The end of November.  Family gatherings, The Dallas Cowboys playing on TV, the smells of traditional Thanksgiving recipes wafting from the kitch–

Wait.  Sorry.  Not that kind of “turkey.”  This one:

Turkey was never on our list of must-visit countries.  The only reason we went to Istanbul was because (aside from some place in France), it was the cheapest fare out of Israel listed on Kayak.com.  We only spent three days there, and we didn’t stray far from the Sultanahmet area, but even just that little taste was enough to put Turkey at the top of a list of places I want to return to again.

Public Transportation

Arriving in a new country is never very fun.  There’s always so much to figure out.  When we fly in, our priorities are to get through immigration, find an ATM to secure some local currency at an exchange rate we can trust, and then we usually just suck it up and pay for a cab straight to a hotel.  Airports are usually a good distance from the city center and we end up paying for that first ride, but it’s often worth it to skip having to navigate yet another metro, in a foreign language, with all our luggage.

Istanbul was different.  The airport was a pleasure to navigate, with English translations printed on every sign.  We didn’t yet have visas, so before going to immigration, we followed the signs to the “visa bank.”  Step up to any counter, present your passport and a twenty-dollar bill, and they’ll slap a small stamp on one of your empty pages.  Total time to obtain a visa: 30 seconds.

Later, as we came out of customs with our bags, we were not surrounded by taxi touts, even when we stopped a minute to look around.  We collected our Turkish lira from the ATM and decided to follow the signs to the metro.  Hey, why not?  It was mid-afternoon and it didn’t look packed.  On the way, we spied a tourist information booth.  They gave us a free metro map and confirmed what we had already figured out; we’d need to make just one route change on the way.

Metro

Istanbul’s metro system is a pleasure to navigate.

The token dispensing machines couldn’t be easier.  Just slide in some cash, select how many trips you want, and out come your tokens and change.  The hardest part was getting our big backpacks through the turnstiles.  Half way through our ride to Sultanahmet, we had to get off the train line and get onto a trolley (tramvay.)  It was slightly more crowded – we had to stand with our packs – but no more troublesome.  Within 20 minutes or so, we had made it all the way from the airport to the doorstep of our hotel and at a tiny fraction of what it would have cost us to take a cab!

Tourist Friendly

I hate to keep harping on Egypt, but Egypt deserves it.  It’s impossible to simply go sightseeing there, because touts and hustlers are constantly vying for your attention.  Istanbul, in comparison, was like a breath of fresh air.

Stepping off the metro at the Sultanahmet station was like walking through the gates of Disneyland.  The Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque dominate the skyline, literally thousands of people wander around the large park and countless vendors are selling their wares.  We’d been traveling since late the night before and I was in no mood to be harassed on the way to our hotel.  I hefted my pack, hunched my shoulders, and resolved to not make eye contact with anyone except the receptionist at the hotel.

No one spoke to us on the way.  No one called out, asking us to buy anything.  No one offered us – two tired tourists with backpacks! – a taxi. It was wonderful.

Later that evening, once we had rested a bit, we decided to go out and wander through the stalls.  I slung my DSLR over my shoulder – something I would have felt very uncomfortable doing in Cairo – as we headed out the door.

Just as soon as we stepped into the street, a man came out of his carpet store and sidled up next to me.  “Sir, can I show you some excellent Persian carpets?”

Oh, here we go, I thought.  “No thank you.”  I looked straight ahead, but he was still walking along beside me.  I turned to give him a bit of a glare.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I’m just walking in the same direction.”  He smiled as we parted ways at the corner.  I felt bad.

Over and over, our inaccurate preconceptions were thrown back into our faces like that.  At the Grand Bazaar, vendors were happy to have you just window shopping.  At the Spice Market, we bought an assortment of dried fruit and the salesmen rounded up when weighing our bag and went on to trim a few cents off the price because it was easier to make change.  At a convenience store near our hotel, the guy behind the counter would always throw a couple pieces of gum in our bag, just to be friendly.

