Our Intrepid Istanbul to AnkaraTour

Our small group tour started with a meeting last night, and today we start touring.  Our guide is a young turk named Fatih (pronounced "fahtee") who seems very good.  The company used to use Australian guides to run each tour complemented by local guides at each stop, but the government made the use of Turkish guides mandatory.  Fatih has completed a four year university course to qualify himself for this job.

Our guide Fatih (looking unusually serious).

We travel in a comfortable Mercedes minibus.  On our first day we drove our longest leg, from Istanbul to the capital Ankara, which took about 7 hours.  That road is a six lane highway all the way.

Istanbul to Ankara

This is the least fascinating part of the tour, as we are basically just travelling quite a long way to get to the start of the more interesting bits.  It rained for most of the day, and we were all glad to arrive at our overnight stop.  Tomorrow we visit the Museum of Anatolian civilizations.  Anatolia is the name of the asian part (the main part) of Turkey; the remainder is the small part attached to Europe, called Thrace.