We travelled straight to the Mediterranean Coast of Turkey to a small seaside town call Kas (pronounced “cash”). Here the plan was to relax and go diving, which is exactly what we did. Overall the diving was a little disappointing, primarily because we are so spoilt living in Australia and having been diving on the GBR and in PNG. The water temperature was a lovely 25 degrees and the visibility was great at around 30 – 40 m, but there just wasn’t the marine life that we are used to. The diving was primarily on rocky outcrops which were unusually shaped and made for some interesting swim throughs and caves. There was also a large seagrass bed that the afternoon dive focused on each day. We did see some turtles, barracuda and schools of herbivorous fish feeding on the seagrass and these were enough to keep us entertained, without wowing us. It was really pleasant out on the boat (except for when Luke got a bit seasick and fed the fishes), and a nice respite from the hot temperatures on land. My travel recommendation for anyone thinking of diving in Kas (and probably the Med more broadly), would be to definitely go for a dive, but maybe just plan for 1 -2 dives. Diving photos are on flikr. Click here for diving photos
We also continued our Tour watching in Kas, and made some local friends in the process. Since we were in Europe the Tour finished most days around 6 – 6:30 pm. This gave us the perfect amount of time to do our diving and then wander up to the pub for a drink and to catch the last hour of the day’s stage. We found the most reliable coverage at the Barcelona Bar and made friends with the owner, barman and neighbouring shop keeper (all of whom were going for Contador and had no idea who Cadel was – presumably that has now been rectified). The funniest thing was that they would speak Turkish, we would speak English, we were in a Spanish bar and the Tour coverage was in French – not a common language amongst us, but we still all knew what was happening and the collective cheers and groans were understood by all.
From Kas we headed to Istanbul to catch up with Luke’s friend Aylin. Since we’d both been to Istanbul before we didn’t feel the need to fight the cruise boats and other hordes of tourists and instead focused on the local haunts. We did spend a day in the Grand and Spice Bazzars, buying Luke a tie for the wedding, Turkish Delight for people at home and a crazy chandelier for our future (yet to be discovered and purchased) house! Aylin took us to some great local places that we never would have discovered for ourselves, like little tea gardens on the Bosphorous and lovely little restaurants. It was also really interesting to hear about the current goings on in Turkey, where it seems the conservative government is slowly making a proudly secular state less so. We were also introduced to just how big Istanbul is (~17 million) when we travelled for 1.5 hours at 11 pm on a Tuesday night on 4 buses, each of which was crammed full – and that was just to get half way across town!
The food in Turkey was also delicious and I was inspired to buy a Turkish cook book (in English), so that we can continue our own Turkish Food Safari in Troopy.
From Istanbul (and what a chaotic international airport that is), we headed to Santorini, Greece for the driving reason behind the Euro leg of our adventures – the wedding (to be continued in Part 4)!
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