Jess and Craig:

Well we have been slackers and taken a large break from the internet...now we have to play catch up. We did a lot our last week in Turkey, including sea kayaking over a sunken city, a 3 day trek on the Lycian way, a visit to a place where hot spring water flows down a white mountain of calcium, and finally a visit to Troy.  I will now try to do my best to recap the time, so bear with me.

5/16, 5/17- Kas

We spent two days in the small coastal town ofKas (pronounced Kash). The town was incredibly cute. It is an old fishing village that developed into a touristy town, but managed to retain a low key atmosphere and charm. While there we went kayaking to the "sunken city". I was pretty excited about this activity, I though truins are cool, but certainly Atlantis is cooler. The kayaking wasgreat. I have actually never kayaked before (or not at least that I remember) and I thought it was fantastic. The Mediterranean was areally amazing deep blue with perfect clarity and the weather was great. The city, however, left something to be desired. There was not much to see. Many crumbling walls and not much else. The guide kept pointing things out like specifics on rooms or mosaics, but I mostly just saw rocks. They don't let you snorkel or dive in the area (which is really what I had hoped for) so it was a bit difficult from the surface to see below the choppy water at the shore line. Despite the disappointment in the lost city, we both really enjoyed the kayaking and even began discussing the possibility of one day kayaking the Mediterranean (of course given our current bank account situation, that trip is not going to be anytime soon.)

Our second day we were Kas Craig went on a dive to see a wreck. I had a bit of a cold so I ducked out. He had a good time and couldn't stop talking about how amazingly blue the Mediterranean remains even when you are 20 meters deep.

5/18-20 Trekking the Lycian Way

I had never actually heard of the Lycian way before this trip. It is a route that follows the Mediterranean coast of Turkey through areas where Lycian people used to live. We read about it in our guide book and choose to do a three day portion that was rated as one of the top ten walks in the world by I can't remember who.

Day 1:

Our trip to our starting point was a bit more challenging than our guide book made it sound. The guidebook directed us to take a bus to a town called Esen get off and hail a cab to a village called Alinca. We got off the bus (which actually did not stop in Esen but instead a couple of kilometers away on the side of the highway) and began trekking. Unlike when we trekked in Nepal, we did not put any of our belongings in storage, so with heavy packs filled with ridiculously useless belongs (i.e. down jackets, dive computers, winter clothing) we entered Esen in the heat of the day. We discovered pretty quickly that this was a village that tourists rarely visit, as the children and grown-ups stared, yelled hellos, and giggled as we passed. What we also discovered as we walked through the village was that there were no taxi-cabs and we had about 19k to go. Another kilometer or so down the road we did get picked up by a minibus which took us a few  K before dropping us at the turn off to Alinca. We walked a couple of kilometers and managed to hitch a ride with a local in their car a little further, and then got another ride on the back of hay tractor.  We ended up walking the last 6k (all, alas, an uphill climb) until we reached the village. The walk was lovely through pastures, olive groves and around huge rocky mountains with cliff drops to the Mediterranean and reaching thousands of feet above our heads. We ended up walking about an hour or two beyond Alinca and pitching camp in a small olive grove terraced on the slope of one of the mountains. It was an ideal camp spot with a beautiful view of sea and an old cistern where we were able to get water.

Day 2:

I woke the next day with a terrible terrible cold/cough...very sad for me. But the hike was still great.  We continued down the mountain we had camped on and at the base was a canyon that eventually popped out at a beautiful rocky beach. The weather was windy when we got there so we did not get to swim, but I did get to have a nice lunch of chicken soup at a little hotel in the small village that sits above the beach. From there we hiked on to the next village, a small quaint place called Faralya. Like the day before, the hike was gorgeous(definitely deserving of a best walk award). Along the way we didn't pass very many tourists, but funny enough we did cross paths with two ladies we had kayaked with in Kas two days before, I guess Turkey isn't so big after all. Here we ended up pitching our tent at a guest house. I was feeling pretty crummy when we arrived, so while I swam in the pool and took a nap, Craig went down the hill (actually more of cliff) to the Butterfly Valley canyon and beach. What he described when got back was a beautiful beach with a gnarly river canyon that you can ascend up through waterfalls using ropes. He also said that the beach had a young Turkey hippy scene, I picture college kids camping and doing yoga in a little bit of paradise.

Day 3:

This day I woke up feeling even crummier. So I decided that instead of taking the7 hour Lycian way trail through the mountains we would take the 2 hour coastal road route. It ended being a beautiful walk and we arrived a tour destination right at the start of a huge rain storm, so I think we did well to take the short cut.

5/21 Pammukale

From the end of our trek we got directly on a bus and headed to the town of Pammukale. My interest in Pammukale began with a photo I saw in Mexico of a woman snorkeling in crystal clear pool with broken ruins underneath her. Again, I thought this was my chance to see Atlantis. However, I subsequently found out that this pool is actually man-made and the ruins were bull dozed into the bottom of it. But, it turned out that the place where this pool is located is actually a must see in Turkey.  Pammukale is a small village that is located next to the ruined town of Hieropolis. The ruins of Hieropolis sit on the top of hill above a mountain of calcium pool hot springs. From Pammukale the hill looks like a small ski slope. You approach the ruins by walking up a chalk white path through tiers of crystal blue pools. It is breathtaking and, like Cappadocia, it looks like you could be on a another planet (you will have to see the photos). The ruins themselves were very impressive, dating back to 200 BC. The pool I had longed to see was actually built in the middle of the ruins and despite its artificial beginnings I was still determined to swim in it... that is until I found out it cost 30$ a person and the water was more slimy green than pristine blue....alas.

5/23 Troy

Moving right along. We hopped another long long bus(Turkey is a huge country) and headed to our last site, Troy. We had heard that there was not much to see at Troy, but we could not pass up the opportunity to stand where the Trojan horse once passed. We stayed the night in a large port town called Cannakale and hit up the ruins the next day. The trip to Troy ended up being really enjoyable. The ruins were actually only discovered a little over a hundred years ago, when a German named Schliemann used Homer's description of the city to pinpoint where it could have been. What he discovered was actually the ruins of nine cities that existed between 3000BC and 100AD...let me repeat that: 3000BC. The ruins were labeled based on which era of Troy they were and from the days of Homer's stories (1300BC) there still existed the city walls, a portion of a tower, a well, and some foundations of homes. Although the remnants are not as impressive as other ruins in Turkey, and it turns out that Homer's story was more of a fable, Craig and I both found it pretty awesome to be standing in Troy.

From here we move to Craig's tale of our time in Egypt.