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Mud monsters
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

During our stay at the mashed potato mountain (Saklikent Gorge), Colin and I met another Canadian couple with a toddler. They were traveling on the cheap, camping and getting around by dolmu? (private minibuses with crazy drivers). I was impressed that they were traveling not only with a kid, but with all that camping gear and stroller etc. On our way out we gave them a lift to Fethyie via some interesting backroads. Now that we are headed back to Izmir, I’m taking us by some different routes so we can see new things. So far: lots and lots of farms.

After dropping them off we continued to Köyce?iz, a cute little town on the edge of a beautiful big lake and wildlife preserve. On the road in I spied a cute store selling knee-length dresses and sleeveless shirts made in Turkey, things that I had trouble finding in Istanbul given the headscarf/turtleneck/trenchcoat/jeans that most women there wear. I bought a lovely dress for 10 tl which is perfect for the 30+ weather here. Then we walked along the lake with a friendly stray, who showed us a hidden path into a marshy area where it dug around looking for frogs. On the way back we met some uk expats who had just moved to town and were launching a little sail boat, which got me thinking we could spend some time in a little town like this, and got Colin wondering whether the wind was right for kiteboarding.

The next morning we left early to beat the crowds to the main attraction of the area: mudsprings! For 4 tl you can coat yourself in (magical, healing, yadda yadda) mud, hang out and let it dry off while you pose pictures of eachother as swamp monsters, jump in the lake to wash the mud off, then follow it up with a good soak in the (magical, healing, yadda yadda, and very sulfury) hot springs. The nicest pool was a huge marble one with pebble floor, and another pool built into an ancient wall suggested people had been coming to these hot springs for a very, very long time. We had just about the whole place to ourselves, and left right as the first busload of tourists pulled in.

Later that afternoon after several hours of driving through hot valleys and mountain passes filled with gravel trucks, we stopped at Bafa Lake to cool off. It was once part of the Aegean and is still very salty today, filled with clams, muscles, seaweed and presumably crabs (lots of crab traps anyway). And just offshore, an island covered in the ruins of an old fort! We swam out to it then climbed around on the rocks for awhile, discovering several well preserved buildings and a lot of prickly bushes (I forgot my shoes). Colin made it to the top of the tower nonetheless and it made for a good, cooling break.

That night we ended up back in Selçuk where we spent our second night. We are staying in the Barim Pension which I like much better than the Kiwi where we stayed the first time. It is built into a huge old house and decorated all over with wrought iron (made by the owner) and ivy. There is a large peaceful courtyard and (like many high things in Selçuk) the chimney has a stork nest at the top. Our bedroom is decorated with antique furniture and a four poster bed, and is partially open to the outdoors. Lying in bed early this morning I can hear the swallows chirping and the stork making a crazy noise like a distant jackhammer.

We decided to stay in this setting for an extra day and leave early the next morning rather than spend another night in big-city Izmir. That gave us lots of time to check out more ruins right in town, then visit the Ephesus museum where they have some spectacular statues of multi-boobed Artemis and that guy with the big wang, both things that you can buy miniature replicas of (I was tempted!). I also learned that the cherub making out with a woman that I saw a few weeks ago was probably Eros and Phoebe, not just some guy’s weird fantasy. Next we visited the Temple of Artemis, one of the 7 Wonder of the Ancient World… which today is just a big mud pit with a single reconstructed column (and of course a stork nest on top). I am positive we’ve seen some of the missing 180– marble columns in the 7-9th century ruins around here; those guys were not shy about using “recycled” building materials. In the afternoon we went for a long walk on the beach then drove up to “Mary Mania”, the ruins of an old house where people believe (for no logical reason) that the Virgin Mary once lived. A million people make a pilgrimage here every year because some nun once had a vision that Mary lived here. The house has apparently been carbon dated to 400 years after Mary’s time. So… yeah.