Three days in Turkey wasn’t enough for us to completely lower our guard, but Istanbul went a long way towards restoring our enjoyment of markets.

Shopping

You don’t shop when you’re on a round-the-world trip.  Or, if you do, you spend a fortune on postage.  Oksana and I have both remarked about how “lucky” we are in this respect.  Because we both already have heavy bags and a tight budget, souvenir collecting has lost much of its appeal.

Turkey, however, was perhaps the first country where we began to regret our inability to shop.  Hanging lanterns, colorful earthenware, clothing, and antiques.  We wanted to take so many things home with us from the Grand Bazaar!  We also appreciated that we were once again in a world where prices were posted on most items.  Even if we weren’t planning to buy anything, it was nice to at least know the starting price.

I remember an interaction with one of those ubiquitous carpet salesmen.  While Oksana was taking pictures in the Grand Bazaar, I was standing around, looking at everything on display.  A man came out of his store and walked up to me.

“Come in, let me show you my carpets,” he said.

I could tell his English was pretty good.  I decided to be polite and explain why I couldn’t.  “I’m sure they’re beautiful, but I can’t buy one.”

“But why?  You don’t even know the price!”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve been backpacking around the world for a year and I don’t have that kind of room in my bag.”

“Ah,” he said, thinking he had me trapped. “This is no problem. I can ship anywhere!”

“Ah,” I replied with a smile, “but I don’t have an address! We sold our house and all our belongings before traveling!”  It was a half truth, but it worked.  I could see him struggling to come up with another angle, but eventually he had to admit that I wasn’t in the market for a giant rug.

Trenchcoats

Turkey, or at least Istanbul, is mostly Muslim, but to me, it seemed a much more liberal Muslim than the countries we’d visited in Africa and the Middle East.  Granted, we were in a very touristy area, but even at the height of Ramadan, we saw fewer women in full burkas.  Perhaps in a testament to how cosmopolitan Istanbul is now, we saw many women who were wearing trench coat-burkas.  More stylish than simple billowing silks, these were burkas that managed to cover everything that needed covering, but with fashionable buttons and lapels to give it a certain flair.  Reminded me a bit of the costumes in The Matrix.

They say that Asia meets Europe in Istanbul and I can think of no better example than those trendy burkas we saw there.

Smoking

Small note, but one that we certainly took notice of.  While waiting for our bus to Bulgaria to get underway, the driver started smoking a cigarette.  Within moments, the whole bus smelled like smoke, but fortunately for us he didn’t keep smoking on the 12-hour ride to Burgas.

We Americas often get a (bad?) rap for being overly health-conscious and controlling, but I tell you what:  There’s nothing like having a nice meal in a restaurant ruined by a guy with a cigar sitting next to you to make it all seem worthwhile.

That said, this was just one incident in Turkey.  To be honest, I’ve been quite surprised about just how many countries we’ve visited that have laws in place to protect the public health.  Restaurants, bars, public buildings – many more places that I would have guessed are off-limits to smokers, just like in the U.S.

Fountains

All over Istanbul, we noticed public fountains.  Not drinking fountains, more like, I don’t know – something older.  These were concrete basins, often set against monuments or ornamental walls.  We saw them in Sultanahmet, inside the Grand Bazaar, just about everywhere.

Even cooler, they were almost constantly being used.  Often people just stopped by to wash their hands real quick, but I also saw a few people splash water on their heads during the heat of the day.  Personally, I wasn’t going to drink from them, but they may have even had potable water.  I saw one person washing their fruit in one and another drinking straight from the spigot.

I’d bet this fountain culture is a holdover from past times when people got their water from communal wells.  I think it’s pretty neat that the city still devotes resources to keeping a tradition like this alive.

