Selcuk to Pamukkale

On the recommendation of a few people we had met, we had decided to cut our stay in Selcuk short by one night, and chose to head to Pamukkale, where they had something called ‘tavertines’. These have been formed by a small lime-rich spring at the top of a hill that over millions of years has formed a massive white lime cliff face with small pools of water down its surface. At the top of the hill is a ruined city, and many of the tourist brochures speak of a pool at the top where you can swim amongst the ruins.

We got up, breakfasted, booked out of the hostel and headed to the Selcuk Otogar. I was still feeling queasy, and ended up snoozing for most of the trip. We departed Selcuk about 11.30, and arrived in Denizli at about 2pm.
The day was stinking hot, and as we jumped off our bus, we had people approach us to help us get on another mini-bus that would take us to Pamukkale. We panicked a bit, because we were supposed to be picked up from the Denizli Otogar, and waited for a while without any sign of people from our hostel. One of the guys that had approached us offered to call the hostel, and wandered off to make the call. He returned after about 15 minutes, telling us that they were on their way. We continued to wait, and he came back, offering to call them again. He returned to tell us that there had been issues with the bus, but that they were still coming. In this heat we were starting to get quite annoyed at all of this, so decided to just jump on one of the mini-buses and make our own way there. The ‘helpful’ man told us that it was quite rude of the hostel owners to promise to pick us up and not show up, and said that if we wanted we could rent a room from him. Out of spite we were tempted, but since our booking had already been paid for we chose not to.
We hopped onto the mini-bus, which just kept piling people on. It was so crowded that I had to get off three times to allow other passengers to disembark.
We arrived in Pamukkale and started to wander up to our hostel. We had two other people approach us and ask us where we were staying, and why we weren’t staying at their hostels.
We got to our accommodation and booked in, asking what had happened with the lift from Denizli. They said that we hadn’t told them what time we were arriving, and that they hadn’t received any phone calls from people asking to come pick us up. The penny dropped at this point – since there are a lot of day trips organized by tourist companies, not a lot of people organize to stay at Pamukkale, and so it has become quite a fierce market to get people to stay at particular venues. The ‘helpful’ man had obviously been winding us up to the point where we would pull the pin on our accommodation and decide to stay with him. Devious bastard.
We took our bags up to our room, and it was quite a nice room. The rest of the hostel wasn’t so great. There was water over large portions of the floor, which the owners did mop up, but still… They had promised 24 hour hot water… but it was more like 24 seconds. 1600 television channels with lots of foreign stations… but no televisions to watch them on. A swimming pool… that was empty.

