Category: Minerva

Today, we arrived in Batumi, Georgia. My geography isn’t good at the best of times, and if you’d asked me to stick a pin in Georgia on a map, I wouldn’t have known where to start. I’m still not a hundred percent certain where we’ve been today, other than to say that Georgia is tucked somewhere in between Turkey and...

Today, we arrived in Trabzon, Turkey. It was another early start, as we were both assigned escorting duties on the ‘Sumela Monastery’ tour. Sumela is an ancient monastery situated at over 3000 feet in the hills, in a National Park roughly one hour’s coach drive from Trabzon. The journey there was relatively uneventful. It was a grey, drizzly morning, so...

Today, we arrived in Sinop, Turkey. The First of May is Labour Day in Turkey; the first day of holidays for school children and a day where peaceful protests take place in city centres across the country. Peaceful on account of the massive amount of policeman assigned to making sure they’re peaceful. Or that’s how our guide explained Labour Day...

This morning, the alarm went off at 5:30am, and we crawled out of bed unenthusiastically, and headed for the top decks. It was cold and a keen wind was blowing. Slowly, other passengers emerged; some in dressing gowns, all wielding cameras and ipads, most looking like they’d prefer to still be in bed. By 6:15am, we were passing Istanbul, on...

Today, we arrived in Canakkale (pronounced Chan-ackle-ee), where we were down for our first tour escort duty (well… I was… Tracey had a paid-for ticket), to visit the ancient city of Troy. At the grand old age of approximately 5000 years, Troy is actually several cities all built on top of each other. Naturally, there isn’t a great deal left,...