19 October: Pamukkale to Kusadasi

Our experience with the hotel (Hotel Koray) just deteriorated. And after we looked it up on Trip Advisor, we were amazed at how many of our complaints were the same as people had listed there!

The wifi signal was rubbish. After I was already in the shower, The Trucker had to go and find clean towels! The breakfast was the least impressive we've seen so far (except there was watermelon :) ). The owners (or managers ?) were also not very helpful.

We're actually a little confused right now as they seem to have us registered as Graziela Someone-or-other?! Our itinerary says we're where we should be. Perhaps Graziela booked for us, but none of it left us feeling overly confident about this place.

We're being collected for Heirapolis and Pamukkale tour at 11h30. And at some point after the tour we have another "approx 3hr" bus ride ... let's hope it's better than the last one!

While we were waiting, we took a stroll around the area surrounding the hotel. The town seems in terrible disrepair. I would not advise staying here.

Needless to say, everything worked out and improved exponentially as soon as our tour arrived to collect us.

Our guide for Pamukkale was great! And again, we met some interesting people, for the day. We headed to the top entrance of Heirapolis and took a wander thru the unexcavated town up to the theatre. Which took our breath away!

Wow. Seriously, wow. It was amazing. I was completely in awe. I do think it helped that we watched Spartacus earlier this year. It really made the experience more real, imagining the people who lived here and attended the theatre (which was used for gladiators and animal fights as well as plays and other things).

On our way down the hill, we saw the tomb of St Peter being excavated in the distance. And then we wandered down to Cleopatra's Pool. Which wasn't at all what I expected. We decided not to pay the 32Tl to swim there but, rather visited the museum in the old bath house and then went down to the actual pools and "swam" there.

It wasn't quite what I was expecting, but it was pretty cool. The calcium deposit is just a large clump in the middle of perfectly normal mountains. Reminded me a bit of the stretch of fake snow in Lesotho at Afriski! Haha.

They divert the water regularly to different pools to allow others to dry out and kill the algae. But the pools we could go to were quite shallow so the water had lost it's warmth. The real fun was sitting in the canal with the warm water rushing past you!



After that our tour drove us to Kusadasi, our next overnight stop. The hotel here, Hotel Sozer, is awesome, with a sea view! Which definitely makes up for the last one. Reminds me a little of our experience in Nah Trang.

We checked in and immediately headed to the stretch of restaurants along the coastal road. We (oddly) settled on a Chinese spot and had a very nice dinner. I had Chicken with Satay sauce and The Trucker had Sweet & Sour Beef.

After dinner we headed to the Doubletree where the people we'd met on the tour had promised to leave some of their famous chocolate chip cookies for us. The Trucker is such a sneak! Delish :)