Turkey, Here We Come

The trip is on.
              And we are are at T minus 3 and counting.
Unlike past trips where I have used the services of various tour agencies like Insight and Trafalgar, this one is a "solo flight".
  After travelling large sections of Eastern Europe a couple of years back, wanting to sucker punch a Momma's Boy from Florida by the name of Jeff who whined whenever he couldn't get his own way, I decided that I would henceforth avoid travelling on buses tours with annoying "sixty-somethings"- especially when they are actually younger than me but mentally seem ten years older.
   If that isn't bad enough, I recal a bus trip in Greece when I was a "youthful" 55 year old and I seemed to spend most of my time waiting for the lard ass 20 something Americans to catch up.
 Nuff bitchin!
 The flight from Pearson leaves around 5pm Sunday and lands in Rome some 8 1/2 hours later. With only 2 hours between flights there is no time to squeeze in a bingo game in the Vatican before the next leg of the journey continues on to Istanbul.
 With a variety of transportation options available, I have decided to wait till I get there and just "wing it"
   If all goes well a general shuttle should get me within walking distance of the hotel. Hopefully my internal GPS will find me heading in the right direction and that street signs will be recognizable to my untrained ( in Turkish) eye!!!!! [ that is a brief reference to a Havana trip in 2011 when I found myself trying to navigate a grid system that was totally devoid of street signs resulting in a half hour of aimless wandering in the wrong direction in 32 degree heat!!]
  At roughly 14 million population, that's a little too big of a city to be wandering aimlessly!!!
This will be my third visit to the city ( In actual fact 4th, since I was there twice during one trip to turkey!) Hopefully the gunboats won't be in the harbour and the riot police wont need to be on duty like last time.
  Seems like every place I go I run into some form of tension. Last year it was teacher strikes in Peru and riot police locking down town squares and main protest routes.. The year before I was bumping into riot police in full gear while mobs were assembling in downtown Athens.
  Hopefully this time, the only protests I will get is a little bit of resistance from a cork coming out of a wine bottle.
  A two day sampler of Istanbul will be followed by a quick flight to Antalya on the Mediterranean coast where the plan is to spend a week exploring ancient Roman sites- kind of ironic after flying through Rome and being unable to see any there.
 Perge and Aspendos are top of my agenda- an ancient city and a fully functional Roman Amphitheater. The top site in Turkey is actually the ancient city of Ephesus but having been there twice I will be giving it a pass. A 2 or 3 day trip into eastern Turkey is another possibility but may be impacted by the refugee crisis boiling over from Syria. But if I can, I will. Even Antalya itself is loaded with various antiquities and could keep me busy on its own for several days. Apparently the beaches provide a little alternative sight seeing so I am packing my 45 SPF tongue screen!
 If all goes well and I have the time, I will be posting updates and hopefully photos of my travels. Hopefully my experiences will not parallel the experiences of Dr H Mubarak, a london MD currently arrested and detained in Egypt fir being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
                    Cheers
                             David D
 

Poolside observations and ramblings

After a really good mojito, a Cuba Libre tastes like crap. I guess fresh mint is in short supply!- Damn.

  Interesting to watch the population around the pool:

 A Japanese couple roughly the same as age as yours truly- the wife wearing a life jacket in the one meter end of the pool while the hubby walks around wearing swim goggles while never immersing his face in the water,

 A few feet over a scrawny 65 year old wearing a Harley Davidson T has clearly never ridden anything bigger than a two wheel bicycle in many years, if ever.

 There are more boobs hanging out here than at a topless show in Paris. Sadly most of them are attached to the male segment of the crowd.

The mix of visitors to the resort seems to be evenly divided between English and French Canadians and various Europeans.

  Loudest by far seem to be the French, but embarrassingly, the most obnoxiously intoxicated seem to be the English Canucks.

Perhaps fearing that the resort might actually run out of booze, many have taken up the challenge to ensure that they have absorbed more than their quota. And while not as loud as Les Francais, they are clearly demonstrating that not all the rednecks in the world talk like Jeff Foxworthy.

 At 4pm the sun is still shining, the sky virtually cloud free, our first day of the trip when we have not been sprayed by some sort of rain shower. I am somehow reminded of the Allan Sherman song “ Hello Muddah, Hello Father” aka Camp Granada!

 I’d still rather be riding a local bus through Central America and flopping in a $20 hotel for the night, but somehow I might actually get used to this lazy life.

 I had my first Scotch in almost 10 years last night – VAT 69 [ I always thought that was the Pope’s phone number!] Not the best, but a pleasant change from really bad rum!!!!!!