It was now 4pm, and we were pretty pissed off over the whole situation. We decided to tackle the tavertines and head up to swim with the ruins. As we reached the end of the street, we could see the tavertines and the lime-stone cliff face. It was quite an amazing sight – this sheer white cliff face, with hundreds of people walking up and down it.
After paying our 20 Lira entrance fee, we got to the bottom of the cliff, which had a little pool where some of the lime water had accumulated. There was a sign warning that the pool was slippery, so I took off my shoes and walked around the edge on the smooth limestone. After about 5 steps I discovered what the sign meant.
I slipped and cracked my right knee on the rock, saw stars and couldn’t move for about 5 minutes. I realized that my bag containing my swimmers and camera had dipped into the water, so I rolled my shoulders a little bit to get it out, but still couldn’t stand for the pain. Opening my eyes, I felt a pair of hands grab my shoulder and help me to stand. A dark man who had been sitting under a tree about 5 metres away helped me to the side of the pool, and pointed to my knee. I grabbed onto the tree to help me stand, and he started wiggling my toes, then my ankle, and then my knee, causing a bit of pain but he was obviously a physiotherapist by profession. Seeing that nothing was broken, he started lathing the lime water onto the cuts that I had copped, and smiled at me, patting me on the shoulder.
He tapped his chest. “Iraqi.”
Amidst the haze of pain, I realized that this guy who had been sitting under the tree and selflessly come across to help me out wanted to show that he was a genuinely friendly and nice person, due to the ridiculous propaganda that had been put out during recent years. I tapped my chest back and said “Australian”, reached out and shook his hand, thanking him for his assistance.
Lapzang, Doolittle and I continued up the steep hill, me feeling like some sort of flagellant pilgrim with my knee, looking forward to the swim at the top in the lime water, hoping that some of the purported healing properties of the water would aid my knee’s recovery. It was a breath-taking view from the top, and I certainly needed to get my breath back once we’d achieved the climb.
Looking out over the cliffs, there wasn’t much water running across it. All of the photos that you see show huge amounts of shallow water running down the entire cliff, and sure it is summer, but I was expecting more.
We could see a building that had a sign “Ancient Pool” on it, so we made our way over there, able to see the ruins of the city spread out around us – not as impressive as Ephesus, but still intriguing.
We got to the entrance to the “Ancient Pool” building, and looking with a sense of indignation at the cost to swim in the pool – 27 Lira, on top of the 20 Lira to get in. We thought we’d go in and see what it was all about.
Walking through the door it looked like we had entered Club Med, since there were tables all around, bars, food places, games for the kids… all surrounding this little pool. None of these extra bits could be seen in the photos of the pool, so I suspected that a high level of photo-shopping had gone on. Looking into the pool was the greatest disappointment – it looked just like a normal swimming pool that somebody had dumped a few columns they’d collected into it. I sat down at one of the tables, gutted and feeling extremely ripped off at how commercialized this had become, ready to start belting the little Italian kid that kept on pushing his chair into my back.
I really felt like the jam had been sucked out of my donut.

We walked out of the pool area, Doolittle and I went for a wander while Lapzang dangled his feet in one of the man-made limestone wading pools near the main path at the top of the hill. “We’ve seen so many ruins recently, I’m sick of shit that’s fallen down,” he pronounced. After my knee and seeing the travesty that was the “Ancient Pool”, I agreed with him, but felt like I should at least see what was up here.
These ruins were nowhere near as impressive as Ephesus the day before, so I quickly ended up joining Lapzang again while Doolittle kept wandering.
Once she’d returned, we walked the other way down the path, and found a few of the tavertine pools that did have water running into them.
Lapzang and Doolittle decided to take a little dip, but I was furious and had had a gutful, so I headed back down the cliff to the hostel, where I rested my knee.

We ordered dinner at the hostel, and not only did they not have half the things on there, the food was dry and shit. I was becoming more and more unimpressed with Pamukkale every second.

During dinner, we noticed a little shop across the street that had carvings of a white material on display. Doolittle went across and investigated, and came back to tell us that it was a stone like a cross between pumice and chalk – very light, and able to be carved very easily.
I headed in with Doolittle and looked at the wares. It was exquisite craftsmanship – there were pipes, busts, animal carvings… Doolittle wanted to get a gift for her sister, and saw a carving of two horses running. It didn’t look like it was finished yet, as the surface still looked like chalk rather than the glossy surface of the other carvings. While she was umming and ahing about it, I asked the store owner if the statue needed more work done and how much it was. He told me 25 Lira, and that it wasn’t finished, but if we wanted it he could finish it for us. Doolittle finally said yes, so he called out his wife, who sat down with a very fine piece of sand-paper and smoothed out the edges, while he brought out a gas bottle and a tub of bees-wax, which he melted and dipped the sanded statue into.
The finished product was amazing, and Doolittle had a big grin on her face for the rest of the night.
We decided to end the night with a beer, so we headed up to a bar a little along the street. Out on the terrace was a fantastic view of the lime-stone cliff, all lit up in different coloured lights. This was an amazing view, and actually made me feel a little bit better about the disappointing events of the day.
We also tried a sheesha, the Turkish water pipes, for the first time, which I quite enjoyed.

We headed back to out hostel a little later, agreed that we wanted to get out of here as early as possible.