Ephesus & Pamukkale

16th June 2010

The morning was off again bright and early, and the first stop for the day was at the ancient city of Ephesus (I was getting pretty sick and tired of ancient cities - after a while they just look like piles of marble), but this one was really impressive. Busloads were arriving, and we were there fairly early, but we had to push and shove our way through lots of them. We were especially jealous of the group that had matching bright orange hats!.

Information from Dan tells us that the ancient city of Ephesus is the 3rd city still remaining from Roman time. The first one was actually built by the Amazons. It was the best preserved of all the ancient cities we'd seen this far in Turkey, and it was by far the largest.

As soon as we arrived Kev told us to be on the lookout for snakes and scorpions, as they've seen plenty around the area. He told us about this stupid American woman who went looking in the bush (for who knows what reason) and got herself stung by a scorpion and ended up spending a night in hospital. The news of scorpions in the area piqued the boys interest and started wandering off turning over loose rocks in the hope of finding one. No such luck.

We saw lots of interesting things at Ephesus. I liked the carving of the Godddess Nike. It is reported that the person who came up with the Nike 'Swoosh' had only recently visited Ephesus. It was crystal clear where he got his inspiration for the famous tick after seeing the sculpture of the Goddess of the same name. The swoosh is clearly visible in this sculpture hundreds of years old.

We also so the first ever carving of the official symbol for medicine - the snake spiraling up the goblet - and there was also the pharmacy (?) one as well carved into some more stone.

We passed through the Hercules gate, where if you can put both palms on the two columns you're meant to be strong, or something. I had no hope, and Dan just barely made it.

Just after we'd passed through the Hercules gate we stopped so Kevin could tell us about some of the Roman baths that we were about to see. The boys still determined to find their scorpion, turned over another loose rock and to their surprise they found one. Kev nearly s*** his pants and started panicking and tried to get us all away, but we were all too fascinated by the little critter. I actually couldn't see it, and it was only about 2 feet away from me. He had camouflaged himself in pretty good.

So we ended up seeing the Roman baths, and toilets - where there was space for 46 men to s*** simultaneously, which was elaborately decorated with anice water feature and space for the band to set up in the corner. People who poo together stay together hey??

The double story library was brilliant. I think that only the façade remained, but it was incredibly well preserved and the most spectacular thing in the whole complex. It also had a secret underground tunnel that led from the library across the road to the brothel, so the men could sneak off for a quickie without their women ever finding out!

The visit to Ephesus ended with a quick look at the massive theatre, the largest in ancient Turkey (Holds about 20000 people). It was used for recent concerts as it's in such good condition and the acoustics in it are excellent. There were some modern artists who had played there (The only one I could remember was Pavarotti), but they've had to put a stop to it as the vibrations from the loud music were damaging the rest of the site.

We left the site passing by all the tacky souvenir stands, even the ones that advertised "Real fake watches" and the men that wanted you to pay 2 Euros for a photo with their camel. It was only a 5-minute drive until we were at our next stop; another ancient wonder of the world, now taking our tally up to 2. It was the sole remaining pillar of the Temple of Artemis. In it's heyday there were 156 columns, now the only one left has a rather large storks nest on top of it. Behind the temple you can see a church that John the Baptist founded, as well as a mosque - Paganism, Christianity and Islam all in the same spot - apparently it's pretty rare occurrence.

We made a special stop at a Turkish Delight sales outlet. They gave us heaps of samples of 'real' Turkish delight ("Not the s*** you buy in the souvenir stores"). We tried rose, mint, orange, pistachio, lemon, mint and white hazelnut, which is not as sweet as the other ones. Dan caved and had to buy a box, so he bought pomegranate flavour.

After finished off Borat and moving onto Sherlock Holmes, we continued for the afternoon on the bus along to Pammukkale. We made a few stops along the way for lunch and rest breaks, but it was still a pretty big trek.

Pammukkale has these amazing natural springs, which flow up, through the side of the mountains. As the water from the springs is full of calcium it has turned the mountains white. The water flow has also turned all the mountainsides into terraced pools of water. It's pretty hard to describe, as it's like nothing we've seen before - you'll just have to look at the photos. Turns out that there's also another ancient city up on the top of the mountain, but none of us could be bothered looking at that - we were well and truly sick of ancient s*** by now.

We went up and saw the "Cleopatra" or ancient pool, which you could pay an extra 25 Lira's to go for a dip in. Word has it, that Cleo herself had a bathe in there, hence the name. It was all pretty nice looking, like a fancy resort pool, but it was jam packed with fat old people, so we all gave that a skip.

Only recently have part of the natural terraces been re-opened to tourists - they were causing too much damage to it previously - so we all took off our shoes and made our way down the hot white, calcium covered hills. We paddled through the warm thermal water and immersed ourselves in the white water.

Some of the boys thought it would be good for their skin if they caked on the calcium mud which lined the bottom of the pools, they did every part of their bodies, hair included, and let it set hard.We spent an hour just waddling around, and generally laughing at a couple who thought they were there for the cover shoot of Sports Illustrated. Her in her tiny little bikini. Him in his high, high waited Speedos, doing all the poses taking photos of each other. The best was when the camera was set up self-timer and they laid about, almost porno style, taking pictures of themselves. We of course had to take our own sexy, smutty photos, just to take the piss out of them. They were not the only ones though. We stumbled across maybe half a dozen more thinking that they're beautiful and taking slutty photos.

It was not far onto our hotel for the evening, another 4 star, Pam Thermal Hotel. It's big draw card is that it too has it's own thermal pools. The thermal pool there was not calcium and white, but it was filled with iron, so everything was orange. We arrived and checked in and moved quickly out to the pool area. The thermal spring shot out of a fountain at the top and trickled down through about 10 different pools before flowing down to another one at ground level. You could go in all of the pools, but the closer you got to the fountain, the hotter the water got. We made it about 3 pools from the top before we'd burnt our feet and legs with the scolding water. The very bottom pool was a nice tepid temperature, and again the boys caked themselves full of the iron mud and let it set hard. We had to purchased swimming caps for that pool - not sure why - but they were cheap and highly attractive. We spent the rest of the evening hanging out by the thermal pool, and in and out of the regular (cold!) pool! Buffet dinner at the restaurant was pretty good. We were really excited by the fact that they had French fries and Spag Bol; some regular food for a change. It was pretty early to bed for Dan and I as we were both knackered.