Çanakkale

Today we went on a tour to Gallipoli. It took almost 6 hours to get there but it was so worth it. The first thing we did was go to see the beaches where the ANZACs first landed. I was surprised how small the landing zone was, the whole thing would barely be longer than half way to the drain from our track at the beach. The mood at the beaches was pretty solemn, there was a mural talking about all the soldiers that died which was very touching, I'm surprised nobody cried. From the beach we could see the hill that the soldiers had to climb on the first day, apparently it used to be more mellow, but even so, it was extremely tall and daunting. After the beaches, we drove up the hill, stopping by all the graves on the way. It was nice to see all the effort that's going into finding lost soldiers and making graves for them. The tour guide said there're 60 grave sites right now but if we came back in a few years there would be something like 80. The coolest part of the place was definitely the trenches, they were incredibly well preserved and made the whole experience way more immersive. The amount of trenches really put into perspective the magnitude of the war, it was actually insane how many there were, it looked like an ant farm. Both of spencers granddads went to Gallipoli and we got to see the place where one of them got grazed by a bullet in the head while trying to charge the Turkish trenches. His grandparents, with 600 other mostly West Australian soliders were ordered to repetitively charge up the hill and 370 of them died, everyone else got wounded.Lue lisää