First day in Istanbul.
The plan of the day was to visit the major attractions of the city of Istanbul, that is, Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Palace and Sultan Ahmet Mosque (which was closed by the time we reached there).

We woke up in the morning with a wonderful but tiny view of Sea of Marmara through the rooftops of neighboring windows. I didn’t expect at all that our room would come with sea view.

Last day in the beautiful Cappadocia region.

I had been thinking quite hard about what to do for the day, and I was seriously planning for Lake Tuz. But out hotel manager told us that there wasn’t much water in the salt lake in this season, and usually people put Lake Tuz tour along with the Green Tour in one day (and it would be quite a long day then).

I finally decided on trekking the valleys of the Cappadocia region. I saw online and heard from our tour guides that many of the valleys in Cappadocia can actually be walked, and I was particularly interested in the Pigeon Valley from Göreme to Uchisar.
After some more research, I settled on one day’s hiking from Göreme, through Pigeon Valley to Uchisar, visit its historic castle (that’s often seen in the previous two day’s tours), and then walk North along Love Valley, and then walk back through an ATV trail on some nameless plateau back to Göreme.

But before that, I decided to wake up early and watch the sunrise, while the sky’s decorated with colorful air balloons.

Time to head back to Istanbul from Cappadocia.

The Cappadocia region has two airports, Nevsehir and Kayseri; also, Istanbul has two airports, Ataturk and Gokcen. Since we planned three full days at Cappadocia, we would be arriving at night, which meant we preferred the Ataturk Airport with its metro access much more than the distant Gokcen airport on the other side of the channel. Although Nevsehir Airport was closer to Goreme than Kayseri, it doesn’t make too much a difference, as both airports require shuttle services at similar prices. After that, our only choice seemed to be the three times daily service of Turkish Airlines to/from Nevsehir Airport.
I had to say, since both ends of our flight were at the better airports, plus Turkish Airlines was not the big-sale-onboard budget carriers, the price of our ticket did seemed a little bit high compared with our other transportations in Turkey.

The plan of the day was the historic old city of Antalya. Also, since Expo 2016 was going on in Antalya (and the city built a new tramway for it), we decided to pay it a visit.

The first stop of the day was Old Roman Harbor of Antalya. Once an economic lifeline to the city, now the old Roman Harbor mainly served tourism boats, while the actual port of Antalya had been relocated out of city.

The plan of the day was simple, took a bus ride from Kas to Antalya through Turkey’s beautiful coastal route of D400, and got settled in the Antalya hotel room.

The most worry-free day since we arrived in Turkey, as everything would be arranged for us on the 8-hour boat trip to Kekova.

Third day of sightseeing in Turkey, maybe this was the least active day so for.
The plan of the day was no more than paragliding down the mountains and over the beaches at Ölüdeniz, and then took the bus to Kaş.

Second day in Turkey.

Today our plan was to visit Pamukkale, a world natural heritage site not far from the city of Denizli, then catch an afternoon bus to Fethiye.

Although it says this post is for the first day in Turkey about Selcuk, but this post should start following flight PC4122 at Izmir Airport.

This post follows the previous one about flight QR241 from Doha to Istanbul Gokcen.

About my connection.
I was somehow limited by our fares that our outbound flight could only be to this remote airport on the Asian side of Istanbul, with virtually little public transport. So, I deemed the only way to make this work was to immediately fly to our next stop. Similar to most tourists to Turkey, our next stop could be either Goreme or Izmir, depending on whether we took the cycle of cities (Goreme, Antalya, Fethiye, etc) clockwise or anti-clockwise. Since my father had been and was hypercritical about connection times, he picked Izmir with 140-minute transit over Goreme with 120-minute transit. So our next flight was Pegasus Airlines 4122 to Izmir.