Istan..KOOL!!1!

Istanbul was incredible. A fascinating city and one of my favourite hostels. It's a very divided city, you'd be walking down a leafy avenue, surrounded by little French cafes, with the call to prayer blaring from the mosque on the next street.
We discovered to our cost in isparta that train travel in turkey is no more. Those luxurious coaches earn the government more money so trains were scrapped to 'encourage' people to use the coaches. Not ideal for people with interrail passes... So we got an overnight bus across Turkey to Istanbul, on which Sophie and I were both vomited upon!
Unfortunately those coaches are just too reliable, as we arrived in Istanbul about 3 hours early, at 6am. It was nice to see the city as the sun was rising, but our hostel was not yet open so we dropped out bags off and had to loiter until noon. This turned out to be a very pleasant experience as we visited one of the little cafes near our hostel, wandered through a bazaar and relaxed in a breezy park surrounded by two of istanbuls major attractions: the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia. I can't actually remember what we did for the rest of the day, but I'm sure it was very nice. We spent that evening on the roof terrace of our hostel, which was exactly how I imagined a Turkish terrace would look like:





The next few days were spent in mosques and going on a boat cruise across to the Asian side of Istanbul. In the evening we discovered that Turkish drinks are one of the few things that are more expensive than at home.. But the banana shish pipe made up for it!