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The main drag
These pretty columns go all the way along the main street in Ephesus... I had been really looking forward to Turkey. Every traveller we had come across had waxed lyrical about how wonderful turkey was, how friendly everyone was, how the Turkish men would give you lots of camels in exchange for your wife.. sounded blissful really!! The flip side was the fact that the day before we entered Turkey, the Australian government upgraded the warnings - "avoid unnecessary travel into Turkey... terrorists targeting tourists... chance of terrorist attacks imminent" - so we were slightly apprehensive as well!! But we figured that there would always be these kind of problems, and really, you had to just take your chances and trust God to look after us in spite of our stupidity. I'm sure there's some kind of wisdom problem there...
Turkey is a bit like it's namesake. Big, fat, covered in feathers, and rude gobbling noises. OK maybe just big and fat 😊 It was with some dismay that we discovered that this country was HUGE!! Definitely no way we were going to do it any justice in 5 days.
So the plan was pretty basic; hit Ephesus, apologise, then run away to Istanbul, marvel at the rug shops, bazaars, and mosques,
and head off to Tunisia!
I was also looking forward to the food. As you all probably have figured out, I love sampling different food types, and Greece and England were just a little boring... well, just too similar to stuff you get back at home!! So my tastebuds were rubbing themselves together in anticipatory glee at the pecuniary delights ahead!!
So - after the wonderful ferry from Samos (which we were a little bitter about, having already wasted one of our precious days due to a missed boat) - we arrived in Turkey. I had stubbornly refused to withdraw any more Euros to pay the port taxes in turkey, since I argued that we would be able to take out turkish lira at the ports, and pay with those instead!! Wrong. Catherine was moderately peeved with me, but hey, after a bit of handwaving, we managed to get into the country, without going through passport control, paying taxes, etc, and got to an ATM, and then went back and paid for it all!! Left my wife as ransom of course 😊 But I did go back and get her since she was worth more than the 40
The library
This was reconstructed in the 70s. Imagine the jigsaw puzzle!! Euros that we had to pay. I could get a better price at the bazaars in Turkey.
So we finally got our first touch of Turkey. We had arrived at the port town of Kusadasi, which is a horribly overdeveloped tourist haven, full of large ritzy hotels and theme parks. Ugh factor of 200. Also, 10 days ago, a suicide bomber had detonated himself in the area (although he had ineptly failed to hurt anyone else thank goodness). Point is, we were a bit apprehensive about staying in Kusadasi, so we had arranged to go stay in Selcuk, a small village 10 km north. It also had the advantage of being only 3 km from Ephesus.
Our hostel was owned by a Turk called Harry, who had lived in Australia for 18 years with his family. He spoke like one of us, and all his staff had learned English from him, and so also spoke with an Australian accent!! I guess the best way to descibe the speech is "broken Australian". Still was very nice and comforting to hear people speaking english the way it's meant to be spoken!! 😊
The hostel also had about 250 billion
other australians staying there. I exaggerate a little, but nonetheless we had a great time meeting other travellers, some of whom made our 4 month holiday look like a weekend away to the blue mountains 😊
So far we had been very impressed with turkish hospitality. They really looked after us, gave us food and drink, organised tours for us, buses... of course we later discovered that we paid premium for all of this, but nonetheless was a great experience. Harry even drove us around for the day to see Ephesus, and other sights, and charged us absolutely nothing. Must have made enough off our laundry fee 😊
So let me get to Ephesus. As one of our fellow Aussies put it - Ephesus is the city that some bible dude wrote a letter to that made it into the bible (or something like that). We were able to give her a bit more info 😊
For those of you who don't know, Paul wrote a letter to the Ephesians, and this letter is in the New Testament. He also went to the city, and caused a near riot, when the locals threw him out. Apparently the
steady conversions to Christianity were hurting the guild that made statues of Diana (as Christians had no use for idols to Diana!!) , and so they incited a riot, ending up with Paul leaving in quite a hurry (you can read more in the book of Acts).
Ephesus was very impressive. It's now a ruined city, which is in pretty decent condition. Admittedly a lot of work has gone in to restore it, and a lot of the standing structures have been put back together. But still - very nice. It's a bit surreal to walk through a city and imagine what was going on here 2000 years ago. We particularly enjoyed the public toilets that we saw. Basically a row of holes in a stone bench - quite picturesque really. I wonder if 2000 years from now people are going to walk through our toilets and take pictures the way we were 😊
We also got to see a rather impressive amphitheater that seated something like 24000 people. The great thing about this is that you don't need a sound system to communicate to the far ends of the auditorium!! Catherine thinks that we can save a lot of money on the next Hillsong conference if we just use a properly designed amphitheathre and ditch the sound system altogether!! No power requirements yay!
So - Ephesus was nice. We had also taken the opportunity to try Turkish delight. Mind you, every other man was telling Catherine that
he was turkish delight *sigh*. Turkish delight in Turkey tastes pretty much like what it tastes like in Australia. Although they had several varieties which of course I tried. Given that this delectable foodstuff is completely made of sugar, I'm sure that my hard-earned waistline was going to suffer but hey, you're only in Turkey once!! That said, after trying every single type that we could get our hands on (more than 20!) I came to the conclusion that I liked the ones that we get back at home the best!!! *grin*
After Ephesus, we headed out to St John's Basilica. Saw his tomb. Still dead. I was bored to tears but Catherine has made it a sub-goal to visit all the apostle's tombs!! Macabre woman.
The next day we headed out to Pammukale. This is basically a large hill covered in white stuff (we failed to read our guidebooks as to what the white stuff was but maybe chalk? Some kind of minerall-ey stuff? Who cares. Great intrepid travellers like us don't need to know the whys of places, we just need to go 😊).
OK we're basically disgusted that we can't tell you anything about the place. But imagine a big white mountain, with a stream flowing down from it, making lots of very pretty rock pools. Add 35 degrees heat, and a billion european and russian tourists, stir it up, and you get... hordes of tourists jumping into rock pools (that are only about a foot deep) while wearing next to nothing. I have never seen so many women wearing g-string bikinis and high heels while walking around a mountain!! One woman in particular amused us to no end - she was blonde, tall, wearing a leopard skin bikini, 5 inch heels, and was
completely sunburned along the back, including her butt cheeks!! Could not imagine her sitting down for the next two days. ouch!! Would have loved to include pictures of them (the tourists not her butt cheeks) but hey wanted to keep this blog g-rated and also wanted all you boys out there to be reading these for the right reasons!! 😊
In spite of this, the rock pools were quite lovely. Not sure the camera does it justice. At the top of the mountain we also got to see Heiropolis, which was another ruined Roman city. Apparently this city used to be one you came to if you were ill, and you would bathe in the rock pools. We were pretty over roman ruins though, and pretty much breezed through it.
And that was it for Selcuk!! Our next stop was Istanbul. We would have loved to see Gallipolli, but as it was we only had two days in Istanbul, which was going to be a stretch!! Next time.
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