Arrival in Kas

Day 9

Like so many days before, I got up and had a shower. Sparkles, Shakira and I had planned to climb up the limestone hill with an early start, as the temperature was forecast to hit 37 degrees, after reached 41 degrees the day before.
While I was in the shower, I heard a knocking at the door to my hostel room. I got out of the shower, dried myself off, and answered the door wearing my towel when the knocking started again. Sparkles had come to make sure that I had gotten up, which she could see as I opened the door. I got dressed and the three of us headed downstairs to grab some breakfast.
We headed down to check out and saw a rather shabby Ahmet, who was obviously feeling the effects of drinking and lack of sleep from the night before. I gave him a nod, a wink and a grin. He shook his head ruefully at me, obviously regretting staying up and drinking with the three Aussies.

I headed across to purchase our bus tickets from Pamukkale to Kas for later on in the day, and Sparkles took this opportunity to chase up the booking we had attempted to make the day before for an apartment in Kas. I returned to find that the people we had tried to book through had taken their time in telling us that the apartment was already booked, and it was now getting a bit too late to try to chase up an apartment to rent. With a sigh of disappointment, we placed a booking through for a hotel, hoping that we would have bedrooms as well as a living area that we could set up on a table and play some games of cards or whatnot.

With our accommodation for that night (and the next couple of nights) sorted, we set out up the road to the limestone hill.
The main drawcard of Pamukkale is the aforementioned limestone hill, which has formed over millions of years. There is a spring at the top which has a lot of lime in the water, and this water has flowed down the side of the hill, creating an amazing sight. There are pools of water that have formed on the hill side, which in the past people would sit in as they believed the water to have healing properties.
The last time I had climbed the hill, I had slipped right at the base and cracked my knee in the first pool of water. This time, I made it through unscathed. Sparkles and Shakira were amazed at the natural formation, and it is one of those things that is very hard to put into words and describe properly for people that have not been there. I am hoping to figure out how to put pictures in my blog for this entry, but if there are no pictures you should look up Pamukkale on the interwebs.

We reached the top and went for a wander through the gardens and ruins. A place that sold beers was located, so we grabbed a beer each and sat down to admire the view from the top of the hill. While we were sitting down, a random dog came over and joined us in the shade. Fortunately he didn’t ask us to buy him a beer, but we did give him some water, which he seemed grateful for.

The bus we were scheduled to catch from Pamukkale was supposed to leave between 1 and 1.15. Sparkles and I had to give Shakira a bit of a nudge in the right direction to get her down to our bags in time, but we managed to arrive just prior to 1pm. We waited and waited, but no bus arrived. I touched base with Ahmet to see if he knew anything about when the bus was supposed to come as the place that we booked our tickets through was run by his cousins. I laughed a little bit when I told him we had booked through them, as he said “Those inbreds? Why did you book through them?”
He went over to have a chat with his cousins, who I think wanted to get us onto a generic shuttle bus to take us in to Denizli for our connecting service. Ahmet shook his head and drove us into Denizli, fanging it like a bat out of hell. I think he might have set a road speed record.
There was one point where a truck was reversing across the road, dropping stones onto the verge so that they could do roadworks. Ahmet pulled up the van, honked the horn a few times, and then drove around the truck, with the road workers waving their arms at him trying to get him to stop. I caught his eye in the rear view mirror at this point, and he gave me a wink and a smile. I had a chuckle, and figured it was time to extricate myself from the brace position.
He got us to Denizli in one piece, and we jumped onto the bus to Fethiye.

It was a smaller bus than the space buses that we had caught to Denizli, and I slept for a lot of the trip, but this leg of the journey really drove home the terrain of Turkey.
Turkey is a very mountainous country, which is why they have buses rather than trains for their long-haul public transport system. The points that I was awake showed off amazing vistas as we headed up and over mountains, and massive pine forests as we were descending to the sea level town of Fethiye.

I awoke from a snooze as we were pulling into the Fethiye Otogaar. Jumping off the bus, we were approached by a fellow yelling out the names of several towns along the route that we were going to take. When he yelled out “Kas” (Kash), I gave him a wave and said yes. He pointed to a bus and told us to be quick, as this bus was going to leave in about 5 minutes at 6pm. We raced to the ticket office and asked for 3 tickets on that bus. The guy behind the counter said “3 tickets? No, it is full.” He then sold 2 tickets to 2 girls, who went out and jumped on the bus.

Sigh.

The fellow behind the counter told us that there was a good place nearby to sit and wait for the next bus. At 8.30pm.

Sigh.

