Wheelchair Accessible European Vacation: Kusadasi, Turkey

Little known fact: the international sister city to Kusadasi, Turkey, is Monterey, California, USA. Huh.

This port city of some 65,000 lies on Turkey's Aegean Coast, that sunny body of water nestled between Turkey and Greece just north of the Mediterranean Sea. Nearby, the ruins of Ephesus draw millions of tourists to the remains of the ancient Greek and Roman outposts, but we decided to just explore Kusadasi and it's shops near the waterfront.
As before, Em's power chair got her off the boat and around town with no difficulty. Certainly in the more rural or less tourist-oriented areas of Turkey, such accessibilty would be less likely, but in here, where the cruiselines are an economic mainstay, the shops and buildings attempt to cater to wheelers and slow-walkers pretty successfully...

Just outside the main bazaar area in Kusadasi is this fairly large and somewhat surreal cemetary. I'm not sure why the base of the trees were limed, but the effect was kind of chilling; the mix of modern Turkish, using the Latin alphabet, and the pre-Atatürk Ottoman Turkish, with its swirling Arabic script, on the stones leaves the native English speaker without a frame of reference, emphasizing the universally mortal meaning of a graveyard.

Heading into the bazaar that sprawls for several miles around the port harbour, we noticed that nearly every building and streetcorner had ramps or cutouts of wheeled transport- more likely handcarts for foodstuffs, leather knickknacks or faux designer shirts, than wheelchairs, but pretty servicable, especially with a little help, always offered by the storeowner, happy for the trade.

We picked up some baklava and other little treats from a tiny bakery at the fringe of the bazaar, and circled around to navigate back through the narrow alleys cluttered with rip-off brands of clothing, wood and leather things like mini-scimitar letteropeners or (possibly) handmade wool kilim carpets... The smell of coffee and tea, dough and honey, was pleasantly floating and although it was a little like a scripted play, where every storeowner in turn as we rolled through went through his lines of "My turn, please, many good things to find..." and "Hello, hello- where are you from please?" and, we believe without irony: "This way please, we have free parking..."

Some of the fare offered was slightly more Western, though exotic enough to be fun...

In what seemed to be the center of the bazaar, a small washing station marked the entrace to a mosque, modestly tucked into a nearby building neighbored on either side by more ubiquitous purveyors of souvenirs.