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Published: October 13th 2013
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Woolly says – I’m really enjoying camping on the beach, the nights are a bit chilly but it is lovely and peaceful.
We have just under a week before we can move back to our temporary accommodation (still waiting for news on our permanent apartment!) and rather than move further down the coast towards Alanya we thought we would take the opportunity of exploring some of the sights that are closer to Antalya itself. With that in mind and a picnic packed we set off in Ollie for a new adventure.
Woolly says – with only twenty kilometres to go we glanced at the town of Manavgat as we drove through, quite pretty with palms trees and streams flowing down the central reservation, lots of traffic though. Ollie was soon on the smaller roads and pounding his way up a forested hill to Lyrbe, better known as Seleukeia.
Seleukeia is one of the most ancient cities of the region which goes back to the Hellenistic times in the 3
rd Century BC and has strong links to the Romans.
Woolly says – I like Romans and the signs of their
times here were easy to spot from the car park. We parked Ollie in the shade and left him to doze while we walked up to the remains of the city gates. The gates aren’t that impressive but just beyond them we could see the Agora and boy was that an amazing sight. Set around the rectangle there were the doorways with huge stone blocks defining them and the windows where the shop keepers would have shouted their wares, we peeked through and found them to be much larger than I had imaged and definitely much higher than I had seen before. I spotted several large lizards soaking up the sun.
With Woolly disturbing the lizard population we walked round what would have been the centre of this thriving city, with columns still standing and many of the walls it was in an incredibly good condition. Like many Turkish sites you are free to climb over the ruins and go in and out of every nook and cranny, you really felt as though it had only been deserted for a short while instead of the thousands of years that it has remained there.
Woolly
says – Having grown tired of lizard spotting we walked further up the hillside, passing one of the temples which was tiny and making our way to the furthest part of the city, the view was spectacular looking through the trees and over to Green Canyon and it’s reservoir. We perched on some old blocks of stone next to what appeared to be a very large house and munched happily away on our picnic, Ian nearly fell of his block when he looked down to find that a lizard had joined us!
It was so peaceful and serene sitting there. Although there were people climbing around the site you couldn’t hear anything……
Woolly says – it was much quieter once the four noisy German tourists went on their way!
Ian went off to climb to the highest point of the ancient town while Woolly and I sat and contemplated our surroundings. It was easy to imagine the people walking along the streets calling out to each other, the soldiers taking a break in the sun while discussing their latest campaign and the women going about their chores, the whole place seemed
alive. We ambled down the pathway and joined Ian at the bottom where the remains of many more buildings stood.
Woolly says – It was a bit slippy underfoot on the pine needles and since Jo had managed to leave her decent footwear in the tent Ian and I had to help her down the stream bed and into the bottom part of the city. We followed the signs pointing towards the Necropolis Church and the Haman Bath house and as we walked further and further away from the centre of the city you got far more of an idea of how huge this place must have been. After ten minutes of so we made it to the Church perched in its lonely spot and, disregarded the warning signs about it collapsing, decided to go and have a look. It was very overgrown but it must have been a most impressive sight in its time.
Slipping and sliding down the needles we retraced our steps still looking for the Baths. We passed the signs and thought we had probably missed it in amongst the wood so carried on before finding another sign for the
Bath house, we made our through the undergrowth.
Woolly says – turning the corner we found it! It was immense, definitely the biggest we have found on our travels and with roofs still intact you realised how big they would have been. The pools area is still under dirt and soil but the views over the valley were stunning, a wonderful place to sit in the water and soap yourself off. We followed the path back to Ollie and congratulated Ian on this stunning find which was FREE and had been well worth a visit. Driving back down to the valley we decided to make a stop at Selale waterfall and I heard Jo mutter the immortal words, ice-cream, I was out of Ollie and at the ticket office before the wheels had stopped turning.
We paid our 3.5 TL (approximately £1.20 GBP) and walked past the many shops to the waterfall. We had been here previously on a tour trip on a visit with daughter Zoe and our ‘we would adopt you if your Mum let us’ daughter Hannah several years ago, even though we had the girls with us for some strange
reason we hadn’t tried the ice cream there. It wasn’t pleasant and at 5 TL each (approximately £1.60 GBP) it was expensive for Turkey.
Woolly says – it wasn’t like any ice cream I had tried before, in fact it was more like freezing cold chewing gum! It didn’t melt and left me in a rather sticky state, I could only hope that Jo wouldn’t throw me in the waterfall to clean off!
Such a tempting thought, the waterfall was lovely and with lots of people waiting to take pictures in front of it we bided our time and watched the water gushing down from the top and into the river just below it. Pictures taken we stuck our heads into the shops as we made our way back to Ollie and then onwards to our snug tent on the beach to watch the incredible sunset and avoid the low flying bats that come out at night.
Woolly says – Jo has gone a bit mad on the number of pictures on this blog so I apologise on her behalf, I will try and control her snapping more! I
also want to give a big thanks to Ian for pics after scrambling over ruins that my little legs couldn’t cope with and for the wildlife photos.
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