Greencaviar Travel

Cruising the Bosporus As someone obsessed with the sea, I could not go to Istanbul and not take a cruise on the Bosporus. So I booked this activity before leaving for my trip to Turkey. A simple google search could have saved me some money . I paid $89.00 for the same cruise offered at ten Turkish Lira ($5.00) in Istanbul. The only added benefit was that we had a boat chartered by the tour company and a guide , but we had to pay for our drinks ( tea , orange juice ) and they were not cheap . So let me give my travel tip right off : You can take the same cruise for 10.00 Turkish Lira (about $5) or even take a public ferry for less than $5.00. The scenery from the boat was overwhelming .  It was nice to have a guide that gave us information about the scenery and about Bosporus like how deep the water was when we reached the point where it was the deepest (300 feet ). We were on a 2...

The Road to Ankara Leaving the rocky , archaic and lunar-looking terrain of Cappadocia we took to the road for Ankara past beautiful snow-capped mountains and green valleys . I looked forward to seeing the sheer grandeur of the mountains and the immensity of the sky again from the Silk Road we passed on our way to Cappadocia a few days earlier – a landscape whose purity gave me such a feeling of being alive . However , we took a different route . Past the beautiful snow-capped mountains , the road lead to flatlands. We drove for hour after hour, passing empty spaces of land before reaching a nomadic village. I saw men laying carpets out on the dusty road (our guide said that they did it to make the carpet look antique). Had our guide not said that it was a nomadic village, I would not have been able to tell the difference where people lived in that nothingness, walking, trying to make a carpet look antique - an honest living for th...

The following morning I woke up to the sound of the prayer chant . The sound of prayer coming from the mosque near the hotel drowned the noises of cars and the sound of calls made by arriving or departing boats . It made me realize that I was in a place of my daydream . I then joined a tour group to visit the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sofia. We first visited the Blue Mosque, a 17th century Ottoman Mosque famous for its six minarets and magnificent interior with blue tiles . It was a good thing that we visited early in the morning ; we had a perfect light for taking pictures . Our tour group seemed to be the only tourist in town that early morning so that I was able to experience a sepulchral silence and calm inside the Blue Mosque.  The Hagia Sophia was across the street from the Blue Mosque. Originally built as a cathedral in the sixth century AD , it has served as a cathedr...

It started as a daydream, inspired by a Chanel perfume commercial where Audrey Tautou, a French actress, was traveling solo on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul.  A handsome young man fell under her spell and looked as if he had fallen head over heels in love with her. Somehow, she ended up arriving solo in Istanbul, running towards the Bosphorus Sea, amid flying seagulls, with a big camera in tow. Of course, what the ad wanted us to remember was the image in her camera, of a handsome young man who fell under her spell/perfume. However, I was more captivated by the scene at the end of her trip; the city of Istanbul. It was unforgettable. The black and dark images with effects of light evoke a feeling of mystery and left a curious impression of Istanbul. Istanbul is a large city with 14 million people and one of the most visited cities in the world. The city straddles two continents – Europe and Asia, and one of the world’s busiest waterways, the Bosphorus, betw...