Old Things and Impressive Piles
September 22 - October 1, 2022
We’ve been wanting to get over to Japan to visit our friend Kevin for years, and once again that was our intention in September of 2022. But even though Covid restrictions had been lifted just about everywhere else in the world, Japan still wasn’t letting in travelers like us when it came time to plan our trip, so we were forced to look into other options.
Next, we explored the idea of visiting Seychelles: Our friend Kasia had gotten inadvertently stranded there during the pandemic and the beach photos she posted during lockdown filled us with longing and jealousy. After quite a bit of planning, we almost pulled the trigger on that trip, before the sticker shock for what was essentially just a beach vacation led us to second-guess if that was where we really wanted to go.
Then we looked into what it would cost to spend a few weeks in Turkey and our interest was piqued. We could have sunshine and blue water and great food and historical sites at extremely reasonable rates, and each of us could have exactly what we wanted from our vacation. Mazz could explore new places and see some of the oldest stuff in the world and Kirb could read a book laying around all day on a boat. Win-win! We asked our Turkish friend Baris for recommendations and he sent us a photo of a map around Adana annotated with the word, “FOOD.” We decided to begin our journey there.
At this point, we know well enough that we don’t need to stay long in any city to get our fill of it, so we only planned on spending one full day in Adana. Our flight landed late in the evening but it was easy enough to take a cab from the airport to the hotel and get started early the next morning. Though it was already late September, the weather was still very hot along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, and walking through the city quickly left us covered in sweat. Turkey wasn’t included in our cell phone roaming plans so we got new SIM cards that let us use Google maps for navigation, which was a must in the labyrinthine streets of the old town. There are a million specialty stores in Adana selling every item imaginable, with carts on the street slinging melons, figs, green cherries, and pink un-roasted pistachios. Everywhere you look there are delicious-looking piles: Tea, spices, dried goods, all bundled together colorfully in large quantities. Adana is bustling and run-down. The traffic and sound of honking horns is unending.
After walking along the river and checking out the imposing Sabancı Merkez Mosque and surrounding park, we made our way to the Grand Bazaar for lunch, where artisans were banging out copper pots in soot-covered partially-enclosed workspaces. This market had a well-reviewed kebab spot, and not knowing exactly what or how to order, we had them bring us out the whole spread of grilled meats, herb and tomato salads, and flatbreads. The food was delicious and excitingly inexpensive (about €10 total for the two of us). As we waited to pay, we were asked multiple times by every waiter in the restaurant if we wanted tea. It was 95 degrees out; we did not. Eventually, instead of continuing to ask, someone just brought us some anyway, as it is unfathomable in Turkey that you would not have tea after your meal. Next, we stopped for a local staple called Şalgam - fermented turnip juice sold by the glass - before escaping the heat in our hotel suite and planning out where we would be staying for the next few days.
For dinner, we walked north from our hotel and found that the city was quite different in that direction. While the area we were staying in was dirty and loud and outdated, only 10 minutes away the vibe was completely different, with modern storefronts and a noticeably more relaxed feel. We ate an incredible meal at a restaurant called Paşalimanı, and though the bill was significantly higher than lunch, the rise in quality and execution of the food was proportional.
The next morning we took a cab back to the airport and picked up our rental car. From Adana, it’s a few hours north to Cappadocia in Central Anatolia, where we would be spending the next several days. It did not take long on the highways to learn that the driving is very fluid in Turkey, in that most of the drivers are usually driving in two lanes at once. There are a few different towns in the Cappadocia region and figuring out which one to stay in proved difficult, but we think we made the right choice. There are many, many “cave hotels” where one can find lodging in the area, and we decided to go a bit on the fancier end, spending around €100 a night for a luxury cave. The Taru Cave Suites in Ürgüp were fashioned directly into the cliffside, with enormous rooms and marble bathrooms that were bigger than our living room in Berlin. The hotel was secluded and quiet but still only a ten-minute walk from the restaurants and nightlife, which was the balance we were looking for.