D.R.- Day 3

The last time I visited the D.R. was in 1993 ( + or -) I swore that I would never return.

  Never is quite a long time. Almost 3 times as long as the Hollywood term “forever”

 [Forever being the average length of a Tom Cruise marriage]

Approaching the midpoint of day 3, I am feeling somewhat more positive about this trip compared to the last [ when my family spent more time in the bathroom than in the sun]

My first exposure to “all inclusives” probably dates back to my childhood and weeks spent at Butlin’s  Holiday Camps [ A slight upgrade from a minimum security prison!] 

 Ten pounds a week per person bought you seaside lodgings, "entertainment" and meals. I can still taste in my mind the grilled burgers that they offered, smothered with grilled onions and a dash of Heinz- a flavour that I have never been able to recapture after more than fifty years.

 Fast forward to today. 5 stars, all the food and booze one can possibly shove into your face, but sadly the entertainment has gone very far downhill since the days of Butlin's- or perhaps my memory is just getting a bit foggy!!

Today a somewhat lonely walk from the resort to town – alternating between beach and road for close to an hour and a half- was fraught with some fear on my part [ I don’t think I will ever fully recover my confidence after the machete attack in Nicaragua]

 The town of Las Terrenas was like any other town in the Caribbean Third World- narrow winding streets, galleries of cheap primitive oil paintings and overpriced general stores. Pringles priced at the equivalent of a mickey of rum and canned peanuts probably close to the price of a full meal at a local café.

 Black and red coral jewelry look temptingly beautiful but may not make it past Canadian customs , wood carvings though cheap will probably not survive the mishandlings of the baggage beating staff at Pearson. Susanna admires hand made jewelry and haggles for 40 minutes with a Argentinean craft vendor at a small stall and I am tempted to slip her an extra $5 for her patience.

The tip she gave us on catching a local bus did, after all, save us $6 in transportation costs.

  The driver ripped us off for $2 each- an overcharge on the local rate of $1.10, but who really cares. I am not sure just how far it  was back to the hotel but it seemed to involve a speed bump every 100 meters and I gave up counting after about 40.

 A beer, shower and lunch followed in quick succession and I find myself at 3;30pm by the pool nursing my first serious drink of the day- mojito [ extra large]

Unenthusiastic activities staff are trying to motivate equally unenthusiastic guests to do pool aerobics to really bad music- the inventor of autotune should really be put to death, very slowly, with his screams played back to him using his invention at full setting! LOL

 

Hardly worth mentioning- Jan 2013

While it is hardly worth adding to my travel blog, it is worth a couple of lines on Facebook, but wont actually fit the normal wallpost!

  Departed Toronto (-6 and dry) at 8am and arrived in the DR at 11:45 (12:45 local time

(29 degrees and somewhat damp.) A 45 minute bus ride along decent roads brought us to The Gran Bahia Principe El Portillo. One of 4 major resorts in the Samana area ( roughly half way between Puerto Plata and Punta Cana, it consists of about 10 low rises and villas housing about 400 rooms surrounding a complex of 4 restaurants, a similar number of bars and a couple of pools.

Arriving a bit too late for the lunch buffet, a well stocked snack bar provided a filling and varied selection of snacks, burgers and seafood, nicely washed down with a couple of Cuba Libres. In the distance, kite boarders rode distant whitecaps, while occasional gusts of rain washed winds tried to sneak under the shelter of our palapa in a futile attempt to water down our drinks.

  A brief exploratory walk around the resort was cut short by a more intense downpour which fortunately lasted little more than 10 minutes.

  I attended a quick orientation session from our travel rep- that’s “tripspeak” for softening up the suckers in the crowd for the “arm and two legs” pricing of the “must see” tours. Susanna wisely used that time to sleep off her intake ( so far ) of a glass of champagne, a can of Corona Extra and 2 fairly stiff Cuba Libres.

  With her Birthday dinner almost 3 hours away I am typing this as I watch the latest CNN installment of Lance Armstrong’s “ I did not have sexual relationships with that drug.” Best part was watching Oprah looking like she got side-swiped by a bus.

Just in Case- Not Dead Yet!

If you are scanning this blog and wondering why there has been no activity of late, dont worry, I am not dead yet!
   For the uninitiated, this blog is purely and simply the one I use when I am on the road, travelling to the next big adventure.
  For my everyday basic rants, I can be pound on at least a monthly basis and occasionally daily on You couldn't make this shit up if you tried.
   My next trips are set for January/ February 2013. For anyone wondering why I didn't post about my Las Vegas trip- well, that's because it was about Las Vegas- hardly in keeping with my typical backpacking adventures in 1 star hotels.
   Till next time.
          Take Care