Travelpalooza - Part VI

30th January; Fethiye - Bodrum After breakfast departure from the Hotel for the tour of Dalyan by boat (available weather condition permits only) . Afternoon arrival in Bodrum visit the castle of Bodrum and Yacht Harbour. Dinner and overnight at the Hotel in Bodrum.

Fethiye was quite pretty in the morning; our hotel was across from a marina.


Inside, Maeghan was opening her month-after-her-birthday present (I think it's a Canada thing. Like Mounties or Zambonies) and ruhlessly rousing people awake to the tender strains of Avenue Q. And I thought Canda hadn't produced any serial killers.


Girl is waaaay too cheerful in the just-barely-post-dawn hours.

But I digress.

After Maeghan had bullied, cajoled, and threatened everyone out of slumber, we all hauled ourselves out to the bus and departed for Dalyan to see the Lycian tombs. As usual, the long-suffering guide was a little fuzzy on the details (and, indeed, the basic premise), but apparently at some point a really long time ago, a beautiful princess (princess are always beautiful in legends) fell for a boy in a really big way. Inconveniently, this boy was her brother. Kerfluffle ensued, and eventually the girl died tragically and everyone mourned her, because even if she was a creepy, she was, of course, beautiful, so they carved some really nice tombs in a cliff face in her honor.

Anyway. As with the trip to the Sunken City, the Lycian tombs were really only reachable by a rickety boat ride through wind and rain.



Hannah, looking remarkably like the Unabomber.


Sheep!


Tombs!



A very lonely tree.


The local mosque (very pretty):


Valerio, looking cold and miserable and probably thinking about how it's summer in Brazil right now.


Having miraculously survived the voyage of the wannabe Titanic, we thawed out on the bus for the drive to Bodrum.

Bodrum is THE resort town of Turkiye. Talk to anyone in Istanbul, and if they have a summer house, apartment, or timeshare, it's in Bodrum. As I've mentioned before, we were there in the off-season, so about half the businesses were closed and the local strays were looking a bit skinny. Bodrum's also kind of strange in that the entire town is white. By town law, all buildings must be whitewashed. From a distance, the effect is quite stunning - it's just when you get closer that you realize what your mother always told you is indeed true: white shows everything. So instead of looking white and sparkly, things just look kind of...dirty. But once you get past the grime, it really is a fun town.

I think Garet was sleepy. And Julianna was just bemused.


Julianna being...smoochy.


Following lunch (overpriced tost from a cafe; something kind of like a toaster pastry from McDonalds - and man, was that thing hot) we regrouped to tour the Museum of Underwater Archeology at Bodrum Castle. According to our long-suffering guide, Bodrum Castle was built by crusaders and has, and I quote, "a tower for every nationality." Given that the castle only had five towers, I'm guessing that she meant "for every nationality involved in the Crusades."

And apparently there had been some question about whether the Museum of Underwater Archeology was, in fact, underwater:


(It's not)

The vistas...





The scary masks...


The glass fragments...


The highly self-explanatory warning signs...


Myself, cleverly disguised as a slightly more modest Venus de Milo...


Upon seeing this lion next to a lamppost...the first thing that came to mind was, "Aslan's a quadruple amputee!" and some crack about the White Witch's winter being harsher than previously reported. Mattie accused me of destroying her childhood. Oops.



The Marina outside Bodrum Castle...


And sunset on the beach as we walked to the hotel. Lovely.



And finally, photos taken from the hotel room balcony. All but the last were taken with a fifteen-second exposure:





So this is why Bodrum's so popular.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast...

Current apartment complex is generally pretty quiet. I've never heard anything from the neighbors short of a chair being dragged across a floor upstairs.

So tonight, my host brother and I are on our computers in his room; he's doing homework, I'm blogging and browsing Wikipedia. All is quiet save for the gentle clacking of keys when from upstairs comes a sound rather like 300 Spartans diving into battle. Except with mufflers, because it's coming through a few walls.