English

Turkish writing bothered me.  After going through a couple Arabic countries – not to mention Israel – where we couldn’t read a thing, I sort of trained myself out of trying to puzzle out the signs.  Turkish is written with a modified Roman alphabet, though, so my brain couldn’t help but try to read each one, even though I had no idea how to pronounce any of the letters.  The end result was the visual equivalent of having something on the tip of your tongue all day (or perhaps seeing an actor in movie and not being able to place where you’ve seen him before.)  Highly frustrating.

Fortunately, however, Istanbul is a lot like other big, touristy cities, in that you’re never very far from someone who speaks passable English.  We had no problems communicating with our hotel staff, restaurant waiters, or when asking directions.

Once, on the street, a person walking past us said, as a way of greeting, “Hello please Lady Gaga!”  Just like that, all at once, without any punctuation.  I have no idea what they meant, but it could almost be a metaphor for what my brain gets out of reading Turkish.

You really need to click here for a closer look!

Early on, on this round-the-world trip of ours, Oksana and I had a serious conversation about just dumping all our electronics gear — our laptops, our cameras, all the batteries and chargers; everything but our clothes — and continuing on without it.  It would have probably halved the weight of our bags, but more importantly, it would have freed us from the self-imposed responsibility of sharing everything online.  Believe it or not, the stress associated with posting new stuff to this blog or on Facebook and Twitter can, at times, detract from our trip.  The travel blogger’s dilemma: Any time spent blogging is time not spent traveling…

One of those pieces of electronics that’s been weighing us down is a handheld GPS unit made by Garmin.  Every day — every single day! — we start it up just before we walk out the door and let it track our progress wherever we go.  We selected this particular unit, a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx, for its battery life.  Two AA batteries last around 25 hours.  At the end of every day, I save a GPS track.  When I have some spare time in front of the computer, I import them all into Google Earth, write up a brief summary of the day, and then combine everything in Google Maps for our website.

If you’ve been following the site, you know that we post a ton of photos, write something up from time to time, and post a video here and there.  If you’re really paying attention, you also know that we’ve been silently updating other parts of the site with much greater frequency.  (See: Our Recommended Tours page, our travel budget, and our “Where Are We?” page.)  Keeping up with this takes a huge amount of effort and is also a big reason why I haven’t written more blog entries or posted more videos on the site.

To stay motivated, I have to keep reassuring myself how cool it will be to have all this data at the end of our trip.  We’ll be able to dig into our budget and tell you exactly how much money we spent on, say, public restrooms in every country.  We’ll be able to recommend hotels for people traveling to the same destinations.  And we’ll be able to print out a wall-sized map of the world with our GPS track scrawled across it!

That’s what I wanted to show you today.  Google Maps is notoriously finicky about showing maps with huge tracks across them.  To reduce loading time, it usually breaks your map up into multiple pages, but every once in awhile, I’ve noticed that Google Maps displays my map in its entirety.  This time, when I saw all the tracks laid out before me, I made sure to zoom in, screencap everything, and stitch a big map back together in Photoshop.  There are still some problems with it (notice some of the gaps in the tracks — they’re actually there when you zoom in closer, but don’t display at this particular zoom level), but it’s a great representation of just how far we’ve gone in a 16 months or so.

Today, this map is pretty much blowing my mind.  We’ve traveled across the whole freakin’ planet!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (47.5MB)

We really only had one day in Israel, so of course visiting a McDonald’s was high on our list of things to do!  My goal was to go to one of the few kosher restaurants, but they were all closed for Shabbat; we checked.  We lucked out because there was one in the airport and we hit it on the way out, but it didn’t have the infamous “blue arches,” one of the only logo changes McDonald’s has ever approved (supposedly.)

Anyway, we dragged our friend, Michal, to McDonald’s in Tel Aviv with us.  Turned out to be a good thing, as most of the menu was in Hebrew…

Oh, and I think the mic on Oksana’s point-and-shoot is toast.  No idea what happened (raindrop, perhaps?), but this is the second recording where the audio is just horrible.  Good thing we have friends bringing us a brand new Sony TX10 in a few weeks!

