Well well! Guess what I found when packing up our house in preparation for moving from South Africa to Ireland! My travel diary from 1999! My mom and I backpacked through Greece and Istanbul in August that year. I was in 3rd year ‘varsity, and we took the winter break to explore. This was pre-Google (more or less – at least in South Africa!), so we pitched up with no plan, just a “Let’s Go Greece and Turkey” guidebook (or possibly it was “Greece and Turkey on a Shoestring” – some such guide book) and a vague idea of what we wanted to do. Half the fun was supposed to be the unplanned nature of the trip (compared to previous structured holidays).

Herewith, the “transcript”. It is not complete – some days were just too full to have much time for writing, so a lot of Greece is “missing”.

• Part 1: Arrival, Istanbul
• Part 2: Greece