Travelganza - Part I

25th January ; Istanbul – Pamukkale

Departure from Taksim Ataturk Kultur Merkezi 07.30 and Kadikoy Sogutlucesme at 08.00 in the morning. Drive to Pamukkale, arrival in Pamukkale in the afternoon, dinner and overnight at the Hotel.

So really, Day 1 was an awful lot of time on a bus. The best part of the day was when, as we drove along the crest of a minor mountain, our dear and patient and only occasionally erroneous guide turned on the bus's microphone to suggest that "if you look out the windows, you will see one of the stunning vistas our country has to offer..."


She meant the windows on the other side of the bus. And if that's not a metaphor, I don't know what is.

We finally arrived in Pamukkale after dark and in the middle of a drizzle that would follow us for the next few days. The hotel was...interesting; I believe I referred to it as Hotel Le Sketch in an email. I suspect that it had its heyday in the mid-eighties, and possibly its last good cleaning at the same time. Upon reaching our room, myself, Maeghan, and Ohio discovered that all the towels in our bathroom were embroidered with the names of other hotels (and, in one case, a national bank). The walls suggested a fight to the death involving large quantities of hot tea, and hinted that the interior decorator didn't realize that sanding and painting was supposed to follow mudding and taping.

We were also, apparently, in the garret room.




What's especially unfair is that I am the oldest one in that picture. By a good two years. This is also evidenced by the fact that when Chicago (the shady-looking one in yellow) decided to get especially annoying, I did not see fit to join the others in an improvised dogpile in retribution.

Instead, I documented it!


On the hotel's plus side, it did feature numerous hot springs, a swimming pool (which may have had small icebergs in it. We swam anyway) and a delightfully steamy sauna. We circuited from the cauldarium to the pool to the sauna and back again before realizing that we were chasing a group of beleagured Korean tourists, who simply wanted to relax, ahead of us. After that, we left them the cauldarium and dipped in and out of the pool and sauna. The cauldarium had smelled suspiciously of sprouts and cooked salmon, anyway.

Also, in the dining rooms, almost every wall featured at least one print of Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-winning photo of a starving girl in Sudan, watched by an expectant vulture. Carter himself, never able to reconcile the guilt of letting the girl die, later committed suicide. (Photo hosted by fbs-cs.org) Which was a sobering image to have surrounding you as you guiltily pondered throwing out your breakfast and running to a convenience store instead, because the food was truly terrible.

Fortunately, the hotels only got better from there.