Gather for dinner at a local Istanbul restaurant with your fellow travellers. Share a meal and conversation shaped by the places, people and traditions encountered across Turkey.

Istanbul’s dining scene reflects influences from both sides of the Bosphorus and regions far beyond it. This hosted group dinner offers a convivial close to the journey, with time to exchange impressions of ancient sites, Cappadocian landscapes and the city’s own lively streets.

Meet your Travel Director and fellow travellers over dinner at a local restaurant in Istanbul. Share your first tastes of Turkish cuisine while getting to know the small group you will travel with.

Istanbul’s food culture draws on traditions from across Anatolia and the former Ottoman Empire. A meal here offers an inviting introduction to the city’s hospitality and a chance to hear what has brought everyone to Turkey.

• 7 Dinner (D)
• 10 Breakfast (B)
• 1 Lunch (L)

• Cappadocia: Step inside a traditional cave house and meet a local Cappadocian who has lived there for decades. Hear how the home was shaped, how it has changed over time and what it means to remain rooted in this landscape.

• Hand sanitizer is freely available on board for you to use throughout the day.

Insight Vacations

Visit ANZAC Cove and Lone Pine Cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula, where Australian and New Zealand forces fought during the First World War. See the coastal terrain that shaped the campaign and learn why these places remain central to remembrance.

ANZAC troops landed at the cove on 25 April 1915. Lone Pine commemorates soldiers who died in the campaign, while the cove remains a focus of annual ANZAC Day services. The visit gives a human scale to the peninsula’s history.

Explore the ancient site of Troy and see its reconstructed Trojan Horse. Walk among the remains of a settlement whose long history became entwined with the legendary war of Paris, Helen and the Greek armies.

Troy was occupied and rebuilt across many centuries, leaving layers that reveal more than a single moment in antiquity. Its walls and archaeological remains invite you to consider the difference between the city uncovered by excavators and the story preserved in epic poetry.

Visit the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in Selcuk to examine artefacts recovered from the nearby ancient city. Its collections bring the people and beliefs of Ephesus into focus through objects that once belonged to daily and ceremonial life.

The museum provides a close-up perspective that the city’s monumental ruins cannot offer on their own. Look for details in the sculpture and decorative work that speak to Ephesus’s importance as a centre of trade and culture.

Watch an Anatolian carpet-weaving demonstration and see how a pattern takes shape through hand-knotting. Learn about the symbolic motifs and natural dyes that give traditional carpets their colour and character.

Carpet-making is a craft passed through generations across Anatolia, with techniques and designs varying between communities. Seeing the work at close range reveals the patience behind each textile and the cultural knowledge carried in its materials and patterns.

Walk through Ephesus with a Local Expert, following the colonnaded Arcadian Way towards the Library of Celsus and the city’s vast theatre. In the hills above the ruins, visit the House of the Virgin Mary.

Ephesus was one of the Roman world’s great cities, and its surviving streets convey the scale of its public life. The hillside house is a place of Christian pilgrimage, adding a different perspective on the region’s layered religious history.

Walk alongside Pamukkale’s white travertine terraces with your Travel Director and explore nearby Hierapolis, an ancient spa city. See the theatre and the mineral-water landscape that has drawn visitors to this hillside for centuries.

Calcium-rich thermal water continues to leave deposits as it flows, forming Pamukkale’s pale terraces and pools. Hierapolis grew around the same springs, linking the striking natural formations to a long history of bathing, settlement and Roman public life.

Discover Anatolia’s leather-making heritage through an introduction to a craft long associated with the region. Learn how skilled makers and traders helped sustain this tradition across generations.

The craft has historical links to the Ahi guilds of medieval Anatolia and to Ahi Evran, a 13th-century figure associated with leatherworkers. This experience offers cultural context for the craftsmanship you encounter, rather than a visit to a named historic site.

Step inside Sultanhani Caravanserai, built in 1229 as a place of shelter for merchants and travellers crossing the Anatolian plain. Explore its courtyard and the spaces designed to accommodate people, animals and goods.

Caravanserais were essential to overland trade, offering a protected place to rest along demanding routes. The building’s stonework and practical layout make the experience of medieval travel easier to picture, from stabling animals to storing a caravan’s cargo overnight.

Explore Goreme’s rock-cut churches, carved into Cappadocia’s soft volcanic stone. Step inside to see surviving frescoes and discover how early Christian communities created places of worship within the landscape itself.

The paintings bring colour and human detail to interiors shaped from rock centuries ago. Together, the churches reveal a distinctive meeting of faith, art and geology: the same stone that formed Cappadocia’s valleys also provided spaces for communal religious life.

Step inside a traditional cave house and meet a Cappadocian resident who has lived in the area for decades. Tour the home and hear about family life, local customs and the practicalities of living in a space shaped from rock.

Cappadocia’s carved dwellings are more than a feature of its scenery. This personal visit shows how a home can change over time while remaining part of a long local tradition, giving the landscape a lived-in, contemporary dimension.

Watch a Whirling Dervishes performance in Cappadocia and share dinner at a local restaurant. Observe the measured movement, music and distinctive white robes associated with the Mevlevi tradition.

