Taking some time to record thoughts from our trip to Turkey this past May! Technically we spent 9 days in Turkey but a lot of our time was lost to travel so I wanted to record a really solid itinerary and thoughts for the full days we spent playing tourist, as well as recommendations for traveling in Turkey overall.
- Istanbul, Day 1: Sultanahmet & Karaköy (i.e. the tourist day)
- Istanbul, Day 2: The Asian Side & Çukurcuma (i.e. the cool girl day)
- Istanbul, Day 3: Spa Day & Vintage Shopping
- Cappadocia, Day 1: Rose & Red Valley Hike
- Cappadocia, Day 2: Hot Air Balloons, Love Valley Hike, Uçhisar
- General Thoughts
- Helpful References
Istanbul, Day 1: Sultanahmet & Karaköy (i.e. the tourist day)
The first few days in Istanbul we stayed in Sultanahmet and, honestly, I wouldn’t recommend it. The area is really touristy, with lots of folks standing outside of restaurants yelling at you to come in. It was not our favorite. That being said, this is where a lot of the major tourist sites are like The Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Grand Bazaar, and Spice Bazaar. Honestly, I’d probably pass on a lot of these, but I understand wanting to go. We went into the Blue Mosque (it’s free but closes at certain times; you have to wait outside in a line and they give you hair coverings if you don’t have something – and obviously cover your legs and shoulders) but found it a little underwhelming. We passed on Hagia Sophia because like many of the sites in Turkey it was SUPER expensive to get in (25 Euros) and we didn’t feel like we’d get much out of it. I would say the Grand Bazaar is worth going to, pass on the Spice Bazaar, but honestly none of these wow-ed us and we felt like they were all very touristy.
We kicked off the morning with a Turkish breakfast at Myterrace Cafe & Restaurant, which I would highly recommend. Turkish breakfast involves plates and plates of tiny side dishes (cheese, clotted cream, honeycomb, breads, meats, fruit) and was overwhelming and way too much food but delightful.
We spent the afternoon walking across the Galata Bridge to explore the neighborhoods across the water. We grabbed a glass of wine at Karaköy Gümrük (a very cute cafe in the Karaköy neighborhood, just across the water), ate Balik Ekmek (a grilled fish sandwich that was totally worth it and generally cheap). Then we hung out for a little in the Çukurcuma neighborhood and hit up Popstel Liquor, which was absolutely adorable and in our favorite neighborhood that had a few other awesome very hipster bars.
Istanbul, Day 2: The Asian Side & Çukurcuma (i.e. the cool girl day)
We kicked off our day by taking the ferry across to the Asian side of Istanbul, which was very easy to do (walk on and tap your credit card and less than $1 USD). It’s a quick 20 min ferry ride and we loved the Asian side! We definitely would recommend folks either stay there or in Çukurcuma. We put together a little self-created food tour in Kadıköy and hit up Kadıköy Midyecisi for stuffed mussels, Çiçekişleri Kadıköy (our favorite shop of the trip where we got adorable tiny clay houses), Ozcan famous pickle to get a cup of pickles, Cold Neron for Turkish ice cream (not my favorite type of ice cream but it is interesting and chewy?), Dopamine Coffee Shop – Moda & Simyacı Şarlo for a drink, and Say Cheese for some street pasta. The vibes of the bars in this neighborhood were great – it seemed like it would be a rowdy but fun place to go out in the evenings and the area was lively with cute cafes during the day, perfect for some day drinks.
We walked by the water to digest and went into Tarihi Moda İskelesi, an adorable library and cafe out on a pier.
Istanbul, Day 3: Spa Day & Vintage Shopping
Our third day in Istanbul was actually at the end of our trip; we lost a few days of our trip to travel into or out of Istanbul since the airport was about an hour drive away and we aimed to be there 2 hours before our flights.
On our full day back at the end of the trip we stayed in Çukurcuma instead, which we loved and was the neighborhood that had tons of cute bars and little vintage shops.
