Dwayne Hodgson

A Portfolio

The work and adventures of Dwayne Hodgson,
+ Learning Designer & Facilitator at learningcycle.ca
+ Storyteller & Photographer @ thataway.ca

Filtering by Category: tour

CloudAtlasMountains

 

Imlil, Morocco / March 2015

Coming down a steep, scree-covered slope, my left foot suddenly gave way and I slipped, falling back on my butt. Apparently, my left knee and/or my nerves aren’t quite what they used to be: going up is no problem, but coming down, I'm a klutz. 

Back at the guesthouse, I found that the “crunching” sound in my backpack was my glasses’ case imploding. The right arm of my specs had been sheared off from the frame, but the lenses were just fine. At least it wasn’t my camera….

We’re two hours from the nearest optometrist in Marrakesh, so a dorky duct-tape job is the only thing allowing me to see where I’m going.

Buckingham, Quebec / July 1996

The first time that Tricia and I tried mead was on a farm in rural Quebec after a exhausting day biking into head winds. The morning’s optimism of leaving for a week-long ride in the Laurentian Mountains had turned into an evening’s frustration with cross-cultural cartography and prevailing winds.

Ah, non,” said the farmer pointing at the map. “The “camping” icon only means that there is a campsite somewhere within the parish. But it’s no where near here. You'd have to go 20 km back south down that road and to the east.

Seeing our pained expressions, he offered us a spot in his yard to pitch our tent and pointed to a depanneur down the road where we could buy food.

After a one-pot supper of feves, he brought out two glasses of home-made, eight-year-old honey wine. “You’re supposed to drink this during the month of your honeymoon.”

We'd already been married for about a year, but we didn't argue. The mead spills, however, necessitating some spot cleaning of my sleeping bag and then a tumble in the farmers’ clothes dryer, which then melts a hole in the lining. Zut alors!  

250 km later via Mont Tremblant, Mont Laurier and a night at the Black Sheep Inn, Trish expertly patches the sleeping bag with a scrap of red plaid flannel from one of my old shirts.
 

Maun, Botswana / August 1991

Okay, you’ve got a stove, a pot, a tent….and oh, here’s enough pula to hire a plane if you can find a pilot who will take you west towards Namibia," says David, the director of the trip. 

I was travelling with a group of 30 Canadian students had been touring Botswana for three weeks as part of the WUSC Development Seminar. As a way to dig deeper into local issues, each had been researching a topic related to poverty and development.  I had chosen to look into the plight of the Basarwa – San or “Bushmen” –  hunter-gatherers whom the government had been classified as “Remote Area Dwellers” and shoved into even more remote areas.

David shakes my hand and says, “If you strike out, just come and find us in Chobe in a few days.” With that, he drives east-and-north to join the rest of the group.

My task now was to head south-and-west into the desert, and find a local contact who would take me to a group of San people living there. But the pilots all refused to land on the soft airstrip out there, so my Plan B was to hitchhike down the main road south, and then find some way to head out west.

After two more days of futilely waving at cars, I hitched out to the government garage at dawn, and told God that I’d take the next ride wherever it went.

We’re going east, towards Francistown.” Said the guy in the first pick-up. “20 pula.”

Joyfully, I abandoned Plan B and bounced down two hours of dirt roads until the Francistown-Chobe junction. A second ride on tarmac roads with panoramic views hooks me on the joys of hitch-hiking.  


Dar es Salaam, Tanzania / 2001

Her parents couldn’t make the wedding. They need some Mzungus to stand in for them. Can you do it?”

Sure,” I say, and we dutifully sit in the front pew. It’s Sharon and Rama’s Tanzanian wedding, and Trish and I do our best to act the part of the parents of the bride. We shuffle Anglo-Saxonly through the dancing processions, and I do my best father-of-the-bride speech in klunky Swahili to welcome Rama to our family.

We stay in touch with Sharon and Rama after we’ve all returned to Canada. They even drive from Perth every Sunday to attend Ascension.

Istanbul / December 2014

I guess that caught you at a bit of an inflection point, eh?” said Stu as we walked through the terminal. Stu, a former housemate, had emailed to say that his flight from Kathmandu had been delayed, and that he would now have some extra time in Istanbul if we were free.

