After some blissful days it was time to move on.
We left our hotel before breakfast and caught the first dolmus back to Amasra. We had about an hour to kill in Amasra. We ate a poor breakfast at a local cafe and then walked around the town. It was pretty and we walked past a morning market. Though we didn’t get to see much, and we felt we had done the right thing by staying in Cakraz. The beaches didn’t look great in Amasra.
Baris Akarsu
The most interesting sitewe saw in Amasra is the statue of Baris Akarsu. He was a local kid turned rock star and the pride of Amasra. Sadly, he was killed in a car crash at a young age. The statue is the town’s memorial to Baris. The kids found it really interesting – his motor bike, his cd’s, his leather jacket and of course the statue of this guitar-playing rocker.
Dried sunflowers for sale
From Amasra it was back over the mountains to Safranbolu. We then hung around for a while before catching our connecting bus to Kastamonu and eventually when we got there we found the only connection to Sinop was at 5pm. We had started our journey before breakfast and it was now clear we wouldn’t be there before 8pm. A very long day of travel. At the otogar in Kastamonu we tried to get something to eat. The only English-speaking server insisted we could only order Pide – which we did. But we noticed others coming in and ordering rice, beans, kofte – our favourites. We couldn’t figure out why they only wanted to serve us pide.
Our bus to Sinop turned out to be a large minibus with stools down the aisle – our driver then proceeded to stuff this 15 seater with about 30 people and we set off. We weren’t that happy to be stuffedinto this sardine can and with kids sitting on parents, it wasn’t a comfortable journey. But it turned out to be really fun – we quickly made friends with our neighboring passengers – hard not to get to know your neighbors when you are practically sitting on top of them.
With Sinop in sight the road turned bad – really bad, and we crawled the last hour into town. Eventually we got out, said goodbye to our new friends, and started walking into the old city where our hotel was. Otel 57 – a decent 3* hotel, and finally we could relax!
For dinner we went to the waterfront – the restaurants floated on the water, and were packed with locals – we didn’t see another foreign tourist anywhere. Typical for the Black Sea, the menu revolved around fish and the food was excellent.
After dinner it was back to the hotel, but the boys wanted to continue walking about. I took them out and we had a great time – we found a jumpy castle packed with kids at 10pm, and then we walked on the promenade amongst crowds of people. We found a stall selling home-made potato chips – they took a potato, put it on a skewer and then through a kind of revolving cutter, and then fried the chips right in front of us – delicious! Finally I took them back to bed.
PS These days I am planning great family trips to Turkey. For more info click here.
