran into Peter Wilson on assignment for The Australian! We caught up for a beer (or five) in Canakkale, which was lots of fun and chewed the fat about Sydney and London and Turkey and life in general.
Between Gallipoli and Cappadocia, we drove down the Aegean Coast with my boyfriend’s parents and visited some amazing Greek and Roman ruins at Ephesus, Aphrodisius and Hieropolis (above Pamukkale). We had been to Troy, which is near Gallipoli, but that was much older and there was not much left apart from excavated building foundation.
The ruins at (what is believed to be) Troy, near Gallipoli
At the Greek and Roman sites, there was a lot still standing or restored to its original site and I got a much greater sense of what it must have been like. Ephesus is considered the best preserved Roman city in the Eastern Mediterranean and was very popular with tourists but we had Aphrodisius almost entirely to ourselves. Pamukkale had the added drawcard of dramatic white calcified cliffs with bubbling hot springs.
The ruins at Ephesus – the best preserved Greco-Roman city in the eastern Mediterranean
The temple of Cybele in Solcuk
The hot pools at Pamukkale
My boyfriend and I had a week in Istanbul at the end and we took it fairly easy. We stayed in the Old City but we had plenty of time to get to know the New City, which is probably more representative of Istanbul – it’s the local business district and where the locals go to shop and drink and hang out. Old City certainly has its charms though, with the amazing architecture, winding streets and bustling markets with herbs and spices, wonderful Turkish delight and luscious, ripe strawberries at $2 a kilo. Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque sit facing one another and are just amazing. I prefer the Blue Mosque from the outside because it’s a much lighter and graceful building but I prefer Hagia Sophia inside because I found the mosaics breathtaking and more to my taste than the tile art of the Blue Mosque. The Basilica Cistern is also very cool – it was once a water reservoir but the water is mostly drained now so you can see how it was constructed from recycled Roman columns of all descriptions. There are even two Medusa heads – one on its side and one upside down. It is dimly lit and quite eerie but very romantic We also went to Topkaki, Chora Church, the Archaelogy Museum, the Military Museum and heaps of other places. The Turkish baths were fantastic too – I went three times to three different places!
The Blue Mosque
Ancient recycling – the head of Medusa is used as structural support in the Basilica Cistern
The waterfront in Istanbul
The Grand Bazaar
Time now to sign off – I should in fact be editing my resume and applying for jobs.
