Southern Turkey

Greetings from southern Turkey. You may be familiar with the Evil Eye, a ubiquitous Turkish traditional piece of glassware which is meant to reflect evil back to the wrongdoer, thus protecting minibuses, souvenir shops and the like from harm. This is what Turkey looks like through the Evil Eyes.


The wine list does not look great, we have to say. Penny has become quite the connesieur of undrinkable wine, and Matt managed to get a coffee flavoured beer, which was slightly worse than it sounds.

The bread has been epic.

The olive selection is just showing off.

But it is good to find a country that really understands cheese.

And there is no shortage of oregano for the spaghetti and pizzas that discerning tourists turn to when day 5 of a stomach upset beckons.

We have been roughing it, if you can call airconditioned bussess and small hotels roughing it, around south-western Turkey. One of the stops was Ephesus, said to be the best preserved Roman ruin town in this part of the world.

It had plenty of cats...

And the artistry under the awnings of this building were pretty good ...

But it frankly had nothing on Palmyra or Jerash, in Syria and Jordan respectively. Epheses was, however, full of European tour groups, so maybe its perceived accessibility and smaller numbers of crazy Bedu are its big drawcard.

The other big drawcard of Ephesus is the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. This is what it used to look like (and note the little man indicating some of the finer details, because it would not be a Roadshow blog without a picture of a penis) ...

And this is what it looks like now.

It is suggested by promoters that a column remains, but it seems to have been hastily erected to provide a tourist attraction and now serves as one of the world's most expensive homes for a birds nest. The stones of the temple was pilfered to build a Christian fortress just up the hill.

Just to press a cultural point, the Turks in Germany (the largest population of Turks outside of their home country in the world) behave in a certain way. Everyone who has spent some time there knows it. It involves a lot of hair gel, body building and the like. It is not just an integration problem.

The next stop after Ephesus was Pamukkale, another ancient Roman ruin, but this time with crazy limestone pools.

It is a major tourist attraction, and the area just in front of the ampitheatre has been turned into a restaurant for (mainly) German tourists. Some of the columns and the like have been submerged into a heated pool to provide a lovely paddling experience for only $23 per person, plus $6 for a bottle of water. Emperor Hadrian would be choking on his olive oil if he could see what the Huns are doing to his temples now, but he might have taken some comfort in the extortionate prices they are paying.

Then it was down to Kas, on the south coast. Note the sleeping man in the mountain.

It really is a stunning little resort town. The German crowds migrate here in summer when it is 51 degrees.

On our first full day there we went sea kayaking around one of the islands. Earthquakes have submerged a Byzantine town to just below the water line, so you can paddle over houses and see bits of pottery in the shallow water.

And the area was also home to the pre-Greek civilisation of the Lycians, who were responsible for these tombs. They were repeatedly invaded by the Persians, and repeatedly thrashed, history tells us, and there are hundreds of these tombs scattered around the area. One of the villages, Xanthos, even rates a special mention in the annals for fearlessly fighting vastly superior Persian armies on two occasions hundreds of years apart down to the very last man, so that both times the population had to be regenerated thanks to the men who happened to be out shopping at the time. Twice - unbelievable.

As always there is a crusader castle on the small island where we went kayaking.

And here is a nice little view over Kas from one of the hiking trails overlooking the city. If you look closely and use some imagination you will see a catamaran steaming over to the next island, which apparently belongs to Greece.

It wouldn't be a blog post without some cats - these ones found us at a restaurant where we were talking to some musician who is apparently famous, but we were sufficiently oblivious to just chat to him ...

And while walking around this bay one day down to the small restaurant way, way down there underneath a cliff ...

This helpful young guy showed us the way.

We are Istanbul now. We arrived late at night only to discover we didn't have a hostel booking afterall. So much for successfully travelling without a tour guide to hold our hands. We are in some emergency accommodation tonight, which looks frighteningly like Matt's place in Fortitude Valley, and we are off to Gallipoli tomorrow. Look for us in the news. We should be in about row 533 on the left.