Day 10 - Van Lake and Rare Cats

August 27, 2022

Day 10 - Van Lake and Rare Cats

Day 10 Tuesday August 23

After a good night's sleep and a leisurely breakfast, we start at 10.30 am for Akdamar Island in Van lake. The locals prefer calling it a sea or ocean as the lake is huge. Its circumference is a mind boggling 400 kms.

We go to the jetty and take a 20 minute private boat ride to the island. There is a lovely 1100 year old Armenian church with frescoes and an altar inside. Some of us go for a swim in the refreshing clear water.

As we are returning, Tarun is making videos from his drone. He is one of the ace drone pilots of India. Due to some malfunction the signal dropped and unfortunately the drone got lost.

Later we drove to the downtown area and had lunch at Cafe Mencelli. For us vegetarians, a naan like Turkish bread with some dips, salads, a vegetable stew and Haldiram kadhi was lunch. It's nice that 11 out of the 23 participants in our group are pure vegetarian.

Just outside the restaurant was a car wash and the cars had a good bath. We paid 50 TRY (INR 250) per car!!!!!

A few of us went to see the Van Cat research centre. Here they have a very rare breed of cats. They are found only in Van, Turkey. The 3 unique characteristics are (1) they all have white fur (2) each eye is of a different colour and (3) they like water and can swim. We played and fed the cats in a special enclosure. I am glad we chose to visit here as this was a rare kind of experience.