Istanbul and bonus two days in Reykjavik

Time zones get a little odd when you're 11,276 m above the Hudson Bay, but it's nearly 19:00 in the time zone I just left, and when I hit the ground again it will be 4:00 there. I've had excellent luck flying standby in the past, getting to Abbotsford and Vancouver many times and to Bosnia, Venice, Frankfurt, Toronto, and back home in the last two years. I've never actually missed a flight on standby until this trip, when I missed two and Kaylin missed three. 

Our planned route was Edmonton to LA to Nadi, Fiji. The day before we left, our dad checked the flight load and saw that we would not make the flight to Fiji, so we planned to fly from Edmonton to Denver to Tokyo. At 6:00 am, I made it onto the flight to Denver in the morning, but Kaylin did not. Kaylin was not in Denver on time for the flight to Tokyo, and I did not get a seat. I found two flights from Minneapolis to Tokyo and flew to Minneapolis before Kaylin landed in Denver, then Kaylin took her own flight there a few hours later. We got a cheap airport hotel for the night, planning to fly out in the morning. 

In the morning, we went through security and arrived at the gate before I realized that I had left my sweater at security. Fortunately, it was not a special sweater to me. Unfortunately, my passport was in the pocket. I ran back to security and found a TSA agent who told me to email a lost item request to lost and found because they had just sent away a load of lost items. I emailed, then got impatient and left security to ask in person. A very nice lost and found worker let me know me that they did not have my sweater and I should ask again at TSA. Growing increasingly stressed, I went back through the security line and informed another TSA agent of my plight. A second TSA agent overheard and announced that she had found my passport and sweater and recognized me from the five year old photo. The standby list for the flight had grown so long that I didn't think we had a chance, so I allowed an agent to escort me out, a decision that I regretted nearly instantly when Kaylin texted me "run" because a few people had dropped off the standby list. 

The flight to Tokyo came and went without us and nearly 20 other standby passengers who didn't land seats in the end, so, while we watched our plane board and take off, we abandoned the goal of Japan. Finding an empty flight to Reykjavik, Iceland, and one from Iceland to Istanbul a few days later, we booked two more tickets each. We were thrilled when we checked in for the flight to Reykjavik and were immediately offered seats. Surely, we said to one another, now we cannot be foiled. I rented a car and booked a spot at the Sky Lagoon and a hostel. The gate for the flight to Iceland was bustling with travellers, mostly belonging to a huge tour group, who, although calmed somewhat by patrolling group leaders in lanyards, grew increasingly anxious as delays were announced, their voices rising to a frenzied roar that descended upon the gate agents almost in unison when every phone in the room received the email notice of cancellation at once. 

It was a dejected ride back to the grubby hotel, where we set an alarm for just before checkout and slept without a plan for where to go next. I considered a cruise out of Fort Lauderdale or a visit to New York City. In the morning I had an email waiting from Icelandair: We are rebooking you on a flight at 17:00. Press accept to book. 

I pressed accept before even showing Kaylin and saw that we already had seats again. We walked to a close by bakery and had some phenomenal donuts and burnt coffee before getting food for the flight at the Mall of America and heading back to the airport. The flight to Reykjavik took off with 45 passengers, most of whom are currently laying down across a whole row for the six hour flight that lands at 4:00am.

REYKJAVIK:

Given that we landed in Iceland 22 hours later than planned with only 32 hours remaining before our next flight, the already short visit was really more of a long layover than a proper trip. Still, we fit in a good number of activities. 

Upon landing, we waited an hour and a half until the car rental company opened, and then Kaylin drove to the hostel because it was cheaper to rent a manual vehicle and I left my driver's license at home (intentionally because I didn't plan to rent a car and didn't want another piece of ID on me to get lost). We got to the hostel around 7 and, after a shuffling process to get a clean room, got into bed around 8. After a short nap to make sure Kaylin could drive safely, we headed downtown to eat a Braud & Co cinnamon bun for an oddly timed breakfast and to wander the old town for a few minutes before driving to the Sky Lagoon, a luxury that we felt a little obliged to indulge in after the three days of airport hopping. 

The Sky Lagoon was nice; as I told my mom it was a luxury experience at a luxury price. It was definitely relaxing and restful. For the cheapest ticket price you get access to a public change room with three private toilet rooms but no private changing space, and the Skjól ritual, a seven step process of temperate lagoon, cold plunge, sauna, cold mist, salt scrub, steam room, and fruit drink. The ritual was the nicest part, and I wish I would have left it for last so I could leave with my skin feeling just like it did when I finished. Kaylin and I spent three and a half hours there, mostly just lazing about the main lagoon. It was very busy. 

