Taking the Hop on Hop off in Istanbul

nainaztengra (79)in #travel • 11 days ago

I can say that I made a mistake taking the Hop on Hop off tour in Istanbul. We had planned to do the city sight-seeing, visiting the main attractions of the city, so we opted to take the Hop on Hop off, which costed us 45 Euros per person, with 3 of us it costed us 135 Euros which was quite a lot. We took the ride and got down at our first stop which was called Sultanahmet and basically this is the place where all the main attractions are there. We spent almost the whole day here visiting the Topkapi Palace, Blue Mosque, Haga Sophia, Basilica Cistern and the Market, by the time we finished it was around 5 p.m. So then after that we again took the Hop on Hop off and continued our ride, but actually there was not much to see, because all the major attractions were already covered in Sultanahmet area. And moreover we were stuck in crazy traffic.

If we would have taken just a normal bus, tram ticket from our hotel to the attractions it would have costed us 5 euros per person both ways, and we would have saved 40 euros each :-(. I was very upset with hubby, because I kept telling him this all through out the previous day, but he was insistent that we take the hop on hop off and go through the city. Later on we were tired also, so we did not even enjoy the ride much, and it felt like a normal bus ride to us. These things do happen during travels, it is never always 100% perfect. After this through out the journey me and my son kept making fun of hubby on how he wasted money senselessly...hehe.

Nevertheless it was not all useless, I did get a good glimpse of the city and took some pictures as well of some of the places in the passing. Because of the traffic the bus was moving slowly and that gave me chance to get some pictures.

This place is full of beautiful Mosques all over the city.

Looks like a wonderful park

I am not sure exactly, but I think this is the Dolambache palace. There are 2 main palaces in Istanbul, one is Topkapi and the other one Dolambache. We chose to visit the Topkapi palace, it was just a random pick, both of them are good in their own ways.