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Published: October 6th 2008
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Fez Bus: Sector 3 - Selcuk to Koycegiz
After 3 nights in Selcuk it was back on the Fez Bus for the journey to Koycegiz (pronounced Coogies, obviously). To be honest the first half of the day was a complete waste of time with us only actually travelling about 30 miles from Selcuk and instead visiting a variety of sales rooms. We started in a gorgeous little village called Sirence where we sampled the local fruit wines which come in a variety of flavours including mulberry, kiwi, peach and pomegranate of which Col’s favourite was the mulberry (I was still a bit under the weather so had a lovely glass of apple tea instead). Sirence had been a Greek village until the “population exchange” in the 1920s (when Greek communities in Turkey were sent back to Greece and Muslim residents of Greece were shipped to Turkey) and was home to a lovely little church that had stunning views across the hills.
We then headed to a leather factory where we were treated to a “fashion show” followed by 20 minutes to browse and try on the various leather jackets that were on sale. We were quite perplexed at Fez’s
reasoning behind bringing us there since the cheapest item was about £600 and if any of us had that kind of money to spend on clothes I can guarantee that we wouldn’t have been travelling around Turkey on the Fez Bus. The leather was lovely and soft though. The next stop was a ceramics factory where we were treated to a pottery demonstration and shown how each piece is decorated by hand - it was very interesting but as you can imagine, with the pieces being hand made and decorated they were also slightly outside our lowly backpacker budget.
We stopped for lunch at the Turkish equivalent of a motorway service station and were pleasantly surprised when without even asking we were presented with bottled water, fresh bread, salad, rice and chicken breasts for lunch. Despite our typically British apprehension (“this is too good to be true - what’s the bill going to be”) it came to a shockingly cheap £8 - about the same price as one tuna sandwich would have been in the UK. It was then time for a long drive to Koycegiz, which was made even longer when the bus broke down for an hour
in 39 degree heat in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t a serious problem - it had just overheated - but the driver couldn’t work out where to put the water in to refill the radiator and it took literally an hour to find it. Luckily there was some shade so we all just stood on the side of the road while all the passing Turks slowed down to wave, beep and generally laugh at the tourists and their broken bus. Once the driver had worked out how to fill the radiator he then had to ask everyone for their water as there was no spare water on the bus. We’d spent 3 days on Fez Buses and had 2 days without aircon and one breakdown - it didn’t really bode well for the rest of the trip.
On the plus side one of the best things about Fez is that you get to occasionally do something a bit more exciting than visiting salesrooms and breaking down. And that evening, only a couple of hours late, we got to go for a swim at a local waterfall. We had to walk for about 15 minutes and then do a
short (but scary) climb down to the water but after standing in 39 degree heat for an hour it was exactly what we needed and everyone was much happier by the time we got to Koycegiz - where they didn’t seem to mind 20-odd people checking in wearing swimming cossies and towels.
Apparently there is a lake at Koycegiz but we didn’t get to see it since it was dark when we arrived at the pension and we left at 9am the next morning so I can’t really say anything about it except that Tango Pension, where we were staying was lovely and we had a TV for the first time since Bulgaria so we had an early night so we could watch BBC World News. Sad I know.
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