We spent the afternoon walking around the city, poking our heads into caves and doing wine tastings at the different shops and wineries. While the food in the area was superb, in general, the wine...was not. We found one or two drinkable whites at the Efendi Wine House and some “homemade” wine from local winemakers at a cute outdoor wine shop called Mahzen that was good. The main draw for the tourist busses in Ürgüp is the Turasan Winery, which is large and properly equipped to handle big crowds. We can honestly say that the tasting we did at Turasan was the worst six wines we have ever put in our mouths in quick succession.
Perhaps the biggest draw of Cappadocia is the hot air balloons. Every morning, the skyline is filled with them, and if you so choose, you can pay around €150 per person to be inside of one for an hour or so. We were more interested in seeing the balloons than being passengers in them, so we took the advice of the guy who owned our hotel and got up before dawn to drive out to the Love Valley to see the balloons at sunrise (it’s called the Love Valley because it’s full of towering rocks that look like penises). Though it seemed like no one else was driving on the dirt road with us once we got off the main stretch in Göreme, we soon found that many thousands of people had the same idea as us that morning. We’re generally not stoked on crowds, but it was honestly fun to share the experience with so many other people. We bought some instant coffee and a simit (sesame ring) as the sun came up and filled the valley with pink light and watched contentedly as the balloon pilots buzzed the crowds on the edge of the cliff. It was a truly memorable experience, and in the end, we didn’t feel like we missed out on anything by seeing the balloons from the ground instead of seeing the valley from inside of one.
Driving back from Love Valley in the early morning light, we could see just how widespread the caves and fairy chimneys were in the area and how easy it was to just pull the car over and go exploring. There’s nothing to keep visitors from climbing around wherever they want, so we did just that. With the whole day still ahead of us, we decided to drive out an hour or so to Derinkuyu Underground City. These multi-level tunnels go down almost 300 feet and are large enough to hold upwards of 20,000 people along with their livestock and food. We overheard one tour guide say that the volume removed from the caves equals 25 thousand dump trucks full of rocks. It’s easy to get claustrophobic wandering around inside Derinkuyu, and even after only an hour or so of walking hunched over to fit through the tunnels our backs were aching, but we were happy to have made the trip to see it firsthand.
On the way to our next stop, we saw signage for a rug shop and decided to pull over to check it out. In reality, it was a rug-making compound with a spacious, ornate showroom full of beautiful rugs for sale and plenty of tourists haggling with salesmen inside. Curious, we asked how much a rug cost, and the man told us, “Three thousand,” including shipping. Three thousand Turkish lira is about $150 (the € and $ were presently 1:1), which is a pretty great deal for such nice rugs, so we started having the salesmen go through the stock to help us find a color and pattern that would fit our apartment. It wasn’t until we had been inside for a half an hour looking through rugs that a particularly smarmy salesman overheard us talking about the price, laughed, and said, “Lira? You think these cost three thousand lira? These are three thousand dollars. Why would you think they were in lira?” Oh, I don’t know, carpet man, maybe because we are in Turkey and the lira is the currency of Turkey and I do not spend American dollars where I live in Europe, let alone when I am traveling in Turkey. We left that rug sweatshop more than a little embarrassed with no rugs to ship back to Berlin.
Arguably the most dramatic looking village in the area is Uçhisar, with an ancient village built around the base of an enormous central rock structure known as “Uçhisar Castle.” For a small fee you can explore the caves inside and climb up to the top for a panoramic view of the entire area. It’s hard to say which was better between the view from the top or just the views of Uçhisar Castle itself from the town.
Though we still felt spurned from before, another rug shop in Uçhisar caught our eye, so we popped in to take a look. The proprietor was busy with another customer so he asked us to go wait in his back room, which while truly incredible to look at, was not someplace we felt comfortable sitting around and waiting when we actually had very little intention of spending a bunch of money on a rug. Instead, we found a traditional diamond-shaped woven and beaded wall hanging that we both were drawn to instantly, one that had clearly been hanging in shop for years and was bleached by the sun. It is now hanging proudly in our living room.
