Across the Bosphorus

You can take a five hour bus to the town of Cannakale (which is the hop off point for the ruins at Troy and the battlefields of Gallipoli), or you can jump on a boat and sail across the Bosphorus Sea. The latter seemed a lot more romantic. How wrong can you be! Awake at 5, ripped off in a taxi because we were too sleepy to see that he hadn't put the meter on, and sick as a dog because of the sea.

That said, the boat was very comfortable, and I can personally vouch for the cleaniness of the toilets and the sinks (oh yes, there was some hunks of my chunks in the sink - not pretty).

Take a look if you don't believe me; not at the hunks of chunks, but at the general loveliness of the boat.

All of this for only 30 TL (15 squids to you). The ferry takes you to the port of Bandirma, and then you have to jump on a bus to Cannakale.

Cannakale is by no means a bustling metropolis, but we had decided that we wanted to stay in a more peaceful place. We decided on the tiny town of Eceabat, which was over the Dardanelles Strait (yep - another boat). This time it only took 25 minutes to get there. We stopped in this delicious lokanta (workers' cafe) for lunch and didn't realise that there was only a boat an hour to Eceabat. The ferry was just pulling away as we got to the port. I took a picture for prosperity.

Oh well, there was cafe next door selling ice cold Efes, so we wandered over and whiled away an hour.

We were staying in a hotel called The Crowded House Hotel. Yes, it is named after the Antipodean band. Why? I hear you ask. Well, Gallipoli is a kind of pilgrimage for many Aussies and Kiwis. Cannakale is all geared towards it. Most hostels play the film Gallipoli (1981 - starring a young, non Jew-hating Mel Gibson) every night. Barclay also told me that at Petra they play Indiana Jones in the hostels at night. I can't wait for that (as long as it has that little Chinese kid in it - he is mint).

I had a vague idea about Gallipoli, i.e. I knew it was a massive battle in WWI, but I had no idea about the extent of lives lost on the beautiful penninsula. Basically, in 1915, the allied forces tried to knock Turkey out of the war and open a relief route to Russia. To say it turned into a bit of a fiasco is an understatement. 130,000 men died. A third were from the Allied forces and the rest were Turkish. A lot of the Allied forces were British, Australian and New Zealanders, hence why the place has become a bit of a pilgrimage. Although we met one or two British people there, there were definitely more Antipodeans.