We went to Ağa Hamamı in the morning for a spa treatment. This is one of the oldest hamams (Turkish bathhouses) in Istanbul and we got the advice to book in advance (even just the night before). We opted for a package with the scrub and massage included for about $130 USD. The sauna portion is co-ed and was all tourists so people were in bikinis and swim shorts. You get your own private room with a key so we could leave all of our things there and we opted for going nude under our towels, which we felt a bit awkward for in the sauna room but wasn’t an issue in the scrub or massage areas, where I think you’d be expected to strip (but only get paired with someone of the same gender). We overall had a great experience with this and found ourselves pampered and slightly manhandled in the nicest way.
We followed up our spa treatment with drinks and vintage shopping. There are a lot of cute shops in this neighborhood, so it’s just a nice place to take a wander! We grabbed sandwiches at Asya Büfe, drinks at Solera Winery, San Sebastian cheesecake at Tea or Coffee (Turkey is really big on Basque cheesecake? random but delightful), and dinner at Mayko Lokanta. Honestly, I feel like we nailed it everywhere we went to eat.
Cappadocia, Day 1: Rose & Red Valley Hike
We stayed in Göreme in Cappadocia (FYI seems to be pronounced with more of a staccato “kia” at the end instead of a soft “cha”) after doing some research. Göreme is definitely the most common place for tourists to stay with Uçhisar being the other main option. We definitely felt we chose well and I would recommend anyone stay in Göreme, at least right now. Almost every hotel was beautiful and very aesthetic. Uçhisar was so quiet – the hotels seemed lovely but the town was really dead, but we could see it getting really popular within the next 10 years. Göreme was about an hour from the airport and our first day we mostly just puttered around the town, so I’m not really counting that day in this list.
Our first full day, we attempted but weren’t able to do a hot air balloon ride. We booked the hot air balloon in advance of our trip through Viator (specifically with Turquaz Balloons, who we did like) but I think we easily could have waited and booked when we were in Cappadocia. It IS good advice to try to fly your first day there since, as with us, it didn’t work out the first day due to wind and we ended up getting rebooked for the following day. Do expect that you’ll have some early mornings, since they came to pick us up at 4AM for our sunrise flight. It was awesome though! I would highly recommend going for a ride, which is obviously the main tourist attraction of Cappadocia also.
After our balloon failure, we went for a hike of Rose & Red Valley. For us it ended up being 6.8 miles, 990 ft elevation gain, 4 hours total. We did walk to the start of the hike from Göreme, which was about an extra mile each way, so about 9 miles in total. Definitely do this hike in the clockwise direction and I would HIGHLY recommend downloading AllTrails and tracking against the trail that they have listed there since the path is quite poorly marked and easy to lose. There are only a few semi-sketchy parts of the hike where you’re scrambling up choss with a rope (or down without a rope) but we enjoyed it! We did find that the latter part of the hike (I think when we hit Red Valley) part of the path was closed and we had to get a little creative before we rejoined the track.
This hike was one of our favorite parts of the trip! The hike takes you by many cave churches – I’m not quite sure when they were created but it sounds like somewhere between the 1st and 11th century AD. You can do little scrambles up to the churches and look at the paintings and carvings on the ceilings. Our favorite was a MASSIVE cave church with cathedral height ceilings and huge columns. We probably only passed 4-5 hikers the entire hike so we had all of the areas to ourselves to explore. I’d definitely go back and visit more of these cave areas, there were so many and they were all quite unique!
We rounded out our day with some drinks at one of the many rooftop bars in Göreme and grabbing dinner at Dibek with their killer mezze plate (we had so many mezze plates this trip).