Today will be planes, trains and automobiles, although not in that order. I woke up far too early, even beating the 5am call to prayer, and the sun is just now starting to rise. Maybe I’ll see if I can get breakfast before we head off. Most pensions including this one include a free Turkish breakfast of bread, jam, honey, tomato, cucumber, cheese olives and an egg. I’m pretty fond of it, particularly when I discovered you could mix the soft cheese and honey and it tastes just like cheesecake. But Colin has had all the Turkish breakfast he can take and went hungry the last couple days. Hopefully the fruit we bought yesterday will do!

Mashed Potato Mountain
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Yesterday we turned around. Patara is to be our southern most point. But it’s beach is impressive enough to warrant such a distinction.

We woke up and enjoyed our breakfast with local tomatoes and local honey. The honey was particularly good. It’s harvested in October from late flowering trees. The trees have little pollen and so the honey has less sugar and more of a rich caramely taste. It was extremely good. From there we had heard of a secret entrance to the beach which didn’t involve paying anyone any money! So we set out to find it.

The town is very small and everywhere we went we passed old hotels that had fallen into dissuse and new hotels being put up. Eventually we made it to the dirt road leading to the beach. Our little Renault handled the road well enough and pretty soon we were at one of the most amazing lookouts I have ever beheld. We were on the edge of a rocky pine forest ascot gave-way to monstrous sand dunes undulating down to the clear azure water. We could see the twenty kilometers of beach stretch across the sea and the ruins of Patara being swallowed by the sand. It is quite a dramatic view.

Running down to the beach was pretty fun too. The soft sand rewarded leaping off drop offs and running full tilt down the dunes. And when we got to the beach it was nearly abandoned. We played in the sea, again doing some body surfing. I think some of the waves were actually big enough to surf with a board this time out. So we played in the surf, then warmed up in the sun to play in the surf some more. In the back of our minds was the trek back to the car.

When we decided to head back we had some route finding to do. The way we came down was totally unsuitable to climb back up. The soft shifting sand would make climbing up a nightmare. We ended up trying to stick to the weedy grasses growing out of the sand in places as well as the gardens of rocks that made up some of the low-points of the dunes. I think it was a 45 minute trek back in the sand under the blazing sun. But a towel around my head and the Mediterranean dripping off our skin made it a pretty painless challenge. When we got beck it was off to Saklikent Gorge to do some canyoning!

Lonely Planet had this blurb about how there was guided canyoning in the gorge and there were fixed ropes and leaping and climbing and all that great stuff. When we got here: not so much. But the gorge is very impressive. The camp is at the bottom of a mountain range which ends here is a sheer cliff climbing 300meters into the air. And like some giant forced one strong axe blow into the cliff the gorge empties its waters onto the plains.

I have never seen a 300 meter gorge so steep. It’s really astounding to look at. I was disappointed that there is no real Canyoning but the camp offered a “sunset tour” to the top of the cliffs. We figured it would be a short drive we could do on our own but elected to spend the 20lira anyway. I guess because we love spending money.

Turns out it was not a short drive; it was a steep, brutal hike! Our 20 lira didn’t buy us a car ride up but a guide for a 2 hour tour of the top of the gorge. It was wonderful!

He immediately set a pretty withering pace but it was the “sunset tour” and we had to get up and back before the sun set. I imagine it’s done at sunset more to avoid the heat than to admire the view. We started on a very badly deteriorated road and walked past some of the best climbing I have ever seen. The faces here are extraordinary. There is evidence of people going up some of the cracks but the faces look untouched. At some point this is going to become an amazing climbing destination. Assuming the Turkish heat and the Turkish cold don’t make climbing unpleasant for 10 months of the year.

We continued up, at the previously mentioned withering pace, to where the road gave way to dirt path and where dirt path gave way to a steep rocky scramble. Here is where I want to mention how incredibly impressed I am with how Sarah handled the hike: she destroyed it! I was seriously flagging. Three years drinking beer and never leaving the city in SF have taken their toll on my fitness. But Sarah was right there keeping pace, cruising up the steep path. So impressive!

