Day 203 Sun 6 May 2007 Ayvalik to Canakkale, Turkey

Driving round the coast we stop at Assos, a beautiful little fishing village full of little hotels and restaurants on the waterfront and very few tourists where Aristotle set up his teaching shop in 348BC and where we have yet another seafood lunch washed down with some half decent sauvignon blanc. Then it’s on to (World Heritage) Truva or Troy, stopping to watch a tortoise cross the road, before reaching the wooden horse at the entrance to the city.

Troy proves to be fascinating, its the site of 9 successive city settlements spanning 3500 years from 2950BC to the C5 AD, each one built upon the remains of the previous city, an archaeologists delight or nightmare. Its quite hard to get a true sense of sequence and history, particularly after a good bottle of white in the sun, but we persevere and trudge round the ruins diligently reading all the interpretive signs in a manner that would make Graham’s mother proud. Ticking Troy off the list, we’ve now been to 7 of the 9 world heritage sites in Turkey.

By sunset we move on to Canakkale, the town across the Dardanelles from Gallipoli where we find the Kervanseray Hotel in a restored Ottoman general’s house.