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Published: March 31st 2014
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Kuşadasi is a major tourist town, even for Turks. Located on the Agaean Sea, 40km from the Greek Isle of Samos. Its' normal population is roughly 50,000 but in the summer it swells to nearly 500,000. Mark and I wander into town while Zac passed out in the hotel as his head cold had not improved and he was feeling dreadful. Both Mark and I fell in love with Kuşadasi. Firstly the view from our room was outstanding stretching across the Agaean Sea, just amazing, and the atmosphere of the town was capturing, just lovely.
Visiting Ephesus today, the ruins of another ancient city. The site is over 1km long, contains two theatres, a bath house, a library, terrace houses, marble slab streets, a whole bunch of stuff. The population is estimated at 250,000 with possibly 750,000 slaves. A lot of the site has been partially restored, but some is still in original condition. We spent most of the morning here, wandering over ruins that date back nearly 2,000 years. The stone pillars feel old to the touch, it is a strange phenomenon, and I can't explain it, they just feel old. Ephesus also has a large theatre, built to
hold 25,000 people to watch music shows, plays, gladiator fights and Christians being murdered for their beliefs.
After Ephesus, we head to a local rug making shop to see how the famous Turkish rugs are made. Only women weave them, and one rug can take up to 2.5 years to weave. Watching the women work at the looms was very impressive, their hands were almost a blur as they knot and weave. They also breed silkworms, and can get over 1500 meters of silk from one worm. The rugs are horrendously expensive, some were over NZ$4,000 so again, we didn't buy anything. The rug place gave us free lunch though, so that was nice.
We trundled up a mountain to see the house of the Virgin Mary, supposedly. Very peaceful, pretty place, but totally underwhelming. There was a guard with a machine gun though, so that was pretty interesting and I have to say, out of place!
About 2:30pm we arrive back in Kuşadasi and decide to ship home some of our loot, so we grabbed a box from the hotel kitchen, acquire some tape and pack everything up, all up about 15kg. We grabbed a taxi
to the local post office, and was eventually told that it was going to cost 661 lira. About NZ$430, so we gave that a miss and grabbed another taxi to the local UPS depot, which was a tiny shop in the garage of an apartment complex. This time, the price was US$430 and they weren't even sure where New Zealand was whch was not very reasuring, so again we left with the box. Next up was DHL, which was closed. Next door to DHL was a local cargo firm, again nearly 700 lira. After this, we decide to abandon our plans of shipping stuff home, we are all in a pretty bad mood and end up wasting 3 hours and over 40 lira on taxis. So, we decide to take a walk down into town.
Kuşadasi has a really nice waterfront, easy to walk on. We exchanged a few t-shirts that were too small, Zac bought a shisha water pipe, then we went to Starbucks near where the cruise liners dock. We had to go through a security checkpoint to get into the building, which I thought was a little odd.
Starbucks was the same as it is
at home, so it was quite good. On the way back, we saw a nose-to-tail car accident, so decided to sit down and watch the proceedings. It started out civilised, but quickly escalated to finger pointing then to shouting and gesticulating, then to the punching of boots and bonnets. Once the local constabulary arrived, I thought the situation might calm down, but the fellow who crashed into the car in front starts pushing and shoving the cop!
After that we walked off, and has a pleasant walk back to the hotel, then a nice dinner, the we watched a couple of cruise ships leave, then another one arrive. Went to bed around midnight. All in all another brilliant day in this stunning Country.
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