076 Turkey; The tour that nearly did not happen Part 1

Turkey; The tour that nearly did not happen
Gallipoli, Troy, Ayvalic, Selcuk, Ephesus, Sirince, Panakkale, Denizil (airport)

So just three days before we are due to fly to Turkey we get an email from Scoopon to tell us our tour has changed. (It is too long a story to explain why we purchased a holiday via Scoopon) The company that let us all down was called Aisa but Scoopon never told us their name so we hadn't looked them up on trip advisor)
When we look at the itinerary we are gobsmacked. No trip to Capadoccia (which was a must see for me as I'd booked an optional hot air balloon trip) but replaced by Gallipoli. OK, disappointing but I could live with it. Then we read on... 4* accommodation replaced by 2*, 3* and 0* and at the 0* there would be no private bathroom and we might have to share. (photo of the final room below). Pickup from the airport still to be included but the return trip to the airport was now at our cost. Dinners were also no longer included. Frank, quite reasonably, sent an email to complain. They told us we could have our money back! OMG this is just now 2 days before we are to fly. Scoopon tell us Aisa pulled out 10 days ago and they had been moving heaven and earth to get us a replacement trip. What a shame they didn't tell us 10 days before; we would have asked for our money back as what was on offer was not palatable. We survived, the group of people we were with were all in the same boat and they were lovely. The tour was a big disappointment.

Gallipoli is very moving.  Frank put his sun glasses on after this photo to hide the tears.

Anzac cove. Such a small place. How could so many men have been in such a confined space?

If you can enlarge this and read the words you will get a small insight into how great Atatürk was.

Lone pine.
This is the grandchild of the original, which was destroyed. An Australian soldier sent a seed home to his mum and she grew it in their back yard. News of it reached the right people and a seed from that tree was used to grow this one.

This reduced me to tears. Someone has placed a photo of A.G. Manning by his name; suddenly a name on a wall is transformed into a person.

We visit Troy, where our guide dismisses the story. He says Troy fell due to an earthquake.

This is another feature he points to as to why a horse could not have been taken into the city - it would have had to come thru this narrow windy pathway.
In the end though we started to take some of the things he told us with a grain of salt. If you believed everything he told you Turkey would have invented everything known to man!!!

This is our room in the 0* accommodation. What really got me was the way it was written up in the itinerary. "A beautifully restored Ottoman mansion that some of our guests say was the highlight of their tour".
We were lucky - we got a room to ourselves. Others had to share. There was no hot water. There was one "bathroom" (stretch of imagination to call it that) to three rooms.

We had a lovely couple of hours on a boat. This is the  ladies of the tour. The itinerary said we could swim but it really wasn't warm enough and our guide really didn't want us to. His language began to fascinate me. Couple of samples: "I'll let you have some free time now" (means there isn't enough to do to fill in the allotted time); "I can't imaging anyone wants to go swimming, so we'll just drive around".

 

Our itinerary said we would go to a factory to see Turkish carpets being made.  We went to a shop. Our guide was very well connected. He told us which shops we should go to and told us terrible things about the other shops. He invited us to join him for dinner each evening. He never paid for his meal and made sure we all left a tip. The number of 'back handers' he got was very noticeable - very much in the open, nothing sly.

 

Ephesus. Incredibly extensive Roman ruins. Not in the best of shape. Our guide made several reference to countries that had 'stolen' Turkish ruins but my thoughts are that is they'd been left where they were we wouldn't have them today.

The library

The communal toilets.

Frank actually stood on this stage and sang Advance Australia Fair.
and somebody, somewhere, clapped :)
The he did the Aussie, Aussie, Aussie chant.
Our tour exited the amphitheatre and pretended not to be with us! (Frank's edit: someone had to test the acoustics !)

Sirince.  We order Turkish pizza. The lady in the far corner is working furiously making the dough. She could turn these out in seconds. Then someone added the filling and then they were cooked on the open fire. Yummy.

So while our guide never found us someone making carpets, we found this lady sitting in a shop window.

Fortunately the best part of the tour was saved until last and it was so unique that I'll dedicate a full blog to it.