My Impressions of Turkey
Earlier, I wrote a blog about what went right and wrong in Turkey, but I never wrote a post about what I truly thought of the place. So, without further ado…
About a month ago, my wife, kids and I traveled to Turkey for seventeen days. We spent time at three main places – Antalya, Cappadocia, and Istanbul – in that order.
First up was Antalya. We really liked Antalya, but the six days we spent there were probably one day too much. Five days would have been much better. The old town is very nice and I had a lot of fun walking around one morning, getting shots of the interesting houses there.
We spent a good deal of time there going on day trips and saw Kekova, Aspendos, Perge, Myra, and Termessos. Perhaps on future posts I will go into these in more detail, but they were very interesting Greek and Roman ruins and I got a lot of shots I am very happy about.
Some of the minuses in Antalya were that within the old city there weren’t a tremendous amount of things to do. We did take the boat ride and it was nice walking around in the old city, but most of the activities are outside the city. We did love our hotel there – nestled in the old city. Staying in the old city was also much better than staying at one of the huge resorts along the coast – which aren’t Turkey at all.
The other major problem we had, which we had throughout Turkey, was the habitual lying. It was close to impossible to get any kind of truth out of the people who deal with tourists there. For instance, we thought we might pick up a nice carpet there – as we had heard that the selection and prices were great.
First, I will give you the hard fact. Unless you are a carpet expert, I would absolutely not buy a carpet in Turkey under any circumstances. The carpets are expensive compared to places like Dubai and the majority of carpets are fake. By fake I mean they are manufactured by machine in China. This is true for many of the high end rugs which are advertised as Turkish silk but are in fact made by hand or sometimes by machine in China – where the labor is much cheaper.
Of course, figuring out which rugs are fake and which ones are real is close to impossible. Real rugs exist there, but you cannot trust anything the carpet dealers will tell to you. Many carpet dealers there are happy to point out tricks towards telling what types of carpets are fake – and many of these tips helped us. However, once you piece together all of the different tips from different dealers, you’ll realize that determining the real carpets from the fake is close to impossible.
I will end my discussion of that and move on to Cappadocia, which was by far our favorite part of the trip.
There are three things that any visitor to Cappadocia must do. If you do not do these things, IMHO you have not properly visited the place.
1) Stay there at least three days. There is simply too much to see there.
2) Stay in a cave hotel. We stayed at Kismet Cave House and it was one of the most interesting places we have ever stayed.
3) Take a balloon ride – even though they are expensive.
We rented a car and drove from Antalya to Göreme, which was an interesting drive if you discount our insane GPS which we wound up just disregarding. We also used the car around Cappadocia – which worked out very well. We were able to spend the amount of time we wished at each place and we missed many of the huge tourist buses.
The whole region is just spectacularly beautiful and deserves its own post in the future. In particular, the owner of the Kismet Cave House chatted with us often, served as our guide around the area, and my kids played with his kids and his new puppy. In the end, all of us had a great time in Cappadocia. People were also much nicer and honest in Cappadocia than in Antalya and Istanbul.
The trip ended in Istanbul, where we spent seven days. Again, one day less would have been great here.
There are a number of very interesting things to see around Istanbul – the Haghia Sofia, Dolmabahçe Palace, the Blue Mosque, Topkapı Palace, the Basilica Cistern – and I absolutely would not visit it in two days like many of the cruise ship passengers we saw.
We stayed near the Blue Mosque, which for tourists is probably the best place to say as it is within walking distance of most of the interesting sites. Interestingly, the best hotels in Istanbul are far away from the action, while the hotels closest to everything were more moderately priced. Go figure.
The biggest disappointment in Istanbul was the Grand Bazaar. Although it truly is quite large, as stated with the carpets a great number of items there are fake. The prices are also very high compared to other countries we have visited like Jordan, Dubai, Malaysia, and Thailand. We were excited about seeing the Grand Bazaar, but in the end we didn’t buy too much both due to the prices and due to the fact that we could not tell the real items from the fake ones (which is fine if prices are very cheap – but when they are expensive you at least want something real).
Even the fake clothing was a problem. Obviously they do not have real Prada purses and even they will tell you that – but it was difficult to determine the real quality of the fakes they offered. My wife, who loves fakes, feels that Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand had the best quality fakes for the best prices.
In the end, while the lying and deceit certainly put a damper on our trip, the sites more than made up for it. It was also a good location for our kids, as Turks tolerated our kids misbehaving very well – much more so than in the US, England, or France.
At the end of each vacation, my wife and I rank the vacation we just went on. I would rank this vacation third – behind Peru and Dubai. It is just ahead of Thailand and much better than the Riviera Maya (Mexico) vacation we went on last year – which we placed near the bottom of our list.
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Tags: antalya, cappadocia, carpets, istanbul, opinion, Travel, turkey