TURKEY CONTINUED

When we had been in Selcuk, Mari and I had an entire campsite to ourselves.  It was very beautiful, natural and quiet.  We boarded a bus and landed in the town of Bodhrum, which a tourist resort town on the mediterranean coast.  It was amazing the difference.  This town had restaurants catering to absolutely every budget, huge crowds swarming around cafes on the docks, large nightclubs for the rich end of the tourist trade and cruise ships landing at an amazing rate.  It was a little daunting at first, but at least they had a bank machine. 
We had come to Bodhrum for a reason.  This was the site of Turkey's archeological museum.  We were not dissapointed.  Inside were collections of artifacts that had been collected off Turkey's coast for generations.  The museum even had a rebuilt ship on display, as it had been found on the bottom of the ocean.
After seeing this museum, I decided that it was time to once again go SCUBA diving, so on we moved to the town of Kas (pronounced cash).  Kas is a similar town to Bodhrum,  except it caters more to a budget group of tourists, and it has camping facilities.   Almost as soon as we arrived, I found a boat and organized a dive leaving the following day.
Now the mediterranean would suprise anyone who expected it to be warm.  It was actually cool enough to require a small wetsuit.  It would also surprise you that there really isn't much to see.  I say a few clay jugs (called amphoras) that were probably a few hundred years old, and a few fish, but in actuality that wasn't the best part of the dive.  In fact, I was following my dive partner around and watching my air supply, and noting that I was 30 metres underwater.  I couldn't stay at this depth for long (roughly 100 feet), but when I looked up, the surface was perfectly clear above me.  I had 30 metres of visibility.  I was amazed.  At home in Ontario, when I dive below 30 feet, I am surrounded in blackness and must always take a flashlight.  I laughed, imagining an additional 70 feet of visibility in Ontario.
While we were in Kas we decided to partake of some of the local wine and seafood.  This was truly amazing.  There is such an incredible array of food in Turkey, and I wouldn't even suggest one to be better than another, but on the mediterranean coast, they really know how to do seafood right.  The other great part of Kas, is its proximity to an underwater city.  A town built on a small island near Kas was submerged by an earthquake a few hundred years ago.  We bought tickets on board a glass bottom boat, and amongst several swimming stops, we slowly cruised over the ruins of an ancient city.  Half of it was over 100 metres below us, but much was visible just offshore, and a lot just below the boat.
After this much of modern civilization, we decided we would jump into the past.  For the backpacker visiting turkey, one of the must stops is Olympos.  Anyone who has seen the hercules cartoons will be familiar with this town.  Today, the ruined city is easily accessable as is the eternal flame.  But in order to attract budget travellers, the area around the anciet city has several hostels which cater to like-minded individuals by offering tree-house accommodation.  For the most part these tree houses are shacks built on top of an old tree frame or on stilts.  Either way they were an absolute highlight for me, as for the coolest place we stayed in our trip.  The other thing was these huts came with free breakfast and dinner all for an incredibly reasonable rate. 
The reason for the plethora of budget places is that you either have to arrive in Olympos via a tour, or through a series of bus exchanges.  It can be daunting for those of us that speak 10 words of turkish, but we got there.
We spent a full day exploring the ruins of the town of Olympos, and then walking up and back to Mount Olympos.  When you arrive at Mount Olympos you will be amazed at the ETERNAL FLAME that graces the top.  In ancient times  the flame was so large that it was visible from a ship at sea.  Today it is several flames shooting our from rock crevices.  It was phenomanal to see, and to satisfy everyone's curiosity they do re-light themselves if they go out.  While at the top, anyone who wanted eternal flame tea, could purchase a pot off an enterprising turkish man who had set up a kettle a top one of the smaller flames.  We were truly enjoying our time here, when we got an e-mail that asked us to call home.  The following day we rushed off to the town of Antalya.  This is the biggest town on the coast, and a place where we could make our call.  Olympos it seems, is one of the few places where internet and phones are incredibly unreliable.  We wouldn't have even got our e-mail in Olympos except for a very sympathetic local with a laptop, who tried for over an hour and was finally able to maintain a connection for 3 minutes, long enough for us to read 2 letters. 

We did a bit of back-tracking from Antalya and headed for Pammukale.  We again did some camping, and met up with some French people who were travelling our way.  Dusting off our french skills, Mari and I muddled through a daily conversation with this solo traveller who was incredible friendly, but who spoke no english.  We saw it as a great chance to practice some multi-lingual skills.  At one point we had a conversation with an Italian man who we answered in Spanish.  He laughed, not so much that our spanish was so bad and our italian was non-existant, but that it was still better than his english.  For anyone who has heard me speak spanish, you will realize how bad his english truly was.
Surrounding and towering above our tiny global village was the huge cliffs of Pammukale.  Now preserved as a National Park, Pammukale is a collection of huge pools of pure white.  The area is so calcium rich that over time a collection of streams have poured down several cliffs, depositing calcium into large pools.  From a distance the area appears snow white and magnificant.  From up close, warm waters slowly drift down a mountain of pure white.  Travellers can walk barefoot among the calcium laden paths past the pools that have formed over time.  On top of the cliffs is the ancient city of Hierapolis which was a early spa.  Today the amphitheatre, roman baths and old dwellings are still visible, and for a modest fee, anyone  can swim among huge columns and ancient pillers in a natural spa located atop the cliffs.  It is spectacular, although a little crowded in the summer months.

Quickly running out of time, we got an overnight bus to the center of the country, and ended up in Gorome, in the middle of the Cappadocian Vallies.  We set up in a campsite for our last few days, in an orchard of apricots.  Across the road we found plum trees, and between these two fruits we gorged ourselves for a few days.
Cappadocia, is an area of early christian settlement.  The area has huge valleys where early christians found it easy to hide away from religous persicusion.   A couple of the more ingeneous hiding spots included building cave dwellings into the sides of cliffs and rock pillars, and also to build underground cities. 
In the area, there are three underground cities that people can visit, however the town of Derinkuyu is the largest.  This underground city has 18 levels (of which Mari and I were allowed on 10) all inter connected.  Underground there were stables for sheep and cows, churches, houses, kitchens, cooking areas, and hundreds of devices designed around protection  from attack.  We were absolutely blown away as we wandered underground for  over an hour.  How had these people built these?  I truly feel that I couldn't possibly do this city justice in my description, but if anyone gets the chance to see it, I highly recommend it.

The other highlight of the Cappadoccia vallies are the fairy chimneys.  Bascially, a fairly chimney is a rock tower that is built up with a large rock top shaped like a cone and a rather tubular base.  (there are hundreds of these in the area and all of them are rather phallic looking).  Because the area was a huge volcanic valley, over time the elements have laid down several layers of various material.  The top is basalt a hard mineral, and the base is a tufa, a relatively soft mineral.  After the layers were lain, time and the wind began a steady progression of wearing down the valley.  The tufa wore at a faster rate than the basalt, and the loose soil blew away quite quickly.  The result was hundreds of these fairy chimeys, which were so named because locals thought that in the moonlight they could see magical beings inhabiting the chimneys.  It was fascinating anyway.

With that, we headed back to Istanbul, and flew out.  It was a great tour, and was definately the country to break the ice between Asia and Europe.