Eventually we reached the plateau. It was made up of these crazy rocks. I don’t know what they are but the rain wears them into sharp edges and you can see the rivulets where the water runs off them. I guess the softness of the rock is why the gorge is so steep. It’s quite surreal.

Our guide (I really wish I could remember his name) brought us to more and more impressive vantage points of the gorge, of the valley, of the camp and of the mountains. It was really quite breathtaking. The gorge at the widest point we saw it took a second or two to echo our voices back, which is like 1 or half a k? At the narrowest it was almost instantaneous. The narrowest was right over the camp and the wall was so sheer you could drop a rock 300 meters down into the river below. It was amazing.

The hike down was without incident, we stumbled across some wild goats our guide tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to talk to (he did speak better goat than English). And we also picked some wild Rosemary and other great smelling herbs that were growing wild.

At the bottom we had the restaurant to ourselves for a tasty trout dinner. After that we chatted to the only other people staying here: a couple and their young child from Vancouver. They are going to school in Edinburgh and camping their way across Turkey for a month.

They said the trek up the canyon is pretty cool so maybe there is still hope for that leg of the adventure. We shall see after a shower and some breakfast! Seems like Saklikent Gorge might be worth the trip after all.

Hoppitty flippity green
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Today we left Fathiye fairly early and made for Patara. Herladed as one of Turkey’s best beaches and also owner of some of the finest ruins in the country. This may well be our southern-most point. We were planning on making it to Antalya but we’re just going too slow. Oh well, it just means we’re having too much fun and we’ll save some money on gass.

The drive was only an hour or two and on the way was Letoon, some cool sounding ruins, so we decided to check them out. These are tricky to get to so it took a little work to find them on our maps. Not that it really mattered. Turkey is so well signed we found our way there just following arrows. Letoon was actually very cool. Big in the ancient world: temples and theatres. Letoon had impressive specimen of both, and no one else around! (besides the guys who collect the 8 lira each to walk in of course). Big theatres are always built on a vaguely theatre-shaped hill. They carve out the dome shape and then add seats. On the sides, when they run out of hill, they use massive blocks to comlete the desired 180degree viewing area. This theatre wasn’t only cut into a hillside it was cut _out_ of the limestone hillside. The middle seating was almost entirely intact. The sides, which had been made out of blocks were falling apart. It was really neat to sit in such well preserved seats and walk such well preserved stairs and isles. You could really imagine you were meeting some friends there for a play and had to squeeze past other patrons and wheedle your way to some choice seats. Also impressive was the Nymphaeum. I gather that’s, like, a temple to a wattery god? You can go look that up. It was excavated by french acheologists and has since become a small waterlogged pond. Which is pretty cool, and fairly appropriate considering the watery nature of it’s original use. There were frogs GALORE in this pond as well as teeming teams of tadpoles, turtles, fish and birds. It was really neat hopping around on the bits of the site that stuck out of the water startling frogs and turtles.

From Letoon we set off back again for Patara. On the way though we spotted a decrepit looking arrow to “Letoon Beach” (or, “Letoon Plaj”). Sounds like a secret beach! Arrow ho! Well the rest of the route to the beach wasn’t signed so we made a few bad 50/50 guesses and ended up driving throught the copious tomato growning-countryside. Tomatoes here are taken seriously. They are grown in the tons and tons of greenhouses blanketing the country and are _delicious_. Unlike the watery mosters that are so common back home. Driving through two or three little towns We eventually made it back to the main road (thank god for gps navigation!) and headed to Patara.

When we arrived we were surprised to find out that access to Patara and the ruins is only 5 lira each! What a deal! No matter that the very idea of a pay-beach is antithetical to my very Canadian soul.

