Merhaba Turkey

We have been traveling almost every week since more than a year, and had been taking time off from work at regular intervals to travel to a few distant places, but we had never done an international trip together. When the idea of taking an international vacation struck, choosing Turkey wasn’t hard at all, given that the destination has been trending online recently and even looking at the pictures was a treat.

Turkey is one of the 5 countries spanning across 2 continents, the others being Russia, Egypt, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Bosphorus Strait separates the European part of the country from the Asian part. Istanbul airport is located in Europe, so if you fly down to Istanbul, you have been to at least one European country already.

We quickly read about the places in Turkey and decided that we were going to cover the west side of the country because we found the places quite fascinating. We printed out an outline of the Turkey map and marked all the locations we wanted to cover, made a plan of how and when to commute between places in Turkey and an expense sheet to estimate how much we would have to spend per person.

Here’s a list of places we identified and the travel plan:

We will soon be posting in detail itineraries and things to do in consecutive posts.

Packing

We packed really light because we knew we would be on the run almost all the time. As we traveled in summer, we only carried clothes and toiletries apart from the required documents including Visa and Passport. The weather is as different as the geography at different places, so we carried light jackets for chilly mornings and evenings at Cappadocia, shorts and a frisbee for beaches in Antalya and appropriate clothes to visit mosques. In mosques it is expected that both men and women cover their bodies, avoid shorts and sleeveless clothes and women are expected to cover their heads, so I carried a stole for the same. Also, we ensured that we packed our reusable cutlery set containing 1 spoon, 1 fork and 1 straw and our 1 litre reusable water bottle. And as we definitely wanted to capture our journey and experiences, we carried a GoPro, camera and a power bank.

Pikachu uses reusable cutlery; so do we.

We started our journey from Chennai, India to Istanbul, Turkey via New Delhi, India. We took an Indigo to New Delhi and Turkish airlines to Istanbul. A round trip cost us Rs. 38,000. But if you are based out of Delhi you can get round trip tickets for ~27,000

What must you eat in Turkey?

Turkish sweets and kebabs are world-renowned. One of our couch surfing friends was sweet enough to send us a list of food that you must eat while in Turkey. While we do not encourage eating non vegetarian food, we will go ahead and post the list that we were provided with.

1-İskender
2-Lahmacun (called Turkish pizza by foreigners)
3-Beyti
4-Simit (cheap breakfast – costs just 1 TL)
5-Adana/Urfa kebap (Adana is spicy, Urfa isn’t)
6-Çiğ Köfte
7-Dolma/Sarma(homemade food, hard to find in restaurants)
8- Mantı
9-Tavuk dürüm

Desserts you will love:

1-Künefe
2-Baklava

Some Turkish drinks you cannot not like:

1-Ayrand (similar to butter milk found in India, but so widely consumed in Turkey)

2-Salgam (our friend suggested that we record a video of us when trying Salgam. Why don’t you do it too? 😉 )

3-Turkish Chai and coffee