I's raeli F*cked it up this time!

After breaking the rules and getting on the short flight, things went from bad to worse as my left ear started playing up. In this one moment of deaf weakness I let my guard down and managed to get the one blodge of ink that I can't have in my passport. It all went very fast and before I knew it I saw the fateful Israeli stamp punching against my clean page right next to my Sudanese visa. This messes up months of planning as I will need to get a new passport and visa if I want to enter Sudan, but I just have to take it for what it is and laugh at how ridiculous the rules and regulations of the world are. Tel Aviv turned out to be a great city after a short interogation and a few hours sleep at the airport we got to our hostel in the trendy Florentine area. We ended up staying longer than we had planned as we got comfortable not doing alot really. We walked around the different markets, went for a jog and swim at the beach, saw the old town and port of Jaffa, watched the Tel Aviv football-derby where Hapoel beat Maccabi and just enjoyed ourselves in general with the hostel crowd. However it was a surprisingly expensive city with pretty much the same prices as Stockholm, and we decided we had to move on, catching a bus north to Nazareth.

Cyprus Fail

Once we reached Tasucu we wanted to cross over to Cyprus directly, but we were told that the seas were too rough for the short passage and that all boats were cancelled. We ended up just having to spend two days there, but there was absolutely nothing to do so it felt much longer. The only boat that was able to make the trip was the car-ferry which left at midnight and takes a much longer time than the express-boat but waiting longer wasn't an option for us so we took it. We got to the Turkish side of Cyprus next morning and proceeded to taking a few different buses crossing over to the Greek side and arriving in the port-town of Limassol later that evening. In Limassol we have spent some time doing the cultural stuff, visiting ruins, etc, but a lot of the time has been dedicated to finding a way out of the country. However as we have feared for quite some time it just isn't possible to do it without flying. Ever since Greece we have been looking at our options and found that our timing is just off, had we made this trip a year ago we would have had plenty of options, but following the "Arab Spring" and the aftermath of it, we just can't find a way to do it. We've been in contact with cargo companies, port-authorities, cruise-companies and everything in between, but nobody has a solution for us. It's quite sad that some of the world's oldest sea-routes in the Mediterranean are no longer running all due to political issues and border-disputes, but that's the way the world works and we just have to accept that I guess. So now we have booked our flights to Tel Aviv and if everything goes to plan we should be landing in Israel just before midnight.

Alternative Living

We got to Cappadocia in the heart of Turkey and the small town of Göreme early in the morning and decided to start exploring the area straight away. It really is an amazing albeit very peculiar place, giant stone pillars rise out of the desert landscape and for thousands of years people have hollowed them out to make everything from small pigeon-huts to huge Monasteries. We stayed in a cave-room (rumoured to have accommodated Jimi Hendrix back in the sixties) which was very warm and cozy, and took two days to check this mysterious location with all it's fairy-chimneys and underground cities out. However Cappadocia was freezing cold and despite my efforts to escape the snow it turns out I got to see it before Stockholm did this winter. We decided to seek warmer climates and opted for the small Goa or Thailand-esque hamlet called Olympos on the Mediterranean coast. Once again though Mother Nature trumped us and the 23°C and sun we were lured with had turned into lower teen degrees and rain by the time we arrived. Still it was a great place offering some very interesting sights. First of all you have the ruins of the ancient Roman city Olympos and for a mere 3 Turkish Lira (roughly 12kr or 1£) you are allowed to wander the forests freely among collapsed churches, theatres and roman baths without some guide telling you what not to touch and what not to take photographs of. Also roughly an hours trek away you have the strange phenomena known as Yanartaş, where flames come straight out of the mountain rock-face. For at least 2500 years these flames have kept burning, once large enough to be seen from the ocean they used to be used for sea-navigation today they have shrunk considerably, still they are a baffling and impressive sight.

Our two nights in Olympos were spent in a tree-house and if the cave-room was warm and cozy this was quite the opposite, allthough I guess that is to be expected from a room with no heating and gaping holes in the walls. We then caught three buses heading East, first to Antalya then Silifke and Taşucu where we continued our tradition of odd dwellings for the week, with a few hours rest at bus-station cafes and docks. From Taşucu we hope to catch a ferry to Cyprus, but more about that when I know how it goes.

Turkish Delight

Istanbul is an amazing city and we have just ended up getting stuck here for a while. We started our visit by staying in Sultanahmet which is where most of the tourist-sights like the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sofia are but after a few days we decided to move over to Beyoğlu which is where most of the bars are. Here we've just been hanging out with a bunch of really nice people and done the occasional trip somewhere like watching a Galatasary footballmatch, going to a Turkish Hamam and crossing the Bosphorus river where Europe and Asia meet. The two sides are quite similar allthough there aren't as many tourists in Asia, they have a bit more slanted eyes, are slightly better at table-tennis and have problems pronouncing the letter R. Turkish people are generally very friendly maybe sometimes a bit much, and I've never seen a country which is so proud of it's flag, wherever you look you see the white star and crescent emblazoned on the red background in all sizes.
Tonight however the group of people has split up and gone their separate ways. Elias and I plan on getting a nightbus to a place further south called Capadocia.

More Than Five Thousand Words...

Here come's a historic post, for the first time in this blog's lifespan I'm going to upload a few pictures.

The former radar-tower outside of Berlin

A view of the Prague Castle and old bridge

A view from Buda to Pest

Two buildings in Belgrade bombed by NATO back in 1999

The famous bridge in Mostar

(For those of you lucky enough to be friends with me on facebook, there will hopefully be more pictures coming up there within a near future)

Greece Lightning

We arrived in Athens early in the morning, and started out by finding a hostel and slept for a couple of hours. We then spent a few days walking around the city realising it is in ruins in more ways than one. Apart from the ancient temples which have crumbled since they were built it seems the population has been rocked by the economic crisis. I think it has the highest amount of homeless people I have ever witnessed and also it was the most expensive city of the trip so far. After seeing enough ruins for a while we decided to move on and found a bus which took us all the way to Turkey.