Turkey (Istanbul and Gallipoli first visit) April 06

Hello!Well I thought that I might have to send you all an email as people keep emailing saying that they haven't heard from me in a whilewell if you hadn't realised I was in Turkey last week for ANZAC celebrations which is why you have not heard from mefirst of all I will ask you a question - where is this quotation from? "from the uttermost ends of the earth"Turkey is amazing, it's somewhere that you all have to visit at some point - and all you need is a Hep A injection (have started chosing holidays based on which injections you need!!)I don't know what it is that makes Turkey amazing, I just think that it is everythingYour first sights of Turkey is when you jump off the plane in Istanbul and you are in this ultra modern airport which is almost unbeliveable considering all the poverty in TurkeyThere are like millions of queues which you have to join to go thru passport control and for some reason a kiwi passport is a guarenteed quick exit from the airport - the aussies and the poms need to buy a visa but a kiwi passport is whisked thru passport controlwell lucky for us i had arranged for our tour company to pick us up from the airport so we had guarenteed transport to our hoteldriving in Turkey is crazy - honestly it's worse than driving around the arc de triumph in paris or driving in italyand fortuantely for us we had arrived the same afternoon as the annual istanbul football match between the asian and european sides (for those of you who dont know istanbul is split into 2 sides the european and the asian which this crazy sea between them) this caused more chaos on the roads than normal!i think first impresssions say a lot about anything and I fell in love with istanbul the moment i first saw it and even after a week in the chaos and almost a week back in England I am longing to go backok so on our first nght we were kinda convinced to pay like twenty pounds each for this gala dinner which is one of the hightlights of the tour - i wasnt so convinced cos i remember the dinner at he moulin rouge and how much that cost - but emily was keen and hey we didnt have to worry about finding something to eat either
well the food wasnt flash, and we did get a lot of free beers - effes- which are okthen after the dinner we watch a turkish wedding - not mine - which was this poor chick from the audience made to sit in a chair and drink lions milk or raki (national turkish drink) and then dance with all these old turkish menok so tha was kinda boring and then more people joined those old turkish men dancingso we just sat and watched it all - we had met some people who live like down the road - literaly - ok so we live on a street with macdonalds on the corner - and our new friends frequent this macdonalds - i thought this was quiet neat reallly especially when you keep bumping into them and cos they have been here for a while they know things like good hairdressers, or where to eat etcso after this wonderful dancing, a lot of finger clicking - kinda reminded me of the dancing in the film my big fat greek wedding - we were treated to this georgous belly dancing - honestly this was like very low grade p......o......r........n - the belly dancer at cafe istanbul in wellington is a hundred times better! so emily and i kinda got tired of this plus we had been up since 4am UK time so we went back to the hotel and also we had the joy of another 4.30am wake up call as we had to leave istanbul by 6am the next day to "beat the crowds looking around Gallipoli"well we survived another early morning wake up and we were boarded onto the bus and we were luckily enough to leave not long after 6am - the bus our friends were on had had its numberplate stolen and they had to wait round for ageswe had this breakfast break at one of those stupid european roadside things (gina contiki loves to use these) and we all jumped back onto the bus apart from this one dude that we had lost - our guide (who looked like Buddha reincarnated and couldnt walk tooo far) was sweating buckets and it was eventually realised that he hadnt actually boarded the bus!!!from istanbul it's like a 5 hour drive to Gallipoli - the countryside is nice, they cant grow much cos there's no water available but you can see the Greek border - the countryside kinda reminds me of the Tuscan countryside but Tuscany is nicer
our first stop on the peninsula was the museum which has all these artifacts of the battlethis was the most boringist museum ever - you can see lovely photos of australians who came over in like 1990 with their nurses and some guns and bayonets used in the battle and some uniforms the various country soldiers wore and broken crockery etcwhat kinda upset me was that there were some poor soldier's bones also there which were like showing where the shrapnel was still lodged - maybe this makes the whole battle/campaign realthe museum has the metal sculpture which is green with the poor soldier with a bayonet in his chest and the turkish flag flying from its handlethere is also some other triangular shaped memorial which was all in turkish - this was kinda cool though cos the triangle framed the memorial on Chunk Blairthe views from the museum of the whole peninsula were amazing, if the anzac campaign had been successful and they had made it up to Istanbul - there would have been a lot of peninsula and internal land that had been taken - ok that kinda doesnt make too much sense but if you were there you would understandour next stop was to head down to the beaches to see where our ancestors - as our guides keep telling us - landedone thing that strikes you about the whole peninsula - which is a heritage park - is how well maintaned it is - how much respect there is for the maintenance of the graves and memorialthe beach that the anzacs landed on, now called anzac cove - was just beautiful, the sea was crystal clear and warm, the surrounding area was beautiful and would have been even more so back 91 years agothe memorial is rather big here on anzac cove and there is a fantastic monument with ataturks famous words which ask/console nz/aust & turkey to remember that all the soldiers are at rest here and that we (the turks) will look after their graves as they are now also their sonsif you want to see the full speech either google ataturk speeches 1934 or wait till i upload my pics
it was kinda a little errie standing on the beach kinda knowing that this is where the battle occurred and that probably someone died right where you are standingmaybe its cos im a kiwi and anzac is so entrenched in out nationahood or maybe there is a magic there but i did not feel the same when i was in the battlefields of the somme (but there you cant walk on the grass incase there are still bombs undetinated)then we went up the hill a bit to lone pine which is the australian memorialit's huge - typical australianly huge - the cool thing about this memorial is that the tree standing today is the same tree that the anzacs used as their landmarkthere are millions of headstones for some australians here, and a nice big memorial which has some kiwi names on itthen we walked a little bit more up the hill and saw some original turkish trenches and tunnels, which was kinda interesting, the trees have bullets in them and you can kinda imagine how the fightng would have taken placethe good news is..... the nz memorial chunk blair is right at the top of the peninsula and the views from here are fantasticgood old kiwis to reach the highest place!!i'll try and describe the chunk blair - first of all you follow a road which cuts through the memorial on one side there is a nice lawn which has a small sign carved into the wall saying chunk blair and at the bottom of the lawn are some gravestonesthen on the upper hand side there is the memorial which kinda looks like every other one on the peninsulathen you walk up some rustic stairs and you see the magestic nz memorialit is a very simple design, white marble, made in the 1920s, kinda in the same shape as the carillion in wellington but imagine that someone has chopped the top off with a chainsaw just above the entrance door and that is about the size of itoverlooking the nz memorial is this huge - and i mean huge - statue of ataturk - aparently he was shot in the head here and he survived so he needed to overlook nz's memorial
one thing that strikes you about being a kiwi in gallipoli is nz's close connection with turkey and with ataturk - kinda makes me wonder if this is why we dont need a visa to go there - but without being in turkey i dont think that you can grasp how much loved ataturk is to the turkish populationso after this we were taken across the dardanelles by ferry and to a 5 star resortit had a lovely pool and nice view of the aegean