The beach is very very long (like 20k) and all sandy with dunes running into the hills where the old city lived. It is quite a place but you have to walk a good distance to get away from the tourists clogging the closest bit of beach. Patara is a relatively hard place to get to so I’m not sure how all these people ended up here. I think we’ve stumbled into some traveler subset. Aparently the beach made it onto some best-beaches-in-the-world lists or something and that is irresistable to a dedicated group of travelers. There are tons and tons of pensions and hotels here. More I think than people’s houses. Most of them are empty now as it’s the low season. The temperature is still cresting 30c and it’s too hot to do much but swim for a while and then hide in the shade of the scrub growing on the dunes. Still, it’s pretty fun. There were enough waves to do some body surfing and we played in the water for a few hours before spending another few hours recuperating from the weeks exertions in the shade on the back-side of a dune. When we reapeared the wind had kicked up and I was jonesing really hard for a kite. Good god, so much beach, perfect wind, waves to play in. Yarg, the best time and place I’ve ever seen to kiteboard. If the wind is common I could seriously see comming back here and spending some quality time with the Mediteranean.

Since we paid 10 Lira to get in we might as well check out the ruins. They are actually very impressive. Patara was second in size only to Ephesus in Anataolia. A massive “metropolis” of 20,000 people (man there used to be alot fewer of us around). The theatre is grand and has been around for thousands of years and many empires. It’s final use was by the Romans. The theatre used to have well-constructed seating going right down to the floor of the theatre. But the Romans weren’t into that artsy-fartsy theatre crap. They wanted blood! Fights! Tigers! So they built up some (pretty shoddy looking) stone walls over the first row of seats with tiger-cages built into them. It’s really something to see a place made so majestically for such a peaceful art form turned into a circus of glood and gore. Also very impressive was the currently-being-excavated senate building (it’s not a senate building, but it’s something close). And the old main road into the city which french archeologists have re-erected a bunch of the pillars that flanked the road. It was the easiest place yet to imagine yourself in the place of a tourist in 500b.c.

After thta we returned to find a place to stay. This is the first place I’m going to shout out: stay at the Delphin Hotel. 60 Lira (50$) for a room for two with a gorgious low-chlorine pool, a room with a balcony and view, plus free tea and cakes at tea-time. Great place for the money. Totaly the place to stay if you end up in Patara. I’m also going to shout out the place we had dinner:… uh… the Gozleme place run by the nice woman in the run-down shack. It probably has a name but I forget it. There has been a lack of good thai-style home grown restaurants run by someone part-time because they love to cook. This was one. So great. She made us some terrific Gozleme (kind of a Turkish crepe) while we watched and we had another one for desert. I highly recomend it… It’s next to the Pede place.

So now we are back in Delphin, writing up a storm trying to catch up on the travelogue. Which this sentence we are caught up! And I can sleep. Night!

Flip flip off a boat
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Og it’s quite hot just now. Got to be 30 in this hotel room by Patara. I kind of wish I was on a boat in the mediteranean instead. That was yesterday though. We spent two days in Fethiye since it seemed like there was so much cool stuff around it. Fethiye is one of the Turkish cities that does a lot of boat tours. The tours are pretty cheap (like 50 bucks for both of us for a 8 hour cruise including lunch). The day looked like it was going to be rainy and we had some serious sun exposure to recover from so we decided to try out a cruise.

The proprietor of our pension arranged the tour for us over breakfast and the boat owner showed up at about 11:00 to whisk us off to the dock. The boat was quite nice. We ended up paying an extra 6 dollars to get on a sailboat instead of a power boat but there were definitely no sails put up that day (dispite a perfect breeze). Still, the boat was very nice. There were 20-30 people aboard and it swallowed us all up nicely into different corners and decks. Getting started was a little tricky as a half-dozen people had somehow boarded our boat by accident and had to be shuttled off, then the anchor chain fouled while we were leaving, and _then_ we had to motor back into our slip to pick up two late arrivals. But eventually we got going (the owner spent the next hour dealing with the fouled anchor chain).

The itinerary was up in the air. We knew there was a market on one of the islands, mud baths on another, roman ruins on another, and a bunch of remote swimming spots. It’s to the captain’s discretion to decide what ports to stop in. Turns out we only stopped in remote swimming spots. No culture. Just jumping off the boat and swimming around, then back on the boat to motor to the next swimming spot to jump off the boat some more. Sarah was less than impressed with this. I had a blast!