Unfortunately, It turned out that we were scheduled to leave for Dar es Salaam only 2 hours after his new flight would be arriving, but we staked out the Arrivals level at Ataturk International just in case. 

For 45 minutes, we scrutinized every passenger with Nepalese souvenirs and/or hiking gear as they scaled the escalator.

We were just about to give up, when I spotted him.  “Hello, Mr. Thompson.

Stu used his mega-traveller-titanium-bigshot airline card to sneak us into the Turkish Airlines lounge for some free snacks. It was great to see him again, even if only for 30 minutes.
 

Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania  / 1999

John, another former housemate, peered over the edge of my bed, wearing his best trust-me-I’m-almost-a-doctor’s face as he rifled through his portable pharmacy.

Well, I can give you some of these pills for the diarrhoea, and these for the nausea, and you might want to take some diomox to ward off altitude sickness.”

He had clearly mastered the art of improvisational prescription writing during his internship at a hospital in Malawi. And now that my nasty stomach parasites were threatening our hike up Mount Kilimanjaro, he’d come to my rescue as well.

I took the handful of pills as directed, said goodbye to Tricia – who had decided to stay “sensibly at sea level” -- and proceeded to hallucinate my way on the bus from Dar es Salaam to Moshi. I could have sworn that I watched a video about a hopping, homicidal Chinese vampire who is kidnapped over Botswana and parachuted down into the same San community that had once caught a Coke bottle…but that was probably only John’s prescriptions tripping me out.

Departing the next day from Moshi, with an Armstrongian dose of performance-enhancing drugs in my system, we proceed pole pole up the trail and cram into a small wooden hut with a couple on their honeymoon. Awkward

Much to my surprise, John pulled out a sleeping bag with a red-plaid patch on the inside.

“Where did you get that?", I asked. 

Oh, I found it at the apartment after you guys left for Tanzania.”

Nkotakota, Malawi / 2002

Our matola ride down the western coast Lake Malawi peteres out halfway there when our driver refuses to go further. An argument ensues, and Ms. Wind prevails. He arranges a ride for us on another pick-up truck heading south.

Trish is six-months pregnant with what-will-turn-out-to-be-Zoe, so she is given the prized seat in the cab. I get to ride in the back with the corn. But no worries: this is the best way to hitchhike.

A few minutes later, God flicks off the sun, and I realize that the truck we’re on has no head-nor-tail lights at all and there are transport trucks roaring past.   I pull out an LED key fob and flash it meekly off the back, praying that some bleary-eyed driver might see us as we sputter up the hills. 

Two hours later, we arrive at the junction for Nkhotakota, only to find that the place that we’re staying is another 10 km south and 4 km east. We pull out the Lonely Planet, and flip through our options by the fluorescent light of a storefront. All of the places to stay are in town, and we don’t have enough kwacha for a taxi.

Eventually, a guy named Christopher finds us a bar/bordello with rooms for 1 USD. We decide to leave the covers over the bed, lay our sleeping bags on top, take our mefloquin with Sprite and hope that the music from the competing night clubs will eventually turn off. That never happens, but the rain on the sheet metal roof eventually drowns them out.

We awake early the next morning, and hitch-hike to our destination. Over a full English breakfast we agree not to tell our parents this story until after the baby arrives.
 

Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park / July 1993

Before I started graduate school, I decided to attend an environmental conference in California and then bike North to Vancouver. When I started researching the ride, however, I found the prevailing winds go South and nobody ever rides North. So instead, I decided to:

  • UPS my Peugeot from Hamilton to Vancouver,
  • Fly to San Francisco for the conference,
  • Take a 24-hour bus ride up to Vancouver to pick up my bike, and then
  • Cycle back south to San Francisco, but taking the long-cut by going North to the Sunshine coast, West to Vancouver Island, and then South down through Washington Oregon and Northern California.

(It kind of made more sense at the time). 

It had been five years since the car accident, and I was keen to prove to myself that I was back in shape. But I over did it on a 19-mile climb up Hurricane Ridge and blew out my left knee.  I managed to get by for the rest of the five-week trip, even as I’m climbed up some fairly steep mountain roads in Oregon and struggled around some windy headlands in Northern California.

Five weeks and 1,500 km later, I arrived in Palo Alto: skinny, wind-burnt and hooked on bike touring. I stayed with a fellow cyclist who’s dad was the Canadian consular general, and then I flew back to Toronto.
 