Just as we had joined the crowds for sunrise in the Love Valley, so too did we join the crowds for sunset in the aptly-named Red Valley. There were cafes set up along the edge of the hillside where you could get an unobstructed view of the sun going down in the distance, filling the already-red rock formations with soft pink light. It was gorgeous, but watching the sunset with hundreds of other people always feels a bit strange to us.
One of the biggest tourist draws in the area is the Göreme Open Air Museum, which gives visitors access to a variety of stone churches that are over a thousand years old and still contain colorful, intact frescoes. These caves were home to some of the first Christians fleeing persecution and continued to be important religious sites for centuries after. While fascinating, there were just too many people milling about the place to really enjoy our time there, and we found ourselves repeatedly waiting in line to go look inside of a stone structure that looked exactly the same as the last stone structure we had just waited in a line to see. We had more fun when we decided to leave the Open Air Museum and go explore the area outside of it instead, as there were no other tourists on the surrounding trails and plenty of fascinating cave structures to poke around in.
That night after a dinner of local beef stew called Sofra, a man in front of a rug shop in Ürgüp called us over and started up a conversation. We let him know explicitly that we were not interested in buying a rug, but he went in hard on the sale anyway, pulling pieces from the pile and laying them out for us one by one. Kirb was done with it instantly and just walked out of the store, but Mazz stayed behind and heard him out, too kind to just leave. His prices went lower, and lower, and in hindsight we probably should have bought a rug from that guy because they were really nice and he was really willing to make a sale. Oop.
The next morning we left Cappadocia and began the long, arduous drive to Kahta. Driving in eastern Turkey was truly bonkers. Here are some of the things we saw on the road that day: A horse drawn carriage on the freeway; a man riding a bicycle while balancing a soccer ball on his head on the freeway; a jackknifed semi-truck with all the windows smashed out and all its cargo splayed across the road on a winding mountain pass; someone with bladed tire shredders on their hubcaps passing on the right shoulder of a one-lane highway through a small town; a large tractor very slowly pulling out to cross two lanes of highway traffic while multiple cars barreled towards it at full speed, causing everyone to slam on their breaks and narrowly avoid a multi-car pile-up. The speed limit is generally impossible to discern, though it drops instantly from highway speed to 50 km/hr in towns and there are endless signs that warn of speed cameras - everywhere you look the signs with the cameras - and yet no one slows down even the slightest bit in the towns. Do the cameras actually exist? Are tickets issued for speeding? It they are, every car on the road would be getting them. We tried to ask the locals and received no answers.
We took a pit stop at Karatay Caravanserai, a medieval structure that used to house caravans on the silk road and still had rings inside for hitching horses and camels. The other side-quest that day was to the town of Kahramanmaraş, which we were told in Cappadocia had the best ice cream in the world. Specifically, the ice cream at a place called Yaşar Pastanesi, which is made with milk from goats that have been fed orchids and thyme and then combined with ground orchid roots (salep) to create an ice cream that is so thick you have to cut it with a knife and will not melt even when it is wildly hot outside. Cities in Turkey like Kahramanmaraş are truly bizarre: There is nothing but desert for long stretches and then suddenly there are these sprawling collections of hundreds and hundreds of high-rise buildings surrounded by absolutely nothing. Once you get inside the city surrounded by nothing there is gridlock traffic. The ice cream at Yaşar Pastanesi was worth the extra effort. It was remarkable - so incredibly creamy and thick you had to chew it with your teeth. Once we had eaten our plates of ice cream with knives and forks, we got back into the car and continued east. By the time we finally reached Kahta around dinner time, Kirb was truly, deeply frazzled by his driving experience.
