Friday 8 May 2026 – Happy 100th Birthday, Sir David!
Sir David Attenborough may have been overwhelmed by the (perfectly justified) outpouring of love, affection and respect on the day of his 100th birthday, but this was as nothing compared to the overwhelm we felt in the face of having to set an alarm clock for 0230 in the sodding morning in order to take an 0330 taxi ride to the sodding airport to catch a sodding 0605 flight. This is the earliest alarm call for a holiday travels in living memory and I fervently wish never to have to do it again. It was so early that even our taxi driver, Saeed, who regularly takes on the early morning shift for Woking Taxis, was grumbling. Being decent citizens, we got to the airport for 0400, two hours before our flight was due to take off, to discover that
they don’t open the sodding luggage belts until 0430. Not that having an extra half an hour in bed worrying about missing the alarm would have been any less unsatisfactory a start to the day; it’s just the sodding principal of the thing.
The morning crew in Heathrow T5 did start the luggage reception process promptly, so we were well up in the line to hand over our bags, and accordingly
had to wait whilst they started up the sodding security process. It wasn’t a long wait, but it’s the principle of the thing.
We got through security pretty quickly. It would have been even quicker had not Jane’s backpack got flagged up for investigation. It turned out that she had the most suspicious of items in her hand luggage – a book! You know, real paper and that. The combination of outrage and dulled senses meant that we’d taken a seat and ordered coffee before we realised that we were, horror of horrors, in a Starbuck’s. Fortunately, our dulled senses prevented us from being further outraged by the coffee itself, and at least our departure gate was actually by the coffee stop, so there were some compensations.
The flight actually pulled back early and arrived before schedule in Istanbul. We managed, of course, to pick the passport queue with the most diligent, thorough and slow check of people’s paperwork, but the upside of this was that the wait for our bags at the carousel was minimal – once we’d found our way to the carousels, that is. We discovered that Istanbul Airport is huge. It’s the larger of two international airports serving Istanbul (the other being Sabiha Gokcen), the largest privately-owned airport operation in the world, and the second busiest airport in Europe, behind Heathrow. Who knew? The practical upshot was a long walk to the passport desks, another long walk to the baggage hall and an utterly mind-bogglingly large arrivals duty free area. I reckon it’s bigger than any other duty-free retail area I’ve seen in Europe. And around this vast duty free area are at least two dozen carousels (ours was Belt 21) and – somewhere – an exit, although signs to it were noticeable more by their absence than their ubiquity. I wondered if the idea is to trap foreigners in there forever, existing solely on duty free chocolate and booze and using the perfumes to overcome the inevitable bodily odour resulting from that diet.
We eventually found the (I think) only sign to the exit and thence to Gate 9 where a chap with a Peter Sommer board awaited us and the other couple from our flight, Jackie and Andrew, who were part of this junket. We were then whisked into the heart of Istanbul to our hotel.
Well, not quite.
Istanbul Airport is some 40km outside the city, and the whisking got us through probably 35 of them at a reasonable clip on motorway, before we got into the inevitable sprawl that surrounds what is the largest city in Europe
and then progress slowed rather dramatically. It gave us the chance to take a couple of pictures of passing scenes,
including one schoolboy giggle for me,
and, at one particularly slow point, I was able to start wondering philosophically about the influence of English language
The white P in the blue square has clearly influenced the development of the Turkish language, in which I’m sure “Auto” and “Park” are not indigenous words. Architecturally, on the journey from the airport, we’d obviously noted the prevalence of mosques as being an important visual cue that we were bordering the Middle East, so seeing this building
was not something I’d expected, which just goes to show I should have paid more attention to the information provided by Peter Sommer, because it’s a significant landmark in Istanbul called the Galata Tower, it takes its name from the area of the city it’s in and our hotel was the Galata Hotel.
Unsurprisingly, our room was not ready for us when we arrived at the hotel, so we took ourselves off to its second-floor restaurant for lunch. It was not overly busy
and the Caesar Salad, whilst very welcome, was slightly divergent from what one might expect in a UK restaurant, but it passed the time until we could get into our room, which was comfortable but a little on the compact side. It’s nice and modern, though, with international plug sockets and multiple USB points around the room, which is something I’m in favour of.
Unsurprisingly, we were somewhat knackered by this point in the day, so we took the opportunity for a bit of a rest, but then our usual instinct clicked in and we decided that we needed to go for a walk. Obviously. Jane had spotted that the Galata Tower was (a) A Thing that tourists could visit and (b) only minutes away from the hotel, so we headed thither, to discover that we weren’t the only people with this idea.
We really weren’t.
Really, really not.
However, overriding my normal instinct on seeing a queue like this, which is to say “fuck it” and walk away, we realised that today was probably going to be our only opportunity to go up the tower, so we stuck with it. I wandered off to take a few photos in the area whilst Jane guarded our spot in the queue.
On my return to the queue, we realised the first thing that we’d forgotten to pack – we had none of Twinings finest Earl Grey with us! Shock! Horror! What were we to do?
In the short term, the answer was “nothing”. We inched our way forwards for some 45 minutes until we got to the front, where a chap was on hand to make sure there was no trouble from people trying to push in.
Going up the tower is quite easy, as a lift takes one to the sixth floor, whence a couple of flights of stairs lead to the outside balcony which goes right round the tower. And the views are pretty spectacular.
One is directed to take the steps (rather than the lift) as the way down from the tower. On the various levels there were things on display, such as a rather engaging model of the city
and a traditional Turkish vessel.
There was also an interactive sort of display/video game on the topic of the first recorded base jump from the tower. This was (reportedly) done by one Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi, in 1632, who constructed a large wing and then flew across the Bosporus to land safely on the other side, aided by a south-westerly wind – thus predating the (scientifically verified) work of Otto Lilienthal, conventionally regarded as the first man to successful execute heavier-than-air flight. In theory, one can stand in front of a screen and do a Microsoft Flight Simulator with body and arm motion to steer, though it looked a little clunky when we watched.
Frankly, I think the story is bollocks. The altitude at the top of the tower is maybe 115m above sea level, and to create something in the 17th century that would glide 3,385m? I don’t think so.
Some of the stairways down were OK for people up to about 5′ 9″,
but a bit cramped for me, as I’m over 6′ tall. But we made it down successfully with no cranial contusions and made our way back to the hotel.
At 7pm we went down to the lobby to meet our guides, Professor Jim Crow and Seçkin Demirok, and our fellow travellers. Our group is 18 strong, and we chatted to Penelope and Chantelle whilst we waited for the others to come along and to get the initial briefing about our time in Istanbul. It took a little while, but eventually we had a few introductory words from Jim and Seçkin before we strolled out for some dinner. The route to our restaurant led past a lot of shuttered entrances, many of which had been decorated with painted figures, some well-known
and some less so.
The restaurant we went to, Mahkeme Lokantası, had a private room for us (confusingly accessed through a different front door), where we came face to face with what I suspect are typical realities of eating out in Istanbul – many, many starters with bread, followed at a leisurely pace by main course, then dessert and tea or coffee. It was around 8pm when we started eating, a time which is uncomfortably late for us, and especially bearing in mind that it was by this stage some 18 hours after we’d been roused from our slumbers. The food was lovely, but the quantities far too generous, and so Jane and I took our leave before the end of the meal to give us a chance to catch up with some much needed sleep.
Thus ended our first day. The morrow promises to be content-rich, with visits to mosques, museums, carpet shops and, excitingly, cisterns! Stay tuned to find out how that all went!