At the sky lagoon

We went to sleep early, planning to get to the trailhead of a thermal river hike 45 minutes away by sunrise. Reykjadalur Thermal River was unbelievably beautiful, and I recommend it to anyone heading to Iceland. We hiked for about an hour including a few stops for pictures of the surreal landscape before reaching a boardwalk with basic change rooms, benches, and steps down to the river. When we first reached the boardwalk I climbed down the stairs and felt the river and thought it was a bit too cold to want to get into on a 5° day, but just a little further up the stream where the boardwalk ended we found two people in swimsuits sitting chest-deep in the river. I tested the water there and found it a perfect hot tub temperature! Because we were flying out at 3:00pm that day and I didn't want a wet swimsuit in my suitcase, we didn't pack any. For such a short visit I was happy just to wade, but Kaylin really regretted not bringing a swimsuit. If I could do it again I would bring a swimsuit, a big Ziploc bag to put it in for the flight, and a pair of water shoes for the very sharp rocks in the riverbed. 

To me this hike had it all: mountains, a waterfall, boiling mud pools, steam vents, and, of course, the thermal river itself. I plan to be back to Iceland for a proper road trip around the whole island, and when I am I'll definitely come back to the thermal river. It's so incredibly unlike anything we have in north America; it kind of baffled my mind. I actually found that I hesitated to step into the river even after feeling it because I couldn't shake the feeling that a mountain river should be glacial. 

We drove the long way back toward Keflavik and before heading to the airport made a quick stop at a lighthouse that caught our eye on the approach from the plane. Both of us were definitely a little nervous about making the flight out after the luck we had back in North America, and they didn't give us a seat until boarding was nearly finished (and made us check our carry-ons due to overhead space since we were last onto the plane), but there were several empty seats besides the ones we occupied. 

ISTANBUL:

Turkiye has been on my radar since 2022 when I spent several days around Rome with a man from my hostel who lived in Cappadocia and worked in the tourism industry doing something with the hot air balloons. He strongly recommended a visit, and, while it never made the top of my travel list, I've kept it in mind, so when we saw an opportunity to get there on flights that looked quite empty, we grabbed it without really thinking about it. 

We landed at midnight on October 19, took the bus to our hotel, and went to bed around 3am with the "do not disturb" sign on the door. The 15 minute walk from the bus station to the hotel gave me a good impression of what the city is like: alive at all hours, with abundant street food, many tourists, and friendly people. We stayed just off of Istiklal street, a thriving pedestrian street that has existed in its current location since at least the 17th century, once called Grand Avenue before it became Istiklal (independence) following the founding of the Republic of Turkey. Alteration of names and uses of buildings and areas in Istanbul to better suit the Republic of Turkey is a common theme in many of the places that I was able to visit on this trip, but Istiklal street has changed names while remaining a shopping hub for many years.

When we woke up Kaylin and I went to the Grand Bazaar, a massive, sprawling covered market with all manner of souvenirs, scarves, and faux designer clothes and bags. We wandered for a while but didn't find anything of particular interest to us. We continued to the Blue Mosque, which is free to enter, then ate donair, which was inexpensive even in Sultanahmet, the old city and tourist hub of Istanbul. I continued on to Hagia Sophia, a building serving as a church from 360 CE to 1453, before becoming a mosque in 1453 after the fall of Constantinople, acting as a museum from 1935-2020, and becoming a mosque again in 2020. The building itself was beautiful, but non-Muslim visitors are only allowed on the top floor and entrance costs $40.50. I paid the entrance fee and visited for the historical experience, but I wouldn't again. If entrance fees had not been so prohibitive I would have visited far more historical buildings, but Hagia Sophia is actually one of the cheaper options. It is interesting to see the fusion of Christian and Muslim architecture in the building: the dome shape is common between the two but was constructed in this case by Christians, the minarets were added when it initially became a mosque, and the inside is full of mosaics and paintings of Christian icons, some of which are covered. Most significantly, a large mosaic of Mary holding the child Jesus on the ceiling is covered with white curtains and only visible from a small area of the balcony. Mary was considered to protect the city and called upon as a sort of patron saint of Byzantine Constantinople.

