Boating up the Bosphorus

On our last day in port, Laura, Becky, Leah, and I decided to get out of Istanbul for the day and see what there was to see. Our original plan was to catch a ferry over to the Princess Islands, which we heard were beautiful, and hike and bike around the area.

We started our day off by a trip to the Starbucks near the ship. I got the most amazing carmel hot chocolate, which totally made up for the car splashing us when it went through a huge puddle on the road beforehand. We caught the metro down to the river to buy our tickets, only to find out we’d gone to the wrong spot and had no time to correct the error before the last ferry pulled out. So instead we bought out tickets to take a ferry up the Bosphorus River round trip.

That was probably the best idea we’d had the entire time we were in Turkey. If any of you ever goes to Istanbul, take this boat ride! We traveled up the river stopping at little ports along the way in little picturesque towns hugging the coast and edging up the hills. The Turkish countryside is the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen, and it was so nice to just float along and get to see so much of it. We say lots of lovely houses and boats and passed some castle ruins and not a few mosques with minarets piercing the skyline.

When the boat got to it’s last stop on the route, a little town that I still don’t know the name of, and we got off and walked around. Becky had heard there was a castle ruin up at the top of the hill, so we made our way up the steep, steep hill on this blustery day to see what we could see.

It was totally worth it. The ruins were really cool, some old castle, I couldn’t even tell you how old it might have been. We had a lot of fun wandering around, and got some other American tourists to take our picture there. We kept commenting that it didn’t seem to fit into the Istanbul picture; Leah kept saying it felt Ireland up on the hill.

On the way down we ran into Rochelle and we all wandered into town for some food. We ended up eating pizza and kabobs, and the others had some baklava, but I passed.

We wandered around the little shops then, and Becky and Leah bought rings that were really cool. Then we caught the ferry back to Istanbul and got into town around 5:00pm. What a great way to see Turkey!