Turkey: Selçuk and Ephesus

It was a distinctly less exciting journey from Pamukkale to Selçuk, the town located just a few kilometres away from the hugely historic ruins of Ephesus. The journey took four and a half hours (again using the Pamukkale bus company, with the journey costing just 20TKL) and we drove along very average toll roads, took in Kuşadası, a very popular tourist town on the Aegean coast complete with huge tower blocks, lots of areas of housing that all looked the same and a few dolphin themed water parks. Needless to say that having gotten up at 4am to catch the bus, I was more than a little jaded once I arrived in Selçuk, and was ready to check into the hotel and relax for the rest of the afternoon.

I stayed at the Akay Hotel, which I got a taxi to from the local otogar (bus station) which cost 7.50TKL to go the short distance, but considering I had no idea which way to go when I arrived, it was money well spent. The hotel itself was nice, run by Ria who was very helpful and showed me to where I was to be staying. I was a little disappointed by my room, and had the feeling that I’d been given the smallest room as I was a single traveller and it was cramped, cold and dingy. It did however, look out on the pretty courtyard and pool area that was generally quiet while I stayed there. The best part about my accommodation was its location- tucked across the road from the Isa Bey mosque.

Having settled into my hotel room and read up a little on Selçuk, I was surprised to find out that it had plenty of history itself, and so I decided to go and investigate. My first stop was the Isa Bey mosque, which is apparently one of the oldest in the county, having first been opened in 1375. I only got to walk around the courtyard of this beautiful building as I’d forgotten to bring a scarf with which I could cover my head and shoulders with, but the beautiful geometric patterns on the marble walls and the towering minaret (now only half its original size due to the many earthquakes this region suffers) still made the visit well worth my while.

From there I wandered into the town and got my bearings a little. I visited the train station to see if I could book my onward ticket, and found the squares where the men sit and drink çay together whilst watching the world as it slowly continues around them, or playing backgammon or perhaps a heated game of dominoes. I then walked the short distance up to the Basilica of St John.

Saint John is believed to have visited Selçuk twice in his lifetime, and apparently wrote his gospel on a mountain overlooking the area, and is believed to have been buried there. A small chapel was built over the site several hundred years later, and over the years this monument got bigger, attracting pilgrims from all over Europe, and eventually being converted into a mosque, and then ransacked by Mongol armies. A huge earthquake was the final event which ended the basilica’s history as a place of worship, but over the last hundred years or so, archaeologists have slowly been going over the site and reconstructing the incredible buildings that used the stand there. The views of the surrounding area alone are a reason to come and visit these ruins, and it also offers a great vantage point on which you can see what’s left of the Temple of Artemis.

On further investigation into the Temple of Artemis, I found that there was only one column left of the entire building ( there used to be 127 columns), but astonishingly enough, the height of which proves that the temple was in fact larger than the Parthenon in Athens, and is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It’s difficult to imagine the scale of this building, when there’s just one column left in a vast empty field with a stork’s nest perched on top, but it’s a nice place to try to contemplate it.

I had the misfortune of eating in Hotel Akay’s rooftop restaurant that evening, and was sorely disappointed with the service and with the cold, congealed food, and so while I can’t recommend anywhere to eat, I can definitely recommend where not to!

I left early the next morning for Ephesus, the world-famous ruins 3km outside of Selçuk. The ruins open at 8am, and I recommend getting there as close to this as possible to avoid the heat of the day and the huge crowds of tourists bussed in from resorts and cruise ships docked nearby. That being said, the audio guides that are rented out at the entrances are pretty awful, and tour guides can work out expensive if you’re travelling alone, so it is good to occasionlly to stand close to some of the bigger tour groups and find out some interesting facts! You have to get a taxi to the ruins if you’re not travelling as a part of a tour group, and this will cost you 15TKL from the otogar. Your taxi driver may offer to meet you a few hours later and take you back for the same price, but there were plenty of taxis waiting once I left a few hours later. It’s a good idea to ask to get dropped off at the Magnesia Gate, and then you can walk down the gently sloping hill to the Lower gate where the taxis, souvenir stands and food vendors are gathered.

Ephesus is said to have the best preserved ancient city anywhere in the Mediterranean, and though I’m sure this is hotly contested by many other sites, I can see why it’s been said. The first settlers here are believed to be the Leleggians in about the 12th century BC, and the population grew and mixed with new settlers over many centuries to become the city of 250,000 people who lived here in its heyday. As with the civilisations of much of Turkey, the people who settled here are from all over the world, and many different empires asserted their powers over the city. The Ionians came after the Leleggians, then followed Kind Croesus of Lydia and then the Persians. Ephesus briefly joined the confederacy of Athens, but then fell back under Persian control, and then Alexander the Great ruled over the city until his death, when Lysimachus took control and built the Ephesus that we can recognise today. All of that was before the year 0! The city became a thriving port attracting immigrants and pilgrims from all over Europe, but sadly it’s port eventually silted up in around the 6th century AD, despite many efforts to stop it and it fell rapidly into decline. It’s been excavated for the past 150 years, and the archaeologists have only uncovered about 18% of the ruins.

