Gallipoli and the Anzac’s
Friday, August 22nd, 2008My bus ride over to the base town for visiting the Gallipoli peninsula was around 5 hour long. I chatted to a lovely Turkish girl on the way who is studying English and off to visit her friends for the weekend. It was nice to be able to talk to a female for a change and interesting talking about Turkey and the future and the past. The country has had a crazy history and interesting now with becoming more modern and things. So it was a nice journey. Our bus drove onto a boat for the last bit and we crossed the Dardanelles to Cannakale.
I had booked into a hostel which unsurprisingly had a lot of Aussies there to visit Gallipoli, the town is also the base to see the historic site of Troy, however I gave that the chop as I have enough ruins to get me by. I went for a bit of a walk around the town before it got dark, a nice place, not really any tourists which was great and no one harrasing you to eat or buy stuff. I grabbed a pide (turkish pizza) for tea and spent the evening watching the Aussie movie Gallipoli with Mel Gibson at the hostel. I’ve never seen it before and while apparently its very bias it was a good way to get a bit more of an overview of the battles.
I booked in for a day tour of the peninsula with the hostel, as the area is too big to explore on foot and I thought it would be good to have someone explain. Obviously for Kiwis and Aussies, Gallipoli is a really important part of their history but also important for British and Turkish. So there was a bit of a mix on the tour but mostly Aussies. We had lunch included at a restaurant made for your groups then jumped on a our big air-con tour bus with our guide on the microphone…despite being everything I hated about traveling it turned out to be really good and our guide was able to explain lots of things. As we were fighting the Turkish I did wonder how a Turkish guide could be sympathetic towards Anzac troupes when they killed thousands of their own soldiers but he was really goof at explaining how lots of people died on both sides and the whole thing was a tragedy for everyone and really pointless in the end and its not really about who won or lost but that it was a terrible thing for all involved. One memorial had a quote about those allied troops who died now rest in a friendly country and they are important to Turkey and things. We visited the cemeteries of the soldiers as well as Anzac cove where the solider landed. A tiny strip of beach with an almost vertical cliff face, which was of course, the wrong beach to land at.
We saw the Aussie memorial as well as the kiwi one which was at Chunuk Bair, the highest point of the peninsula which was the aim to capture and the kiwi soldiers were the only ones who made it there. All the old trenches are still there and at some points they are only about 8 meters between the two sides. So during trench warfare basically you would just die, and thousands from both sides just went and were killed instantly.
During points of no fighting the Turkish and Anzac soldiers shared food and tobacco and had concerts. Its a strange way of thinking about that one day then killing each other the next. I am not normally very interested in war and things but this was very interesting and educational, it made me really proud to be a kiwi but also how terrible war is and how depressingly sad that we never learned from those 2 major wars. Altogether from both sides if you add up people killed on site and also after from injuries the total casualties was 500,000 over the 8month campaign. Terribly sad.
By the time we got back to the hotel it had been 6 hours so I had a rest and tried to get some sleep as my bus the following day left at 3am, towards Bulgaria which was I was hoping to get to in one day
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