Catching up on Istanbul stuff: Day 7

For Boxing Day, Sarah and I had planned a trip out to the Prince’s Islands in the Marmara Sea, about an hour and a half boat ride from Istanbul.  Unfortunately, we relied on our Lonely Planet for this one, and on this particular day it chose to lie to us.  We got an early start so that we could make the most of the day and bought a picnic lunch from the grocery store to take with us.  Our guidebook said to get the ferry from the Adalar dock in Sirkeci (near the tourist part of town), so we caught a tram and went to that part of the city and spent a good half hour wandering up and down the docks, looking for signs reading “Adalar Iskelesi”.  While we were wandering up and down, we noticed an inordinate number of vendors selling Palestinian flags and headbands and scarves expressing support for Palestine.  Huge numbers of people bought these things and seemed to be headed in the same direction – a group of young boys with blue flares and carrying Turkish and Palestinian flags marched together, chanting something-or-other in Turkish – and we wondered what was going on.  We checked the news later that evening and found out the following: over the summer, a number of foreign ships had tried to break the Gaza blockade and a Turkish ship had been among them; seven Turks were shot by Israeli soldiers in this attempt.  The ship was now returning, with the remaining activists who had not been killed, and the city was celebrating its return and showing its support for Palestine.  Although Turkey and Israel had been on relatively good terms, the event unsettled their relationship and renewed anti-Israeli sentiments among the Turkish population.

Eventually, we found out that an Adalar Iskelesi no longer existed on that side of town, but that we had to go back to a dock at Kabatas near our hostel, another 20-minute tram ride.  We were glad to get away from all the confusing goings-on, but frustrated that we had just wasted nearly an hour of our precious day-trip time.  We found the dock, got on the boat, waited for it to shove off and by that time it was late morning.  The boat ride was beautiful.  It had been raining, and the sun shone through on the sea in bright spots.

There were dozens of sailboats out fishing and when some of the passengers started throwing bread to the gulls that flew alongside we gathered a whole slew of flying friends who caught the crumbs in mid-air and made quite a racket.  

It was cold up on the deck but I refused to go down below, enjoying the breeze so much.

We reached the islands (there are a total of four) and got off at Buyukada, the largest one, just as it started to rain again… just our luck.  Still, I was in good spirits, having spent some of the best day-trips of my life in the rain this semester (Howth in Ireland, Pampaneira in Spain).  But Sarah was smart and asked when the last boat back to Istanbul would leave.  The answer was 2 pm, exactly 2 hours away from the time that we landed.  And that was a total bummer; our book, once again, had lied to us by saying that boats ran between Istanbul and the islands every half hour from 8 in the morning until 10 in the evening.  The rain wouldn’t have ruined it, but with such little time it was hard to enjoy the place without stressing out about not missing the last boat.  It’s a beautiful island; I wish we could have had more time.  In the towns, horse-drawn carts and bicycles were the way to get around:

… and we, having heard about an old monastery on the top of the hill in the middle of the island, headed in that direction and found a really lovely trail through the woods with some amazing views (albeit partially obscured by the fog):

No matter, we still caught the last ferry back to the city, a little bit chilled and a little bit bummed but glad to have gone.  We bought some delicious fried fish from the tiny restaurant next door to our hostel and spent the rest of the rainy afternoon and evening in the hostel resting and packing for our trip to Israel and Jordan.

…and Jordan is where we are now!  We reached Wadi Musa near Petra early this afternoon after another long exhausting day of travelling from Jerusalem.  Our new hostel is excellent.  We scored a room of our own this time and had some coffee this afternoon with the very friendly staff.  We’ll be exploring Petra (an ancient city of the Nabataeans, who controlled the frankincense routes in the region in pre-Roman times) all day tomorrow on foot – outdoors hiking adventure with ancient stuff, exactly what I LOVE!!