Toward the end of our stay in Egypt, we began looking for a way to reach Eastern Europe.  Our plan had always been to start somewhere around Turkey and work our way north.  There were many routes we could take, some of which were easily discarded due to visa costs.  Even so, we looked forward to visiting Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia before entering Russia.

But before all of that, we had to find our way to Turkey.  Overland from Jordan was simply not an option, not with the unrest in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.  We thought for sure we could find a cruise ship or ferry or something out of Israel, but that turned out to be next to impossible.  When all was said and done, we simply purchased a flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul.  Simple, but spendy.

Because we lingered in Africa, we were in a rush by the time we got to Israel.  I would have enjoyed having a week or more to visit historical sites like Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and the Jordan River, but by the time we crossed the border, we had barely 24 hours before our flight out.

Fortunately, our friend, Michal, was living in Tel Aviv and offered to show us around.  We packed quite a bit into that day and a half and, with her there to answer my questions, we learned a lot about the country, too.

We spoke a lot about geopolitics – I was very curious about how Israelis see themselves, how they fit in in the Middle East, and how religion plays a role in their country’s politics.  I’m not going to get into that here.  I know I wouldn’t be able to do our conversations justice, but furthermore, I didn’t get a chance to talk with anyone else.  While very informative, hers was only one Israeli’s opinion.

(more…)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (22.1MB)

I have to admit that recording this video — even asking to stop at a McDonald’s on the way — felt a little awkward.  I’m self-conscious enough recording videos in a restaurant; doing the same thing with two strangers in the car?  A little odd.  After it was over, though, Tina said I sounded very natural, so maybe it doesn’t come across that bad.

Exercise for the viewer: See if you can spot the continuity error!

Let me ask you a question:  How many times have you read about Jordan in the news?  Thinking back, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Jordan making headlines.  Now, what about the countries that surround it?  Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.  Can you remember a time when one of those countries made international news?  Maybe once or twice?

Most people only know about the Kingdom of Jordan because of Petra, the ruins that played a part in the third Indiana Jones movie.  To be honest, that’s about all I knew of it before we arrived, too.

We ended up sharing a cab ride, from Aqaba to Petra, with an Australian woman a short time after we cleared immigration.  I asked our cab driver how, in such a volatile region, Jordan doesn’t make any waves.  His answer?  “We’re peaceful – the Switzerland of the Middle East!”

Maybe so, but I just did a Google search for “the Switzerland of the Middle East” and the tagline seems to belong to Lebanon.  For some reason.  Huh.

At any rate, Jordan was a very pleasant change from Egypt.  We noticed many differences right away.

(more…)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (34.7MB)

After a long Big Mac dry spell, we finally made it across Africa and found another country with Golden Arches: Egypt!  We ended up eating at McDonald’s again and again before we left the country if only because we kept stopping in for the AC and vanilla cones!  Egypt is hot in August!

This is the first video we didn’t shoot in the restaurant itself.  I find it ironic that we chose not to because the environment wasn’t conducive to good video, but look at the problems this video has!  The florescent lights in our room wreaked havoc with the image; sorry about that.  We weren’t planning to shoot another review, but when we saw the sandwiches on display in Aswan, I had to try one.  We only had Oksana’s point-and-shoot camera with us, however, and it did a horrible job with the audio.  (Not sure why, either, because we shot practically the whole Ecuadorian Jungle video with that little camera!)  These issues bother me, but I’m trying to remind myself that these McDonald’s videos were never intended to be perfect.  That comforts me somewhat.  It also helps when I think about the mayo that both Oksana and I had stuck to our faces in the first segment…

Speaking of awkward food review moments.  Boy, when you’re on camera, the time between taking a bite and swallowing it so you can talk again seems like an eternity.  I should watch the the Food Network and take notes on how they do it.