There are so many wonderful ruins, buildings, sculptures, that I couldn’t possibly mention them all, but a few in particular stand out in my mind. There were many, many fountains in the city, which must have been an amazing sight, but surely none could have been more amazing than the Trajan fountain. This huge fountain once incorporated a statue of Trajan (though about three times his real size!) and the water would flow underneath the statue and onto the street, cleaning it. The statue is balancing one of his feet on a sphere which represents the earth, which the Romans already knew was round.

Ephesus is probably most famous for its Library of Celsus, an incredible building that was built in between other buildings, and to maintain the image of grandeur, they built the building with a distorted perspective.

If you look closely at the picture, you can see that the top row of windows and columns are about a third smaller than the bottom row. This is to make the building seem much larger than it really is, and the central columns are taller and wider than those at the edges for the same reasons. It used to hold over 12,000 scrolls in niches around the walls, and the building had been specially designed with two sets of thick stone walls with a metre cavity between each one to control the heat and humidity of the building.

The last mention has got to go to the last street in the city, Harbour Street, which has columns running each side of the road, down to where the water would have lapped at the edge of the city. Now, there is a column taller than the rest to mark where the water would have been, which is now nowhere in sight.

I left Selçuk on the train later that afternoon to go to İzmir and then on to Istanbul. The train from Selçuk to İzmir airport only cost 4TKL and took less than an hour. The trains are not the fastest way to travel, but they are the comfiest and give a great view! Due to the peculiarities of Turkish train travel, I wasn’t able to book my train ticket from İzmir to Istanbul in advance, because I couldn’t purchase the ticket for that leg of the trip in Selçuk. I didn’t want to run the risk of an 8 hour train journey without a seat, so I decided to fly from İzmir to Istanbul with Pegasus Air, which only cost 79TKL. After less than an hours flight I had touched down in Istanbul’s Atatürk airport…

Tales from a small Ísland in the north Atlantic- The Golden Circle Tour

Whilst on an entirely different adventure with some free time, I’ve decided that it’s about time (or rather four months late) that I blogged a bit more about Iceland.

The Golden Circle Tour is a tour that encompasses at least three different sites that are prime examples of what Iceland has to offer over a relatively small area. These sites are Þingvellir national park, the waterfall Gullfoss and the geysers Geysir and Strokkur. Some tours only go to these three sites, and others, like Iceland Horizon, which was the company we decided to use for the tour, went to other places along the way.

Our guide, David, was a very friendly and informative native English speaker that picked us up on a wet and windy boxing day morning. The rain lashed at the bus and as we drove higher into the mountains, a hush fell over the bus as we contemplated what lay ahead of us on that wild day. Once we got a reasonable distance out of Reykjavik, we could see that David was anxious, and a couple of telephone calls later, we turned around because the wind, rain and ice that lay on the road ahead would have made the journey too dangerous. We were all disappointed, but I think we were all a bit relieved too, not least of all because we wouldn’t have been soaked to the skin every time we got out at one of the attractions.

The weather was much better the next day, and we breezed up and down the mountains with the horrific weather of the day before a distant memory. Just as dawn broke (about 10.30am), we reached the first stop of the day. It was Katla, a small volcanic crater which is 6000 years old and not much higher than the surrounding territory around it, and a real surprise to find just by the roadside.

The next stop was a set of beautiful low-level waterfalls, gently cascading over the landscape, and complete with a salmon ladder. It was hard to believe that salmon could swim this far upstream from the ocean, and still have the energy to writhe up waterfalls! It was a stunning sight, and although I was promised that the next set of waterfalls that I’d see would be much more breathtaking, it was hard to believe.

I also got to meet and stroke some wild Icelandic ponies, whom were incredibly friendly and trusting as well as very fluffy and squat. The ponies are cousins of the breeds found in mainland Europe, but are so valued that all other horses are banned in Iceland, and that has been the case since the early settlers first arrived, so as not to pollute the breed. Icelandic ponies are highly sought after all over the world.

The first stop of the big three sights on the tour was Hakaudalur valley, an area of intense geothermal activity where Strokkur and Geysir are found. Strokkur and Geysir are fountain geysers (where ground water meets magma and a huge buildup of pressure forces the water up and out of the ground in a jet of boiling water and steam) and two of the most famous in the world. The most famous is Geysir, which rarely erupts these days as the continuously shifting ground means that the gulleys and chambers which the water flows through often become blocked (sometimes this is done by humans putting various objects and solutions into the mouth of the geyser hoping to try and make it erupt). The oldest account of this geyser erupting dates back to 1924, and there have been reports of the jets of water reaching up to seventy metres in the air. Strokkur on the other hand is much smaller than this, and also much more reliable. It will erupt between every 4- 8 minutes, and you can see it erupt from several miles away as the steam rises much higher than the water.