Perth, Ontario / December 2010

I borrow my friend Haig’s jacket to be the pall-bearer at Sharon’s funeral. She had died after a long fight with what started as skin cancer on her foot.  

Gary, our priest at Ascension, asks me to play Bruce Cockburn’s “Closer to the Light” during the service.  

Gone from mystery to mystery.
Gone from daylight into night.
Another step deeper into darkness.
Closer to the light
.”

I choke up when I see Rama and his son, Baraka, at the front of the church. I only just manage to keep playing.
 

Kananaskis, Alberta / August 1997

"I wonder why we need to rope up to the next hiker", I said to myself. This was my first time crossing a glacier and I was about to find out why.

Voomp! Suddenly I was up to my chest in snow, my feet stopped by who-knows-how-little-snow-over-who-knows-how-deep-a-crevice.

"Oh, that’s why”.

The hikers in front of me fell forward with their ice axes in the self-arrest position so that I wouldn't fall down the crevice. However, I can't get up: I'm wedged in like Winnie-the-Pooh in Rabbit's doorway. Tom’s colleague, Al, reached down and hauled me out. I'm cold, wet and embarrassed, but at least not deep down in a glacier.

Sengerema, Tanzania /  2000

The line up for the last boat over Lake Victoria to Mwanza is long and its getting dark.

There’s no way that they’ll let us on this last ferry,” Pallangyo says. “We’ll have to spend the night here”.

Can’t you just tell them that you’re VIPs?” I joke. “I mean, we’ve got a doctor, a priest and a veterinarian in our group.”

Right…. And you’re the Ambassador of Canada!” he retorts.

We all laugh and head back to our cars and think through Plan B.

Just as I’m speaking Swahili with my colleague, Margaret, the ferry guard leans over and peers through the window. “Yeye ni Mbalozi ya Kanada,” he says to his buddy.

Oh no! Someone actually told them that.

I quickly switch to English and they wave our cars under the barrier. The guard then brings us a VIP-tray with a flask of chai tangawizi (ginger tea). Moses, my other colleague who is built like a cop, swaggers up to our car and salutes me, a big grin on his face.

Crossing Lake Victoria, I’m sweating bullets wondering how much time I’ll spend in a Tanzanian prison for impersonating diplomatic personnel. But we make it without anyone calling us out. 

I eventually confessed to the real High Commissioner to Tanzania, albeit after he had retired to live in Perth.

Toronto / Christmas Eve 1987

For Christmas, I gave her Farley Mowat’s biography of Diane Fossey, the primatologist who studied gorillas in Rwanda. She gave me a red-plaid, Eddy Bauer shirt. I packed it along when we went skiing at Blue Mountain a few weeks later.

Ruaha National Park, Tanzania /  Christmas Eve 2014

Ralph and his family had come down from Geneva to spend Christmas with Rama, Baraka and the four of us. He brought a sack-full of German stolen and Swiss chocolate so the kids could have something resembling a “normal” Christmas, even though there were elephants dashing past our bandaIt was really hot in the government-camp chalets, but we lit the candles anyhow.

Let’s sing the Huron Carol”, Zoe said. It took three notes to agree on the key, but soon enough we've converged:  “’Twas in the moon of wintertime when all the birds had fled…”. We sweat our way through verses about snow, wandering braves and furs of beaver pelt, rejoicing in stories and bonds that ripple across years and continents.  
 

Imlil, Morocco / March 2015

Turn around,” said Zoe, pointing up the valley we had just hiked down. 

I saw this:

This was the first time during a day of hiking in the High Atlas Mountains that we’d seen the summit so clearly.

It just shows that it’s good to look back from time-to-time see where you’ve been. 

 

 

 

 

12 Essential Family-Travel Gizmos

A more efficient way of carrying the weight of the world....(Image from La Routard guides)

A more efficient way of carrying the weight of the world....(Image from La Routard guides)

Back in the day, I once hitch-hiked around Ireland with my buddy, Mike, carrying only an MEC backpack with a tent, a sleeping bag, a thermarest sleeping pad, a stove and fuel, water bottles, two pairs of trousers -- even a pair of jeans! -- some other clothes and raingear, a big old SLR camera with a zoom lens and spare 35 mm film, and a set of bongo drums (long story -- but hey! Mike had a ukelele and I couldn't leave him unaccompanied). 

