Efesus

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Efesus 

Today we had to be up nice and early to try and get to Ephesus before the crowds. I'd have to say it didn't really work - I think everyone else had the same idea! Our hotel shuttled us to the upper gate (the main entrance is the lower gate) where there were already quite few coaches and minibuses. Apparently about 100,000 people visit daily at the moment. While it was painfully crowded at times, there were also lulls, and it was really good when the crowd cleared and I could get a picture that wasn't full of people!

We bought our tickets and also hired an audio guide. We made our way around the tour groups and started to check out the various sights of Efes, of which there are many! It is a whole ancient city. Of some things there's little more than a few stones left, but in other cases there is enough to get a good sense of what was there and in others fairly complete structures (reconstructed). There are lots of marble columns, some lining the main streets and some parts of particular buildings.

Some of the highlights were the Celsus Library, some of the monumental gateways, but best of all was the "terrace houses". These are the quite well preserved remains of a number of grand houses built up the side of a hill. They were only fairly recently excavated and have had a massive shade/roof built over the top of them as some of the walls are mud and there are also some gorgeous mosaics and wall frescoes to protect. The best thing about the terrace houses is that less people visit them - most of the tour groups miss them and it costs an extra TL 15 per person, but so worth it to see really well what some of the houses looked like way back in those times. We spent close to five hours all up in Efes and when we got to the end our hotel sent someone to pick us up.

We decided to be lazy for the rest of the afternoon- had a nap and took it easy. I also had a good look in the adjacent shop owned by the guy who manages the hotel. Downstairs was a carpet shop but acouple of tourists were down there getting the treatment so I didn't go down. Upstairs were all sorts of intricate ceramics, including drawers and drawers of tiles and various other lovely things. These were not cheap tourist trinkets, but I managed to avoid purchasing anything!

Up on the terrace having a pre-dinner beer we got chatting to Rob/Bob and Annalie from Toronto and we all decided to go and check out the Ejder restaurant that had been recommended to us by the Perth contingent on the gulet. Turned out to be a good decision - the food was excellent and they also had half decent wine! So we had a lovely meal (dad does the meats and his wife does the vegies). 

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