Spent last week in Turkey for our second visit, clearly we should have been visiting this wonderful country many times before now. Plenty of people have told us about its fantastic scenery, its numerous historical sights and the warm Mediterranean waters that lay on its coast.
As with our first trip last year, Turkey was to live up to expectations with a few new excursions, as well as a few pool days and a some good meals out at local restaurants.
Again, we stayed at a friends apartment just outside of Dalaman, not your typical tourist town, but I think closer to the norm that is rural Turkey.
Not wanting to turn this post into a holiday Blog! But I’ll jot down some interesting points of the week.
Went to visit Turtle beach (real name – İztuzu beach) at the end of the Dalyan Çayı River on a hire boat from Dalyan. Very pleasant boat trip through the nature reserve reed beds stopping on what was supposed to be a nesting area for Leather-Back Turtles. Overall very disappointing, too many people on a pretty tacky beach, beats me how any Turtles would ever want to could come up to nest here and lay their eggs. Maybe we were there at the wrong time!!!!
A much better second half of the day was a visit to the ruins of Kaunos (Caunus). When you stand in the silence (we were the only visitors there) you have to ask how they managed to build such a place with such huge stones with very little mechanical technology, plenty of slave labor I think!!! I took some good pictures, mostly in black and white (4 year old Canon IXUS 400) – a medium that doesn’t get full appreciation today.
There are lots of unsigned (and unmade) roads all over this part of Turkey (I assume that this is the same for much of rural Turkey).
Went out one day and just followed the twists and turns of one of these unmade roads until we ended up at the top of one of the hills surrounding Dalaman and we we’re met with another ideal photo opportunity above Koca Lake.
Could not get over how much traffic was using this unmade road, seems that there are a number of smaller villages further up the road towards the coast as can be seen from this Google map link.
What continues to amaze me when comparing Turkey to the UK is the quality and the low cost of the locally produced vegetables, I said this last time I visited Turkey. It seems that a year has not seem a great deal of price increase. Visited Dalaman market and purchased a number of items, plums, salad stuff, mushrooms, melons, apples and still had trouble spending 10 Turkish Lira (approximately £5.00). Some four days later, much of this purchase is still in good condition, not something that you could say for vegetables purchased here in the UK due to the over-amount of chilling used by the distribution chain.
Another interesting trip was a visit to Xanthos, a registered UNESCO World Heritage Site.
A curious British link to this ancient site is that in 19th century Briton Charles Fellows carried away many original artifacts from this site and are now to be found in the British Museum.
I suppose that many counties had similar people ‘removing’ historical artifacts, so I suppose that you can’t get too upset. However, there is an active restoration program although it is somewhat under funded, it is trying to save many of the remains, particularly many of the mosaics.
We finished of the afternoon with a visit to the Patara historical site and to spend a few hours on the lovely Patara beach (much better than the Turtle beach mentioned earlier in this post) and in what I can only say was some of the warmest water that I’ve swam in.
Overall a very good weeks holiday in Turkey, but with many more historical sites a other areas to visit, I’m sure that we will be visiting this country quite a few more times in the future.
Beasley's Place 