The reason for coming out here was to visit Mount Nemrut. It was difficult to figure out online whether we needed a guided tour to see the summit of the mountain at sunrise or not, but this was poised to be a highlight of the trip so we figured it was better to be safe than sorry. The English guided tour we found was tied to staying at a place called the Kommagene Hotel, which wasn’t especially expensive and we needed a place to stay, so we went for it. For the first time in the trip, communication became an issue, as the guy who worked the front desk of the hotel - which was a total dump - did not speak English and required us to pay for the whole tour in cash up front, which was all the cash we had. The guy we’d been texting about the tour didn’t actually work at the hotel, but he swore he’d be around to pick us up at 4am to drive us up the mountain.
True to his word, there was a van waiting outside at 4am, and it did indeed drive us and a two other guys up the mountain in the dark. But first it stopped at the gift shop and made us sit there for about an hour while it was still dark outside with nothing to do but endure some guy who was passed out, laying across four chairs and snoring so loudly that it shook the entire lobby. Then we got back in the van and were driven up 5 minutes to a parking lot, and from there we went up the rest of the way to the summit on foot with a dozen or so other tourists to the top, and we were feeling quite swindled by our “tour.” But the sun rising and illuminating the statues on the top of the mountain was an incredible sight, making it hard to feel like we had made any mistake at all, no matter how we had chosen to get there. Our guide did give us some interesting information at the top: The mountain is actually the tomb of King Antiochus, who reigned in the 1st century BC over the kingdom of Kommagene, located north of Syria and the Euphrates after the breakup of Alexander the Great's empire. One of the statues is of him, seated alongside the Greek gods. Supposedly the mountain is his tomb and still filled with his treasure.
After leaving Nemrut, we were surprised to find that there were actually several more stops to the tour we hadn’t been informed of. We were guided to the remains of the ancient Greek city Arsameia and to Kahta Castle, which is nestled into the crevice of a cliff face above a pastoral stream. We walked across Cendere Bridge, the oldest still-standing bridge in the world, originally constructed in the 2nd century. We made a final stop at Karakuş Tumulus, a funerary monument for Queen Isias and Princesses Antiochis and Aka I of Commagene. After all of these interesting locales, we were quite glad we had sprung for the tour. At each stop, one of the other guys in the car posed for endless Instragrams and Tik-Tik videos while his friend dutifully photographed. Then, on the way back to Kahta in the middle of absolute hot nowhere, the sassy influencer got mad for some reason and demanded the van pull over and let him out. The guide sped off and left him out there and we have absolutely no idea what happened or why. When the tour was over, it was hard to get back into our own car and drive 3-4 more hours to our next destination, but we definitely didn’t want to hang around Kahta anymore. That city was bad.
We were extremely hungry when we finally made it to Göbeklitepe, but the only restaurant in the area appeared to be situated in the middle of a farm field. It was hard to tell exactly what that place was, but it was definitely in the middle of a field. The restaurant was covered but still open-air with chickens everywhere roosting on chairs and underneath the tables. No one there spoke English, but using our phones we were able to order some pretty good kebabs. Just down the road was the entrance to the archeological site, which included a particularly nice museum with fascinating relics and historical information about the area. Göbeklitepe is the oldest known worship site in the world, dating back as far as 9500 BC, which is 7,000 years older than the pyramids in Egypt. It’s so old that its discovery actually changed the way archeologists understood the relationship between religion and agriculture. It used to be believed that religion came after the invention of agriculture, but Göbeklitepe predates agriculture. Now it is believed that people first gathered together to worship, and once there were a lot of people in the same place, they had to figure out how to feed everyone. Everything about Göbeklitepe felt mythic and powerful. It’s an awe-inspiring site.
Gaziantep is the culinary capital of Turkey, particularly famous for its pistachios and pistachio-related delicacies, so we decided to make that our next overnight stop. The city also houses the Zeugma Mosaic Museum, which is the largest mosaic museum in the world and is filled with intricate artworks that were recovered from the ancient city of Zeugma that became flooded when a new dam was built on the Euphrates. The artworks that could be saved were then painstakingly restored at the museum, but many more mosaics are believed to be submerged by the reservoir. Most of the pieces inside are from the 2nd and 3rd centuries and are immense in size, with some single pieces covering the floor and walls of entire rooms.
