Update from Istanbul: We have finished our one week tour of western Turkey and will fly from here to Athens this afternoon (assuming volcanic ash and strikes in Greece do not affect our flight).

Our Insight tour was very interesting and covered an enormous number of sites in the time. So excellent value for money, but quite long hours and quite tiring. The price of doing so much in a short time. So the blog has not been updated during the tour week, due to the need for us to get some sleep prior to the next day´s early coach departure.

A further blog complication arose last night, when it seems our netbook hard disk crashed (or its cable failed). In any event, the BIOS does not recognise the presence of a hard disk. A bad bad sign. So it looks like our clever plan to blog, Skype, do email and save pics on the netbook has crashed, along with the hard disk. As the netbook is still under warranty, I should not pull it apart and replace the disk. It will have to await warranty repair in AU. At least we have not lost any pics.

So this update is being done on the public PC of our Istanbul hotel, before we depart for Athens. It looks like further blog updates will have to be done that way. That will make it all more complex and time consuming, given the usual need to sort out why foreign computers and keyboards are not behaving as we expect.

More shortly I hope (including the best of the 1900 pics taken so far). The belly dancer pics are particularly impressive - to whet the reader appetite for the developing blog story.