Fez Bus: Sector 6 - Olympos to Egirdir

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The highlight of getting back on the Fez Bus was being reunited with our original tour leader Kerry who had been with us on the first 2 sectors and was by far the best Fez leader on the circuit. A large part of her appeal was that she appeared completely scatterbrained - mainly because she said everything as she thought it so, where others would try to maintain an aura of calm regardless of what was going on inside, you always knew exactly what Kerry was thinking and feeling as it happened - but despite this things always worked out and everything got done correctly which is more that could be said for most of the other tour leaders we’d had. We had 2 brilliant examples of this within minutes of rejoining the Fez Bus - the first one when Col asked if she had her own personal air con now as she tried to board the bus with the air con remote from her cabin - she yelped and ran to reception to return it. The second as she was stood at the front of the bus, as we drove away from Olympos, telling us what the day had in store and wondering why she couldn’t see out the back window before shouting “Shit, the boot is open!” and turning to the bus driver screaming, “Dur! Dur! Dur! Dur! Dur! Dur! Dur! Dur! Dur! Dur!” (stop! in Turkish) until he finally got the message and stopped the bus. Luckily we hadn’t left a trail of luggage along the road and all bags were accounted for, as I said things always seemed to work out well for Kerry.

We had a fairly uneventful day that included a stop at a gorgeous waterfall (just for photos, no swimming this time) and lunch on the banks of a lake. In the afternoon we tried to watch a DVD but the player overheated after 45 minutes, which was a relief since the “romantic thriller” we were watching centred around paedophilia. We arrived at Egirdir (another lake) and were gutted to find that Lale Pension, the “House of Fez” for the night was full so we were staying at a place called Hotel Sinan which can only be described as grim. The whole place smelled like that room at you granny’s that hasn’t been used for 30 years - that sickly sweet damp smell - and everything was very old, very worn and very floral. We dumped our bags and headed out for dinner with the rest of the Fez Bus crew and then Col went for a drink while I braved the 800 year old Turkish Hamami.

We had been planning to go to a Turkish bath together but had read about how mixed baths had only been introduced for tourists and were leading to the demise of segregated baths and especially female baths so we had decided to wait until we found a segregated one. I was also a bit apprehensive about going on my own and making a complete arse of myself by doing everything wrong so when I had the chance to go with another girl decided to take it. Kerry had warned us that the hamam had only been refurbished once since it was built and the Lonely Planet had described it as grim so our expectations were pretty low but I was still a bit surprised to see a cockroach in the outer room of the baths. The scrub and soap massage were brilliant, though I was a bit gutted that I didn’t have lumps of dead skin coming off like the girl I was with but I exfoliate all the time so it’s not really surprising. I felt really clean afterwards but because my skin is not used to soap so my skin felt really dry and I couldn’t wait to moisturise. Overall it was like going for a Turkish bath at Scotthall Swimming Pool but it was very cheap and the end result was the same so I was happy. Which was more than I could say for Colin who couldn’t face spending the evening in the horrible hotel room so had hung out in Lale Pension for the evening despite being knackered.

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