Sille is a pretty small village just outside of Konya. The traditional village houses are mirrored by a rock-face full of cave dwellings and chapels.
If you have the chance to go to Sille, you should time your visit for a mealtime at the terraced Sille Konak. Sille Konak is a restored Greek house featuring a small museum, and providing excellent and reasonable priced home cooking.
Kastamonu is a really nice town and an ideal place for a stopover between Anatolia and the Black Sea. It features many old Ottoman houses, a castle, and several museums and mosques.
Atatürk launched his hat reforms in Kastamonu in 1925. Mustafa Kemal regarded the fez as a symbol of backwardness and banned it.
Göreme is set amid towering fairy chimneys, majestic honeycomb cliffs and cave dwellings. Altough Cappadocia is one of the most visited tourist attractions in Turkey, village life in Göreme manages to happily coexist with a thriving tourism industry.
The region around Göreme was used for shooting “Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam” (Turkish Star Wars). Besides showing the beautiful landscape of Cappadocia it also contains some really hilarious dialogues:
Murat: “Begin your famous whistle which no woman can resist.”
Ali: [Whistles]
Murat: “You whistle it wrong”
Ali: “Why?”
Murat: “Skeletons came instead of women”
And my personal favourite:
Ali: “Do you think you are the man who saves the world?”
Murat: “As much as you think you are a womanizer.”
If you are into bizarre movies, you definitely have to watch “Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam”.
Sinop is a popular destination for holidaymakers from İstanbul and Ankara. The city takes its name from the legend of Sinope, daughter of the river god Asopus and was the birthplace of Diogenes.
Sinop’s main attractions are the relatively well-preserved fortification and the Tarihi Cezaevi (Old Jail).
Anıtkabir is the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Mustafa Kemal is the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. The mausoleum is located in Ankara on top of Rasattepe (Observation Hill).
Antalya is one of my favourite cities in Turkey. I especially like Kaleiçi, the historical center of the city.
Alanya is a seaside resort in the south of Turkey. It has in the past couple of decades been discovered and subsequently conquered by European package tourism, especially from Russia, Germany and Scandinavia.
In my opinion, unfortunately Alanya was not able to keep its identity during this process and most parts of the city look like German or Russian colonies. But there are still some really nice places like Alanya Castla, an old Seljuk fortress, or Kızılkule (Red Tower).
The Mevlâna museum, located in Konya, Turkey, is the mausoleum of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a Sufi mystic also known as Mevlâna or Rumi. It was also the lodge of the whirling dervishes.
This year is the 800th anniversary of the birth of Mevlâna and the UNESCO year of birth of Mevlâna Rumi.
The dive site gets its name from the numerous ledges and cracks in the reef. The reef is composed mainly of hard corals including brain coral, starlet coral, smooth star coral and fragile saucer coral.
The ledge shelters green morays, hawksbill turtles and nurse sharks. Also look for the ever present large barracudas hovering in mid-water, hiding beneath the overhangs or following divers around.
Englishman’s Bay is hidden from the road by a thick cover of bush. This spectacular beach with powdery light sand leads to the deep, calm water of the sheltered bay and is one of the loveliest beaches in Tobago. It is utterly ravishing and virtually undeveloped.
From Fort King is one of Tobago’s best preserved historical sites. It was built by the British in the 1700s when it was also captured and occupied by the French and renamed Fort Castries.
The road leading up to the Fort, passes by Tobago’s only Hospital, leading up to the top of the hill where the Fort is located. The views from the Fort provide the visitor with spectacular views over Scarborough and further north along the coastline.
The Maverick was originally called Scarlet Ibis and was previously a passenger, vehicle and cargo ferry that travelled between Trinidad and Tobago. Scarlet Ibis went into service in 1959 and was retired in 1975.
On April 7, 1997 it was scuttled by the Association of Tobago Dive Operators and now sits upright on a sandy sea bed at a depth of 30m. Before scuttling, the ship was thoroughly cleaned of oil and other pollutants, hatches and other entrapments were either removed or secured making all compartments of the ship completely accessible.
