Henry Poon's Blog

We planned this trip so last minute that, that we wrote down the wrong hotel in our itinerary, arriving at the wrong establishment on our first evening.

We headed eastward across the Iberian Peninsula toward Gibraltar.

We arrived in Tangier in the morning after boarding the ferry from Tarifa, a small coastal town in southern Spain.

It started when we scored what we thought to be a pretty good deal on Air Canada business class tickets to Spain at just ~$2k for the outbound flight.

We had always been curious about Istanbul’s history, but actually wandering through Sultanahmet put us in the centre of centuries-old architecture.

Arriving at Pamukkale in the morning, the first thing that caught our attention was the dazzling sweep of white, rising from the plain like a tiered amphitheatre.

When someone else in our tour group asked our guide about the possibility of visiting an additional archaeological site not included in our official itinerary, we jumped at the chance.

We started our visit in Selçuk, small town in İzmir Province sits at the heart of one of Turkey’s most significant archaeological regions, where layers of Byzantine, Ottoman, and Roman history create a compelling narrative of civilizational change.

We were on what we thought was a fixed tour itinerary, until a history-loving fellow traveller asked if we could squeeze in Pergamon’s hill-top ruins.

During the peak of Turkey’s summer heat wave, our journey took us from the legendary ruins of Troy, where Homer’s epic tales come alive, to the charming coastal town of Ayvalik, where modern social innovation meets traditional Mediterranean life.