Ancient Civilisations and Awesome Landscapes

Hello again! Welcome back to our little blog. If you're reading this then you've done well listening to our stories for this long!

We left Cappadocia and headed across to the west coast. It's a long way so we flew. Flights are so cheap here! We stayed in an interesting backpacker type of place run by an Aussie Turk. We met some lovely people there and had a lot of fun.

Our main destination there was Ephesus, one of the largest ruined cities in the world. It was incredible. Even more incredible is that 80% of it is still under the ground, awaiting discovery! This was the fourth largest city of the Roman Empire and it had everything - houses, theatres, temples and markets.

The main street must have been stunning in its time.

Restoration makes such a difference to what we see and can understand. The restored building above was a highlight.

There was a separate section that was still being excavated. It was kept under cover for protection and we had to pay extra to get in but we're sure glad we did it. This was an area of houses owned by the wealthy. There were gorgeous mosaic floors and amazing painted walls.

For some weird reason that I can't work out, I've lost the next lot of photos on my camera so you'll just have to envisage the following. One of the strangest places was the public toilets. There was no privacy in those days. Rows of toilet seats were carved into marble slabs over drains. There was only about half a metre between seats. The really privileged people had the rights to one toilet seat and they had their initials carved into them! There was also supposedly a brothel.

The next day we visited a very cool old castle and explored the ruins of a huge church. Wish I had the photos. We also found a restaurant owned by a Turkish/Chinese couple who had lived in Australia. We were excited to have Chinese food after about 7 weeks of Turkish food!

We caught a bus to our next destination, Pamukkale, and had our first negative experience with Turkish touts when we were told we had to get off the bus and got driven to our hotel but in they detoured past a tour shop to try to get us to buy a tour. We had heard about that sort of thing happening but we had never experienced it anywhere else. We were definitely in prime tourist country now!

Pamukkale is famous for mineral-rich water which deposits calcite onto the landscape, leaving gorgeous white terraces cascading down the hill. There are pools of ice-coloured water that people can swim in. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site but we were so disappointed to find that they had diverted the water away from the real pools and had built new pools from concrete! They had ruined a large part of the area. We think that maybe this was done before it became World Heritage listed but we're not sure. We could still see some lovely real pools though.

As the water drips over the edge of terraces it creates stalagtite-like effects. This is a real pool.

There were some cool features on the white surface.

In one of the fake pools.

Pamukkale is a double whammy - at the top of the cascades is a gorgeous ruined city. Some parts were lined with flowers. It was very pretty.

Ohhh, poppies again!

The main street here was amazing once again. All those columns on the right belong to the public toilets. That's a lot of loos!

As we slogged up a hill to see the theatre I said to John that I was at the stage where this was a JUT - Just Another Theatre. I was getting a bit theatred out. Then we stepped out onto the top floor and were blown away! The theatre had been 90% restored and it was simply stunning. It was huge! The stage part was several stories high and was still missing its last two stories. The views from the top were sensational as well. This photo is taken from half way up. Over the centuries this place served many functions, including gladiator fights.

We're off to Istanbul next - it's our final destination in Turkey!

Cheers,
John and Heather