Travelling as a family is certainly different. Somehow, we have ended up carrying a massive stack of books for road-schooling, two diving masks and snorkels, a pocket Scrabble game, a bag of neglected but somehow still-oh-so-essential-dad! LEGO, and a deck of playing cards for our epic euchre games in bus stations. 

If only someone would have told us what to bring on a year-long trip...

Cue the Inevitable List

Most of the family travel blogs that I looked at before we left Canada started out with The Gear List: a detailed inventory of every item that they were taking along during their trip.

Usually, these were written by the gear-head Dad of the family, who is inevitably an "S" on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory and probably closet software coder. Invariably, the follow-up blog post ends with "and we ended up buying another suitcase to carry it all". 

I, however, resolved not to write such a blog post for two reasons.

  1. It seemed like TMI for my long-suffering readers... and
  2. In these days of social media and because we tend to stand out wherever we travel, it also seemed a stupid idea to tell any potential, internet-savvy thieves exactly what we're carrying.  

But in the interests of helping others learn from our experience, and as a middle-aging man who is stretching beyond the boundaries of his INTJ-ness, I present the following 12 Essential Family Travel Gizmos -- some high-tech, some no-tech, but all oh-so-essential...

....drum roll please....(Honey!....where are my bongo's?...)

1.   iThingsAlways in use, and thus, never fully charged. It's a guidebook, map, email, arcade, camera, cinema, jukebox, videocamera, library, social connection, compass....heck, the smaller one even makes phone calls. That both devices have survived this far is a miracle of LIfeproof cases and duct tape

2.  A Spidermonkey Compact Aluminum Four-Way USB Hub: Such a cool name! Spidermonkey! And it's great for hotel rooms where you have only one electrical outlet and you have multiple iThings to charge. This one also has the swappable, international heads that let you plug into the outlets in Africa, Europe and North America. Unfortunately, the charger took a nasty zap somewhere in Tanzania, and much smoke ensued. It was only by the great skills of our friend, Philip, and a local fundi in Mwanza, that it could live to charge again. 

3. A Cocoon GRID-IT Organization System: Really just a mess of bungee cords strapped on to fabric-covered cardboard, but it is really super helpful for organizing the various cords and charger paraphernalia that keep everyone wired and happy (see #1). I also tuck our grids into a small, waterproof-ish-i-hope Coleman envelope that keeps the dust out. 

4. Osprey Ozone Convertible Wheeled Luggage: It converts into a back pack when necessary -- i.e. cobblestone streets in Istanbul -- but its big honking wheels make towing it a pleasure. So much so that the kids often ask to pull my bag instead of theirs. I wish that we had splurged on these for everyone, because I don't think their rolling suitcases will make it through the year. 

5. The Trail Wallet App: A great expenses-vs.-budget tracking iPhone App that lets you record what you're spending in five currencies at a time, and that admonishes you when you go over your daily budget. It also produces full-colour pie charts (pie charts!) and geek-out-worthy-exportable Excel spreadsheet reports to review during quiet nights in rural Tanzania. Actually, this App has probably been a trip-saver, heck a marriage-saver, as it helps balance our different ways of budgeting. (Hint: I'm only half Dutch). Available on OS, Android and smarter phones and traveling husbands near you. 

6. Stuffed Animals: Vital even for big kids: Instant home. Just unpack and hug. Prone to hiding under beds when leaving a rental apartment, however. Be vigilant. 

7. An AeroPress Coffee MakerI have owned an embarrassing number of coffee makers in my time on this earth, some of them professing to be portable, and others protesting too much to work well. But I finally took my friends' Shawn and Eric's advice and bought one of these this great plastic syringe-like, reverse-Bodum, java makers. With the optional metal screen, it makes a passable cup of joe out of almost any grounds. It also helps to work your triceps...which brings us to....

8. The TRX Suspension Training SystemA very portable gym made up of adjustable webbing straps and handles. You can anchor it to a tree, overhanging beam or over a locked (!) door and then use your body as the weight for resistance training. Even if you don't use it regularly, the extra 3 pounds in your luggage surely contributes to burning more calories. Stand back, I'm going to flex. (It also makes a great clothes-line in a pinch). 

