Eventually we dragged ourselves away from Lesbos and caught the ferry across to Turkey, arriving in the port town of Ayvalık. After ten very comfortable days of ouzo, good food and doing very little, it was time to start travelling properly again.

We stepped off the ferry, collected our bags and set off in search of the bus station.

For reasons that are now completely unclear, we decided it was somewhere in town.

So we walked.

And walked.

With backpacks.

After a couple of kilometres we eventually discovered that the bus station was approximately one hundred metres from the ferry terminal.

In the opposite direction.

This was excellent news.

We had, in effect, arrived beside the bus station and then deliberately walked away from it.

By then we were hot, hungry and not especially interested in immediately walking all the way back, so we stopped for lunch. Unfortunately lunch did very little to improve matters. It was fairly ordinary and certainly not good enough to justify having carried our packs several kilometres in the wrong direction.

Eventually there was nothing for it but to turn around and walk back.

When we reached the bus station we discovered that Turkey’s transport system was going to involve rather more buses and minibuses than we had been used to. We squeezed ourselves into a packed minivan and set off, stopping at what appeared to be every town, village, petrol station and possibly private house between Ayvalık and wherever we were changing next.

The van filled and emptied constantly. People climbed in with bags, boxes and assorted belongings, had lengthy conversations with the driver and disappeared again twenty minutes later.

We just stayed put.

Eventually we were deposited at another bus station where we had several hours to wait for our connection.

This turned out to be surprisingly entertaining.

All around us waiters hurried between the buses and cafés carrying silver trays loaded with tiny tulip-shaped glasses of tea. Drivers drank tea. Passengers drank tea. Men standing around apparently doing nothing drank tea.

Turkey, we quickly discovered, took tea very seriously.

The little glasses seemed entirely impractical for anyone with large hands and were always filled with tea hot enough to remove several layers of skin, but everyone else seemed to manage perfectly well.

Eventually our bus arrived and we continued north towards Çanakkale, sitting on the Asian side of the Dardanelles opposite the Gallipoli Peninsula.

For Australians, Gallipoli has a particular significance, and being there made that part of history feel considerably less remote than it had from the other side of the world. Across the water was the peninsula where Australian and New Zealand troops landed in 1915, while Çanakkale itself had been an important point controlling the narrow strait for centuries.

We stayed for two nights, using the town as a base to visit Troy.

Troy is one of those places everyone has heard of long before they know exactly where it is. Homer, Helen, Paris, Achilles and, of course, the horse have all done a very good job of keeping the name alive for a few thousand years.

The archaeological site itself contains the remains of several different cities built one on top of another over thousands of years. It is not a single beautifully preserved ancient city in the way Ephesus would turn out to be later, and it takes a little imagination to make sense of the layers of walls and foundations.

Fortunately, by this stage of the trip we had become reasonably accomplished at looking at a pile of ancient stones and imagining something much grander.

After Çanakkale it was back onto another bus, this time bound for Istanbul.

I was enormously excited.

Istanbul had been on my list of places I wanted to see for years. The city straddling Europe and Asia, the Bosphorus, the mosques, the bazaars — in my head it was going to be magnificent.

We arrived at the enormous Büyük Otogar bus station late in the afternoon and somehow negotiated our way across Istanbul to Sultanahmet and the hostel we had booked.

The hostel was ordinary.

Very ordinary.

Our roommates were also fairly unpleasant, which didn’t help. There is a particular kind of hostel traveller who seems genuinely surprised to discover that other people are sharing the dormitory they booked. We appeared to have found some.

Still, we hadn’t come to Istanbul for the hostel.

We headed out.

Sultanahmet put us right among some of the city’s great sights, and despite the rather underwhelming accommodation it was impossible not to be impressed by where we were.

We visited the Blue Mosque, with its great domes and minarets rising above the old city. Inside, the scale of the building was extraordinary, but what I remember most was the blue İznik tiles that give the mosque its name, covering the interior with intricate patterns.

We wandered through Topkapı Palace, once the centre of the Ottoman Empire and home to generations of sultans. The palace sprawls across a hill overlooking the Bosphorus and is a collection of courtyards, pavilions and beautifully decorated rooms rather than one enormous building. There were treasures, weapons, ceramics and enough gold and decoration to make it quite clear that Ottoman rulers had not been particularly committed to minimalism.

