So now I'm on Contiki!!!

The first day was a travel day, which I spent sleeping as I was rather tired from the lack of sleep and stress of getting to Contiki. We stayed the night at Kavala in Greece, which is a lovely quiet town, with nothing to do, so a fairly quiet nigt was had.

The second day we headed to Cannakale in Turkey. We enjoyed this immensely as we got to stay in Hotels!! Ok so the 46 dayers enjoyed it much more than us newbies, but that's not saying we didn't enjoy it. We spent the afternoon in the pool, followed by dinner, then up to the rooms for a room party to celebrate Alex/Welshy's birthday!! That was quite a fun night, starting to bond as a group.

We then headed to Istanbul the next day, but we had a stop over at Gallipoli, on the way. Gallipoli was amazing, just to be able to see what they had to go through and what they were faced with when they got there. It was fairly emotional and all of the Aussie and Kiwi flags were out.

We arrived in Istanbul that afternoon, had a quiet dinner, then headed down to the local Shisha bar, we tasted about a gazillion different flavours of shisha, it was amazing!!! Then afterwards when we got the munchies, what else would you eat in Turkey, than a turkish kebab :D

The next morning was a beautiful morning, the sky was blue, and we had a walking tour organised to the Blue Mosque and the Grand Bazaar. We got to the Blue Mosque, and got some awesome photos, found out all the history, I've already forgotten most of it! Then as we were wandering around inside, it sounded like a bomb had gone off! We went outside waited under the tree for the grouo, turns out it was thunder and the sky was falling!!! Well it felt like it, we were drenched in seconds, but it was fun none the less, and saved us walking to the Bazaar, they got us a bus YAY!

We spent the rest of the day looking at rugs, never have I seen so many, bargaining at the Grand Bazaar and just some shopping in general! That night we went to a Kavernseray Dinner, where we were plied with more food than I'd seen in a long time, got to see belly dancers, and some other type of danceing which just had us in hysterics, though it was good. Then a singer guy came up and sang a song for each nationality, us Aussies brought the house down with Waltzing Matilda, no-one beat us and we were even one of the smallest groups!

We then had another travel day the next day and ended up in Sofia, in Bulgaria. We got in, had dinner, then headed into town to try and find the best club Sofia had to offer. I don't think we were successful, but once we were all in there it didn't really matter, we had fun none the less.

We had another travel day the next day. We had lunch in Skopje, Macedonia, at an Irish pub, there wasn't much choice. We ended up at Lake Ohrid (aka Lake Horrid) the lake was gorgous, the facilities were hideous, squat toilets I can cope with, these were just disgusting!! And I won't even mention the showers, they were just scary. Can't say we were too upset to leave the next morning.

And that shall do me for now!!

You will hear from soon, i'm trying to catch up on it all!

Chook xx