My last few days in Olympos were very relaxing and mellow. I continued to meet great people at my pension, including Egor, a Dutch journalist who had covered Beirut and had just been to the Kurdish part of Iraq, and Ursula, also Dutch, who sold everything she owned two years ago and travelled the world teaching diving. I hiked around and swam a lot (had an hour plus swim looking for an elusive water cave). Also went up to see the Chimera, which are mysterious eternal flames up on a mountain. Today they look like a bunch of built-in gas grills, but you can imagine how magical they must have been 2000 years ago.
After some downtime in Olympos, my last hours in Turkey were a bit of a sprint to the finish line. I took a bus on Thursday to Selcuk, got up early in the morning, toured Ephesus for a few hours, and then took a flight to Istanbul in the afternoon followed by one to Dubai at night. Whew! It was the only way to fit Ephesus in, which was definitely worth it.
Ephesus: the capitol of Roman Asia, most complete Roman ruins in the eastern Mediterranean, and freakin' huge! It's an experience to be actually surrounded by ruins like this, instead of just viewing a few isolated examples. The theater and the library are the highlights, though I was surprised to learn that the library entrance (the iconic image of Ephesus) was reconstructed and basically had a wall of concrete behind it. I guess that makes sense if you look at it - it's just sitting there with no apparent support, kinda like Ralph Nader.
I knew coming in that 9 days in Turkey was pretty quick, and this trip has only whetted my appetite to come back and see more of the country. I would have loved to have seen Cappadocia, with its fairy chimneys and underground cities, as well as a lot more of the Mediterranean coast and eastern Turkey. But I'm really happy with what I was able to see in my time here.
One of the highlights has been the food here: kebaps, koftes (meatballs), mezes (little dishes like tapas but usually delicious things you can spread on bread), the billion and one ways they prepare eggplant, and the traditional breakfast of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggs, meat, olives, bread, cheese, jam, and butter. Along with small tulip-shaped glasses of tea (chai) at every possible moment. It was so good I couldn't get enough of it and found myself trying to find one last Turkish meal (instead of a turkey sandwich) at the airport before my plane flew out.
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