As promised, here's some words and pics to tell you about our trip down south. (As always, if you click on a picture you get a bigger version.)
We spent about 6 days at a little place near the city of Antalya. It wasn't a big stupid anthill of a hotel, thank God, but a really nice, small group of wooden bungalows nestled between the mountains and the shore (ten bungalows spread out over 9000 square meters, or 2.2 acres). The owner is really great about keeping the place peaceful and quiet; there was no music, no TV, nothing to mar the absolutely beautiful silence. Here's what our bungalow looked like:
And here's the setting we found ourselves in (this is the view from our porch toward the mountains):
Those are citrus trees planted between the bungalows. We weren't sure what the fruits were because they weren't ripe yet; I used my tried-and-true method of rubbing the leaves and savoring the citrus aroma that wafts noseward, coming up with the idea that they were lemons; Meltem pointed out that they lacked the pointy ends of lemons and theorized that they were oranges and tangerines. There were also a lot of pomegranate trees around with big fat pomegranates hanging off them; here's Meltem to demonstrate.
As I said, the bungalows were nicely placed between the mountains and the sea. We surprised ourselves by displaying the willpower to get up at 6:00 am each morning to go down and watch the sun rise over the Mediterranean. It looks like this:
The setting was really amazingly beautiful because you really are right between dramatic mountains and beautiful blue sea. Sometimes this made the place bear an uncanny resemblance to Hawaii, a place brought to mind by views like this:
One of the mountains, the tallest in the area, was known to the ancients as Mount Olympos (not that one, another one). I took this picture of it from the beach:
Speaking of Olympos, that was the name of the
local city in ancient and medieval times. It was a major harbor city in the Lycian League (a confederation of city-states in Hellenistic times) but eventually fell into obscurity. The ruins were about a half-hour walk down the beach from us. I took a morning walk over there and was just stunned at how cool it was; I totally felt like Indiana Jones as I clambered over paths in a dense forest, here and there coming across ancient and medieval ruins. Here, for example, is the entrance to the local temple from Roman times:
The Romans also left this bath with a lovely mountain for a backdrop:
There was also a nifty Byzantine structure of unknown, but probably religious, purpose. There were remnants of mosaic floors scattered around the site but I just liked the evocativeness of the building, thinking how 1600 years ago there would have been gloomy Greeks muttering their prayers under the now-fallen domes.
My jaunt over to Olympos was really the only non-lazy thing either of us did the whole time, I'm happy to report. We intended to relax, and by God did we ever relax. It was certainly easy to do so in our bungalow-amid-the-fruit-trees. Here's my better half sitting on the porch:
And here's me blissfully swinging in a hammock on the premises:
Since the "hotel" was so small, there were few other people around, which is one of my
sine qua nons for a vacation worthy of the name. We did have numerous companions, though. For example, there was a cat we named Cheeky for his big sideburns:
Cheeky was impressively sanguine given the horde of chickens who constantly roamed the premises pecking and peeping:
There were other creatures too; I snapped this little guy as he lumbered toward the shade under our bungalow:
Anyway, that should give you some idea of what kind of nice vacation we had. Now we are back in the big city, getting ready for the school year to begin so Meltem can teach and I can await the hordes of SAT candidates I've been promised. Don't worry, we'll keep you up to date on all our thrilling doings!
