Last time, we covered the ancient city of Ephesus and had started on our journey to Pamukkale and then Konya. If you haven’t read it yet, no worries – I’ve provided all the links at the bottom of this post.
Our drive to Pamukkale took almost three hours. Our guide, Abdul told us that there were many thermal springs found in this area and the steam was used to generate electricity – we even saw some of these plants on the way. This region was also famous for its cotton – the cotton grown here is considered among the best in the world, only second to the famous Egyptian cotton. In fact, the name Pamukkale itself means “cotton castle” – but that is mainly attributed to the sight that we were about to see.
Here is a map-view of the journey that we will be covering in today’s post
(Image credits: most pics on this blog of Troy and the other Turkey ones were taken by my dad 🙂)
After almost 2 days of exploring Istanbul on our own, we joined our group – we had opted for a group tour for the rest of Turkey. My parents were also part of the group – a big reason why we went for this trip – it gave us more confidence to take Parth on his first international trip. As soon as we reached the airport and saw them, Parth jumped into his Appuppa’s (grandfather) arms and stayed there for a good part of the next 4-5 hours! We would be back in Istanbul for the last day of the trip. You can read about it here.
Our first stop in the trip was the western city of Çanakkale. It was a long drive – took almost 4 hours and Parth slept throughout the drive on Appuppa’s lap. On the way, we saw the Marmara sea, a sea contained entirely within Turkey and the one which connects the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea. On the Aegean end of the Marmara is the Dardenelles strait (Çanakkale is at the narrowest part of this) and on the Black Sea end is the Bosphorus strait which we had crossed in Istanbul. The Marmara Sea and the straits split Turkey into its Asian and European sides. The Marmara is named so because of the marble islands in it (the origin of the hindi word “sangmarmar”).
