Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Have you been to Turkey? Come on in!
We are headed to Turkey in May, for at least 3 weeks, potentially longer. We have pretty much no restriction on where we go, though we are travelling on a budget due to the long-term nature of our travel. When I say budget, I mean we are staying in hostels or couchsurfing, cooking for ourselves generally, but we enjoy going out for a decent meal at least a few times per country, and we love love love street food, or very local places where we can get a real sense of the local cuisine. We do splurge for big "must-see/do" things, and we very much enjoy being in the mountains, or smaller communities. We can fly between major points of interest if the distance requires it, but we are pretty accustomed to taking long bus or train rides as well.
If you have places you've been that you really loved, please let us know the names and we'll start checking them out.
If you've blogged about Turkey could you please post a link?
Thanks!
**Check out our travel blog**
Planning Bio Married Bio
Re: Have you been to Turkey? Come on in!
Thanks for checking it out, sometimes it seems like nobody actually read the thing, except our parents of course...
It's been a great trip so far, and I'm so glad we decided to do it, even though we'll be totally broke when it's done...we spent all our "coming home" money on the cruise to Antarctica, which was totally worth it.
**Check out our travel blog**
Planning Bio Married Bio
I did 10 days in Turkey a few years ago. I never blogged about it, but I posted a trip recap on The Nest:
http://community.thenest.com/cs/ks/forums/thread/14564391.aspx
If we'd had more time, I would have loved to visit Ephesus, Pamukkale, and done a Blue Cruise around the southwestern coast (probably from Bodrum). Sounds like I'll need to plan a trip back at some point!
Part of me also wants to head over and visit Mt. Nemrut. (no pun intended)
You will love Turkey! Here was our itinerary if it helps. I would recommend all three places:
--Istanbul--we spent about a week there divided between the beginning and end of our trip. Tons to do there. I would give it at least 5-7 days. We stayed in both the real touristy area and then across the bridge in the New District. We liked staying in the New District better although it was farther away from the sights.
--Overnight bus to Goreme in Cappadocia. We spent 3 or 4 nights there. Loved it! Do not miss this area.
--Overnight bus to Selcuk, which is close to Ephesus. 2 nights. Ephesus is definitely a must see. After Selcuk, we went to Greece.
I have done overnight bus rides in several countries and I thought the ones in Turkey were awful. If you can go a different way, I would recommend it. We were there in the off season. I think they may have more bus options in the busy season. Perhaps, those would be better.
I'm be in Turkey during April. So far I have an extremely rough sketch of an itinerary. I've basically only scheduled flights and hotel stays.
We will fly into Istanbul and stay for 3 nights before flying to Izmir. From there we'll rent a car and drive to Ephesus and other towns (will need help with suggestions). After 3 nights we'll drive back to the airport and get on a flight to Kayseri where we will rent a car to visit the Cappadocia region. We'll probably spend a few nights there before flying back to Istanbul to spend the remainder of our time. My husband is interested in taking an overnight train from Istanbul to Sofia, Bulgaria at that time, but we're not definite on that.
As a side note, I've also heard that many of the Turkish train lines will be closed due to repairs. Does anyone have info on this?
Do you remember what company you used for the hot air balloon ride? Do all the companies pretty much offer the same services/prices?
In terms of bloggers, Adventurous Kate was there recently with some posts about Istanbul and Cappodocia, and A Wandering Sole is posting about Istanbul right now.
In terms of people reading your own blog, I'd suggest utilizing Twitter more/better if you want more readers. Interact more and share more than just links to posts to increase followers, and then when you do tweet your posts, more people will see them. Not sure if you really care about the numbers, but I've found Twitter drives a lot of traffic, so I figured I'd mention it.
Married bio
Pro pics
Travel and expat life blog
We honeymooned in Turkey in May 2007. Here's our itinerary:
Day 1-3: Istanbul. Must sees include Hagio Sofia, the Blue Mosque, Basilica Cistern, and the Spice Market.
Day 4-5: Fly to Ismir and then bus to Selcuk, gateway town to Ephesus. Take a guided tour of Ephesus. Also visit nearby village on a hill called Sirince for great food and nice fruit wine.
Day 6: Bus to Fethiye. Walk to the cliff-side rock tombs. Take a Turkish bath, if you haven't already.
Day 7-11: Blue cruise from Fethiye to Olympia--highlight of our trip and a must-do for any visitor of Turkey. We visited towns only accessible by water, sailed over underwater cities, and hiked the abandoned Lycian Way. It was magical.
Day 11: Overnight bus from Olympia to Cappadocia. We took several long-distance buses and generally had no problem. On this particular ride, a man tried to grope a young female tourist in the back of the bus and got slapped in the face. After that incident (which I only found out after arriving in Cappadocia) the bus attendant asked me to sit next to a local woman traveling by herself and her male seat mate was switched to sit next to my DH. I had some difficulty communicating with the bus attandent so at the time it was very confusing, but I think he was just trying to be extra cautious.
