With an
early start, we made our way quickly to the enormous bus station in Istanbul with
the intent to buy tickets to Çannakale, but as luck
would have it the earliest seats available were not until 12.30pm… so, we did as
we always did when faced with any adversity in the cold weather in Turkey, we
sat down to enjoy a creamy salep in a café to wait. We didn’t really know much about what our trip
would entail, but after the buses in Africa, South America and Mexico – we felt
a bit uneasy about boarding and finding out what the ‘bus experience’ in Turkey
would entail. Our fears were generally
unfounded and the bus itself was quite good, they even had extremely shoddily
installed TV screens in the seats (although all the shows were in Turkish,
there was also a USB port – which Dave was sure that he could use, so next time
we came prepared with our own shows).
ANZAC Cove |
We arrived
5 hours later in Çannakale, where the
main attraction is to cross over the channel and do a tour of ANZAC cove,
something Sarah had always wanted to do since her birthday is on ANZAC
day. Our tour started at 11.15am the
next day so we explored the town that evening, for as long as the cold would
allow.
Head stones for the fallen soldiers |
Our tour
guide, Canon, on the other hand was fantastic.
He had done tours with Bob Hawke, John Howard, Helen Clarke, and quite a
few sports stars and American politicians as well. He’s a retired teacher and an ANZAC history
enthusiast and has flown to Australia on a couple of occasions to attend
conferences and present his findings on the war. He was a quietly spoken man who had an
appearance of a professor who had passed his heyday. He told us that after many years of
researching both the Turkish and ANZAC accounts in order to gain a more
complete and less romanticised version of events, he has been interviewed for
many documentaries and films but sadly he is generally ignored, as the
Australians and British prefer their way of telling history even if it’s not exactly
accurate…
'The Fallen Soldier' statue |
We managed
to time our visit perfectly with the off-season, as during the peak there are
up to 200 tour buses per day which herd people around, clogging up the entire
bay – however, on the day we were there, we saw a total of 4 other
tourists.
It really
made it special to experience the peninsula and cove in silence with the snow
falling on the graves and in the trenches.
Most of the beach where the troops landed has been swallowed up by the
ocean now and it’s hard to imagine that 86,000 men lost their lives there. We came to the decision later that while
standing on a football sized field that contained over 10,000 men who lost
their lives in a matter of hours that perhaps the human mind just cannot
comprehend such large numbers of dead as it’s too horrific, but the memorials
with their engravings of the age of the soldier and date (often approximate) of
death are a sobering reminder. The
entire experience was chilling and brought on chills to think how many fathers,
brothers and sons perished due to human stupidity.
Monument to the Turkish soldiers |
After
ditching our disinterested friends for their bus back to Istanbul (the NZ’er,
for the most part picked at her nails, yawning, while listening to the various atrocities),
we defrosted on the ferry with a hot cup of chai and booked our next onward bus
to Bergama for the following afternoon before relaxing over dinner and getting
an early night so we could be up early to visit the ruins of Troy before our bus.
As per
usual in Turkey, despite the early rise to get to Troy, the driver of the minibus
didn’t want to leave until the it was full so we sat around for a long time and
eventually made it to the site by 10.25am.
However, the site was still essentially empty except for one massive
group of Japanese tourists who moved through so quickly you could have mistaken
them for a swarm of locusts with cameras!
Troy's famous Trojan horse |
While Troy
wasn’t exactly the most fascinating of places we’d visited, it was interesting
to see the place associated with the myth.
The fascinating part is that some of the ruins of Troy date back to
3000BC, and there are actually 9 cities of Troy which were built on top of one
another, so the further down they dig the older the ruins get, and there’s
still a lot of excavation work going on there. Sadly, as it seems the case with most sites we
visit – one particularly eager German “archaeologist” (Read: Gold digger)
literally tore a trench through the middle of the ruins, destroying several layers
of history in the search for gold. While
it wasn’t said outright, you had the feeling that he was a little mentally
unstable!
Even with our
late start we managed to get the 12pm bus back to town and rushed to collect
our backpacks and grab a quick kebap before boarding our bus to Bergama.
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