Then there was the Grand Bazaar.

We disappeared into its maze of covered streets lined with shops selling carpets, jewellery, lamps, leather, ceramics, spices and virtually anything else someone might persuade a tourist to carry home.

Everywhere somebody wanted to sell us something.

Fortunately they also wanted to give us apple tea while they tried.

I became very fond of Turkish apple tea.

This was possibly a tactical error, as accepting tea seemed to imply that one was now available for a forty-minute discussion about carpets.

We weren’t buying carpets.

This did not stop anyone showing us carpets.

Istanbul itself was everything you would expect from a city that had spent centuries sitting between continents and empires. Ferries crossed the Bosphorus constantly, minarets punctuated the skyline and the streets were full of people, traffic, food, markets and noise.

Unfortunately, I was also coming down with the flu.

This was poor timing.

There are cities where feeling dreadful and wanting to lie down for several hours probably doesn’t matter too much.

Istanbul is not really one of them.

I tried to ignore it for as long as possible, but after three days I was feeling increasingly awful and our hostel had not improved sufficiently to make staying in bed there an attractive option.

So despite having waited years to see Istanbul, we decided to move on.

I knew even then that three days was nowhere near enough and that we would have to come back one day and do it properly.

We booked an overnight bus south to Selçuk.

At some point during the night the bus joined a truck ferry to cross the water. I remember sitting there surrounded by enormous lorries while the ferry carried the entire collection across in the darkness.

I also remember a toilet stop involving one of the more challenging squat toilets of the trip.

There are some travel experiences that broaden the mind.

Others mainly test your thigh muscles.

We arrived in Selçuk early the next morning and made our way to the ANZ Guesthouse.

We loved it immediately.

It was a double-storey building arranged around a courtyard filled with couches and tables, the sort of place where it was very easy to sit down for ten minutes and discover an hour later that you were still there.

The owner was Turkish but had grown up in Australia, which explained the name and immediately gave us something to talk about.

At some point I jokingly asked whether he had any Vegemite.

He disappeared.

Then he returned with Vegemite.

I was impressed.

There are moments when being Australian overseas becomes extremely uncomplicated.

Selçuk itself was also a pleasant change after the size and intensity of Istanbul. It was smaller, easier to get around and had plenty of good places to eat. Near the guesthouse we found a restaurant serving excellent Turkish food and, once again, I drank considerable quantities of apple tea.

By then it had become one of the constants of Turkey.

Someone would feed us.

Then somebody would produce tea.

This seemed a perfectly reasonable system.

The main reason we had come to Selçuk was Ephesus.

I had seen a lot of Greek and Roman ruins by then and, if I am honest, there comes a point in extended travel when yet another collection of columns can begin to look suspiciously like the last collection of columns.

Ephesus was different.

It was magnificent.

The ancient city had once been one of the great cities of the Mediterranean world and enough survives to make it possible to imagine what it must have looked like when thousands of people lived there.

We walked down the old marble streets with columns still lining the route, past temples, fountains, public buildings and houses.

The Library of Celsus was extraordinary. Its reconstructed façade rises above the old street, covered with columns and carved details, and is one of those buildings that somehow manages to live up to the photographs.

Then there was the enormous theatre, built into the hillside and capable of holding thousands of people.

Unlike Troy, where you needed quite a bit of imagination to rebuild the city in your head, Ephesus did much of the work for you.

The streets were still there.

The buildings made sense.

You could see how the city fitted together.

For me, it was easily one of the best ancient sites we had visited anywhere.

Selçuk also has plenty of history of its own. Above the town are the remains of the Basilica of St John, built in the sixth century on what tradition holds to be the burial place of John the Apostle. Nearby is the House of the Virgin Mary, another important pilgrimage site, believed by some traditions to have been where Mary spent the final years of her life.

By the time we left Selçuk, Turkey had given us a slightly mixed experience.

Istanbul had been somewhere I had desperately wanted to see, but three days, a fairly grim hostel and a dose of flu had not exactly allowed the city to present itself under ideal conditions.

Selçuk, on the other hand, had been easy from the moment we arrived.

There was a great guesthouse, lovely people, excellent food, endless apple tea, unexpected Vegemite and Ephesus just down the road.

It was enough to make one thing very clear.

We had barely scratched the surface of Turkey.

We would have to come back.