Olympian Efforts

Another long overnight bus trip from Goreme in Cappadocia to Antalya, connecting to an hour long regional bus along the coast and a 40 minute trip in a "Dolmus" or minibus from the mountain highway down a steep valley. At 10am we finally bowled into our accomodation at Olympos. Olympus is on the south west coast of Turkey and shares its name with nearby mount Olympos, it dates back to a few centuries BC when the place was Greek (Hellenistic period), though all that is left is ruins covering a 1500 year period with nothing currently inhabited. The ruins lie between the beach and the hostels and it costs a couple of dollars to go the beach via the ruins every day, money that is supposedly used for maintentance, but as with the rest of Turkey it is pretty obvious that this money is just going into someone's pocket. Nonetheless it is pretty essential expenditure as it is damned hot and the beach presents the only way of keeping cool.

Olympos was just a small valley surrounded by steep rocky hills until the tourist boom of the last 20 years. Now there are thousands of tourists during the summer months and a huge number of pansyions (hostels) have sprung up to take advantage, they are very comfortable and well run with outdoor lounges/bars/restaurants and very nice places to hang out, which seems to be the primary entertainment. A semi-local Australian told us that in fact all the businesses and hostels are actually run by the same extended family. Result: Lots of infighting, politics and price fixing. We stayed at Bayrams which was excellent and highly recommend it, it's about as close to the beach (1km) as you can get.

Exploring the Olympos ruins occupied a few hours, and was interesting to see the overgrown remenants - contrasts the more excavated and well groomed ruins we have seen elsewhere. Walking through the undergrowth I had a near-miss with stepping on a snake (admittedly tiny and speeding off in the opposite direction but still willies-inducing). Another fascinating excursion was a three hour trip one night to visit the Chimaera - a mythical fire-breathing beast with the forebody of a lion, body of a goat and a snake for a tail, real scary huh? In practice it is a small area 50m long and 10m wide on the side of a rocky hill where methane has been released continuously for a few thousand years and will spontaneously reignite (residual heat) when blown out. Not something you see every day.

After three days, lots of swimming and book reading we boarded a minibus to take us to the boat that we were going to tour along the coast to Fetiye, this included a brief stop in a town with a statue of Santa Claus in a central square, turns out this was related to a Church of St Nicolaus who was a one-time inhabitant of these parts and had a bit of a cult following as Saints tended to a thousand years ago - a local boy does well sort of thing. The boat cruise to Fetiye was a three days and nights affair fully catered with 13 passengers and 4 crew on a well set up 24m (80ft) tub of a sailing boat, that only cost NZD$400,000! We would stop at four or five coves or bays a day and would go swimming, snorkelling, diving (extra side trip that cost more, but dived on replica galley) all in ridiculously warm water. We saw octopuses, we ate great meals three times a day and slept on deck mats rather than in our cabins due to the heat. It was a bit of a voyage of the damned in that there were 8 Aussies with just 3 Kiwis and 2 Belgians as counterbalance but was a lot of fun, and was over far too quickly. The coast of South East Turkey slopes steeply into the sea and is high, rough, rocky and Arid. The best curio for this trip was the ancient sunken town of Dolchiste, which sank into the Ocean in an Earthquake 2000 years ago, leaving ruins on both side of a wide deep channel.

Fetiye was our destination, and served as our base for a further three days. A visit to Saklikent was a relief from the hot dry weather that makes the days quite tiring. Saklikent is a18km long chasm through the mountains up to 300m high and down to just 3m wid. In wet weather it serves as a gorge, but most of the year it is dry with polished marble walls, massive bolders and trees lodged in this crack that while hundreds of metres high is so narrow in places that you cannot see the sky. Huge cold springs leak out of the walls at the bottom end of this gorge sending forth a frigid river of water that only the stupid (ie Jane) are prepared to swim in. The shade and cold water make this a haven from the heat, and local developers have set up restaurants and cafes perched on platforms over the river. A walk, clamber and climb for an hour and a half up the gorge followed by a swim for Jane and sitting around for an hour on one of these platforms filled an afternoon. Nearby we also got to visit Alexander the Great's Cave (quite massive) and just beside it a thermal spring where you enter a building on the side of a hill, then walk down a narrow sloping underground tunnel into the hill then finally desend down ricketty stairs into a near vertical crack in the rock that is just a meter wide and maybe 15m long and is absolutely packed (as in sardines) with turkish men standing one in front of the other. It's hot, it's humid, and it's more than a little bit bizzare.

P.S. Quick congrats to Mark and Susan who just got married, Ross and Amanda who are about to get married and Dave and Katrina who just got engaged.