Istanbul 2.

I spent four or five days in Istanbul alone before Sue and her daughter, Caitlin, arrived. At first I was very wary and nervous but I soon learned to go with the flow and, once I did that, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Istanbul strikes me similarly to other great cities of the world, you could live there all your life and never see it all and my visit barely scraped the surface. So all I can do is give you my impressions of this exotic and exciting place. Brisbane is a great place to live and Istanbul is a great place to visit.


A woman travelling on her own is a real curiosity, I discovered, for men and women alike and a small, softly spoken woman is often mistaken for prey. It doesn’t matter if you are walking from A to B or looking in a shop window. My first lesson in this was the very first time I stopped to look at something on my very first foray from the hotel. I was ready. I was going to be careful. I wasn’t going to get roped into anything. I’d heard about vendors in Istanbul. So I stopped to watch a woman making a carpet and it was fascinating.

The next thing I knew, she invited me to sit next to her and then she showed me how to make the knots and let me do a few and then she wanted to show me some of the rugs she had made and then I was in the bowls of the earth with a rug salesman. He showed me beautiful rugs, plied me with apple tea, accepted my protestations that I wasn’t buying a rug and then got huffy when I woke up and made my escape. So much for having my wits about me, caught hook, line and sinker!

Other times when I was just walking around, soaking up the atmosphere, getting my bearings, people watching, deciding what to do next, someone would materialize at my side offering to be my guide, asking me if I was married, offering to be my Turkish husband if I said I was married, offering to take me to their cousin’s carpet shop or telling me they had a brother living in Australia. I discovered, in Turkey, it’s easy to pick an Aussie by their freckles so I, of all people, had no hope of passing myself off as an English rose! And, true to form, I got lost many times. The streets of Sultanahmet were never planned, I can assure you. I wasn’t there at the time, granted, but they just go anywhere. They are narrow and cobbled and unpredictable and I spent many hours walking in circles trying to find my way around. They are also teeming with Istanbul drivers AND Istanbul parkers. (I once saw a bus run over a no parking sign and park right there!) My saving grace was that I knew our hotel was just below the Blue Mosque which is in a very elevated position with tall minarets so, night or day, if I could get back there than I could get back to the hotel.

Hippodrome wall & Blue Mosque from hotel.





Hagia Sophia



Blue Mosque






Inside Topkapi Palace

Our hotel was right in the middle of the old part of Istanbul and so it was very easy to explore that part on foot. The centre of it all seems to be the Hippodrome which was built and used by the Romans during their occupation. It was a gigantic stadium but now all that remains is the park area in the centre, some walls and the surrounding streets. However, the area close to there is a conglomeration of Turkish culture and history. There is the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia, the Baths of Roxelana, the Topkapi Palace, the Egyptian Obelisk and the Serpentine Column, the Basilica Cistern and numerous other highlights too many and varied to mention in anything short of a travel guide. You could spend a month just in this small area alone. Istanbul has been occupied and governed by many civilizations from prehistory to their current democracy, from Christian to Muslim to secular and it has resulted in a rich and interesting culture of which they are rightly very proud. Turkey was established as a country only in 1923 in the aftermath of World War 1 and its first leader was Kamal Ataturk of Gallipoli fame. He set about forming a secular state that is still evolving, note the recent referendum, but they have a rich history and culture that is enchanting.  Mostly we heard about the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire and, of course, Kemal Attaturk.

Basilica Cistern

Egyptian Obelisk