I have been cultivating an interest in wine drinking for a number of years now. After a dry month in Jordan I pounced on some good quality wines within my budget in Lebanon and was keen to rekindle my love hate relationship with Turkish wines.
Unlike the UK where £5 will present a wine drinker with a large choice of decent bottles in Turkey this is less the case. There are good Turkish wines but finding them involves a fair amount of trial and error with the errors coming thick and fast.
Posted in Photo Features, Photography, Travel Features 
Tags: avanos, cappadocia, food & drink, photos, turkey 
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I didn’t sleep through every major festival in Cusco. The feast of Corpus Christi celebrates the body of Christ and events are held around the world by some Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran Churches.
Held in June sixty days after Easter Sunday, the feast in Cusco is particularly popular. The night before the celebration local dishes including the Peruvian delicacy of guinea pig are prepared and consumed, and the following day after Mass processions from different churches around the city carry statues of saints and virgins to Cusco’s Cathedral. There they ‘greet’ the body of Christ; the statues made to do a little bow or curtsey by their bearers.
Posted in A Week In..., Photo Features, Travelling Tags: cusco, festivals, peru, photos 4 Comments »
We came to Butrint as people without a home. The past four months had been spent across the strait in Corfu waiting to be allowed back into Bulgaria to resume our house hunting travels around Eastern Europe.
Conversely, Butrint is peopleless. Formerly a Greek colony and Roman city, Buthros, as it was once named, is a home to no one any longer. A residential area since before history was written down, Buthros outlasted the Byzantines until the encroaching marshes caused its gradual decline and abandonment in the Middle Ages.
Once we crossed over the Tigris in to Turkey we were on the final leg home. Though we knew it is a beautiful country Turkey surprised us. We have lived here for four years but, having only seen the Aegean coast, a few towns in the west of the country and Istanbul, we didn’t understand quite how varied the landscape can be.
The mountain snowlines and the level of greenery particularly sat awkwardly with what we thought we knew about Turkey. The people too were different in the east. Turkish hospitality seems to be in even greater abundance nearer to the country’s eastern and southern borders.
Posted in Cairo to (almost) Istanbul, Photo Features Tags: accommodation, avanos, cappadocia, diyarbakir, goreme, kas, koycegiz, mt nemrut, olympos, sanliurfa, selimiye, turkey No Comments »Laying slap bang in the way of getting to Turkey, we needed to cross Syria to get home but when we turned up at the border Syria said no and turned me away. We had to decide what to do next. The temptation was to turn around and head back to Egypt and take the once in a lifetime opportunity to have the Pyramids and the rest of Egypt’s historical assets to ourselves.
Then we remembered the country we bumped when planning our route. I had thought the Syrians wouldn’t let me in at the border twice without a prearranged visa but now that they had already rejected me Lebanon was on the table again. We flew to Beirut.
Posted in Cairo to (almost) Istanbul, Photo Features Tags: amadiya, beirut, dohuk, erbil, iraq, lebanon, tripoli 2 Comments »Now we are back we are attempting to wean ourselves away from writing solely about our recent adventures. Having predictable access to the internet again means we can get back to writing researched pieces about working and volunteering abroad and focus more on other areas of the planet outside of the Middle East.
For the rest of this month though I’m taking a last chance to indulge ourselves and show some pictures of our travels. I learnt a long time ago our friends ain’t interested but the advantage of having a website is I can force them on to you. (Tip: I don’t pay much attention to our stats so if you want to slowly back away from the computer now I won’t know about it).
Posted in Cairo to (almost) Istanbul, Photo Features Tags: amman. aqaba, dahab, egypt, jerash, jordan, petra, sinai, snorkeling No Comments »
Our home town in Turkey is very much a package tourism destination. Young families and the retired from the UK come to lie on the beach in the mornings and afternoons and drink in the bars and clubs in the evening.
Turks from nearby towns and villages daytrip in Altinkum, the beach area of Didim, and residents of Ankara or Germany spend some of the season in their summer homes.
The vast majority go nowhere near the Temple of Apollo, Didim’s only notable attraction aside from the beach. It is the same story for the Turks who staff the bars for six months each year before returning to their homes dotted around the rest of Anatolia.
Posted in Cairo to (almost) Istanbul, Living in Turkey, Photo Features, Travel Features Tags: altinkum, didim, photos, seven wonders, turkey 7 Comments »
Bordering Israel and with its own multi fragmented political scene, it should come as no surprise that the most politicised street art I have noticed was found in Beirut.
I don’t go around looking for such things but I have had a soft spot for stencilled street art ever since I lived in south London. The Tooting Bec chapter of a Peruvian political group was particularly active in painting small clenched fists on blank white walls in the streets around my home.
Posted in Cairo to (almost) Istanbul, Photo Features, Travel Features Tags: beirut, lebanon, photos 4 Comments »
Twice a day Saturday to Thursday (except Tuesday) the Romans come to the Jordanian town of Jerash. There they demonstrate their soldierly skills, stage a gladiator fight, and race their chariots around the former Empire’s smallest Hippodrome.
The Romans have been in Jerash before. Pompey’s Legions took over the region in 64 BC and Gerasa as it was then known later become part of the Decapolis: ten Roman city states on the eastern border of the Empire.
The Roman Army and Chariot Experience is good fun but I have a fantastic suggestion to make it even better.
Posted in Cairo to (almost) Istanbul, Our Travels, Photo Features, Travel Features Tags: jerash, jordan, photos 3 Comments »
Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq lacks the world class attractions of other cities. Despite spawning urban souls for longer than almost anywhere on our planet, a sightseeing tour of the city will take in a few average mosques, a couple of nice parks and a busted minaret.
On only one attraction can Erbil compete and compete well: the Citadel. Erbil’s Citadel offers the freedom and fun that other citadels with a less filled in near past can lack.
Posted in Cairo to (almost) Istanbul, Photo Features, Travel Features Tags: citadels, erbil, iraq, photos No Comments »
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