The hull and exposed decks are encrusted with red polyp octorals, tunicates, sponges and literally thousands of Atlantic thorny oysters.
Grafton beach is located in Stonehaven bay and is an attractive coarse sand beach.
Stonehaven bay is one of the three places in Tobago where the endangered giant leatherback turtle comes ashore between March and June to lay their eggs which will hatch around three months later.
Mount Irvine Wall is located just 3 minutes from Mount Irvine Beach facilities by boat. This wall dive has a maximum depth of 15 m and is actually a group of rocky outcroppings extending out to sea.
It is considered an easy dive, suitable for beginners, but also good for all levels as there are plenty of smaller, interesting creatures such as scorpion fish, juvenile spotted drums, lobsters, octopus, queen angel fish, frogfish, parrot fish, pipe fish, batfish and seahorses.
The coral covering the wall is composed mainly of small yellow tube sponges, branching vase sponges, black ball sponges, encrusting gorgonians, small black sea rods, porous sea rods, stinging bush hydroids and large quantities of social feather dusters.
The Little Rockley Bay is a long stretch of darkish volcanic sand fringed by coconut trees and bordered by the old coast road which is now bypassed by the Claude Noel Highway between Scarborough and Crown Point.
The eastern section of the bay, adjacent to Rockley Bay and alongside Lambeau - where I was staying during my time on Tobago- is protected by a reef and provides good swimming.
Further down towards Crown Point, Little Rockley Bay beach is exposed to the full force of the Atlantic Ocean and the trade winds. The pounding surf means that the beach remains largely empty but it is arguably the best walking and jogging beach in Tobago. I went jogging there almost every morning during my stay.
The Tobago Forest Reserve located in the central ranges is the oldest protected rainforest in the western hemisphere. Thanks to the British scientist Stephen Hales, on April 13, 1776, 14’000 acres of central Tobago were designated a protected Crown Reserve.
Hales began researching the relationship between rainfall and trees during the plantation era. He needed 10 years to convince Tobago’s planters that if they continued to cut down the forest, the island would soon be incapable of supporting any plantations.
A rainforest trip is a must for every Tobago visitor. Make sure to hire a guide, as you’ll see a lot more and will get interesting information about the flora and fauna. I can really recommend our guide, Peter Cox.
Dutchman’s Reef is easily accessed from either the shore at Mount Irvine beach or from a boat. Along the reef’s edge, you can see two very old cannons that were once part of the Dutch East India Company fleet that ran aground in the 17th century. They can be difficult to recognise because of heavy coral encrustation.
If you are very lucky, you can see hawksbill turtles which normally feed on the smaller barrel sponges. I saw two of them while diving at Dutchman’s Reef, but they were way too fast to photograph them. When you see how sedate they are ashore, you would never guess how spry they are under water.
Two pictures from my trip to Tobago in February and March 2006:
The Sisters lie about a mile off Bloody Bay on the Carribean coast of Tobago. Underwater these rocky outcrops plunge to over 40 metres and periodically attract some exciting species such as scalloped hammerhead sharks. Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to dive there.
View from Fort Bennet down to the rocks which gave the beautiful village of Black Rock on Tobago its name.
Pigeon Point is Tobago’s most famous beach and the scenery is smashing indeed. The beach can boast of powdery white sand and leaning coconut palms.
But as beautiful Pigeon Point is, it is also one of the few places on Tobago to suffer from development and commercialization. It was the first beach to charge an entry fee, and regularly increases rents for beach vendors. Pigeon Point tends to be very crowded, especially if there is a cruise liner in the port of Scarborough.
Close-up of a star coral (Montastrea) at Flying Reef, one of the greatest dive sites in Tobago.
The Batteaux Bay is a small secluded beach in the grounds of the Blue Waters Inn in Speyside, Tobago. From Battaeux Bay you have a very nice view of Goat Island and Little Tobago.
The triple-tiered Argyle Falls are on the Argyle River, just west of Roxborough on the southeastern coast of Tobago. It’s a really nice place to chill after an exhausting rain forest tour. Those pictures where taken by me in February 2006.
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