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Published: November 14th 2007
December 9 - 11, 2006
Saturday
When we woke up Saturday we knew we needed to get out of Antalya. It was a nice enough place and not touristy in the way that other well-trod, over-blown, tout-filled towns are in other parts of the world, but for Turkey it was our low point thus far.
We had really been struggling to make decisions about what to see and where to go while in Turkey. Any sane traveler should be able to see and savor Turkey in 26 days but we felt smothered and rushed almost since our arrival. The tough decision was whether to head further along the southern coast, seeing the ancient ruins of Olympus, the fire breathing mountain Chimaera, and then the sweet seaside village of Kas, or to move on to the ruins and travertine pools of the inland village of Pamukkale.
We had two weeks left in Turkey and knew that any time wasted or any destination added in the south would eventually come out of our planned time elsewhere. As we had already committed ourselves to returning to Turkey someday you’d think it would have been easier to forego some destinations but we
were still trying to decide in a cab on the way to the bus station. When we got in the car the cab driver, making conversation, asked where we were headed. We mentioned Carsi (near Olympus) but continued our debate. When we arrived at the bus station he pulled up to terminal B for Carsi but he threw it in reverse and drove a good hundred meters when we said we were headed to Pamukkale. Turkish cab drivers are aces.
Our three hour ride from Antalya to Pamukkale was pretty uneventful. Our bus stopped in Denizli (a much larger town 18 km from Pamukkale) and we hopped a local bus. After wedging ourselves into the bus, which filled up quickly, we were immediately targeted by a trio of eleven year old boys who used every English word they knew to try and talk with us. Two of the boys, Koon (pronounced kahn) and Tunce (toonch) befriended us to the extent that we traded email addresses with them (eleven year olds!). When we arrived on the fringe of town they yelled at the driver to stop and asked us to follow them (which, of course, we did - Lonely Planet
says "always follow children when you are new in town and have no place to stay").
When we got off the bus the boys realized how tall Roger is and, through imagination and a miscommunication, thought Roger was a pro basketball player (it is very easy to masquerade as such when the competition is 11).
Tunce, as it turned out, is the nephew of the owner of one of the most highly rated places to stay in the village and both he and Koon escorted us to the gate. Here Tunce's grandmother took over, showing us a lovely room and letting us know her daughter would arrive in a little while to help us get situated.
We decided to head out to explore the town and happened upon the boys again, fresh from a trip to the store and armed with a chocolate bar and orange soda (which they immediately offered to share with us). The boys asked us if we wanted to play football (of course we did!) and we followed them about a mile through the village before finding a spot to play (first choice, groomed soccer field behind the town’s most plush hotel, was
in use, but second choice, a rocky vacant lot, was free and already had “goals” (piles of rocks) set up. Having secured a field we realized the boys had no ball. Tunce was content to play with an empty two liter bottle, though Koon searched for ten minutes and ultimately appeared with a flat basketball that worked just fine. Roger’s natural ability at soccer blew the boys away so much that Tunce reorganized the two teams of three to compensate (Roger is terrible and every 11 year old in the village now knows it).
During and before the game we were given quite a slice of Pamukkale life with our diminutive hosts. When a black cat crossed our paths, for example, the boys urgently grabbed a lock of their hair and would not calm down until we did likewise. You seem to exist in a state of panic grabbing your hair until you see a bird and everything is restored to normal (the good fortune of a bird sighting following a calamitous cat encounter does not keep the boys from throwing rocks at every other bird they come across).
The boys seem to share everything thoughtlessly and we
saw them take turns on the beaten up bike that one of them owned, racing up and down the hill, attempting mild hops or tricks, and riding one another on the handle bars. The only thing that interrupted our afternoon in Mayberry, Turkey was the domestic dispute that erupted in one of the homes on the edge of the lot where we were playing soccer. We overheard a great deal of angry shouting, some shrieking, and some crying and a boy leapt from the open window of the home and ran as if seeking help. This all provided great theatre for the boys but unsettled us somewhat.
Tunce walked us back to our hotel and we were shortly met by the owners, Umy and Mehmet. The couple had driven the sixty-odd kilometers to visit Mehmet’s family and, upon hearing of our arrival, returned to welcome us. During the peak season they work long days cooking three meals a day for all of their guests. As we were the only guests tonight they did not bother to fire up the kitchen, which is in one of the other small buildings around the garden, and instead had us to their home
for dinner. Their hotel, which includes a dorm-style building, a pool and garden, two tree houses, and the restaurant / kitchen / office building, has recently added a sparkling, lovely new building of rooms. The lower floor of this building is their residence, a beautiful and warm apartment.
We talked for quite some time before enjoying an excellent home cooked meal. We may have stayed all night happily chatting away but realizing they must get very few guest free evenings we departed after two and a half hours.
Sunday
Our day started with breakfast downstairs in the family’s apartment, a full Turkish breakfast with the usual fresh fruit, vegetables, olives, bread, honey and jam, as well as a nice fried egg and sausage. They spared no effort or expense in making us welcome or well fed.
From the hotel we walked up the road to Hieropolis and the famous Pamukkale travertines. The hills just above the village have a wealth of warm underground springs bubbling to the surface and flowing down the hills. The water or the land or both are rich with calcium that accumulates wherever the water flows (from the surreal arctic moonscapes along
the hills to clogging the water pipes of the village). These springs, considered to have healing properties, drew the Romans to the area in great numbers starting in the second century BC. Visitors today can explore the somewhat manicured natural phenomena of the travertine pools and a massive site of ruins.
