Istanbul

From Batumi we caught a coach down the Black Sea coast into Turkey, surviving maybe our worst land border this year. Two hours of chaos, people fighting in the queue, crying, panic attacks, the lot. We were through extremely quickly once we reached the immigration officials, but man, Turkey is putting that EU money to work on Project Fortress Europe.

We had a short stop in Trabzon, but like Emperor Hadrian we had better things to do and quickly moved on to Istanbul (well, as quick as a 19hr bus can be). Here we met Chelsea’s parents for a family reunion, working on our step counts, petting cats and coughing up second-hand smoke. Even against stiff competition, Turkey has treated us to the most cats and cigarettes of any country this year.

On our first night we sought out a vegan Turkish place and over-ate on salmas. We repeated this a few days later on a food tour of Balat, a cool neighbourhood with local stores and eateries. The major find here was ‘çig kofte’, a spicy bulgur wheat paste wrapped in a lettuce leaf. We also had ‘stuffed mussels’, which we nicknamed street clams due to their ubiquity as a late-night post-pub snack, and of course kasarli pide (cheesy bread!). One of the joys of traveling overland is discovering how cuisines mutate across geography. Khachapuri becomes pide becomes pitta becomes pizza as Asia transitions into Europe.

We sought out a Georgian restaurant to share our enthusiasm with Andrew and Charmaine, but the wine was far too expensive and they didn’t have a license to serve chacha so it was a somewhat subdued affair. Inflation has hammered Turkey in recent years, and we were surprised that it was as expensive as it was, though some of that will have been the tourist tax of wandering around central Istanbul. We resorted to saving money on dinner a couple of times by going to a fast food shack selling enormous baked potatoes (Dan was the architect of this plan, obviously).

Walking down the main drag of Istiklal St, you cannot help but notice women’s noses shaved, tapped and plugged, their eye sockets deeply bruised. And men with the dotted and bloody scalp of hair plugs. Dan shaking luscious blonde locks out of his man bun seemed particularly cruel given the proliferation of insecure men visiting Istanbul. Nowhere has cosmetic surgery been so obvious, though fillers, Botox and inflatable chests have proliferated in ever greater numbers since Almaty. Turks and Armenians may hate each other but they really have a lot in common when it comes to mutilating their own (and other people’s) faces.

Istanbul is more than just a medical tourism destination. It’s also the former capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Consequently, it has ancient walls (Chelsea loves an old wall) and incredible palaces. Dolmabahce Palace is perhaps the sleeper hit of all the landmarks we've visited on our travels. Of course Istanbul is also famous for gorgeous mosques, especially the famous Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque, which we visited on our last day. Turns out though that the Suleymaniye Mosque is even bigger, older and better (we had skipped it by the time we learned this 🥲). We’re already planning a return trip.Read more