Hidden gems

After a good night's sleep we found Miss Bec tucked deep into her covers to escape the chill in the Ankara air then we were up and away heading towards Istanbul.

Tucked up tight

We lunched in  Eskişehir and followed our usual routine of finding the specialty food for the town to hunt down.   This often involves dedicated effort trying to then find a place that sells this specialty food, but today this was easy: we only had to walk a few hundred metres from where our motorhome was parked.

We ordered Cibörek, and what a delight it is.   This dish was bought to Eskişehir by the Tartars of the Crimea early in the 19th century, who were among the early settlers in this town.    It is as light as a feather pastry, thicker than filo, but so fragile you barely know it from air.  It is filled with mince meat, shaped like a half moon, and cooked in vegetable oil.

This was just one serving 

It should be deadly, but it is one of our favourite dishes, to date.  Mind you, we say that at least once every day.

I doubt we will find it so brilliantly prepared and served ever again, so we are already in mourning for it.

Eskişehir is a university town and it feels like one.  Just a few hundred kilometres away is Konya: traditional, fundamentalist, sombre.  Eskişehir is different.  Students walk the streets hand in hand.  Tight jeans and trendy T's are the girl's standard gear.  You rarely see young people, or old ones for that matter in traditional long or black gear, tho' there are suburbs where this still happens, we drove through them.

So it will be interesting to see how this developing regional difference will pan out as future years roll on.

Several villages around Eskişehir mine a very rare product that looks like chalk but is much lighter and much softer,  though as soon as it hits air it hardens.  This white stone is called meerschaum.

Beautifully carved

Meershaum is mined by drilling vertical shafts some thirty metres deep.  Then using a rope ladder to access the material.   As it has always been mined.

It is carved into some of the finest tobacco pipes in the world, and some of them sell, even on the second hand market, for exceptional prices.

Expensive Meershaum  pipe

Today's driving turned into a marathon, which really was no great hassle as the roads were brilliant.   Formal camp sites are frequent along the coast in Turkey, and in very touristy inland spots, like Cappadocia.  But,  elsewhere, they are few and far between.   We finally found a lovely informal spot on Lake Iznik,  just south of the town where the tiles that were used in Istanbul's Blue Mosque were made.

We were given permission by some restaurant folk by a lake to use their car park.  We stopped because of the view.  They gave us power, access to the amenities, and a brilliant fish meal from the lake for dinner.   With a view second to none.

Lake Isnik 

This was on a back road heavy with ancient olive trees, and hardly a development in sight.

How old is this olive tree?

I can't believe the Istanbul billionaires don't realise this little gem is there.

We loved it.

oooOOOooo

As usual, the rest of our trip was too busy to allow detail.  We took a ferry across the water back to Istanbul, camped one night near the heart of the city close to where the ferry landed, then our lovely motorhome rental agent came there to collect it next morning, saving us finding him.   We found transport to the airport from there, then headed home that day.  

 But this trip, for each of us, was one of our favourites, ever.  We would do it again in a heartbeat.  We loved every minute.  

oooOOOooo