Cappadocia, Day 2: Hot Air Balloons, Love Valley Hike, Uçhisar
The next morning we had our successful hot air balloon launch and then followed that up with a hike through Love Valley to Uçhisar and back. It was about 5.5 miles, 1200 ft elevation, 2 hours to get to Uçhisar and then another 2.6 miles 115 ft elevation, 1.5 hours to hike back to Göreme through Pigeon Valley (I was hauling there and hiking more slowly back). This wasn’t as much of a top hike for me as the Rose & Red Valley hike but it did get you very close to the most phallic of the fairy chimneys. Uçhisar as I said previously was fine (a big castle that didn’t honestly have much to see but was only abut $8 USD to get in) but we got a great Turkish breakfast for lunch at Wish Terrace, and the Pigeon Valley hike back was very cool with lots of little caves to look at from a distance. It was another trail that was very easy to lose so again I would highly stress having maps downloaded (though I had service the whole time) and tracking against your maps.
General Thoughts
Overall we had a great trip! I wouldn’t rate Istanbul as one of my top cities and it felt similar to me to Budapest (though I like Budapest more) but I loved Cappadocia and hiking around and visiting the caves.
- Taxis. We didn’t really end up taking taxis around Istanbul, with one exception where we booked in advance though our hotel. In general, we ended up booking transport to and from the airport through the hotel shuttles, which generally cost us about 50 Euros each way. It almost certainly would have been cheaper to just hire a taxi to get us to and from the airport but we’d heard mixed reviews about tourists getting ripped off by taxis, so we were very hesitant to call for one. Uber isn’t really a thing in Turkey and what we heard was that any ride share services really just call taxis and use the taxi meters, so you don’t get absolute costs in advance in the same way that you do with Uber. In addition, the airports were quite far from Istanbul city center and Göreme where we stayed in Cappadocia, so we were typically driving for about an hour each way. Overall, I don’t know that I would have done things differently since we went with the shuttle option to have it coordinated in advance and for peace of mind. But note with those hotel shuttle options you will need to pay in cash.
- Cash (specifically Euros). So, Turkey uses Turkish lira BUT basically everywhere seems to accept and prefer Euros. Getting money out of ATMs was kind of a nightmare as well, with fees often being upwards of $30 USD. So my recommendation would be to just keep Euros on hand and take them out in advance of arriving in Turkey.
- Overall cost. We didn’t find Turkey to be SUPER affordable at least where we went. There were several times we felt like prices were being inflated for us as tourists or we were being taken advantage of and, when we looked at menus from 5 years ago of restaurants on Google Maps, prices had more than doubled. I get the sense that 5 or 10 years ago Istanbul was an awesome place to visit, and now it seems just fine but not a huge standout or great value for your money.
- Clothing choices (for women). We didn’t find Istanbul or Cappadocia to be overly conservative. We did bring higher necked shirts and clothes that covered our arms and legs but these areas tended to have more tourists or more university aged students who dressed more liberally so overall I wouldn’t say being overly concerned with what you wore in these parts of Turkey was a huge thing. Be relatively modest and don’t just wear bike shorts and a sports bra out and you should be fine.
- Alcohol. Not an issue! I was worried that we might not be able to get easy access since my friend had that situation in Egypt but most bars, restaurants, and stores sold at least beer and wine. Turkey does have many local wines and wine regions (my friend loved the Emir wine) and generally I liked it though it was a bit more acidic.
- Safety (especially as a woman). I never felt particularly unsafe, though I was with my friend at all times. I would have felt fine traveling here as a solo female traveler though! In some of the more populous tourist areas, some restaurant vendors can get a bit pushy (and I had one guy grab my arm to try to get me to come into his restaurant) but otherwise we didn’t have any trouble.
- Turkish Delight. I dunno, man, I feel like we got sold a lie by The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe – it’s just not that good. I tried it a few times and had some that was OK but overall I feel like it’s pretty passable and just too sticky sweet.
- Cats. The cats in Turkey are delightful and very sweet and well cared for! You’ll see water dishes and little piles of food everywhere and definitely get a lot of opportunities for pets and seeing kittens, which was our favorite part about the trip.
Helpful References
Here are a few of the reference sources I used when planning!
Fun-sized: A Travel and Life Blog 