I tell you, this is an amazing country...
Leaving Cappadocia, we traveled west. First, we made a stop in Konya, a city that has seen trade and been a stopping point for caravans for thousands of years.
While there, we visited one of the holiest sites in Turkey. I forget the name (Mevlana something-or-other), but it's a great mosque with the tombs of several great sultans inside. We had to remove our shoes to enter (and Leila did have to wear a shawl over her head), but it was worth it.
Apart from the actual physical beauty of the mosque, with its high arches, paintings and chandeliers, one could immediately tell that it was a holy place as well. I experienced the same peaceful feeling here as in some of the great European cathedrals and monasteries.
From Konya we traveled West with Pamukkale as our destination (a few miles from Denizli, if you happen to be looking at a map). I had expected western Turkey to be mostly flat, but the truth is that it is more a mixture of plains or gently rolling hills interspersed with mid-sized mountains and mountain ranges. That made the eight hour drive more interesting.
The most exciting city we passed was without a doubt Egirdir. The scenery in this area is breathtaking. The city sits at the shoreline of a crystal blue lake, surrounded on all sides by tall, jagged mountains. The road there takes you along the edge of the lake, with the road carved out from the rock, occasionally just a few feet from water level.
Egirdir is not yet an international tourist destination, seemingly more popular with Turks themselves, but I expect that to change within the next 10 years or so. Already, there is a small trickle of French tourists coming there for a few days of peace and relaxation.
The other interesting thing about Egirdir is that it houses one of Turkey's major special forces training grounds (Komandos), with their base stretching from the shoreline all the way up the mountain behind the city.
We arrived in Pamukkale late in the night. The next day, we visited the famous baths. The calcium-rich thermal spring here has created an impressive collection of pure white little pools descending the side of a hill. Because of abuse and overuse in the past two decades, it is no longer possible to swim in these, but the sights are quite otherwordly.
We did get to swim in thermal water at our hotel, though. It's definitely an experience, especially after I saw the chart outlining all of the components of the water, including a section on radioactivity, with a bunch of elements ending in "-um." If I never get to have kids, I know why.
More interesting than the baths themselves were the ruins of the Roman city above them, the hierapolis. I didn't expect much from these (after all, it's hard to top Macchu Pichu), but they were quite a lot of fun to explore.
We drove to Antalya that afternoon. It's a big city, and a large port. The Kaleuci, or old city within the fortress walls, was especially interesting (and touristy). It's interesting to note that Russians are the number one tourists to Antalya, and they were everywhere.
We visited some more great ruins, and I am progressing from a state of complete ignorance to being able to distinguish between Greek and Roman architecture. Not bad, huh?
Actually, this brings up a good point. Like most people, I would expect most Greek and Roman ruins to be in Greece and Italy, respectively. That is not the case. These were empires, and although their capital cities were in those two countries, some of their most impressive cities were actually much farther out.
Turkey has an astounding collection of these cities. Aspendos, not far from Antalya, is the best-preserved Roman theatre in the world. Ephesus, which we will visit in a couple of days, was the Roman empire's largest city and features some of the most impressive Roman ruins in the world.
But I digress. In Antalya and the neighboring area, we also visited a lot of hotels. This is part of Leila's work, and I didn't mind because 1) they are all luxury four and five star resort hotels and 2) this allowed us to stay in these otherwise prohibitively expensive places free of charge. Heh, heh.
From Antalya, we ditched our rental car and took the bus west to Oludeniz, a beautiful beach area on the Mediterranean. Yesterday, we took a guided tour up to Dalyan (by crossing the Dalaman river, we were technically now on the Agean coast).
We saw the nesting grounds for the Caretta Caretta turtles, that somehow swim all the way from Mexico every year to lay their eggs there. We saw Lycean tombs carved into the rock cliffs.
The most exciting part of the day, though, was the mud bath. There's a knee to waist-deep pool of murky warm water, with mud at the bottom. Everyone proceeds to scoop the slimy stuff up and cover their entire bodies with it. This is quite a lot of fun, actually, with the only drawback being the stinky smell of sulphur.
After coating yourself in the greyish-green stuff, you stand in the sun and the mud dries on you. Needless to say, a good part of the enjoyment is seeing everyone else coated in mud and looking like swamp slime!
When all is hardened and you begin to think that you will never smile again in your life without ripping off the skin from your skull, you shower and remove the mud. Right after that, you jump into a hot spring pool and soak in bliss for a few minutes.
When you exit, the promise is that your skin will feel like a baby's bottom, and that you will look ten years younger. After looking in the mirror, I can honestly say that I looked 14 and smelled like a baby's butt!
Today, we're taking it easy. As I'm typing this in the Internet Cafe, I'm only 40 feet from the sandy beach and have a great view of the calm, blue Mediterranean. In a few minutes, I'll be basking in the sun...
Cheers,
Gabriel
