Kalymnos!

We've arrived on Kalymnos, settled in and enjoyed two amazing days of climbing.

New home.

A crag and its goats.

The view. Ahhh.

We don't want to leave. Ever.

Kos (and a long overdue family catch-up)

View from the balcony at dusk ... time for a rose?

Ah the beach ... we swam out to the island, and clambered up the rocks for an amazing view.

Easter Sunday lunch - yep, that's a whole lamb. The other one is slow-cooking in the wood oven ...

Sisters.

Steph flew in from Oxford to meet us on Kos, and we spent six lovely days over Easter eating, drinking and chatting. We also swam, sunbaked (supervised by our dermatologist, of course) and admired the goats and chapels and the wild, rugged scenery. Perfect.

Bafa Golu

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a large, walled city on the edge of a natural harbour. It was close to the trade routes of the Aegean sea, yet well protected by both its location and more than 5km of stone walls, with numerous towers. It was called Herakleia, or sometimes, Latmos.

Once a tomb, now a pond.

One of many towers on the walls.

After some time, the Romans took over but they didn't really favour it like other cities and so it started to decline. And the landscape changed, blocking off the entrance to the sea and forming the large lake that exists today - consequently the city diminished entirely. Oh, and the Byzantines came along later and added a castle on the peninsula, but that too was eventually abandoned.

Another of many towers!

Posers.

So, there is no longer a city on the edge of Bafa Lake; just a small, sleepy rural town filled with ladies selling handmade lace and delicious citrus fruit. Cows wear coloured beads around their horns and donkeys are a common form of transportation. All over the rocky hillsides the flowers were in bloom and the bees busy making honey from their nectar. 

We parked up out of the way, but nevertheless had more than a few locals pop their head in the door to try to talk to us in Turkish (lots of smiling, hand waving and laughter). Each morning went to nearby cafe for tea – and on the last day, having got talking to the owner about the van and our trip, the tea was his gift to us. It really is a beautiful place.

And on top of this, the stone walls, towers, amphitheatre, bath-houses and temples remain as testimony to the great city that once stood here – perfect for wandering around and scrambling through, enjoying the countryside. Indeed, the walls are so immense and the towers so numerous, we couldn't help but wonder – was it all for defence, or just for show? How many soldiers would be needed to guard this city, and who was attacking it?

Apparently, too, the stones that were left over after these city structures had been built (and there are many!) are great for bouldering – a type of climbing where you never really leave the ground, so have no need for harness or rope, but instead make a short series of extremely hard moves around or to gain the top of the boulder. 

Pebble Wrestling

Herakleia is the new bouldering destination, written up in climbing magazines as the place to go. We found some boulders worth playing on for a bit … but found many others where holds crumbled away or the ground was too uneven to fall on safely. Well, we have to admit that we didn't really try too hard as we're not really boulderers anyway!

View from the van at sunset ... time for a swim!

Ephesus

More ruins? Yep!

By now Mark and I were feeling like we'd seen more than our fair share of brilliant antiquities in Turkey – tombs, castles, old city walls, amphitheatres, bath-houses and more, from the Lycians and the earliest Hellenistic cultures to the Romans, and later the Byzantines and even the Crusaders! Frescoes on hidden churches and underground cities. Polygonal walls. Hilltop fortresses. Tombs carved into the cliffs and scattered across the countryside. Even cities underwater! They were everywhere!

Yet we hadn't even been to Ephesus, the “best preserved classic city in the eastern Mediterranean”. After all we'd already seen, it had better be worth the hype, we thought.

In ancient times, this was an important harbour and pilgrimage site for Artemis, whose temple was just around the corner, but the silt from the rivers clogged the harbour and the sea retreated, cutting off the city from commerce. Over time much of it was buried beneath the fields, and during the last forty years more and more of it has been slowly dug out and propped upright again.

The Library, upright once more.

We started by heading to the top of the amphitheatre (the very same that Paul the Apostle famously denounced idol worship; also used for camel wrestling tournaments (!) until a few years ago), for a view of the site, and then down along the marble streets, past the temples, agora, fountains and extremely impressive library. 

We stopped in to check out the famous men's loos in time to hear a tourist guide tell his captivated audience that the Romans were more sanitary than we are, as they used communal sponges on a stick rather than toilet paper, but were quite amused when someone asked where the ladies “went” - and apparently, in ancient times, the ladies “didn't”. Likewise, it was frequently repeated that the grand private house on the corner was a brothel … Which it probably was, of course, as at one stage in its history, it might have been owned by a woman – and that's a sure sign it was a den of sin.

Our trusty LP does say that the site can get crowded with people, but this isn't all a bad thing – if you want to experience what a Roman city was really like, hordes of people moving in different directions and pushing here and there may certainly help.

With the arrival of a few drops of rain, we retreated to the terrace houses – the amazingly well preserved houses for the wealthy – to admire their frescoes and mosaics under cover. Definitely worth the extra entrance fee!

Hot Mud and Hot Lunch

We decided to do something a little different … so we headed to Sultaniye Hot Springs for an apparently therapeutic and beauty-enhancing mudbath.

The Chemical Analysis: better not to know?

It works like this: you get into your swimmers, and sit in a pool of hot, slightly smelly mud, coating yourself completely. Then you sit on the pool's edge and enjoy the view until the mud dries onto your skin, feeling all the while slightly ridiculous – but hey, everyone else is doing the same thing. You then jump into the water to scrub the mud off, and once clean, head to the hot tub for some relaxation.

Jen tried to convince Mark that people pay hundreds for this sort of "beauty treatment" in luxurious spas worldwide. Look at the therapeutic benefits on the sign! Mark thinks anyone that would pay more than a few lira for this is crazy.

Smile! You're having fun, remember?!

And the end result? Yes, we smelled like sulphur for a day or so afterwards - despite thoroughly scrubbing the mud off. No, we felt or saw no great improvement in our health or beauty. Still … when was the last time you had a hot mud bath?

But the best part of the day was definitely grabbing lunch off this guy. Delicious.

Trailer with a chimney ...

... and lamb roasting on the coals! Delicious!

Faded Glory

Having just read Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres, we thought it was worthwhile to head to Kayakoy – a city of 2000 empty and abandoned stone houses near Fethiye. These abandoned buildings are a product of the population exchanges after WWI and the Turkish war of independence when all the Christians living in Turkey were sent to Greece and all the Muslims living in Greece were sent to Turkey. With more of the former than the latter, towns were left as empty shells.

This was one of those brilliantly simple ideas from on high, designed to prevent further bloodshed, yet done without any consultation of the people forced to leave their homes and move far away: their struggles and the suffering and confusion felt by them are hard to imagine. Many of the houses still have their decorated fireplace, or bright blue paint on the walls, but now the streets, marketplaces and churches are empty.

Roadside Ruins

Tower carved from one piece, with added tomb on top: quite a momument!

One of the great things about driving around Turkey is that when you see something interesting by the side of the road, you can stop to check it out. 

We found these tombs by the road near the UNESCO World Heritage Listed site at Letoon and Xanthos, and decided to explore them rather than head to the temples and amphitheatres further in town. Impressive, eh?