The practice has roots in the teachings of the 13th-century poet and mystic Rumi. Encountering it in person offers insight into a spiritual tradition with deep ties to Anatolia, while the shared meal provides time to reflect on the performance together.

Visit a pottery studio in Avanos to watch local makers work with the town’s characteristic red clay. See how the clay is prepared, shaped at the wheel, dried and decorated.

Set beside the Kizilirmak River, Avanos has a pottery tradition reaching back to Hittite times. Watching the stages of production brings that long history into the present and shows the control required to turn river clay into an everyday vessel or a decorative piece.

Visit Ankara’s Hittite Museum to encounter artefacts from the ancient civilisations of Anatolia. Examine objects that help explain the region’s history long before the founding of the modern Turkish Republic.

The Hittites established a major power in central Anatolia during the Bronze Age. A museum visit gives context to that distant era through surviving material culture, connecting Ankara’s setting to the much older societies that lived and worked across the surrounding plateau.

Cruise the Bosphorus, the waterway running between Istanbul’s European and Asian shores. From the boat, watch ferries, fishing boats and cargo ships share the strait as waterside houses, mosques and palace facades pass by.

Linking the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus has shaped Istanbul’s trade, neighbourhoods and daily movement for centuries. A cruise gives you a waterside view of how closely the city’s architecture and life are tied to the strait.

Explore Istanbul’s historic peninsula with a Local Expert, taking in the Blue Mosque and Hippodrome before visiting Topkapi Palace and the Grand Bazaar. See landmarks of imperial power alongside lanes still animated by trade.

The Hippodrome was a centre of public life in Byzantine Constantinople; Topkapi became the seat of Ottoman sultans. At the Grand Bazaar, textiles, ceramics and other goods keep a centuries-old commercial tradition visible, giving this tour a broad view of the city’s layered history.

Choose an immersive digital exploration of Hagia Sophia’s history as one of two included Insight Choice experiences in Istanbul. Through exhibits and digital interpretation, trace the landmark’s changing role across the centuries.

Built in the sixth century, Hagia Sophia served first as a Byzantine cathedral and later as an Ottoman mosque. This option focuses on making its layered past accessible through visual storytelling. It is an alternative to the included visit to Hagia Sophia with a Local Expert.

Visit Hagia Sophia with a Local Expert as one of two included Insight Choice experiences in Istanbul. Stand beneath its vast central dome and observe architectural details that reflect its Byzantine and Ottoman chapters.

Completed in AD 537, the building has been a defining landmark of the city for nearly fifteen centuries. Expert interpretation helps connect what you see inside to its changing religious and imperial history. This option is an alternative to the Hagia Sophia History Digital Experience.

Watch hot-air balloons lift into the sunrise above Cappadocia’s valleys on this optional early-morning experience. See their colourful silhouettes drift across a landscape of rock formations and carved hillsides.

The low morning light brings out the contours of Cappadocia’s volcanic terrain, making the balloon-filled sky a distinctive sight even from the ground. This is a balloon-watching experience, not a balloon flight. It is available at additional cost and bookable on tour.

Visit the Copmadam workshop in Ayvalik to see how local women transform discarded packaging into distinctive handmade items. Learn about the work involved and the employment opportunities the initiative creates.

This MAKE TRAVEL MATTER® experience connects a practical approach to reuse with women’s economic participation. Seeing the finished pieces alongside the materials from which they are made offers a tangible view of the workshop’s creativity and its contribution to the local community.

Walk through the vines and crop fields at Nif Baglari, a family-owned wine producer in the foothills near Izmir. Learn how the property is cultivated before sitting down to a farm-to-table lunch of seasonal dishes.

Produce grown on the property brings the surrounding landscape directly to the table. The vineyard setting offers a closer look at contemporary farming in western Anatolia, with time to appreciate the flavours and rhythms of a working family estate.

Explore the underground city of Saratli, moving through carved tunnels, rooms and passageways beneath Cappadocia’s volcanic landscape. See how spaces below ground were arranged for shelter, storage and the necessities of daily life.

The region’s workable rock allowed communities to create substantial protected interiors. Walking through the lower levels reveals the ingenuity involved in making these confined spaces usable and offers a striking contrast with Cappadocia’s open valleys above.

Explore Pasabag Valley to see Cappadocia’s fairy chimneys: tall rock pillars shaped by erosion. Look closely at the formations and the dwellings carved into the area’s soft volcanic stone.

Near Zelve, the valley offers a clear view of how natural forces and human settlement have shaped the same landscape. The pillars’ unusual forms give Pasabag its character, while the carved spaces show how people adapted to the rock around them.

Visit Anitkabir, the Ankara mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey and the Republic’s first President. Walk through the ceremonial complex and enter the Hall of Honour.

The monument’s broad spaces and formal architecture reflect Ataturk’s place in the country’s modern history. This visit provides a setting for understanding the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic and the continuing significance of its founder.

• Business class coach with extended leg room
• Top-rated dining, from farm-to-table to local restaurants
• 4 & 5-star stays