Pamukkale and Dalyan

After my last post we had a lovely evening in a small but touristy town outside Selcuk. It is built up a hill with cobbled streets and has a very Mediterranean-area feel to it - really quite romantic. We tasted some fruit flavoured wine and picked up a few bottles for the road. We then had a traditional dinner in a local restaurant where we let the owner choose a bunch of dishes for us to try. We got a great variety of food and I tried some things that I probably never would have ordered on my own, like stuffed squash flowers. It was a lovely meal.

Yesterday we travelled to Pamukkale and spent the afternoon exploring the limestone waterfalls and the ruins of the town of Hierapolis. The limestone formations are really beautiful and must have been a wonderful place to visit when there was still thermal water running down the hill and filling the pools along the way. I can only image what a beautiful spa it must have been before environmental changes dried it up. Hieropolis was built on top of the hill to take advantage of the hot pools (circa 2nd century CE). The ruins are quite lovely and the theatre is very impressive - even bigger than Ephesus with a capacity of 25,000. The most interesting part for me was the necropolis (cemetery) which has hundreds of tombs and sarcophagi in various styles. There is also a museum which houses the most beautiful of these - it was really quite amazing.

They have built a current-day hot pool on the site which is nicely done and allows you to swim around broken columns and other ruins in the pool itself. Very cool, but unfortunately we didn't have time for a swim by the time we had finished visiting the rest of the site. Given the number of tourists who were wandering around in there, it likely would have been a bit uncomfortable anyway - I think I would have felt like a fish in a fishbowl. Still, it was a very beautiful setup.

I have to admit that it's somewhat disappointing that the water has stopped flowing down the limestone hill. It's something I'd seen photographs of and would very much have liked to bask in the hot pools formed of limestone and filled naturally with warm water.

Today we drove to the town of Dalyan. We are working from a winter itinerary for this tour, which I wasn't even aware existed until this morning. (Can't really blame anyone other than myself for this - didn't do my research thoroughly enough.) As a result, we did not spend the afternoon on a gulet nor are we sleeping on one tonight. It was a beautiful day today but am glad we didn't spend it on a boat. Dalyan is a small resort town on a river that feeds into the Mediterranean and it feels just like every other small coastal town all over the world. There's a great vibe here even though the season is over and it's very quiet. I imagine it would be a great spot for a summer visit. There's not a whole lot to see and do here, so I opted to spend some time alone this afternoon. I had a lovely lunch in the sunshine and then caught a rowboat across the river. There are some amazing Lycean tombs carved into the hillside over there and I was able to hike up to them. I was of the understanding that there were also some ruins on the hill but I covered every inch of it and didn't really find much. I guess I was in the wrong place. Oh well, at least I had a lovely scramble over the hill and the views from up there were amazing. I probably won't suffer from one less Roman ruin on this tour.