Next, we went to explore the Coppersmith Bazaar to try some of the famous baklava inside of the market, but when we showed up to Güllüoǧlu Baklava Shop the owner was being interviewed by a Dutch TV station and we couldn’t buy any treats. So instead we headed to the “Baklava District” and were only mildly shocked to find that every other storefront in that quite-large area was indeed a baklava shop. We bought a variety of treats at Çelebioğulları baklava that tasted every bit as good as we had hoped, but honestly, we were more blown away by the accompanying shop filled from front to back with impressive piles. Every tasty thing you could imagine was inside, neatly sorted and presented as a pile. Though we were extremely full, we went to a second baklava spot called Koçak that was supposed to be the biggest and best. This place was churning out treats on a massive scale, but it was packed and everything looked amazing, so we had someone help us pick out an assorted box to take with us for the coming days.
It was time to drive back to Adana for one final night before flying off to the coast, and after what we had learned our first time through, we got a hotel in the much-nicer north end of town. For about €70 we rented an entire penthouse apartment to ourselves, though we quickly learned that it was sparsely furnished with things we might need, like a bottle opener. Thankfully, the kind people at the grocery store down the road agreed to help us open our bottle at the register with a makeshift corkscrew. The gentleman was more than happy to accept a glass of the red wine as thanks, which he stashed away in the break room.
The meal we had for dinner at Mıdık Kazbaşı Restaurant around the corner from where we were staying was the best we ate on the entire trip. We asked for a menu but there were no menus at this restaurant (kebab restaurants serve kebabs, idiot) and the servers didn’t speak English. We were sure whatever they brought us was going to be fine. Before we knew it, the entire table was covered in plates, each one more delicious than the last. We got a bottle of Yeni Raki, a traditional anise-flavored Turkish liquor that becomes cloudy when you mix it with water, as well as unmarked bottles of fermented turnip juice. Kirb didn’t really care for Şalgam the first time around in Adana, but paired with the grilled meat and raki he definitely developed a taste for the salty red drink. We were in the back of the restaurant, and sitting at a table in the corner was a solitary man with a giant bottle of raki and an entire sliced watermelon but no other food. Over the course of the night, various people would show up and pay deference to him and it became clear that he was some sort of mob boss or other extolled ne’er-do-well. Our table-filling feast cost €50, and half of that was just the bottle or raki. It was the perfect sendoff from Adana.
The next day was a long travel day. We left our penthouse to return the rental car to the airport just after dawn, and on our way we found ourselves on a 5-lane-wide Mario Kart road with no lanes actually painted on it. There was only one car on the road aside from us. They were a fluid driver, moving gracefully from one side of the girthy road to the other without signaling, though fluidity is easy when there are no distinguished lanes. We watched them drive directly through a red light. Kirb had never been so pleased to give a car back and not have to drive in a country anymore. We flew from Adana to Antalya and immediately got on a local bus that took us to an enormous bus depot on the other side of town. There, we had to find a kiosk for a bus that would transport us to the coastal city of Fethiye. There appeared to be only one option, and their last bus of the day was leaving in less than five minutes. Somehow, we miraculously completed the transaction and were escorted to the right vehicle after crazily trying to run behind all the busses to a separate parking lot, misunderstanding the directions we were given. We sat down in the last two seats on the bus. It felt like a good sign.
3+ more hours on a bus and we found ourselves on the coast. Our main task before getting on the boat the next morning was to get cash to pay for the trip. For some reason, Sail Turkey insisted that we pay for the vast majority of our weeklong cruise in cash when we arrived, even though our balance was €1000. This was problematic in a number of ways. First: we don’t like traveling with that much cash on us. Second: cash machines in Turkey charge a crazy percentage in fees. There are dozens of different banks and they range from 6-13% on the amount withdrawn, which for €1000 is not an insignificant amount. Third: cash machines in Turkey only give out small bills and don’t allow large withdrawals. We would have to hit up several cash machines to make it to the total we owed. After testing literally dozens of machines to find the cheapest interest rates, we finally found one machine that charged no interest at all, and used it to max out withdrawals on each of our debit cards. Even then, we had to hit it up the next morning too to reach our total. When we arrived at the meetup spot and handed the guide a fat €1000 stack comprised almost entirely of €5 bills, he looked at us like we were crazy people and made a small scene about how he had to carry it all in his backpack. We are still deeply confused about how we were supposed to pay him any other way.
