Bosphorus-for-us
I can’t believe it’s been over a week since I last wrote – the days have been flying by. This time, I’ll tell you about the trip on the Bosphorus. Me and Ange decided that we wanted to go on the river, and we were going to plan it for the Thursday we were in Istanbul, but I think we’d had too much raki the night before and so we were a little slow. We took a saunter down towards the harbour area and found the ticket office. There were only two options, as it was out of season; a 2-hour tour starting at 2.30pm, or a 6-hour tour starting at 10.30am. We looked at our watches, and it was coming up to 10.30 in the morning. We didn’t really want to do the long tour, but then we didn’t want to wait until the afternoon – so we bought tickets and ran on board. The photo above is leaving the harbour – no matter how hard I tried, I could not get that damn flag taken correctly.
We travelled up the river, stopping off at various ‘towns’ along the way, until an hour and a half later, we arrived at the above photo, where Asia and Europe meet, along with the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. We’d read on the boat that there was a fortress on top of the hill, overlooking the river and the two continents, so we thought we’d take a wander up there. Ha! Us, along with what seemed like thousands of Italian students, and various other randoms. We got off the boat and had no clue as to where to go – so we followed a lone man who looked like he knew where he was going. The Italians followed us, and so did all the rest. Rather like a damp pilgrimage. Walking through dingy streets and houses, and many, many stray dogs and cats, a very wet dirt track, millions of steps, we finally made it to the top, and the photo below is what we saw.
It really was stunning, even though we battled with hail on the way down. We had lunch, and baklava at the top of a restaurant overlooking the harbour, on the Asian side.
These were the boats next to our ferry – Ange thinks I took too many photos of birds – couldn’t help that they were in the way.
We made our way back down the river, very thankful that we had done it, and pleased we chose the long trip – certainly something worth doing, especially as we had lunch in Asia!