We have two full days left in Istanbul - today and one more day at the end of our Turkey trip. Honestly, it's not enough. We could all spend a few more days wondering the streets and discovering neighbourhoods in this amazing city. However....
Today was the best day to cruise the Bosphorus Strait - the thirty or so kilometer "river" that joins the Sea of Marmara (essentially the Mediterranean) to the Black Sea and splits continental Europe and Asia. It is the main reasons why Istanbul became such an important, strategic, world class city.
We decided to walk to the ferry dock, a really nice half hour walk up and over the big hill that the old city is built on. I don't think we've found a street yet where we haven't said "why can't Toronto have street like this?". To be fair, Toronto does have streets like that! However, this city is just amazing every turn you take.
Of course we got to the ferry rather early, so we got some choice seats on the European (left) side so I could follow Rick Steves description of the cruise. We had a little four person booth, which was nice.
I'm glad we went during the week - the boat filled up to standing room only, and that was without the crush of locals joining us. The ferry is essentially a public ferry that takes a ninety minute trip up towards the Black Sea and sixty minutes or so back, with a three hour break at a small fishing village halfway.
There were some beautiful sights along the way, including the Mosque and Palace that replaced Topkapi Palace as the seat of the Ottoman Empire until it fell at the end of World War I.
The city in the coast was as beautiful as we'd come to expect of Istanbul, and every little bay had new sights to offer. There were little former fishing villages that had now been swallowed by the ever expanding city.
Halfway up the strait, vendors came by selling the famous yogurt with powdered sugar as a snack....which we of course tried. Not bad.
If I had time, I'd check out the little port of Sayeri - it looked really cool: quaint fishing village layered with modern municipal touches and upscale bistros and shops. It was a Gram special if I'd ever seen one.
After about an hour and a half, we arrived at the quaint little fishing town of Anadolu Kavağı on the Asian side of the country. It is a very picturesque little place that is obviously set up for tourists, in a nice way. We took to the streets, following Rick Steves advice of climbing up twenty minutes to the lookout at Yoros Castle for a place to eat our picnic lunch.
The view at the top next to the castle ruins was very nice... You could see back down the strait towards the old city one way, and up to the Black the other way (where it looks like they are just completing another massive bridge crossing of the strait). The castle is basically non existent and really pointless as a "sight".
Rick may have been a little out of date on the picnic idea, as all there was at the top were stray dogs (more on that later) and a flat patch of dirt. Oh well we hiked back down a kilometer and found a bench at the side of the road for our picnic. All you could hear from the girls were oohs and ahhs as they devoured the olives, bread, cheese (well, Robin did) and sausage. It was really nice sitting out there, relaxing to a Euro style picnic lunch that I'm sure we'll repeat in Rome and Paris.
Ali had told us that all of the stray dogs are government controlled for safety - they are spayed/neutered, given shots and tagged for identification, and they are almost everywhere. We've become very familiar with dogs on our travels throughout Asia, and Turkey seems no exception with their high tolerance for strays. The difference we have seen are cats - they're all over the city in big numbers. It seems a little weird for such a clean city to have so many stray animals.
Anyway.... We walked back to the little town and explored a bit as we waited for the return trip to begin. The girls made a cute little "shopping" video (try and count how many times Robin mentions the word "traditional"!) while we chatted with an elderly couple from the UK who were obviously avid travellers based on their resume.
The boat trip back was more of the same. This time we sat on the left to look at the Asian side of the strait. It is the more residential side of the city, and just as stunning, if a little less historic.
Getting off one stop before the end got us relatively close to the Taksim area. We could have cabbed it, but thought a brisk up and down hill half hour walk would have done us well. It did! The area on the way to Taksim from the Beşiktaş dock was a local yet upscale cobbled street that climbed sharply up towards KüçükÇiftlik Park, a huge dugout concert area that we had to circumnavigate.
Eventually, much to Beth's chagrin, we got to Taksim Square - a huge public square that is going through a massive renovation that contained exactly zero political demonstrations. We walked around the area and reached the top of the famous İstiklâl Caddesi. This avenue is the most famous street in Istanbul and really seems like a narrower, hipper, slightly downscale version of the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
The street aims downwards back down to the Golden Horn, the body of water the divides new and old European Istanbul. It is almost completely closed to traffic save for the odd motorbike, police vehicle and single car street car that very occasionally crawls through the throngs of shoppers that pack the street.
We all wondered why Yonge Street couldn't be transformed to a street like this. I explained to Abby who was in "why" mode that it was a common North American held opinion that if you take away car access, it would reduce business for the retailers on the street and lead to difficulties supplying the stores with no car or truck access. Guess what North America, the rest of the world knows we are wrong!
We did a bit of shopping ("Daddy, there's an H&M here!" - you can take the Candian out of North America, but you can't take the North American out of the Canadian!), then spotted a movie theater that was showing the Martian. It was 6:00, and I think we were still trying to digest our picnic lunch, so we checked it out.
The movie was fantastic - I'm sure little kids will be thinking of science once more when they watch this movie. We did have an intermission half way that was announced with a rough shut down of the projector and the lights flaring on. How odd coming from our movie culture to have these unannounced intermissions. Robin didn't exactly "take it for advantage" and shortly after the movie resumed, she was yanking on Beth's arm to do a duo toilet visit. D'oh!
We emerged back on to the fantastic avenue and continued on.
The crowds at that time of night (after eight) were even thicker than the afternoon, and this was a Thursday night. It is a city of fifteen million after all, so they have to go somewhere! We kept going, starting to look for kebap, donair or other street eat places for a quick on-the-run dinner. It wasn't that hard and we soon had our hands full of dinner while we kept on walking.
At the end of the strip came the picturesque Galata Tower, which we'd seen many times from across the Golden Horn but never this close, and not at night. It was built in the 1300's and looks like it will last many more years to come! Seeing it lit up at night, with birds swirling around the top and cafes full of night revellers below was really nice.
It was a long day when we got out of the cab, a short ten minute drive back to the hotel. We charmed Beth into one late night Walking Dead episode, using the semi-false pretence of being upset at her bright red travel pants turning most of our wash pink.... Abby suffered the most, lol.
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