Haukadalur is a very strange terrain, very frosty and icy as the steam condenses and freezes again, but you can be walking on a frozen path next to a stream of boiling water. There are patches of bubbling mud where little vents of steam are blowing through it, and there is a strong smell of sulphur in the air, as the water is very mineral rich which also gives it an incredibly blue colour. The larger pools of boiling water have simple ropes around them reminding you to watch where you step, but it’s a continuously changing landscape where streams regularly change their paths and there are many horror stories of people being burned whilst not paying attention.

The next stop was just a few miles down the road, and it was the Gulfoss waterfalls- and everyone was right to say that they were much more stunning than the ones I’d encountered previously. They were bigger and taller and wider and louder and so much more powerful than any other waterfall I’d encountered, and thanks to the sketchy-at-best Icelandic health and safety laws, I was able to walk along the steep icy path, scramble over the icy rocks and look over the steep icy drop into the gushing water below. The waterfalls do not begin much higher than ground level, but falls into a fissure in the ground instead, gouging it’s path through solid rock. Clinging to the edges of the waterfalls are huge clumps of icicles formed from the spray of the water in the air- it was a truly breathtaking sight. We also had our lunch here- forget your packed lunch and forgo lunch at the Haukadalur fast food inspired canteen and walk up the steps to the plain, go into the wooden building and have a bowlful of the beautiful lamb stew there.

Our last stop of the day was perhaps the most intriguing to me. It was the national park of Þingvellir (Thingvellir), where the world’s first parliament was settled and also where the European and American tectonic plates are slowly drawing apart, creating incredibly dramatic scenery. We arrived there just as the long sunset was beginning, creating incredible hues across the sky, and we were the only people in the vast expanse of land. There are several telltale signs that this is the area where the plates are drawing apart, great cracks in the landscape, cliffs suddenly emerging from otherwise flat landscape, mountains in the distance, all of which add to the vista. There is no actual parliament building in the area, because it’s where the notion of democracy and parliament first came into fruition. Tribes from all over Iceland would meet in this area every summer and spend weeks there buying and selling crops and materials, providing the circumstances for men and women to arrange to marry and also becoming the place where fair judgements could be passed on people that had committed cats of wrongdoing, such as stealing. This lead to laws being created, laws that were created by the people and that were then adhered to, or a reasonable punishment was metered out. The daily news and laws were read out from atop a cliff which overlooks the entire camp. Today the only buildings to be seen are the church and the house of the Icelandic prime minister. Excursions can be taken in the summer to the nearby lake where you can swim, snorkel or scuba dive into the fissure between the two continental plates- a bit too cold me for in the winter, but just another reason to go back in the summer!

From Þingvellir, it was just a short bus ride back to Rekjavik, passing along the way the worlds only hydrogen refuelling station. It was a very long day, but every moment spent in the bus was worth it, as the Golden Circle Tour exceeded all my expectations and make me even more eager to explore the Iceland more thoroughly.

Things to do in Bangkok- Canal tour

Bangkok is criss-crossed with canals, which is why it has been (dubiously) dubbed the ‘Venice of the East’. The canals have been used for many years as another means of transport around the city, which gives a welcome break to taxis or tuk-tuks. We did not get in a gondola for our tour, but a longtail boat, which is a really long, skinny boat with a simple engine, engineered to skim across the wakes of other boats along the very busy Chao Phraya river. We had chartered this boat for 800baht, which is fairly expensive, but there are organised trips, or you could get together with a group of people to split the cost.

We zipped down the river for a few minutes before turning into one of the canals, and I quickly became jealous of the people that had waterfront homes. Some of the houses were made of wood and balanced on posts (which made me wonder what happens when one of the posts begins to rot), and others were made of concrete and looked a bit more stable.

As we turned into narrower and narrower canals, we started to notice that the houses had mail boxes on the canal side of their homes- the postman comes by boat!- and some had small boats outside, and many had beautiful seating areas with many well watered plants decorating the outside. We also noticed that street vendors had adapted, and were paddling the canals selling their wares- from food to brooms and (of course) souvenirs. Once the vendors had someone interested, the person buying would put some money into a bucket, attached to a pulley system, the vendor would swap the money for the item and send the bucket back. The ultimate shopping experience!

We even passed through a lock, though I couldn’t work out how the water level a few miles downstream of the main river could be higher than where we started off. It was quite fun squeezing 8 boats into the small space, and all banging together while the boat drivers caught up on gossip as the water levels changed.

If you get given the option of ‘feeding fish’- take it, it looks great fun. I passed up on the opportunity as I wasn’t sure how much extra it would end up costing and what unsavoury delicacies we might end up feeding them, but I really regret it. Most of the temples on the waterfront sell ‘blessed bread’ to feed to huge catfish, which gather by the dozens and wrestle the bread off each other, some of the catfish even stick their entire heads out of the water to take the bread from your hand. They really are blessed fish, with boatloads of people feeding them loaves of bread every few minutes.

We didn’t go for the option of going to the snake farm or the floating market, having heard that they got pretty busy with tourists, but the boat drivers can arrange all sorts of tours, including going to Wat Arun, the Grand Palace and the royal barge museum.

Again, this trip was a first for me, and watching the world go by at a snails pace and getting kids waving from their gardens was a very welcome change of pace. A definite must.