Oct 2 (con’t) Pamukkale

After Afrodisias, we continued to drive through Turkey. Coming from the US, you would not believe how many solar panels were on all of the houses and apartment buildings. I guess someone has figured out how to make solar affordable. We drove past cotton and corn fields and orchards of pomegranate and nut trees. The women in this part of Turkey also wear a kind of strange (to me) flowered “pant” that basically looks like flowered MC Hammer pants.

Pamukkale

Once we got to Pamukkale, we parked and went up to the entrance we saw, got our ticket and took off our shoes. Luckily, my Scottevest travel vest has a key fob holder that I used to attach my shoes to my jacket. Earl tied his shoes to his belt. We then walked up the travertines to the top.

Jeanette and Earl in the pools

As we got closer to the top, it became much more crowded, and more damaged. They had made huge efforts to protect some of the areas and you could tell that they purposefully re-routed the water and created pools to focus the activity. So, I would imagine that it would have looked very different before and will continue to look very different as you go back at different times.
There are many places where the water just rushes over your toes.

Down to Pamukkale

After walking up and then back down, and not falling on the “slippery floor” as it said on the sign and seeing way too many people in bathing suits that I didn’t really want to see in bathing suits, we put our shoes back on and worked out way back to Izmir.

We finally found our hotel, after going around it at least twice. Thank you Google Maps and whatever price I paid for the map data. (Don’t wanna see that bill yet). There are actually no street signs the direction signs direct you to the “area” that you going to. To the point where we thought that many of the streets were called Tuk Yon, which as we drove around in Efes later, we realize that this meant “One Way” and was not a common street name. But granted when you don’t understand any of the street signs since you don’t read Turkish it becomes just another adventure.

After this long day of 7+ hours of driving, getting lost blocks from the hotel and finally checking in, we went straight to bed and were ready for Efes (Epheseus) tomorrow.