9. Petzel headlampsGreat for hiking out to see sunrises, reading in hotel rooms when you're kids are (supposed to be) falling asleep, and for finding your way during power-black-outs in Tanzania. Very geeky looking, however, if ever worn in visible light. Fortunately, it normally blinds any viewer who might comment. 

10. Leatherman Multi-Tool: For its weight, it is very useful for emergencies like opening wine bottles and unlocking bathroom doors with children behind them. Still needs a Robertson screw-nail-driver head, but this is not so needful outside of Canada. 

11. A Football (a.k.a. Soccer Ball) and pump: Instant sport: inflate and kick. Guaranteed to keep any just-9-year-old boy happy; not so much, his sister. She prefers ultimate frisbee. A football is also a great cross-cultural communication tool that Isaac has used on 4 continents now. 

12. A larger MEC rolling-bag to help carry all of this stuff. Sigh. 
 

Your Turn

What would you add as essential family-travel gizmos? 

Warm, Dry & WIFI

Or, the Art of Guesting

When I was a kid, we hardly ever stayed in a hotel, a motel or even a cabin while on vacation. Our preferred mode of accommodation was always to go camping – initially in our trusty TAG-A-LONG, hard-top camper, or later on in tents.

My dad would usually take his two weeks vacation in August and we’d visit our favourite Ontario Provincial Parks: Killbear, Bon Echo, the Pinery, Arrowhead, and when we started going on church canoe trips, the legendary Algonquin Park. We’d hang out for lazy summer weeks on the beach and evening pyjama-clad visits to the amphitheatre to see such classics as The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes, How I Learn to Love Lichen, and advice on how to escape an encounter with a black bear.

Because my mom and I are both August babies, most of our birthdays were celebrated around a campsite picnic table blowing out candles on a homemade, Tomato Soup Cake. It is one of my mother’s classic recipes– and with a brown-sugar icing, it is actually even better than it sounds. And whatever the heck is in Campbell’s tomato soup lets it stay fresh for a week or more without refrigeration. Perfect for camping.

But being the ungrateful third-born child that I was, I always envied the kids who got to stay in hotels with pools. Well, not so much envied, but I was always very curious what it would be like to stay in a place like that.

I finally got my chance in Grade 9 when our family made a three-week car trip out to Alberta . We had taken the “short-cut” through Michigan and faced with three days of constant rain, my parents decided it was too wet to camp.

At last!”, I thought. “Swimming, here I come!” as we pulled up to a great hotel with a pool.

Not so fast. We actually turned left, across the road from the great hotel with the pool, and decamped at what can only be describe as a rather basic motel: no TV, no restaurant and certainly, no swimming pool. It didn’t matter that I probably wasn’t going to swim the rain; I was still bummed.

Well,” my mother said in her wise, motherly tone. “At least it’s warm and dry”.

And that became the measure for any place that we’ve stayed since.

At least, it’s warm and dry”, I now intone as the kids roll their eyes.
 

To Err, ‘Tis Human. To Air BnB….

Of course, as a kid, I had no idea what anything cost or that part of the reason for camping everywhere was to save money. As a parent now, I’m much more aware of every penny, which is crucial when we’re travelling for an entire year, especially in more cosmopolitan places where our every-shrinking petro-Loonie doesn’t go as far. 

On this trip, we’ve had great luck using Air BnB, a peer-to-peer (P2P) website that allows owners to rent out their houses, apartments or even a room or couch in their house. This “sharing economy” website allows you to search by location and dates, and to filter places by key amenities like clothes-washer, elevator or WIFI.

Former guests can also posts reviews so that you can find out if there were any problems; in turn, the landlords can review you as a guest, so there is some mutual accountability. This review system works quite well, and a recent host told me that he finds the Air BnB guests to be much nicer than others who rent through bookings.com

AirBnB worked very well for us in Turkey, and again now in Spain, although there were relatively few options in Tanzania. On the upside, we’ve been able to rent whole apartments with kitchens where we can make our own meals, separate bedrooms for the kids and a living room to hang out -- all for a fraction of the cost of a dodgy hotel in the same funky neighbourhoods of Montreal, Istanbul, and Barcelona. We can also book the flats ahead of time in English and pay in Canadian dollars via a credit card, which eliminates much of the hassle factor. 

