We landed in Istanbul on Saturday around 6 pm or so. The 1 hour drive from the Sabiha Gokcen airport to the hotel in downtown Istanbul took almost 3 hours, longer than the flight from Rome to Istanbul. The traffic was horrendous; I swear to myself that whenever we land after our cruising adventure we won’t live in a place where it takes always double time to get to places (I could also hear Mark’s voice in my head: “Good luck with that”).

Mark and I loved Istanbul last time that we were there 18 years ago, and it was the same this time. Our best move, both here and in Rome, was to organize a guide. In Istanbul, we had a guide for the full two days that we were there. From 9 am to about 4 or 4:30 pm, our guide took us to visit main architectural sights (Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, Ayia Sophia, etc.), quaint and modern neighborhoods and his favourite eating joints. The queues for some of the top sights were hours long but our guide would ask us to wait at the door and he would disappear and came back in seconds with our tickets. Having a guide was worth every penny.

After two days in Istanbul, we flew to Cappadocia. We had heard of this area in the middle of Turkey from several fellow cruisers as a place not to miss. They were absolutely right. The area is famous for their underground cities some of them dated from Hittite times (~3000 or 4000 BCE) and had been in use until modern times. Early Christians constructed many churches in caves or dug them in the soft rock formations. People still live in cave houses. In fact, we stayed at the cave house of Viv and Will (http://www.vivshousecappadoccia.com/), a New Zealand couple that spend half of their time in the Urgup, in the smack middle of Cappadoccia. With their help we toured the area, went up a hot air balloon (to me, this was one of the highlights of the trip), climbed up and down an underground city, hiked through the valleys with the famous phallic rock formations; we even got ourselves some small Turkey carpets for the boat. Four days just flew by, I told myself I would be back; I could have stayed happily the whole summer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappadocia). But it was time to fly to Rome.

In Rome, we stayed behind Termini Station, just ten minutes from the Colosseum. We spent Sunday walking around from the Coliseum to the Pantheon to the Trevi Fountain to the Spanish Stairs and back. On Monday, after our great experience in Istanbul, we hired a guide to visit the Coliseum and Roman highlights and we also joined a tour in the afternoon to visit the Vatican Museums including the Sistine Chapel. Again, this really helped to avoid the long queues, a big plus not only on time but also on the mood in which you visit the place.

Ten days after we left Crotone, we were back on Por Dos. She was looking good with her first coat of bottom paint and almost ready to go back in the water.