Day 12-13: Tours of Goreme Open Air Museum, Underground City, Monks Valley, and Rose Valley. Best to stay in a cave hotel. We rented a scooter on the last day and went to Sword Valley. Loved everything about Cappadocia, but the highlight of highlights was our hike in the Rose Valley.
Overall I'd say my favorite parts were Istanbul, the Blue Cruise, and Cappadocia. Have a great trip!
I've been to Istanbul and Ephesus. I wasn't so keen on Istanbul (I'm in the minority of people I know who have visited, but I honestly wasn't that into it-- big, big city, IMO, kind of dirty/crowded and I found the market haggling a little too much even compared with other markets I've been to in Egypt and Morracco).
Conversely, I really liked Ephesus. Much more relaxed, peaceful pace. The library was impressive but I think my favorite part of Ephesus was going up in the hill's to the House believed to be the Virgin Mary's final home. Really interesting spot.
Happy Travels!
Thank for the suggestion, I am a bit of a Twitter idiot, and have only recently figured out how it works, sort of. I don't really care too much at the moment about the numbers, mostly because I don't have the time to put in the effort required to make it a serious blog. Perhaps at some point that will change and I can see that I'll have to be much more active on other blogs and social media platforms to get the ball rolling. In the meantime, we're trying to just balance writing about what we're doing for our own journals, writing at least once a week for the blog, and spending the rest of the time just enjoying where we are
**Check out our travel blog**
Planning Bio Married Bio
Thanks for all the input, this will keep us busy for a while!
I too am interested in the cost/variables with the hot air balloons, so if anyone has any specifics on that feel free to post it, or send a PM.
**Check out our travel blog**
Planning Bio Married Bio
I took a study tour in college, and we spent a little over two weeks in Turkey (all of the things I write below are from memory... I wish I had thought to write a journal of everything we did! And to give you a picture of costs, I paid 2700 for the month-long trip--airfare included... so there were group discounts at play, but all in all, we did things pretty inexpensively)
Istanbul--Blue Mosque was really neat to see, Hagia Sofia was gorgeous
Topkapi palace was alright (but it was raining that day, so that may be why I wasn't overly enthused)
Taking a river cruise on the bosphorus was really fun and kept me awake (that was one of the first things we did after we flew in, so I was really jetlagged)
Seeing the Roman Road was really meaningful to me
Antalya was gorgeous (a group of us paid some guys with a boat to take us around near the waterfalls and they stopped so we could swim in the Mediterranean, which was glorious, being that it was the middle of January)
The theater at Aspendos was really neat to see (and was very cool to hear the acoustics that were still at play, despite how old it was)
Didyma was pretty impressive (and is one of the man-made wonders of the world, I believe)
We stayed for a few nights in Assos, which was a really cute seaside town (and we visited ruins to a temple to Athena while we were there--if I remember right, it wasn't as overrun with tourists there as at other ruins, which was refreshing)
Taking a tour of Troy was pretty cool (It was really interesting to see all of the layers of the city--they had to rebuild 12 times!)
I think one of my favorite things about Turkey was Ephesus. I loved the library, as well as the tour of the rest of the town (again, because of my personal beliefs, it made it all the more meaningful to me to see the place I had read about).
We took a barge across the Dardanelles and then continued our trip into Greece.
Have an excellent trip! I cannot wait to go back
We went in 2006 to visit DH's college roommate who is from Turkey. We started in Istanbul and had 4 days there, I would have loved more time there, but the guys wanted to get out on the boat. I had wanted to see Aya Sofia for forever and it did not disappoint.
We flew down to Kusadasi where he kept his boat and went to Ephesis and what he called the "Mother Mary house" what is believed to be the retirement home of the Virgin Mary after Jesus died and she followed John.
From the boat we went to Samos, Greece then back to the Bodrum peninsula, Turkbuku, the San Tropez of Turkey, there was a lot of sun bathing on our trip which isn't really my thing.There was a lot of bouncing back and forth between Greek isles and disco blaring resorts on the Turkish coast. Absolutely NOT what I expected my trip to be!
Eventually we docked the boat in Fethiye, which was a bit bigger and not as much "where the beautiful people go." There was a nice marketplace there.
I wanted to follow the cities of St. Nicolas so we hired a car and drove to Patara where he was born, there wasn't much there, a ruin in the village, but a beautiful white sand beach, we didn't plan for that and I wished we had our swimsuits for this day trip. Then we drove to Myra where he was bishop. There is a ruined Christian church of St. Nicholas there that you can tour. Also a few other ruins in the hillside.
wow are you really on a 15 month trip around the world?!!! amazing!! have a ball!!! That is the ultimate dream of mine!!! I have been to Turkey, part of a 3-4 week tour we did of Turkey, Greece and Italy and I loved it. I would have to look at my journal though to give you some recs, as it's been about 15 years. But I agree with the posters above about Ephesus, it is really something to see.
Safe travels & enjoy every sec!!