The cargo of the boat consisted of one german group of about 6, one turkish group of about 6 and mabey another 6 loose fish. The turkish group was the only one that was really into jumping off the boat. I think everyone else felt they had not quite gotten what they bragained for. They pretty much just lounged around on the boat for 8 hours. A few of them went for a swim. But that’s not a bad way to spend a day and I think for 50 bucks it’s hard to complain.

Me and the turks however had such a good time leaping off the boat all day. I quickly insinuated myself into their group when I charged up the stairs to the top deck on the first stop. There were two of them looking a little sheepishly at the water and when I looked at them with eyebrows raised they motioned that I was welcome to go first if I wanted to: Cannon Ball!

I have learned that few nations like swimming like Canadian’s do. In Canada I’m always one of the weakest swimmers and one of the least likely to set the bar for height-jumped. But in Turkey I’m the most water proficient guy on the boat! The other guys were either diving or jumping straight legged into the water. I was rocking front flips and back flips and big leaping dives. It’s pretty hard to hurt yourself jumping 3 meters into the water. Only once did another guy step over the railing and turn around backwards to do a back flip. He chickened out though, leaving me the undisputed king of leaping into the water which is a title I have never held before. Sarah did a jump off the boat’s high deck too! Which I was very impressed with! She stood at the edge and wavered, wrestling her extreme fear of heights. But when she did leap off into the sea all the Turks cheered and clapped for her when her head bobbed back to the surface. She had such a beaming smile it was a great moment for everyone. Luckily the water was warm and the rain didn’t darken our swimming.

The trip started pleasently rainy. Listening to the rain dab on the cloth covering and watching it ripple in the calm Mediteranean was calm and peacful. Very lovely. But it largely cleared up as the swimming started making the day a perfect mix of sun and shade, hot and cool. The boat also acted as a bit of a ferry. We would pick people up and odd spots. Those people would hang out on the boat, and then at the end we deposited them in a new port. Pretty interesting way to get around.

After we got back we made a trip into the hills behind the city to check out these tombs that are cut into the rock Petra-style. On the way a little girl ran up to us and offered us a branch with 4 perfect fruit on it. I didn’t believe she was so nice. Turkey has been chock a block with people playing angles and trying to get you to spend your money. I took the fruit and looked at her parents who were smiling and motioned to take it. We thanked her in English and Turkish and loved the fruit. It was so great to have such a genuinely kind experience. They have been generally missing in Turkey. I’ve offered a couple of rides to locals we’ve met so mabey I’ve just built up enough good karma.

Anyway, when We did get to the tombs it was back to good old Turkey: 8 lira each to make the short walk up (that’s like 6 CAD). These things are not that impressive, 8 lira was crazy. Luckily it was unmanned and the locals just motioned for us to walk up for free. Which is pretty damned lucky. They were like stage jewelry, very nice from a distance but not much to see up close. I did get to putter around on some of the limestone. The climbing in this country must be amazing! I think the summer heat and the winter cold makes it hard to really enjoy it though.

Curiosity satisfied we got into the touristy bit of Fethiye to find some food. Lonely Planet suggests a couple of places so we decided we were probably pretty safe with one of them. Turns out some of our australian pension-mates had picked the same restaurant. We ate with them, talking about traveling and Turkey, it was a very nice meal. When we got back we had a few back-gamon games, argued about gambling, and talked about Australian politics. It was a really nice evening. It’s great to chat occasionaly with people who aren’t us.

So one missrepresented boat trip, an unexpected act of kindness, and a good chat about John Major later: another pretty damned good day in Turkey.

Ruins of Kayaköy
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

One thing Colin forgot to mention about Izmir: the delicious Izmirian breakfast sammiches called veggie Kumru. A sesame loaf filled with slices of tomato, salty cheese, and a spicy green pepper. Vendors everywhere sell them for just 1 TL (70 cents!). They also make meaty and baked flaky pastry versions. I am definitely buying a dozen on our way back through Izmir.

