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Published: January 25th 2008
Antalya ... Olympos ... Canakkale ...
We finished our time in Turkey by wandering up the Aegan coast back towards Istanbul. After our stay in Antalya with Rabia and her dad, we headed west to Olympos, a charming village in a valley on the sea. Olympos is huge with backpackers in the summer because of the fantastic beaches, but also because of the atmosphere. People pay copious amounts of money to sleep in glorified treehouses. Because it's winter in Turkey we lucked out by having an entire camp to ourselves ... but the experience was a bit lost on Kristena because she was hit with a second attack of whatever tried to kill her in Egypt. Ugh!! We're becoming germaphobes ... always skeptical of the creepy crawly things that must be in our food and on our hands and even just looking in our general direction ... fun fun!
Close to Olympos is Chimaera ... real life fire breathing rocks! Ancient Turks didn't know the source of the flames and believed that it came from an angry creature living in the ground who was part dragon, part lion and part goat (or something like that). We hiked 14km to
Troy ...
- insert tourist trap here - ..... very disappointing!!! It wasn't even the real horse! :(see what all the fuss was about ... and the final 1km up the mountain was worth it - fire really does come from the ground and it was pretty cool to see! (although we've had just about enough of this mountain climbing business!). We then visited the ruins of Olympos before heading north to the quaint city of Canakkale. Our point in going to Canakkale was to see the ruins of Troy ... but Troy turned out to be a huge gong show and a major disappointment!!! We were charged 20 YTL (almost $20) to get into the ruins ... which consisted of a stupid wooden horse that looked like it was built last year and some rubble we couldn't identify. Ta Da! That was Troy. To add insult to injury, we had to hitch hike back to town (about 20km) because the mini buses stopped running at 3pm (but Troy was open until 5pm). Not exactlly the Troy we dreamed about! Anyways, we came, we saw, we conquered .... and then we took off for Greece! Our plan was to cross the border by foot ... it didn't turn out as planned but that's another story!
Happy
Olympos Beach
Trevor climbed a friggen mountain to get this photo! Travels!
Trevor and Kristena
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