There are three entrances to the park. The two main entrances positioned about three kilometers apart at the north and south of the park were made with package tour buses in mind. These entrances are collections of shops and large parking spaces and not too much else, though they do allow for easy access to the park. The third option, leading straight off of the main street in town, is a pedestrian only path that takes you right up the side of the hill under the travertines. About two hundred meters of this path demand that you remove your shoes, both to protect the formations and because you must wade through several milky pools to get to the top. This would be far more pleasant if there were not wide patches of calcium covered pebbles tenderizing your feet. The landscape is so bright and white that it almost
The Soccer Stars (and their tubby American pal)
Koon and Tunce are immediately to Roger's left.made us feel cold despite the mild weather and warm water. For first hour or so we saw very few people, spying only a single couple ahead of us and two people behind us.
We saw the travertines, which you are not allowed to enter, although a few young men were climbing down and taking photos until a staff person waved them out rather lazily. We saw how easy-going the staff could be several times among the travertines and ruins, including a much more blatant trespass in the theatre ruins when two guys ran down under the restricted area partitions to take photos only to be barely chastised by security. This bummed us out for a couple reasons, but chiefly because we anticipated security to lay the smack down on the disrespectful antics and we were excited to see the uniformed guard coming, only to see justice go un-served. For a nice change of pace, however, the most flagrant offenders appeared to be Turks and not foreign tourists.
To rest our feet we stopped at the hot springs swimming pool, which is full of clear, warm water as well as columns and other ruins that you can swim
around. The pool area sits in the center of a large courtyard that is surrounded by vendors. It was so quiet we wondered why the vendors stay open. We had tea and relaxed to get our energy back.
Like the ruins at Termessos, Hieropolis is beautifully preserved and features an amazing theatre (note: we opted to use both the local and the English language guidebook spellings for Hierapolis in this entry - why make hard choices among cultures?). The ruins stretch a great distance and we walked the breadth of them before heading back to the travertines, now brilliantly blinding in the afternoon sun. As we walked along the path overlooking the empty pools (today water is run only periodically through each area of pools to preserve the glistening white from algae), a guard started talking to us and then he told us we could get into the dry calcium pools for some pictures, going so far as to pose us. He snapped several photos while looking around to see if anyone was coming. Just as we climbed out of the pool a female guard showed up looking like she had been alerted to a violation and she was
shortly joined by two more guards. The guard who had encouraged us never looked worried. We hope our sincere thanks keep him warm if he gets fired.
We tried to exit the park by walking along the top of a ridge and down to the village but stumbled upon a filthy naked backpacker (we presume - he didn’t look Turkish and he didn’t look like he’d strayed from a high-end package tour) bathing in one of the streams. This turned our stomach and turned us around, heading back up to try to exit another way, near where the tour buses park. At this point we saw why the vendors around the pool stay open. The lot was packed with bus loads of day trippers. Something possessed us to buy some magazines and then have an overpriced doner kebab from a vendor near the swimming pool. Unlike the quiet morning at the pool, where we appeared to be the only tourists and locals appeared to be the only ones swimming, the place was crawling with tour bus visitors who appeared to shop the vendor’s candy counters and trinkets pretty heavily.
Seeing so few visitors other than those on the
Sarcophagi
The Hieapolis Necropolis is the most preserved ancient cemetery in Turkey with tombs dating from the Hellenistic period and the early days of Christianity. tour buses crystallized something that Mehmet had told us about living in Pamukkale. The vast majority of visitors come to the town for only one day, driving in and out to see the sights and leaving no money in the small town.
We headed back along the ridge to where the skeevy backpacker had been and were able to negotiate our way out of the park, walking across scrub filled fields in view of the travertines until we hit a dirt road that put us out not far from our hotel. We went back to the hotel and took a nap. We weren’t sure if our hosts would come to get us or if we should go downstairs so we went down at 6:30 and ended up staying until after 9 again. Umy prepared a great dinner with vine leaves, cabbage leaves, chicken, rice and yogurt soup for roger and beans in tomato sauce for Amy (the night before Amy had mentioned how much she loved the vegetables in tomato sauce).
Monday
We were unsure what kind of schedule the bus kept between Pamukale and the station at Denizli. We headed downstairs for breakfast about 9am, ate,
Amy Enters The Domitian Gate
Dating from 82-83 AD the gate serves as the northern entrance to the city. and then headed to the street to catch the bus to the bus station. We waited on the street from about 10:30 to 11:30 while four buses passed and never stopped (we suspect they were too full). After a while a family showed up, apparently, also to catch the bus to Denizli. Their adorable 4 year old boy kept talking to us, mostly in Turkish, and he was not discouraged that we could not respond (his parents would periodically tell him some English words to say to us, which may not have enhanced our communication with the tyke but it sure was cute).
Around noon we decided to go back to Mehmet and Umy’s house and caught them as they were preparing to drive to Denizli to shop. They remembered that this being Monday everyone goes into town for the market (this would have been nice to know in the first place, but they kindly offered us a ride, which we enjoyed). On the way to the bus station in their van Mehmet stopped to pick up an old lady and a man on the side of the road. We’re not sure if they arranged to pick them up
The Columned Street
Named for the columned houses that lined the street, the avenue was the main street of the city and stretches more than a kilometer. or if they picked them up because they know the bus is going to be full, but it highlighted just how small a town Pamukkale is.
At the bus station we were happy to find out there was a bus at 1 (45 minutes after we arrived). We stopped for lunch at a popular bus station lunch counter. Everyone in there was eating doner kebabs and yogurt, a fairly simple and basic dish, but when we ordered we got the deluxe plate that came to 10 lira per person (this is the equivalent to stopping at McDonald’s, where everyone is eating value a meal, and having them deliver Thanksgiving dinner). The food was good but we were annoyed that we allowed ourselves to get ripped off that way. But we’d only been on the road for ten months and were obviously unprepared for such a scam….
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