After eight hours in five dolmuses, I arrived in Sinop, Turkey, on a Saturday night. I had been pulled out of Greece to do emergency supplemental research for Let’s Go, writing new coverage about beach towns on the Black Sea. Without any Let’s Go hotels set out for me in Sinop I was left to my own devices. I walked into the first hotel I found-directly across the street from the otogar (bus station). An old, bearded Turk in front of the hotel had invited me in and told me the price for a bed was 500,000 Turkish Lira. That’s about three dollars and 25 cents in my native American currency.
So I was shacked up at the Gul Palas Otel. The night before on the beach in Amasra, 200 miles west of Sinop, I had met a med student named Gul, she translated her name into English for me and so I called her Doctor Rose. Now I found myself in the Rose Palace. In addition to the otogar, the Rose Palace’s immediate neighbors included a mosque with a prayer caller who specialized in vibrato and a prison; that’s right: a Turkish prison. All this was enclosed by massive stone fortifications first erected by colonists from Greece in the Seventh Century B.C.
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Perhaps the best resource on the Net for would-be European travelers is www.budgettravel.com. It has them most extensive European bus listings and “ferry/ waterways/ canals” listings that you’re bound to find anywhere, even in public archives. It has web links to six detailed sites of individual ferry companies in Croatia alone, and provides contact info and price information about many others within the country. You can plan almost everything about your European vacation in advance here, and although the more laid-back, drifter-type travelers will shudder at his European information superhighway, it is an ideal site for first time travelers or those who enjoy a little advance planning.
Another site geared towards European travelers is the surprisingly-named www.eurotrip.com. It doesn’t have nearly the kind of pragmatic, hard information as the previous European travel site, but it is easy to use and navigate. The design is very simple and, in this era of hyperactive web sites-web sites that cause your computer to play very bad loud music and flash all sorts of strange colors-it is not taxing to visit. No frills, no gimmicks. It’s a relatively new site and should be getting more hi-tech pretty soon.
Though it is not very European, is a new site that helps you plan Honolulu Vacation Packages. It has a lot of information to help you plan your trip, starting with what places to visit, where to stay, right through to what to wear. Excellent!
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