The Archive

On the road

We saddled up the motors and allocated the people to the cars (each car was assigned 1 driver, 1 person with a sense of direction to navigate and 1 person to tug on the driver's sleeve and complain about the air conditioning).

And we were off.

One of the joys of driving in Turkey is realising that, if you really go for it, you can actually triple the speed limit. Although as my Mum may be reading this, I'd like to stress we wouldn't do anything irresponsible like that of course, and we drove sedately all the way to Cannakale.

And one of the joys of navigating in Turkey is that once you are out of town, there are only about three roads, so it's a pretty straightforward business.

So much so, we decided we even had time for a bonus site, and slipped off the main highway and up to Pergamon to witness the Acropolis.

The Great Altar of Pergamon is an amazing sight, huge, impressive and in Berlin.

That the Germans had showed up, admired the ruins and then taken them home turned out to be something of a theme of this trip, although being English ourselves, we thought it best not to make too much fuss about it.

Fortunately, I've been to the Pergamon museum in Berlin (albeit twenty years ago, but I can't imagine it changed much), so a short mental jigsaw later I could imagine the acropolis in all its glory.

Or at least I would have, if one of the other tourists on the site hadn't been an incredibly attractive young lady who was taking all of my attention.

The other particularly cool thing on the site was an amphitheatre, which I can confirm if you run from the bottom to the top in 36 degree heat, is quite tiring.

OK, it's too hot to be out in the sun any longer, let's get back in the air conditioned car and on the road.

A couple of hours later, we were in the outskirts of Cannakale.

That was when Pellet declared 'I've got good news and bad news. The good news - we have the address of the hotel. The bad news - I don't actually have a map'.

Great. Good work Pellet.

Fortunately, the spirit of Serbia prevailed ('what do you mean you don't have a map, this is a massive city, we'll never find... oh, there it is') and we were soon pulling up in front of our hotel, a historic customs house where we were soon installed in the courtyard drinking beer.

Ah. Holiday.

Oh wait, I've just remembered something about our guide from yesterday. In describing the city of Izmir, and metropolitan Turkey in general, he was quite insistent on two facts.

Firstly, the rate of divorce was very high.

And secondly, despite being a Muslim nation, they were also very liberal. He illustrated this fact by pointing out that they were pretty relaxed about supposedly haram activities like smoking, drinking booze, and heroin.

Heroin?

So, putting two and two together, we concluded that Turkey must be packed with divorcees toting bags of heroin, desperate for a night of our company.

Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, Cannakale. We popped out for a lovely fish supper (including a range of delicious octopoid, which is what happens if you let Beardog do the ordering) and then, noting that neither the promised exponential rise in people going out nor the hoped-for army of antipodean tourists had materialised, we popped into a bar for a beer and a hookah (insert hooker gag here).

Actually, the Turks call them Nargile, and we enjoyed a rather lovely apple, strawberry and coffee flavoured pipes before retiring to bed.

Tomorrow was going to be a big day with an early start - for we were invading Troy!

posted by Peter The Great @ 9:59 AM