We chose the 7-day Blue Cruise which starts in Fethiye and then travels east along the southern Turkish coast before flipping around and ending in Fethiye again. We were surprised to learn when we boarded that we were the only passengers going for a full week; everyone but us was getting off after 3 nights and then an entire new group would be boarding to head back the other direction. We were given the room under the bow, with stained wood walls and benches and a private bathroom, which Kirb was happy to have after developing a bad tum leading up to the voyage. On the first boat trip like this we took in Croatia, all 12 of us on the ship shared a single toilet. Everything on Hepay A was old and barely functioning, or only functioned in limited capacities while the engine was on. Still, it was a handsome vessel. We later learned it had transported 270 Syrian refuges at once during the 2010s, before the current captain had bought it at auction. The vessel seemed to be held together by spit and determination. We were happy to be aboard.
The first day took us to Saint Nicholas island, which archeologists believe held the original tomb of the man whose fabled secret gift-giving eventually led to the modern legend of Santa Claus. We dropped anchor in the bay and were whizzed over to the island entrance by our skipper on an inflatable dingy, where it cost about €3 to go inside and wander around in the ruins. From the top of the hill, we were treated to an unimpeded picturesque sunset.
There were three crew members on our boat: the captain, a cook, and a teenager whom they ordered around. The passengers were a diverse lot, coming from South Africa, Scotland, the UK, Iran, America, and Hong Kong. We were some of the younger passengers in the group, which was a bit of a surprise, but we were happy to have evenings filled with wine and conversations instead of tequila shots and blaring techno music, which one can easily find on other ships in these waters. All three meals were provided on the boat and everything that came out of the tiny galley was tasty and satisfying. Lunches and dinners were usually simple baked trays with vegetables and meat that have been nicely seasoned, always served with breads and sides. Mazz had told them beforehand she could not eat gluten, but we’re not sure if that information was ever actually relayed to or internalized by the crew on the boat. Regardless, she always had something to eat, and usually something good.
During the day we pulled into ports to explore the seaside towns. The sunken city of Kekova, which dates back over 2,000 years, was destroyed by an earthquake in the 2nd century and much of it sank into the water. You can still see some remnants of buildings and stairways leading into their sunken rooms below the water, but it’s difficult to see any of the submerged ruins from a boat, even from directly above. Unfortunately, you can’t stop your boat over the ruins or swim in them, but the guides did assure as we trolled by that there’s a sunken city under there. We later came to port in Simena (Kaleköy) village which is covered in stone Lycian tombs with castle ruins at the top that overlook the bay. It was a particularly pleasant location to explore and spend the afternoon.
You don’t do a lot on these kinds of boat trips, and that’s kind of the point. Laying around reading and swimming in the sunshine is Kirb’s ideal summer vacation. Mazz usually prefers something a bit more active, but she does love being on a boat, so the Blue Cruise was a good compromise for us. The crew didn’t speak much English, and before long Kirb became the communication conduit between them and the rest of the passengers. He got to be the one to tell everyone else after 2 days of flushing our dirty toilet paper that we weren’t actually supposed to be doing that and that we’d break the sputtering old boat if we continued. Kirb was seemingly an odd choice as the go-between, as he was the only one stupid enough to empty a bunch of dirt and detritus from the rug in front of his cabin into a “trash” can by the kitchen that actually housed all of our bread.
