Büyükada

One of the items on Trish's list of things to do before leaving was to visit one of the islands making up Prince's Islands. Büyükada was not only the biggest (büyük even means "big"), but also the farthest. The weekday schedule was not so great and we waited nearly an hour an a half for our trusty vessel, the "Şehit Mustafa __" (and I thought all boats were women) to depart. Sure enough, the island was calm and removed from Istanbul city life (except that most of the people on the island were likely tourists from Istanbul). There were few cars and it certainly wouldn't have been easy (if at all possible) to rent one... but we would have had an easy time catching a horse and carriage. The picture below is from the (can I say "hitching post"?). Anyway, we opted to forgoe the carriage for bicycles. Unfortunately all the women's bikes were too small... and not only for us - plenty of Turkish women are much taller than us and were also having some difficulty. When we reached the base of the final hill (the one to the monastery with "the view"), we briefly contemplated riding donkeys to the top, but instead parked out bikes and walked the final leg up to the top.
Dogs napped, played and fought at the top of the hill... Sorry, I didn't take too many pictures of the monastery itself, but I do have one of my favorite dog:
And this is the view from the tea garden/restaurant:

And this is Trish. She is smiling because she thinks we have made it back to the dock in time to catch a smooth ride back to Istanbul...
Unfortuantely, this was not to be so... We did in fact get to the dock in time. There were two ferries there, so we took the one from the gate labelled with the dock in Istanbul we wanted to reach. Unforunately, a few hours later when we reached the other side, we discovered we were not in Istanbul, but somewhere rather far. Ever heard of Yakova? Anyway, there were no more ferries from there to Istanbul, so a lovely local woman escourted us to another dock with ferries leaving to a place called Pendik on the Asia side of Istanbul. From Pendik (which we reached shortly before midnight) it was only an hour drive by taxi into Taksim (Levent for Trish). Anyway, we were lucky as the taxi from that stop operated like taxis in Iraq and the fare wasn't so bad as we shared the taxi with two other travellers from Diyarbakir. Trish was embarassed, but the man at the gate at Pendik wasn't so surprised by our error. I hope Trish is laughing now that she is back in Holland.