In and Around Yalikavak - 1st 2 Days
Trip Start
Aug 11, 2007
1
48
68
Trip End
Nov 08, 2007
Yalikavak, Turkey
Monday, October 1, 2007
Bodrum is the main town on the whole peninsula - and the peninsula is effectively dedicated to holiday makers - Turkish, and other nationalities. The amount of development here is incredible - the peninsular is a large area of land and while the mountainous interior doesn't have much besides rocks, scrub and some animals, the coastline is covered in resorts, hotels, holiday apartments and small town houses. The centre of Bodrum town has managed to retain a lot of charm however - narrow roads, whitewashed stone houses, trees and bougainvillea and colourful boats all around a small harbour. The hard part in Bodrum is finding a car park! But we do (at NYC type rates!!). And set off to explore the harbour area - masses of boats - luxury yachts, small pleasure boats, tour boats of all sizes, gullets - you name it. Our destination is St Peter's Castle - built in the 1400's by the Knights Hospitaller from Rhodes. It is now largely intact and is used to house the exhibits of the Museum of Underwater Archaeology, which has the reputation of being one of the best museums in Turkey - full of items salvaged from underwater wrecks off the Turkish coast. And it is great! The castle itself is really interesting, the grounds are beautifully planted and include great old pieces of carvings and recovered items and inside the buildings are fascinating displays of the most treasured items recovered along with lucid and graphically illustrated explanations. We spend so long there, the guards have to chase us out at closing time (unfortunately its now October and since that's considered winter season - regardless of the plus 25ºC temp - closing time is now 5pm, not 7pm! Still we have had a great afternoon.
On the way back to the car, we negotiate to pick up another rental car to replace our one which we will drop off at the airport tomorrow.
On the way back to Yakikavak, we stop at a large supermarket on the outskirts of Bodrum to stock up - and it's a revelation! Great veges, excellent prepared foods - so we decide to eat in and buy a heap of different things to try plus salad and more breakfast items - various Turkish cheeses and olives; several mezes dishes; savoury Turkish pastries called borek; ripe tomatoes, more Lebanese cucumbers, onions, fresh herbs and lemons to make Coban salad. Plus of course more beer and wine. Dinner that night is fabulous!!
Tues 2 Oct - Chris gets up early and sets off up the road to buy fresh bread for breakfast and after breakfast we all sit around drinking coffee and checking emails. We've managed to find a very weak free internet access (the resort charges for access- we are astounded, this is first time we've experienced this in the whole of our travels!). Penny and John are managing their business via the internet while they are travelling and today they need to sort out payments for their workers. Unfortunately the internet connection is just too bad. They tried to use the resort connection but that's no good either! Then the free connection that has been available sometimes disappears completely. Which is one reason I haven't been able to update the weblog much and have not been able to upload photos either. Its all very frustrating - especially as we've still got to book accommodation and ferry and airfares for the next stage of our trip - from here across to Athens next week!
We give up in frustration and go down to swim and feed the fishes. Chris and John stand on the little jetty and throw bread into the water till the surface is a thrashing teeming mass of little silver fish, then jump in and try and catch one with their bare hands. It doesn't work too well - the guys with the fishing lines on the jetty are having way more success, but at least John and Chris are keeping everyone amused!.
Then its time to head off to the airport (its about an hour away, off the peninsula) to drop off our old rental and pick up our new one. It all works out effortlessly and since we are already halfway there and John, Penny and Jeanie have not seen much of Turkey since they arrive, we head up to Lake Bafa to see the lake, its wildlife, some small villages around the lake and the ruins of Hieropolis. Chris and I have already been to this place - back when we were staying at Selcuk, but we arrived in the early evening and didn't have time to have a real look around. The plan is to have lunch in the little village where the ruins are, then decide if we have time to explore the ruins themselves. But when we get there, they want $5 per head just to go into the village. We refuse to pay - we want to go into the village to spend money on lunch, we're not paying for the privilege! So we turn around back to another little farming village (that isn't taxing the tourists!) and have some refreshments (lunch is a little ambitious for this place) and a wander around the interesting houses and farmyards. These are all together - some of the animals are taken out of the yards in the day and taken to the fields to graze, others seem to stay in the yards all day and feed is brought in. Watching and figuring out the farming operations here is really interesting - it's a combination of modern (there are lots of tractors and modern implements here) and old farming methods.
We end up having lunch at a small roadside Gozleme stall. They guy who runs the place doesn't speak much English (fractionally more than our Turkish) and there is no menu, which makes for an interesting discussion about what we want. It all works out in the end and we get another great meal - for very reasonable price compared to what's on offer in the resort towns.
We start heading back to Yalikavak and make a short detour to the ruins of Euromos. This has one of the most intact temples of all the Greek-Roman ruins so far, but there is very little else remaining of this city - the theatre is barely visible on the hillside now with olive trees planted all over it.. Its still interesting fossicking around figuring out what the city must have looked like 2000 years ago.
We have some daylight hours left, so we head off on some more back roads to check out local life. This area is being intensively cropped and right now, they are harvesting cotton - huge fields of it. Some by machine, lots by hand. And invariably it's the women doing the harvesting. They seem to do a lot of the animal minding, all the cooking and much of the rest of the work as well. And in their spare time they knot rugs. The men drive the tractors or sit around in the coffee shops drinking tea and coffee and discussing important issues - Chris and John are quite taken with Turkish rural life! The roads we're on don't seem to correlate well with our maps, but we're not too worried - we know the general direction we need to go. Ten we arrive at a T junction in the middle of a small village and we're not sure whether to go left or right. Until all the men in sitting in the coffee shop across the intersection look at us stopped indecisively in the car and start pointing left. It was very funny and we decided that was way these men sit around all day in coffee shops - its in case tourists need directions!
