Selcuk
Selcuk was a nice little town we visited in Turkey. The town itself was rather pretty, as were a lot of the ruins that were dotted around it:
This is all that remains of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The column has been reconstructed, and most of the archaeological remains have been spirited away to the British museum, but it was rather cool to see, nonetheless.
"Wait a minute Julian: I thought you said you were only going to do the highlights from now on?!" Believe it or not, this actually -was- a highlight. Bear with me for a moment and I'll explain. :) By the time we'd gotten to Selcuk, it was getting about time for another haircut, and, after some translation assistance from the hotel staff, I was ridden into town on the back of a motorbike (no helmet, of course!), and dropped at a hair salon. My usual experience of a haircut in Melbourne is that I go to my very cool hairdresser, get my hair washed, cut, have a nice chat, and that's about it. In Turkey, it's more like an all-in-one therapy treatment. I was given a haircut, wash, and a short head, neck, shoulder, arm and head massage. They also burn away all the hairs on and in your ears with a lit wick. It's actually not that bad, as long as you don't mind the smell of your own burning hair! I'd also deliberately not shaved that morning so I could see what getting shaved with a cut-throat razor would be like. It definitely does the job, and it wasn't too uncomfortable, except for the one little bit they didn't put enough foam on. The only really uncomfortable bit was the aftershave: yipe! All up, it was nice and relaxing. I wonder if I could talk my hairdresser over here into offering a similar service??
Ephesus
The ruins of Ephesus weren't far out of Selcuk, and were extensive and very impressive. I've already bombarded you with a lot of Roman ruin shots, so I'll just put in the ones that stood out for this place in particular:
Yes, this is what you think it is. Yes, I wanted a photo. Yes, we also had a group photo with several of us sitting down at once. :P
The library, which apparently also had a tunnel leading to the town's brothel, just opposite!
A rather impressive ampitheatre:
Gozleme making
A Gozleme is the Turkish version of a pancake. It's basically a very thin, somewhat tough bread that you fill with cheese, meat, vegetables, fold into a thin parcel, then cook. I also had a chocolate one at one point, which was very nice! After our tour of Epehesus, we got a chance to try making them ourselves. This was one time when volunteering to go first (almost no-one ever wants to, esp. if it involves jumping off something!) was not as good an idea, though, as I hadn't had a chance to watch and see what I was supposed to be doing! We were supposed to try the rolling part of the process, which is actually somewhat different to handling bread dough, as you need to use a very light touch. I didn't exactly do a perfect job, but I didn't destroy it either, and one of the ladies finished it off for me. The pancake ends up being about the size of the tables you can see in these photos:
You then put your filling inside, fold it into a large parcel, and put it in to be cooked. When it comes to eating it, one is enough for most people!
Calcium Travertines
The calcium travertines at Pamukkale (which means "cotton castles" in Turkish) were rather cool. They're formed by hot, calcium-rich waters from mineral springs continually leaving deposits as they flow down the hills. Even if they weren't quite what I was expecting, they were still nice. You had to walk on them in bare feet, but this mostly didn't cause a problem, except for the occasional rougher part. In fact, the finely "rippled" texture of the ground actually made for a very good grip!
After sunset, I ended up walking back down in the dark with our tour leader, with our way only being lit by strategically placed floodlights. There was a very narrow water channel that ran down for quite some distance, and we opted to walk down in this, as it was quite warm, especially compared to the now-cool ground! We had to be careful though, as there was literally no space in the channel either side of your foot, and it was very uneven, both depth and breadth-wise! Walking back down in the semi-dark with our feet splashing through running warm water and chatting as we went had a nice feel to it, and really was a lot of fun.
You'll probably remember me talking about the Fairy Chimneys that we saw in Goreme the first time we were there, and me mentioning that people had made houses out of some of them. Thanks to a bit of overlap on our second trip we ended up back in Goreme, and also got a chance to have a dinner at a local's fairy chimney house. They were happy for us to walk around taking photos before dinner:
As you can see, it's really quite something! Dinner was very nice and I ended up next to the host, which gave me a chance to chat to him for a bit, even if his English was a little limited. It turned out that his family had been living there for 5 generations. Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, these houses are worth a lot.
The first time we were in Goreme, my travel buddy and I figured we'd see what our other group members thought of the hot air ballooning there, and do it ourselves when we came back, if they liked it. They did, so we booked ourselves in this time 'round, and got up before dawn (ack!) to make our way to the launch site. About the only times in my life that I've ever been up for dawn have involved some sort of exciting event. This one was no different, with the usual atmosphere of anticipation. We signed in at the store, were assigned a pilot, and then got driven to the site in a minibus, where we got off and waited for the crew to get our balloon ready. Watching a hot air balloon being inflated is quite cool (the first one was ours):
After clambering in and getting the "how to handle a rough landing without breaking something" briefing, we were released into the air by the crew. We'd been told that, unlike all other forms of flying, we wouldn't feel that we were moving over the ground, but that it was moving under us. This was absolutely true: it really felt as if we were hanging there motionless while the ground just rolled by underneath us, which was a rather unusual, but neat feeling.
The problem with being up in a hot air balloon is that it's very hard to take a photo which would give anyone else the impression that you're actually in one, and not just standing on a cliff somewhere. Still, I did my best:
We were up for about an hour, and then started to make our descent. Impressively enough, the crew towed us in for a landing on the back of the vehicle the balloon had first been taken to the launch site on!
Back on the ground, we all had fun helping to tread the balloon flat so it could be packed up, with 3 of us stubbornly persisting even when we could see that it was going to come down over us. We ended up in our own little kindergarten cubbyhouse, which was kind of fun. :) Stuffing the balloon back into its container is pretty much like putting a sleeping bag away. We watched them do it, followed by several people taking flying leaps on to the top of it once it was done ("helping"??). The whole experience had been great, and as we got back on to the mini-bus to go back to our respective hotels, some of us started to feel quite tired, as the adrenaline began wearing off, and we remembered just exactly how early we'd gotten up.
Red and Rose Valleys
As we'd already been around Goreme a bit before, my travel buddy and I opted to go for a walk around a different area to the group when we got back. We went to the Red and Rose Valleys, which were definitely worth it. The walk was nice, with beautiful scenery:
One of the things I really loved was the way some formations almost looked liked marshmallow peaks, complete with pink-white colouring! (You may have to look at the enlarged versions of these two to see what I'm talking about.)
And that was pretty much it for Goreme. I'm going to step slightly out of sequence now, and wrap up all of Istanbul in the next post, even though Gallipoli and Troy came in between two parts of it.
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