As Colin mentioned our first couple days with the car worked out marvelously; Selçuk is a nice little town and the day of swimming and rock skipping at Deltasi Milli park will be hard to beat. That night however…

I consulted our GPS device “James” who said our next destination of Fethiye was too far to make by nightfall, but that local capital Mu?la (Mooola) was along the way. And a non-touristic university town to boot – fun! Well, let me explain something about finding room at a hostel in a Turkish university town: good effing luck. We spent hours canvassing Mu?la, visiting pension after pension and were told each one was full (of students), but you should try the next place up the street. The students giggled at our big backpacks but unfortunately few knew much English and nobody seemed to want to hang out with some lamo tourists on a Friday night.

Resigned to our fate, we rejected the one overpriced “luxury resort” hotel in town and agreed to spend the night sleeping in the car. We found a quiet street, cranked back the seats (they go waaay back in our Renault) and covered ourselves with every piece of clothing we had. It did get a little chilly in the wee hours and Colin was kept awake by barking strays, but with the help of all that sun earlier in the day (and a sleeping pill), I managed a few winks.

We awoke groggily at dawn to the now-predictable urban sounds of dogs barking. We kind of hate the stray dogs here as much as we loved our little pack back in Thailand. We were on the road and in Fethiye by about 9 am, and very happy we hadn’t attempted the mountain switchbacks the night before. We made a beeline for the pension district and got a room at the first place we tried (Duygu Pension). It wasn’t going to be a problem in such a touristy harbor town during the off season, but we weren’t taking chances this time. Duygu had a lovely rooftop terrace, a pool which we convinced them to fill with water (yes 25c is hot enough for swimming people!), and some very friendly hosts and guests. Fethiye itself was unremarkable, but it’s a launching point for boat tours of many nearby coves and islands. Oh, and like many towns down here, it’s chock-a-block with ruins. Tombs in the middle of roundabouts, tombs carved into the cliff above, a Lycian amphitheater and a Crusader fort right in town.

Feeling better after the Duygu proprietors filled us with tea, we headed up the road to the nearby beach. It was pebbly and had a few bars and sunbathers, but a 5 minute walk through the woods brought us to a totally secluded cove where we could jump off the rocks (I took a slower approach) and swim in the intensely turquoise Mediterranean. The water was a little chilly so we swam alternated swimming and sunbathing. At one point a guy on a little boat pulled up to our rocks to sell us ice cream. After a few hours we tried to hike farther in around the area but were foiled at every turn by yet another species of prickly, prickly plant. Instead we chased pretty little jumping spiders and grasshoppers around and tried to take their pictures. Next we drove on to another but far more modern set of ruins: Kayaköy (Levissi).

Levissi was a craftsmen village of 2000-some Christian Greeks, who had lived for generations perched in their stone houses above the fertile valley until the population exchange of 1923. I am fascinated by this event in Turkish history. After the Greco-Turkish War, the Greek Orthodox people who hadn’t already fled Turkey were forcibly moved to Greece, and Muslim citizens of Greece were punted to Turkey. They settled in eachother’s towns and houses, but as 1.3 million people moved out of Turkey only 350,000 moved back in. So places like Levissi became ghost towns overnight. Over the years people took stones from the houses to build new ones in the valley, but the churches were nearly untouched and much of the old town still stands today. I was creeped out by a few parts (the shed where the Greeks had collected ancient human bones taken out of tombs so they could reuse the tombs for their own dead), but mostly it was fascinating to imagine how they must have lived in the early 1900’s without modern machinery. I think that the pace of life must have been slow, and people must have spent a lot of time admiring the view from their little walled-off gardens.

We had a good takeout meal that night and met some of our fellow “pansiyon”ers. We made it to 17:00 (I’ve finally gotten the hang of 24 hour time) then crashed hard on a soft bed after one seriously long, long day.