Cool Head Warm Heart

Day 1, 17 Nov 2006:

The flight departure time was 9.00am. We met our Malaysian tour guide Miss Yong PS from Summit Holidays at KLIA, 7.00 am. (We signed up the tour through Orange World Holidays.) After an 11 hours flight, we reached Istanbul at local time 2.00pm. The time difference between Malaysia and Turkey is 6 hours.

Once touched down and out from emigration we got our currency exchange done. Yeni Turkish Lira (YTL, or new Turkish Lira) is not available in Malaysia. Before the trip we exchanged RM for USD and Euro (just in case). Most Turkey places accept all three currencies, i.e. YTL, USD and Euro. YTL is the default currency in Turkey (of course) and, in hindsight with USD and YTL available, we don’t need Euro.

By the way, we did NOT wait for long to get our luggage at Istanbul. It was much faster than the experience 9 days later at KLIA.

There were 31 of us from Malaysia including our Malaysian tour guide Ms Yong. We have a good mix of Chinese and Malays. The youngest is 4 and the oldest is 66. My son was happy to find out there was another Malay family with 3 children of 4, 7 and 10 year old. It was when he started to abandon us and slowly blended into that family as if his own.

The local tour operator was Dorak Tours. Our local tour guide Mr Sinan Sinangil was waiting for us at the arrival hall. We were introduced to another Mr Sinan, the coach driver, and his assitant Mr Hakan. That was when I had my first few surprises. For one, how do you think Turks should look like?

Previous post on Turkey

The Photo: Looking down to Red Sea from the sky. Look at the tip of the MAS’s plane wings.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Travelogue, Turkey Trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.