lillis absolutely adores ergidir and her feelings for the town were not hurt at all by the presence of their weekly thursday market that morning. amazing looking produce. we bought (and subsequently ate) a big bag of strawberries and sampled a few other items. a neighboring vendor insisted i get this woman’s husband with her in a photo. a cute turkish couple : )
the market was actually a really neat experience. turkey is like many foreign countries in that there is no shortage of old “little” men who are slightly stooped, and who are wearing a sweater and a sportcoat at all times. sometimes they’re shopping in the market, and sometimes they’re herding goats, but it’s always so picturesque. why don’t we still wear suits all the time…..like kirk douglas and val kilmer in the better movie about wyatt earp?
anyway, leaving ergidir, we headed around the lake towards pammukale. the lake was absolutely gorgeous and here’s a pic to prove it. it really was a serene place. lillis has already picked out our house……it’s a fixer upper, but has great views and easy access to this baked thing that’s shaped like a horeshoe made of red rope licorice, but is actually made from some sort of sweet flour mix and coverd (and infused??) with honey.
so we left ergidir and 6 hours later we were in pamukkale. simple? not so simple. compare two pictures….this is a picture of lush farmland, rich green set against a blue sky and a snow capped mountain…..
we made it just in time to heirapolis (not pictured here) and pamukkale. hierapolis is over 2K years old. amazing to see the scale on which that city was build, although the ruins (other than the theater) were mostly…um, ruined. speaking of ruining…there was an antique pool thought to be the sacred center of old hierapolis that has been surrounded by a full on hotel style pool setting by the turks….there are literally ancient columns laying in the pool. bizarre. anyway, that’s not the spoiling part. the spoiling was seeing russian’s in thongs (men and women…big hairy obnoxious men and women) traipsing around the pool, and the beautiful falls of pamukkale and taking pictures that i can only assume were destined to appear in a catalogue for mail order brides. the sun was pretty lackluster, but finally peeked out with a little bit so that i could get a few decent pics of the falls (the falls are actually made of travertine…calcium deposits building up over centuries….and the spring water that runs out over them is probably 85 degrees……definitely odd)
we were to drive to ephesus after, but seeing as night had fallen (and we were not sure where we’d stay if we got to ephesus) we succumbed to the charms of one of the scooter riding “hotel pimps” that cruise the streets of pamukkale looking for someone that can get to come see their hotel. i can only assume the hotels throw these dudes 5 bucks for getting people there, and that for those guys, that money is worth riding your scooter around half-harassing people with stories of how far the drive they’re about to make is, or how other hotels have gone into disrepair since your guidebook was printed. we had two hotels fighting over us. i felt like the prettiest girl in the ball. the place we stayed was decent (and only 50 turkish lira after some haggling – approx $35) and we were able to get to bed at a decent hour with a big day of driving to and seeing ephesus (and the house at which the virgin mary theoretically lived in at the time of her death – which is basically catholic disneyworld) and then heading on to fethiye for our sailboat cruise. good times ahead. oh, and on the list of good things from lillis, she noted that i forgot to mention that she saw a 70 year old french woman who was very stylish and whose haircut lillis aspires to in her later years.
Posted in Travel, Uswith Comments Off on turkey day 4 – market in ergidir and driving to pammukale/hierapolis
quick note her…..lil’s tummy hurt a little today so we skipped the underground city over concerns about the quality of restrooms eight stories underground in a one thousand year old city and instead drove on through aksaray, konya and beyeshir in he hyundai we just acqired. destination; ergidir. a smallish town on an impossibly beautiful and peaceful lake. no internet so sending from my phone, so pics later. i am wandering around the village in the AM as lillis takes a morning nap due to some apparently particularly impressive snoring last night….poor lillis.
Posted in Travel, Uswith Comments Off on turkey day 3, goreme to egidir
phew. 2 days in the books in turkey. we had a big day today…..lillis’ synopsis over dinner. we had a turkish breakfast, we drank turkish coffee, we saw an awesome monestary with some old frescos, we hiked a long way, we sat in the shade and had tea, we got massages (and i fell asleep during my massage), we had a romantic stroll, and we ate dinner.
i think she summed it up pretty well. i’ll only add that it was amazing to see the monasteries and cave homes that these people worked, worshiped in that long ago. particularly, seeing caves with remaining frescoes from 1,000 years ago was pretty impressive. the landscape was truly surreal, and we saw 4 hours of it over some pretty vigorous hiking up and down a canyon. one of us got a little tired and grumpy right at the very end of that (and so we hitchhiked with some passing locals so we didn’t have to hike the last mile back to the hotel) but otherwise we had a great day.
i was able to leverage some of the birthday money from my parents and lillis’ parents and supplement that with a little of the clothing budget in order to purchase the most expensive piece of luggage i will ever buy. i love it. i took it’s picture in front of the ancient monastery in goreme. it’s from saddleback….i highly recommend the bags and the company.
i’ll spare you another fairy chimneys picture and instead throw one in from our hike after we finished up at the goreme open air museum.
at the hamam after, they scrubbed off about 2 lbs of dust and then we got massages before heading to dinner at a la turca. darned good eats.
Posted in Travel, Uswith Comments Off on turkey (and cappadocia) day 2
