Gallipoli Peninsula
Trip Start
Sep 15, 2008
1
8
9
Trip End
Oct 15, 2008
Gallipoli, Turkey
Sunday, October 12, 2008
We organised to join another tour and caught a bus to Eceabat. Dom who had traveled East further into Turkey, was still catching up to us at this point so we elected to miss the start of the tour to allow her time to arrive in Eceabat. This ended up working in our favour as we were given a private tour in a taxi with a brilliant guide who knew his history and was really enthusiastic about it.
On the tour, we went to Brighton Beach and ANZAC Cove where despite the violent past of the place you can appreciate that it really is a beautiful area. One of the most moving tributes is a marble monument containing Ataturk's address to New Zealand and Australian families saying in brief that that the fallen are at rest in their country and are honoured along with the Turks that died.
Further along we visited the site where the ANZAC dawn services are held. It was surprisingly small given that it hosts around 15,000 people on ANZAC day. From here, we continued up the hill further and visited the Australian Memorial first, then the New Zealand Memorial and finally the Turkish Memorial.
Off the road in many places were the remains of the trenches used by the diggers in World War 1. Some were preserved to enable people to see what they were like when in use and others had been left to erode and had slowly be filled in over time to become small depression amongst the trees.
That evening, to get a better understanding of what we had seen we watched the Australian movie Gallipoli. This seems to be something that all tours do after visiting the Peninsular but it is a good movie and was a nice way to complete the experience for us.
Gallipoli as a whole was a very affecting experience. It was a very sombre day and it gave me a new appreciation for why we celebrate the sacrifice of military servicemen and women. Something that I don't think I had been able to fully appreciate up till that point.
