Fethiye
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
1
151
228
Trip End
Jul 15, 2008
Where I stayed
Fethiye, Turkey
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Fethiye, Turkey
We are staying at the Yacht Plaza Hotel here in the Mediterranean resort town of Fethiye. It's a beautiful place with a picturesque harbor. The hotel is listed as a three star and we are given one of the best rooms on a corner of the building so we have two balconies overlooking the harbor. At the docks below the sailing yachts are tied off and covered for the winter; nearly gunnel to gunnel all down the shore line. If it were only August or even September it would be the perfect place to spend the next three days. As it is it is chilly and overcast most of the time. The way our tour is set up we don't stay with the same group the whole time. We have bus tickets from point to point. Someone picks us up at the bus station and takes us to our hotel then a van picks us up and takes us on a tour. Then they take us back to our hotel and in the morning a van takes us to the bus station and we start over. But here, in Fethiye, we have no tours planned, just three days to relax. This gives us a chance to go through our photos and catch up on this blog. We also walk around the city and check it out. There are very few tourists in town and we are practically the only guests in the hotel. At an outdoor café, which atypically in a Muslim country had English bacon on the menu, we met a man and woman who are retired ex-pats: a man from England and a woman from Ireland. They have fallen in love with the place, but not with each other, and have been living here year round for several years. They both have houses here and it appears that they have an unspoken understanding to meet here for beers in the evening. He's retired from his clerk position in a navel shipping company, somewhere in the south of England, specializing in lumber. He tells us how cheap the real estate and land tax is here. She is living on money she and her deceased husband had saved for their retirement, and tells us of a stray dog she took in. She has a shopping bag from a boutique displaying that she has put her time to good use and is not simply downtown to meet him. He appears to have nothing better to do then meet her for drinks and has probably been waiting all day for this little bit of company. She gossips coarsely about the locals they both know. He laughs as if he was thinking of something else, or maybe he had heard the stories before. The four of us are the only ones at the café. They tell us how gay the place is during the summer, but there is a melancholy about them, and the town, now that the beautiful people are gone. But they will be well positioned when the new people start arriving in April or May.
November 12, 2007
Urgup, Cappadocia, Turkey
We travel inland into central of Anatolia to get to Cappadocia. We travel by bus from Fethiye to Goreme where we are picked by a van from our hotel in Urgup, arriving in the dark of the morning. Our trip to Cappadocia is a detour from our path to Syria and but Cappadocia is a place we've wanted to see since we first heard about it. We weren't disappointed . . . it was an incredible landscape of volcanic tuff eroded into fantastic shapes. And almost as incredible is what the ancient Christians did with it. Christians started coming here in the 3rd century to escape persecution and dug out homes which were easily defended, as well as churches and whole towns from the soft stone. You have to see it to believe it.
