Sinop Travel Guide

The Diyarbakir restaurant is a good place to eat if you don't like fish....we weren't keen on fish so gave the posh fish restaurants by the sea-front a miss. Anyway, this restaurant has a nice outdoor section out the back, and we ended up eating here twice.

Favorite Dish: It has the usual array of kebabs...every type of kebab you can think of, and salads, and other meze....typical Turkish stuff! Good and cheap.

We weren't really up for nightclubs, and a good job, as Sinop didn't seem to have any! But if you are interested in Turkish music, the best place to go is a cafe set inside the city walls...for the price of a glass of tea, you can sit and enjoy the views over Sinop, while listening to live Turkish music which was definately aimed at locals rather than tourists....it seemed 'the' place for the young people of Sinop to hang out. It can get very windy and cold though, if you choose a seat on the upper levels....and you might not have a choice where you sit, as this place was packed!

Sinop has frequent buses to Samsun, Trabzon and other places east along the coast, as well as connections to most major cities in Turkey. However, coming from Amasra, or somewhere else to the west of Sinop, it is a bit more problematic. It took all day to get from Amasra to Sinop, and we had to change buses four times...these were not the comfortable buses, but local, short-hop buses, which stopped every five minutes to cram a couple more passengers in the doors...most of our journey was spent standing up!! If you can't face a similar journey, along the twisty coast road, then it is probably easier to head inland and do a huge circle round to Sinop. There is also the coastal ferry in summer...at least I think it stops in Sinop. It leaves Trabzon on wednesday evenings for Istanbul, arriving on a friday, before returning to Trabzon again, and it stops at Zonguldak, Sinop, Samsun, Giresun and Rize either on the outward or the return trip. I didn't take this ferry, as when I wanted to head back to Istanbul, it was September, and classified as 'winter', despite the 30 degrees + weather, but my friend took it from Trabzon a month earlier...tickets are extremely cheap, selling for as little as 13 million lira (when I was in Turkey, this was around $10) from Trabzon to Istanbul, a price which supposedly included a seat (in reality, it meant deckspace!) and no food. Cabins are also available, and the prices aren't much more...so this sounds like a good deal!
The bus station is nicely located next to a ruined bit of city wall, so if you have to wait around for your bus, you can have a clamber and see this view of the beach.
Sinop isn't a huge place...most things are within walking distance of the bus station, so we didn't feel the need to use public transport. There are buses to other beaches on the peninsula, but apparently not to the most spectacular beach of them all, Akkum Plaji.

There is an ancient hamam in a fairly old part of town, not far from the cheap hotels and restaurants. It has a touristy sign outside, but it didn't seem as if they had an awful lot of foreign tourists among their customers...it was a local affair! This was our first experience of a real Turkish bath, and I was not entirely sure what to expect...but the attendent was friendly, and explained to us exactly what was going on, as we had told him that it was our first time...he only spoke Turkish, though, so it was difficult to understand everything! After this bath, we were hooked, and went to quite a few hamams during our time in Turkey.