I look at Kaaan. "Football match tonight?"

Kaaan: "Yep."

Me: "...I'm blogging this."

Travelganza - Part V

29th January; Kaş - Fethiye Departure from the hotel, visit Xanthos, later drive to continue to Fethiye, arrival early in the afternoon and visit the Dead Sea (Olu Deniz), dinner and overnight at the Hotel in Fethiye.

We started the day by wandering around lovely Kaş. It was the off-season, so not much was jumpin', as it were, and Mattie was crushed to find that we had to hit three different diners and a convenience store before we found a place that sold ice cream. I believe she and Maeghan managed to eat ice cream in every town we stayed in. That takes dedication; most of the towns we visited were resort towns, and we were there in the peak of the off-season, and anyway, Turks have a Thing about cold. They're pretty phobic about it. Frozen deserts and white shoes: not to be found between May Day and Labor Day.

Anyway, Kaş was nice:


Leaving Kaş, we drove to the ruins of the town of Xanthos. The long-suffering guide was, as usual, slightly confused, but the gist is that Xanthos was inhabited for quite a long time (from Umpteen Thousand BC to the decline of the Roman Empire in 435 AD) despite the fact that the inhabitants tended to commit suicide en masse in protest of takeovers by various and sundry Roman emperors. Exactly how an entire town can commit suicide twice bends the mind a bit, but apparently it happened.

And in case there's any confusion about admittance fees, there's a handy sign on the gate to help you sort it all out:


At Xanthos:



The funny thing about touring a country with so much history is that it's treated very casually. At the might-have-been-the-basilica-of-Zeus, about half the exchange students ran off to go chase a herd of goats that was wandering the site (the long-suffering guide looked like she really missed her Valium). Most of the historical sites have a few stray dogs or cats wandering around. Xanthos, though, went one step further. Xanthos had a resident cow! (click to see better - it's a buffalo shot)


Amanda and Valeria, chilly but cheerful:


After Xanthos, we regrouped back on the bus and absconded to Fethiye, which will be a familiar name for all two of you who have read Birds Without Wings* and is a sprawling medium-sized town. And not far from Xanthos is the Dead Sea. No, not the Dead Sea; that's in Israel. This Dead Sea is a small, very salty, and freakishly cold inland pond.

So, of course, we had to swim.

Like many things, this is Maeghan's fault. She's Canadian, and therefore not truly of this earth (she celebrates Thanksgiving in October: Case in point!). She practically lives in an igloo, so of course the Dead Sea felt like a Jacuzzi to her. And because Mattie couldn't be bested by Maeghan, Mattie had to swim. And then they were taunting Garet, and Garet's from Chicago and runs warm anyway, Garet had to swim. And then they all started taunting Blase, who's a Michigander, so Blase had to swim.

And then I realized that if I didn't swim, I was seriously going to regret it, in spite of the inevitable hypothermia/frostbite/pneumonia/impending death. So I swam, too.

(And by "swam," I mean "stood shivering on the dock until Mattie and Maeghan pushed me in, and then crawled back out, toweled off, and wished fervently for hot chocolate." Just so we have our definitions straight)

Well. That was fun!

And from there to the hotel, which was mostly unexciting. After we got board throwing pistachios at each other from the balcony, we wandered down the street to a convivial convenience store for provisions, and retreated back to the room to eat junk food and view Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog.

It was also around this point that Mattie, Maeghan, and I were conscripted into doing the wake-up calls. We were roomies, and consistantly the only ones up and ready on-time in the mornings, and thus were recruited by the long-suffering guide and Can the Rotex Chaperone to coerce others into doing the same.

Materials: Room list, iTunes with a playlist of "possible wake-up music," and excessively cheery voices.

