Uzungöl and Sumela Monastery

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Had a traditional Turkish breakfast, of course. at the teacher apartment. The guy who runs the place wrote his complete name, email, phone, and address on a map and gave it to Megan. Then I guess he thought maybe he hurt my feelings and as an afterthought, did the same for me. I left mine in the room and eventually, Megan's ended up in the trash. So after a long breakfast, we headed to Uzungöl, which means 'long lake.' This quaint little village on a small lake gets its fair share of tourist buses, but it has not yet been completely negatively influenced by tourists. It is still quaint, even though it has a lot of pretty good size hotels, and the local eateries are still local. There aren't too many shops and the shops that are there sell locally made products like honey, tea, and there was one shop selling items carved from wood. We walked around the lake and up into the hills, and the people were friendly and didn't seem at all bothered by these two foreign women walking around. I don't think many tourists bother to walk up the hill. I think the tour buses just stop here for an hour, let people take photos, and then they leave. They don't even really have time to eat. But we did. We had chicken döner kebap that was delicious, and my Nescafe with milk was so good, I had two of them. Not a fan of Nescafe, but this was so good!

We thoroughly enjoyed our walk around the town. While we were there, Megan realized she'd taken the key from the teacher apartment with her, so we took it to the post office and they said give it to someone else and they would take it there for us. So she did. Then we were on our way to Sumela where we were going to visit a monastery tomorrow, and on the map it looked like we could drive a long loop to Sumela rather than driving back to Trabzon. Well, the road quickly turned to gravel and was not so easy to navigate as we were in the mountains. A bright orange car was coming the other direction and we flagged it down and they said the road would become near impassable and that we should turn around and go back to Trabzon. And we were happy to do it. Megan was doing all the driving and she was not happy on that road. It was only a short drive anyway, and we were staying in a town called Coşandere because they had the only hotel close to Sumela.

We arrived fairly early and checked into our really lovely room with really nice bathroom (50TL each/night) at Coşandere Otel. It has a much longer name in the Lonely Planet. It was early so once again, we went walking in the hills. We saw a lot of hazelnut trees and great views and one really huge dog. We went back to the hotel for a lovely dinner of sarma (stuffed grape leaves), çorba (soup), and a salad, and afterwards we went back to the room for an early night.

The next morning we had the buffet breakfast and got a fairly early start to Sumela Monastery (8TL). It was short, beautiful drive away and we parked at the bottom and decided to walk up. It was quite a steep walk through the woods, but we had some great views. It took about 30 minutes and when we got to the top, we were rewarded with a long staircase to climb to the entrance! When we entered, we were looking down on a courtyard with a lot of frescoes. Off the courtyard you can visit the chapel, the library, and a few other rooms, but most of the monastery is closed to visitors. I think it is unsafe and has not been restorated. Given its precarious location, it probably never will be. The color of the frescoes was surprisingly vivid, but many had been defaced by the Ottoman Muslims. Sumela Monastery is a Greek Orthodox monastery and was closed in the early 1920's when Ataturk came on the scene. We wanted to get a good view of the front of the monastery, so we walked back down via the road instead of the trail. We were rewarded with a postcard view, but our cameras wouldn't zoom in close enough for a really good picture. It was a stunning sight though, and we saw it just before the clouds moved in.

After we got back down the hill, we decided we had earned a snack. Megan came prepared with peanut butter and bisquits and we had some grapes, but Megan wouldn't eat them because we found six small snails on them. I didn't care. A little snail pee never killed anybody. Hee hee. Then we headed back to Trabzon. Today was our last day with the car, so we wanted to make the most of it. It was only about 1PM so we figured we could use the car to see some of the sights in Trabzon before returning the car. More about Trabzon in my next entry.

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Photos

Honey
Honey is very famous here and very expensive!

Hazelnuts
70% of the world's hazelnuts are grown in this region of Turkey. I bought a pound for 5TL.