After dinner on the final night with the first group, we moved away the tables on the deck and set up the speaker for a pass-the-youtube dance party featuring hot jams from all of our different cultures. How do you follow up a traditional Scottish group dance? With an Oh Sees psychedelic freak-out, naturally. The captain turned on a disco ball and the music was cranked to full volume and we realized that our boat full of adult conversations about literature could also be a dancing and boozing boat. It didn’t take much of a catalyst to change.
The next morning in Ucagiz Village we welcomed a new, smaller crew, including 4 more retired South African travelers, a 20-something Kiwi, and a nice couple from the Bay Area/Mexico. In booking the trip, we missed the part of the description that said, “On this cruise, you see the same significant attractions twice,” thinking the last 3 nights would be different than the first. It initially seemed like we had made a mistake, but in the end it was perfectly fine seeing the same sights in reverse. In fact, we got to appreciate them in new ways. Our first time in Kas, we spent much of our shore leave trying to find Kirb some diarrhea medicine. On the second visit, we got to go shopping for souvenirs instead and found some great earrings and sunglasses.
We ran into the Californians in front of the liquor store, where they were contemplating buying more bottles for their room, even though bringing outside liquor on board was explicitly forbidden by the tour operators. Once we learned that our neighbors were already breaking that rule, we decided we were going to sneak some booze on dad’s boat as well and bought a small bottle for ourselves. For the rest of the trip, the four of us giggled like high-schoolers as we snuck into our cabins to liven up our drinks. As affordable as everything else in Turkey was, the booze purchased in eating and drinking establishments was not, and unfortunately our non-BYOB boat priced its drinks just a little higher than what felt reasonable. Kirb will always have a problem with this pricing model. If the goal of the bar is to make money, it will earn more by pricing the drinks lower so that a higher volume is sold, especially in an environment where there is nothing to do but sit around on a boat drinking all day.
On our final morning, Kirb began to get anxious when we still weren’t anywhere near our port by late morning, so he asked the captain when we were planning to disembark. His itinerary was not at all the same as the one the cruise company had given us, returning to Fethiye several hours after the long-distance bus we had already paid for was scheduled to take us back to Antalya. Following a few extremely confusing phone calls to the agency, the captain loaded us and the other Americans onto the inflatable dingy and sped us around the coast to a harbor on the other side of Fethiye from the one we had originally embarked. The dingy ran out of fuel after about 2 minutes on the water, but thankfully there was a gas can under the seat. From the harbor, a taxi took us through town to the bus station, where we had just enough time to grab some snacks before the bus whisked us off to Antalya.
We sat in the front seats for the 3+-hour journey, and for some reason, even though he had his own seat, the attendant decided to sit directly on the floor in front of us with his arm splayed up on the railing, completely erasing any personal space we might have otherwise enjoyed. On his phone, he was watching and commenting on some livestream of two pretty young girls and it all felt...not great. The driver chain-smoked and was usually driving down the exact center of the two-lane highway, so fluid the lanes could not contain him. It felt so great to be back on the road in Turkey.
Antalya was not an ideal place to end our trip after a peaceful week at sea, but it was the best option for a reasonable flight home to Berlin. Though it has a beautiful old town, Antalya seemed to be mostly populated with extremely-drunk Russians who were out looking for trouble and/or actively vomiting in an alleyway. All the restaurants seemed like tourist traps and the food was comparatively not great and several times more expensive than everywhere else we had been in the country. On the plus side, there were lots and lots of kitty cats in Antalya, sitting on scooters and piles of rugs and just about everywhere else.
We don’t want to be in a city like Antalya, or really, most cities. We want to be on a boat or at some incredible historical site. For those things, Turkey really excels. We didn’t know exactly what we were getting into going into this trip, but the pictures and the prices looked right. What we found was better than what we expected: The people were exceedingly nice, the food was consistently great (even if kebabs did get a bit stale after a week), the history was fascinating, and there wasn’t a single point where we felt sketched out, harassed, or unsafe. Communication issues came up fairly often but could always be ironed out with a functioning smartphone. There is a whole lot to see in this very large country. We could easily see ourselves coming back for more.