Our trip to Olympos

  Olympos, Turkey
Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Here are the highs and lows of our first real Turkish adventure... outside of the city of Ankara...

We loaded up our VW Karavan camper van and headed out after school on Tuesday... to enjoy the start of the Ramazan Byram holiday break... van running great... boys sleeping... lots of legroom... food... ahhhhhhh...
Van Broke down... around midnight... in the mountains... pulled over and popped up the top and slept near a cow barn with a scary barking dog inside... Deb and the boys creeped out... engine overheated... coolant cap popped and well... more money into fixing it... stayed overnight at a charming town with nice people... shit of a hotel... very filthy... awesome receptionists... found a very nice mechanic on the edge of town... experiencing the Turkish lore that Turkish men can fix anything... because they have had to... van can not be fixed until Monday after break... it is Ramazan... same as Ramadan... different spelling... took a sip of water in the daytime heat... 20 men staring at me... nothing to cross the lips during the daylight hours... the one man that spoke english said it is ok for foreigners... still felt like I was eating candy in front of a group of children... cultural faux pas... ooopppps.... won't happen again... caught a morning bus to a coastal town on the Mediterranean... rented a car... drove through the mountains along the coast... boys very happy and screaming in the back seat... go faster, faster, faster... Debra with a smile on her face... saying that we can still handle the challenges of traveling, but does not want to take crowded buses... we love this car... arrived at Mount Olympos... breathtaking... took a snake of a hill road down, down, down to the coastal town of, you guessed it... Olympos... stayed at a pension in a cabana tucked in an orange and lime grove... heaven... ate, played backgammon, and lounged around in the shade within a courtyard filled with olive, pomegranate, fig, apricot, etc. trees... Todd wanted to start gardening... the lovely owner gave us a royal tour of eden... truely... walked an ancient Roman road/path through a dense forest to a beach surrounded by towering cliffs... ancient ruins clinging to the cliffs and sprouting from the vegetation... dating from the 2nd century BC to the 1200's... A few of the ruins... Roman ampitheatre, Lycian tombs carved into the hillsides, mosaic floors... the head of Medusa staring through the brush as we walked by an old tomb... Genoese castle ruins perched atop a cliff overlooking the beach... Almost not real... swam and snorkled in the Mediterranean Sea... boys loved their first real snorkeling experience... some lovely little fish and a scary 4 foot swordfish... freaked Aidan... kind of looked like a shark... took a night hike up to see the burning rocks of the chimera... flames shooting out of the rocks on top of Mount Olympos... a natural and very surreal phenomenon...head-scratching hard to describe... look it up online for more info... slept, woke to roosters crowing, ate a lovely Turkish breakfast... very healthy and fresh... explored more ruins tucked in the forest... swam, snorkeled, played backgammon... invented in Turkey... Turks are very proud of and love playing this game... Aidan beat the owner in a game... big smile... an hour later asked if we thought that she let him beat her... simple answer... yes... left the coast and the mountains... very hard... drove to Ankara in the evening... 7 hour drive... drove 170 kilometers per hour... too fast.. over 100 mph... Turkish highways are like the German autobahn... arrived home to our apartment on the hills overlooking the city... felt like home... maybe for the first time... crashed out in our own beds... Todd thinking about making the drive next Friday... to pick up the van... new and improved... and a smaller bank account... oh well... live in the moment and stay grounded in the present...