Procedure: Wake up around six. Fortify self with Nescafe is provided gratis; if not, complain about the lack of Nescafe and get dressed. From the room list, pick the people least likely to haul themselves out of bed when ordered to do so. Call them. When they've picked up, chirp "Good morning, sunshine!" into the phone, hold the phone over the computer's speakers, and start a track on the wake-up music playlist (Spice Girls went over very well). Go through the whole list in the same manner. Repeat twice. If, after the repeats, certain persons are still apparently not suitably awake, go pound on their doors. While singing.

Okay, so not the best way to win a popularity contest, but the results were impressive. Every day for the rest of the trip, we had everyone on the bus on schedule.

* Regarding Birds Without Wings: the novel is fictionalized, but the events and places it describes are indeed real. It's a beautiful, moving, humanizing portrait of the death of the Ottoman Empire and birth of the Republic of Turkey. It's also one of the best books I've ever read.

Travelpalooza - Part IV

28th January; Antalya - Kaş
After breakfast, leaving the hotel for Kaş, drive to continue to Demre where Father Christmas was born , visit the Church of St. Nicholas (Father Christmas). Drive to continue to Kekova for a boat tour (available weather condition permits only) after visiting drive to Kaş, dinner and overnight at the Hotel in Kaş.

We'll start the day with breakfast. This was a typical hotel breakfast, and generally a pretty typical Turkish breakfast. Occasionally the hotels had Frosted Flakes, too, which was divine. Mmm cereal. It's expensive here. But the filter coffee was good. Most Turks don't drink filter coffee; it's Turkish coffee (boiled) or Nescafe (instant) instead. Or tea. Turks like tea.


Derick (Brazil) sleeping on the bus. You're missing Scenary, Derick! Scenary and herds of goats!


Maeghan doing...actually, I don't think I want to know what Maeghan was doing. Wacky bus hijinks. We'll leave it at that.

(Also John (Florida), Tinkerbell (Mexico), Mattie (Ohio), Blase (Michagan), and Amanda (California), going left to right)

Town of Demre, as seen from the bus:



And the church of St. Nicholas in Demre. There are all sorts of legends regarding his origin, and our long-suffering guide seemed (as usual) to be having a little bit of trouble keeping them straight, but basically she said that the man who was eventually known as Santa Clause was a very rich man in his town. When another rich man lost all his money and was preparing to sell his daughters into slavery because he had no money for their dowries, Santa Clause dropped bags of gold down the other man's chimney to cover the dowries and save the girls. She didn't have an explanation for the costume or the elves. Or the Northward migration. Anyway, there's a lovely church, statues, etc.






That last one was Hannah (Maine), by the way.

And a very tilted orange tree.

Inside the church:





Later - desert after lunch. Yedigun is a fizzy orange-flavored drink, sort of like Fanta. It's a little bit like how I've heard soft drinks from the fifties described - almost painfully carbonated, and with a strange aftertaste that some say can cause hallucinations.


I don't know why there's a monkey on the bottle...

From Demre, we drove to Kekova , for our if-weather-permitting trip to the so-called Sunken City (no, not Atlantis. Atlantis is in the Pegasus Galaxy. Everyone knows that). Which involved taking a very small boat into very big waters (go with it. It's for contrast) in the middle of an awful lot of wind and rain. And, because this was Turkiye, there was disco blasting from the boat's speakers. You could feel the decking vibrating under your feet as the wind tried to toss you overboard. Good times!






But there was good scenary - lots of little isolated seaside towns - and the ruins of the Sunken City (which I know absolutely nothing about, save that it was a city that...well...sank at some point). And the problem with trying to look at (or photograph) it is that most of it is underwater, on account of the "sunken" thing. But it's still pretty cool: we're sailing along, and you're looking at the shoreline, going "Gosh, that could be a door...wait, it was a door. Wow."




On the way back, someone decided that the sea was too rough to go all the way back to the Kekova, so the bus came to one of the little isolated seaside towns and met us halfway.




And from there, we drove to the lovely little resort town of Kaş.