Interesting Turkish city. In 2020 they will have an EXPO and you can already see that they are trying to patch the city up. The old town (with the Bazaar) is nice to see and there are few landmarks. The city feels more asian (middle eastern) than Istanbul. The people are in general very friendly, but they love to take your money. You need to haggle for everything. Paying 10-15 TL (2,5 TL = 1 EUR) ...
EphesusPrivate excursion (Ephesus Shuttle) was less than the cruise excursion and we had our own guide and a driver. Ask for Gurka (?) he is a well-educated young man and did a great job. My complaint is with the company- they will take you to a "state-sponsored" rug factory for lunch. I requested to go to a lunch place of my choosing instead which they said no problem in our emails. However, our ...
Izmir was very interesting. We walked from the port to the bazaar which took about 60 minutes but you can catch the hop-on-hop-off stop right at the port. ...
We walked from the port to the Barzaar. Nice flat walk around the water front. However cabs are waiting at the port and are not expensive. The Barzaar is busy Nd large. The sellers are trying to get you to buy their goods. Lots of clothes, carpets knock off goods. They sell fresh Turkish delight by the kilo and it is very good. People are friendly and we enjoyed our day there. ...
Not the best port of call. We missed the bus tour of the town, not enough buses. The taxi drivers fought over us. We had 2 taxis and they piled 6 in one taxi and the 4 of us in the other, which was quite ridiculous. ...
When we got off the boat at Izmir we took the City Bus tour which costs about 10 euros each or 25 lira. (euros works out cheaper) This drives you around the city and you can get on and off all day as many times as you like. The only downside is the buses run every 30 minutes and we actually had to wait close to an hour to get back on a bus once we had got off.
Izmir is not particularly exciting, ...
Izmir: My mom and I backpacked through Greece and Turkey during summer 2002 and already have seen the magnificent Kusadasi and Efes. We elected to stay back and explore Izmir. Once you walk out the cruise terminal, you will have to walk outside the fenced terminal perimeter to grab a cab. There was no public transportation running on Sunday, so that was the only option presented to us by the ...
Our guide met us at the port in a new Van. As we journeyed to Ephesus, she gave us a wealth of information about the area. We first went to Mary"s House, which was
a basic stone cottage with a holy water fountain.spiggot.
Following that, we traveled about 10 mins. to Ephesus, which was a spectacular site It allowed us to visualize how folks lived 2 thousand years ago.
next, we visited the ...
