A few days ago I returned from a pretty challenging 2 week trip to Turkey. It was created and led by Patricia Cori, author and spiritual channel. She has written about 15 books and has been interviewed on many of the more popular radio shows and podcasts, in addition to leading trips to sacred sites around the world for many years. After a problematic trip to the sacred sites of Peru in 2015, I had vowed to never go on that kind of trip again. Nevertheless, I felt confident in choosing this one because of Patricia’s reputation and the itinerary that she created. I was excited to visit Gobekli Tepe again, and also see the excavations at Karahan Tepe. I had been to both in 2018.
Unfortunately, things did not proceed as planned. There were travel delays, missed activities, some very late nights, and unseasonably cold weather with some snow. The “spiritual” aspect of the trip did not quite materialize. We had some good hotels, and a few not so good ones. Food was not a problem, but meals were sporadic and poorly timed. As the trip progressed, I made a joke about seeing what kind of daily screw up would happen! And they certainly were daily.
Clearly Patricia had a lot of problems with time management. You cannot lead a trip with 24 people without giving some time frame for the daily activities. So we were running late a lot of the time. Also, I had never been on a trip where the tour leader chose not to participate in a lot of the group activities. She left that to our Turkish tour guide, Emre.
Speaking of Emre, at the end of the trip, we found out that he had appropriated a lot of our money that Patricia had transferred to him that was supposed to be used for prepayment of our hotel rooms, among other things. For example, upon arrival at our last night’s hotel in Istanbul, we found out that in addition to not having prepaid for our reservation, Emre did not make a reservation at all. Luckily, Patricia was able to pay for those rooms out of her own funds so that we were not out on the street. At that point, Emre dropped us off and promptly left. So efforts are now underway to recoup some of the stolen funds.
On the positive side, Turkey is a lovely country with much to offer a visitor. The people are friendly, the food is good, and the scenery is gorgeous. They are very fond of their cats, which are outside all over the place. I have a fascination with very old archaeological sites, of which there are plenty with more being excavated all the time. It is near the cradle of civilization and where hunter gatherers turned to a more settled agrarian way of life.
I really enjoyed the fellow travelers on this trip, as we all had much in common, having previously traveled with similar groups to similar spiritual destinations. It was fun to compare notes on past adventures. That made the trip worthwhile. I was happy to revisit special places that I had experienced on a prior trip, but disappointed that visits to new places did not pan out as I had hoped. Luckily, the trip home went well and was uneventful, which is usually not the case for me. In the following posts, I will share some of the special places that we visited.