On the downside, we have found that a lot of the places that we’ve stayed are actually commercially-rented properties rather than private residences. As such, the contact with the host is often limited to handing over the keys and the odd text message. Not so gezellig, I’m afraid. And since we’re often staying in a private residence, we don’t bump into other travellers like we used to in hostels or hotels.

But on balance, it really is the way to go as a travelling family.
 

More Essential Criteria

The Ruffians have been remarkably easy going about some of the places that we've stayed at during this trip. Some of these hovels have not quite lived up to the "4-stars" rating they had advertised.  But having now stayed in something like 30 places since we left Ottawa last August, we’ve added a few criteria to my mother’s list. These include:

  • cool: a good night’s sleep in Tanzania often required having air-conditioning, and/or a ceiling fan;
  • bednets: essential in places where malaria is common.
  • a central location: sometimes it is worth paying a bit more to stay downtown to avoid having to take a bus all the time for every outing;
  • more than one bedroom – preferably three, so that our kids can enjoy some alone time;
  • a place to play football: although Isaac has been remarkably flexible about this, and has practiced his craft in alley’s and courtyards.
  • kids: If a place would have kids for Zoe and Isaac to play with, we’d probably stay in a bus shelter.

Probably the most important additional criteria, however, is access to WIFI. It is hard to imagine that we used to travel (shock!) without the Internet.  But these days, we’re online constantly to check the weather forecast; to navigate the backstreets of cities we get lost in; to book tickets for planes, trains and automobiles; to find our next week’s accommodation; and of course, to stay in touch with all of you out there in TV-land. Having WIFI also allows us to download English books from the library back home and to stay in touch with our family via a Voice of Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone.

Again, being connected is a mixed blessing. With the internet in your pocket, you’re never actually as much “away” as you used to be, and it is easy to be only half-immersed in your surroundings. But it also helps you find things and solve logistical issues that used to take up so much time in travelling.

So... here we are (left) in a new AirBnB place in Barcelona. It’s great: warm, dry and WIFI, and even better – an espresso maker in a funky, red kitchen!

Now if only I could just find some Tomato Soup Cake….

 

Cappadocia Dreaming

 

October 31 - November 7, 2014 / Cappadocia

All the leaves were brown, and the sky was grey. Not a great start to our time in Cappadocia, I thought. Flat light makes for dull pictures and I was hoping to take some good shots of the stunning geological features here. It was also quite cool up here at 1200 m above sea level: around 5 Celsisus in the evenings. 

Weather? Underground!

So we made the best of the so-so weather by visiting two underground cities where communities of Christians (AD 400 to 1300) used to hide from marauding invaders. There are reportedly about 100 underground cities in the area, some of which go down as far as 8 stories and which could shelter as many 20,000 people for up to 6 months. The kids had a great time exploring the tunnels and rooms where people used to cook, make wine and worship in subterranean chapels.

Click here to see the full gallery of Cappadocia Below 

We Are Lost Together

We went for a walk on a winter's day....Well, okay it was not quite winter, but certainly very fall-like, and we went for a walk in the Ihlara Valley. It was great to be tromping through crunchy leaves again, and we stopped into some of the 105 rock churches we passed on the way. Many of these churches had frescoes on the ceilings and walls depicting stories from the Old and New Testaments.  

We also took some hikes (and got a bit turned around) among the fairy chimneys and crazy rocks of the Red, Rose and Pigeon valleys. As mon beau pere explained, the basalt tops protected the softer, volcanic "tuff" rock below from eroding. The rain has also cut some really sharp valleys into the rocks, and as we found out, it was really easy to lose the main path.
(Click here for the standalone gallery, Cappadocia On the Ground)

The View From Up Here

The, uh, high point of our visit to Cappadocia, however, was taking a hot air balloon ride at dawn. Seeing the rock formations from 6,000 feet (about 2000 m) was awesome, but it was also really neat to see close to 50 balloons all around us.
(Click on the pics to see them up close or on Cappadocia Aloft). 

Making war history

September 25-28, 2014 / Canakkale & Gallipoli, Turkey

 

We recently enjoyed three nights in the town of Canakkale (pronounced "Cha-nak-kah-leh", with an "cedi" on the first C, natch).  

