Big Adventures, Little World

The next morning we got a bit of a sleep in before we made our way out to the city of Troia (Troy) with our new tour guide. He was a youngish guy with long hair, whose English was quite good, and seemed to know every bit of Australian slang possible, and came out with telling us just after he introduced himself that he had ‘rocked out with his cock out’ the previous night, and had ‘kissed a ranga or fanta pants’. As we stopped at a cafe on the way to the site of Troia and ate Turkish pancakes and had a beer, he wanted to know more and more slang, but there wasn’t much more we could teach him. He was a funny guy and I think that if it wasn’t for him telling us the stories of the city of Troia, and the story of the Trojan Horse, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as entertaining. Don’t get me wrong, it was an interesting place, it’s just that there it still about 90% of the cities of Troia still underground. When the first city of Troia was destroyed, Troia II was built on top of it, and then Troia III on top of that when that was destroyed, and so on. So at the moment, there isn’t really that much to see, as there has only been 10% excavated. They do however, hope to have 90% of it excavated, working at full capacity of 4 months a year, and with enough funding, in 200 years time! A lot of what had been excavated had been destroyed during initial excavations by German businessman Heinrich Schliemann as he was generally only interested in jewellery and treasures.

Later that afternoon it was back on the bus, and then onto the ferry where we made our way across the Dradanelles once more, and then onto another bus for the 5 hour drive back to Istanbul. At about 11:00PM that night we made it back to our hotel in Istanbul, and then it was off to bed to get up early again to get to the airport and catch our flights. Mark and I heading back to London and Chandy making his way onto Germany. It was a pretty full on week but definitely filled with interesting things and some amazing sights and events. I now very much want to go back to Gallipoli next year for the ANZAC Day dawn service.