The next day, I made a stop at a grocery store to fill my fanny pack with snacks for a long day of walking, then made my way out to the ancient wall of Constantinople. The wall is well within the current city of Istanbul, but at the time that the city fell it was the main fortification from land attacks and stretched from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn (a long inlet to the Bosphorus, the divide between Europe and Asia that splits modern Istanbul in half). Today the wall is largely in a state of disrepair but still has interesting points. I spent the day walking the length of it, a journey that took me well outside of the tourist area and lasted about 10 km altogether.

Sitting at my favourite point of the wall I wrote in my little notebook: A bedraggled one-eyed cat sits beside me in the cemetery by Egrikapi, the crooked gate in the ruins of the wall of Constantinople. A UNESCO world heritage structure, the city wall is not maintained or advertised, but this gate is intact with a two-way street barely wide enough for a single vehicle running through it. While the paving is new, the location of the street is original and takes a sharp turn on this side of the gate, lending Egrikapi its name.

A portion of the wall that had a lower wall, a section of land, and then a higher fortified wall, is now used as a sort of garden and is quite busy. Mostly the wall blends right into the city, crumbling into newer buildings. In a few places I was able to walk on top of the wall and through surviving gates.

The second costly historical building the I chose to visit was the Basilica Cistern, the Roman water supply for Topkapi Palace and the neighbourhoods above it. The scale of the place was baffling, with arched ceilings and pillars several storeys tall holding them up. The water appears to be only a foot or so deep, and yet it is a lot of water in a space of this size. I imagine also that it would have held far more water when it was in use. A black and white photo at the entrance showed a rowboat inside the cistern. One of the 336 columns, dating to 2nd century CE and probably taken from a nearby theater to be reused here, had a theater mask carved into the top.

San Sebastian cheesecake is not from here originally, but a cafe right next to Galata tower, another important historic building that I did not enter because it cost $48, became famous for their cheesecake with rich chocolate sauce, so I stopped there for a ($15) slice on the way past, which was absolutely lovely.

While walking in the early night I wandered past a beautiful storefront that I had to go inside and found an open-late bookstore with a cafe, bar, restaurant, and quiet study rooms. I found an English book about an Irish monk who shored himself up on an untouched island and took it with me for the next day's adventures. When I got back to the hotel and googled the bookstore I learned that the store, called Minoa Pera, was voted the most beautiful bookstore cafe in the world this year, which I think I could agree with, although I have seen many lovely bookstores.

The next day I took my new book with me on the ferry to Üsküdar, an area on the Asian side of Istanbul, where I found a park bench along the Bosphorus and read before taking a bus back over the massive bridge to Europe. On the ferry I sailed past Dolmabahce Palace, and I walked by Beylerbeyi Palace on the way to my park bench. I ate supper several blocks off of Istiklal street at an Ensa Lokantasi, a "tradesman restaurant" that serves home-style food on cafeteria-like trays for well under $10 a meal including dessert and a drink. One dish that I took looked like a Shepherd's pie to me but was actually soft stewed lamb under a yogurt-based roux, which I found a recipe for that I have now already made at home (with a bit less success than the restaurant certainly, but with a plan to improve the recipe for next time).

Another day I took another ferry to Adalar, the Prince's Islands, and got off at Burgazada, the third largest of the islands. I spent the afternoon with my fanny pack full of snacks wandering the island's beautiful flower-lined streets, eventually finding my way just past the marked highest point on the island down a narrow trail to a small clearing with a couch overlooking the sea. I sat there and drank my canned coffee and ate trail mix for a few hours before continuing clockwise around the island and finding myself at a rocky outcropping where the waves beat the shore just in time for sunset. The sun set at 18:13 and my ferry left at 18:45, but I couldn't tear myself away from the West side of the island before the sun disappeared, so I sat there in the cold ocean spray in my short-sleeved shirt until the colours faded, then hurried back to the East side ferry terminal and found my boat back toward Sultanahmet to get off at the old city and walk 20 minutes back to the hotel.

So many cats on Burgazada

View from the random couch

Sultanahmet from the ferry

Altogether I spent 8 days in Istanbul, and of course I didn't even see a sliver of the enormous city. At some point on the trip I picked up a book on the cultural history of Istanbul, which I read a bit of in the evenings in the hotel and a bit of on the plane rides back around naps to begin to piece together the long history of Istanbul and its people. I had a lovely time in the city and even in a few days I learned a lot about the empires that rose and fell to make Istanbul what it is today. I feel deeply privileged to have been able to visit, even if this trip was nowhere near what I planned and I was somewhat ill-prepared in my packing and planning. I'm looking forward to more forays into Asia in the future.

- A