Canakkale is on the Dardanelles, the waterway that connects the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas with the Sea of Marmara and then the Black Sea (via the Bosphorous at Istanbul). It is a much smaller and calmer city than Istanbul, which worked well since the kids were ready for a break. 

Historically, Canakkale is notable for two wars:

1. The Trojan War as described in Homer's Iliad  and as seen on TV

Unfortunately, because the weather was wet, we didn't make it out to the actual site of ancient Troy. Instead, we went to the Canakkale Archaeology Museum, which houses a number of the artifacts that weren't looted by the Russians.  For a long time, academics believed that the battle of Troy was merely part of the vast volumes of Greek mythology, what with its interplay of gods, beauty-pageant goddesses and muscled heroes who wouldn't look of place in a modern WWE contest. But excavations by Indiana Jones type treasure hunters and later more careful academics fond that there were actually seven Troys, all piled upon one another like so many layers of historical sediment. 

Was there actually a Trojan horse? Sure! I've seen several around here (see the photos). 

2. The Gallipoli Campaign of World War 1 in which the Ottoman Empire successfully defended Turkey from an invasion by the combined forces of the British, French, Australian, New Zealand and Newfoundland (then a British territory). 

We did, however, manage to take a rainy-afternoon tour of some of the WWI cemetery sites on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable, although he had a puzzling way of inserting a rhetorical question into every sentence: "The ANZAC soldiers were pushing up the hill. To where? To the Turkish positions ....".

As he explained, the conditions were brutal for the soldiers on both sides: mud, heat, awful (even by British standards) food, lack of drinking water, lice, extreme cold and frostbite, and of course, intense machine gun fire and shelling -- often between soldiers hunkered down in trenches that were 20 metres apart. Nearly a hundred thousand soldiers -- some say more -- died during the nine months of this battle. Their names are now engraved in dozens of Turkish and Allied memorials throughout the peninsula. 

The guide was fairly even-handed in how he told the story, which would be tricky given the significance of the battles for the Turkish people and for the thousands of Aussies and Kiwis who make a pilgrimage here to pay their respects. 

The best moment of the day, however, was watching an Aussie tourist taking photos with a group of Turkish students. It made me wonder if their ancestors who fought here would have ever imagined a time, just two generations later, when their descendants would be shooting selfies instead of each other. And if today's soldiers could imagine this, would they still fight? 

As our tour guide might say, "May all wars become what? ....Ancient history."

Instantbulagram #1: street scenes are made of these

Greetings from Istanbul, Turkey.

After flying in-style-in-economy class with Turkish Airlines, we arrived safely on Wednesday afternoon and caught a cab into town. The cab driver responded to the onslaught of "traffic problems" with very pious profanity and several out-of-vehicle tirades at obstructing drivers. Forty minutes later, he gave up on even finding our hotel and suggested that it would be faster to just walk towards.....well....he pointed vaguely to somewhere back behind the traffic problem.

The hotel was actually in the other direction....

We have spent the first few days getting over the cultural shell shock of landing in the heart of the Old City, Sultanahmet and finding our feet again in the New City, Beyoglu.  We are grateful for the modest progress of:

 
  • finding our Air BnB apartment again without staring at the Google Maps app;
  • loading up our Istanbulkart transit pass to take the tram across the Bosphorous;
  • meeting up with some friends-of-a-friend-of-ours who set us straight on a few issues;
  • seeing a few of the marvellous historical sites in the Sultanahmet district;
  • jet-lagged kids sleeping through the night and even wishing they had stayed longer at historic sites (#roadscholars);
  • finding more-or-less the groceries we needed. NB: that bottle contained salted yogurt smoothie, not milk, Trish.

Today, Isaac even successfully haggled for his first purchase, using his winsome smile to dicker down the price of a Fernando Torres jersey from 45 TL to 25 TL and winning an affectionate kiss from the proprietor. Our Turkish vocabulary so far consists of 3-4 mangled phrases, so we are grateful for the kindness of local merchants. 

My first impression of the city is that it is a marvellous soundscape of cultures, and religions, teeming with pedestrians and small businesses that crowd up the gnarl of streets that are piled on layer upon layers of empires....

....Oh dear, I'm lapsing into competing metaphors. Clearly words fail me.  SI'll think that I'll just pour myself a bit more raki and share a few first impressions for now....