Leaving the best until last, we visited the Dolmabahce Palace this morning as our last thing to see in Istanbul. It was the last palace of the Sultans built in the 1840-50s and is amazing in its opulence. It is like a time warp, as if the last Sultan had just moved out. Ataturk also lived there until his death in 1938.We got back to the hotel, had a quick freshen up and checked out to wait for our transfer to the airport.....to be continued

We started early with a visit to The Hagia Sophia Museum which was really quite good. With a lengthy history going back over 1500 years, it started off as a Christian Church and was later turned into a mosque. In the 1930s, Ataturk turned it into a museum and it still has a number of mosaics depicting its Christian past.After that we paid another visit to the Grand Bazaar before catching the tram to Kabatas. We then caught the funicular underground tram to Ta...

We intended to visit the Hagia Sophia Museum this morning, but as we had slept in following the trip to Gallipoli yesterday, the queue was a mile long by the time we got there. We resisted the efforts of scalpers and the like and decided to postpone until tomorrow. As an alternative we visited the Basilica Cistern which we had bypassed several times previously without much of a thought. However it turned out to be well worth a visit...a huge underground chambe...

We were picked up from our hotel about 6:45am by a small bus for our day trip to Gallipoli. We had another surly driver who didn't appear to speak English at all and a 'Transit Officer' named Furkan who spoke enough English to get by with difficulty. It took about 5 and a half hours including 2 rest stops to reach the small settlement of Eceabat on the Dardanelles side of the peninsula where we stopped at a restaurant called Maydos for a reasonable 3...

This morning we caught a Hop-on Hop-off Bus for a tour of Istanbul. We saw Taksim Square which looked pretty quiet at the time, although there was a police presence and we crossed the first Bosphorus Bridge to the Asian side before looping around and heading back.After lunch, we went back to the Blue Mosque to see the inside, having purchased a scarf for Gail on the way and after that it was time for a bit of shopping. (I weakened in my resolve not to purchase ...