About Me & Anatolia
Ever
since I was a child, I have been interested in history and the orient. While
others were reading
Karl May's "Old Shatterhand", I spent many
hours reading the adventures of Kara Ben Nemsi in the orient.
It was in 1981, after five vacations of traveling through Greece and the
Greek Islands, that I decided to visit Turkey. From the Greek Island of
Samos we took the ferry to Kusadasi and spent a week visiting the
archeological sites of Ionia: Ephesos, Dydima, Priene, Myletos. We did
hire a sparkling white Chevrolet Impala with driver for about 40
Euro (50 US dollar) a day to take us around. I remember visiting the white rock
castle of Pamukkale when it was still unspoiled, clean without the bus
loads of tourists.
As we enjoyed this first visit we decided the year after
to return to see more of the country. So in 1982 we had an organized tour
that started in Istanbul and included the highlights of Anatolia: Ankara,
Cappadocia, Konya, Aspendos, Side, Antalya, and finally arrived in
Kusadasi. At that time Kusadasi was still a small tourist resort, where
nothing much happened. There was one big restaurant-night club-disco place
called "Oriental Club" and that was it.
It was not until 1990 that I came back to Turkey, this
time by car coming from Belgium via Greece and Yugoslavia. In the
meanwhile, I had visited Greece so many times, that I knew all about even
the smallest village on the Greek mainland. Arriving in Kusadasi, which had
developed in a booming city, I met Nazif again. Nazif was an old
acquaintance from 1981 and 1982. This time we became friends for life.
During the 1990's, my vacations alternated between Turkey and the far East
(mainly China). In 1992 we hired a car in Izmir and made the grand tour: Izmir,
Afyon, Ankara, Safranbolu, Inebolu, Sinop, Amasya, Trabzon, Sumela,
Erzurum, Dogubayazit, Van, Diyarbakir, Urfa, Mount Nemrut, Cappadocia,
Konya, Egirdir, to arrive finally in Kusadasi after 14 days. In 1997 I did
it all over again, but this time by public transportation and taking a bit
more than three weeks. From then onwards, I brought many friends to Istanbul and the inland of Anatolia.
In 2002, I bought my first digital camera (Olympus Camedia C-1 zoom). The question was, what to do with all those
digital pictures. On the other hand, friends in Eastern Anatolia asked me
to promote tourism to their region. The combination of these two resulted
in my first web-page "Eastern & Central Anatolia". The 2003
vacation which covered the North East and the Black Sea region resulted in
so many photographs, that I had to look for another web-host and also had to
reorganize the page. The result is what you see now.