So, we left our bags in the ticket office and headed over to a covered area in the middle of a shopping area attached to the Otogar. I dumped my bags and had a quick look for the toilet as I needed to make a tactical stop, and when I returned Sparkles and Shakira had ordered me a nice large glass of fresh orange juice. It went down a treat after sitting on an air-conditioned bus, which is an amazingly dehydrating experience.
We also ordered some food there while we waited for our next bus – Sparkles finally got herself a hamburger which she had been craving for a couple of days. Now, Turkey being a majority Muslim country there wasn’t actually any ham in the burger, but she did enjoy it all the same.

One of the people working there turned on the television for the news… or it could have been more of a Today Tonight style of show with the dramatic music at the start and end of each advertisement break… I’m not sure as my Turkish is nicht so gut. There were a number of stories that drew large reactions from the people watching, which I think focused on skirmishes between Turkey and Syria in the south eastern part of the country.
It has been hard keeping up to date with a lot of world events, as travelling takes up most of your time, and when you’re in a country that broadcasts news in another language you can’t always understand what the stories are about.

After faffing around until 8.15 we headed back over to the office for the bus company, where we found our bus waiting for us. Loading our bags onto the bus, we jumped on, and I found a man sitting in my seat – he was obviously supposed to be in the seat next to me, but he had spread out, and was happily talking away on his phone. When I pointed out to him that he was in my seat, he became a bit grumpy and moved over to the window. Which was fair enough, since he had only paid for one seat was didn’t look like he was going to reimburse me for my seat.
The bus didn’t depart on time – it was about 15 minutes late leaving the Otogar, and Gustavo (I will refer to the guy that sat next to me as Gustavo from here on) started grumbling to himself, looking up at the driver and waving his hands around. He wasn’t Italian, but he could have been.
The bus finally left the Otogar… and stopped just around the corner. There was no announcement why we were stopping, the driver just kept on looking in the read view mirror as the second staff member on the bus disembarked. We waited some more. And waited even more. It was about 9pm when the second staff member got back on the bus with another passenger. Gustavo was getting rather irate by this stage, and was no longer muttering – he was grumbling quite loudly, and got up at one point and started yelling at the driver. The driver just shrugged and looked out the front of the bus, ignoring Gustavo.
With this additional passenger embarked, the bus departed and started to make its way along the southern coast of Turkey towards our destination.

Our route went along the Turkish equivalent of the Great Ocean Road – a beautiful coastal road that had a cliff going upwards on one side and a cliff going downwards towards the water on the other. The sun had set, and we were still in the twilight period, so there was enough light to make out our surroundings, but we also had the lights from any towns (and offshore islands) that we passed, making it a beautiful view.
Gustavo didn’t think so, though, as he spent the whole time grumbling, except for when he was on the phone to the person that he was obviously visiting. I picked up from one of his conversations that he would call the person on the other end of the line to let them know when he was arriving in Kas so that they could come to the next stop and wait for him.
After about 2 hours we arrived at Kalkan, the town before Kas where I had stayed on my last trip to Turkey with Lapzang and Doolittle. It was nice looking down at the town and being able to make out some familiar landmarks – there was the Italian restaurant with a tree growing through it, there was the café that I had my morning coffees at, there was the bar that we had a nargile in where the staff member we befriended told us of the difference between Turkish price and Tourist price, and there was the marketplace that I drove a hard bargain with a 12 year old on my nargile (who then complimented Doolittle, saying to me “Your wife, she is beautiful, like Jennifer Lopez!”).
Shortly before pulling out of Kalkan, and old fellow got on the bus, and at that stop Gustavo started looking around in confusion.
“Kas?” he asked the old fellow.
“No, Kalkan” the old fellow replied.
Right. Gustavo was obviously meant to get off in Kalkan, and had thought that Kas was the stop before Kalkan. He stood up and started abusing the driver for not announcing that we were in Kalkan, to which the driver obviously replied “Mate, if you don’t know where you need to get off, that’s not my problem.”
Gustavo hurriedly jumped up, so I had to emulate him, and he stormed off the bus, giving the driver a quick “araquiem” (I won’t translate that particular phrase) on his way past.
I was glad that Gustavo was off the bus, as this meant that I could stretch out and look out the window on the final 20 minutes of our trip.
As we departed Kalkan, I was able to see the location of the villa that I had stayed at last time.

I was full of anticipation for the last leg of our journey, as a) I was keen to arrive after spending several hours travelling and faffing around, b) wanted a beer, and c) was excited to be spending 6 nights in one of the more beautiful parts of the world that I have been to.

The bus pulled into the Otogar of Kas at about 10pm – quite good timing since the bus left 30 minutes late and we were told that the trip would take 2 and a half hours.
Rather exhausted (it is amazing how sitting on a bus travelling around the Turkey-side can tucker you out), we waved down a taxi which drove us the 5 minutes to our hotel.
The hotel Linda was a very nice place, although it was the Plan B accommodation since we were unable to secure ourselves a villa or apartment to stay in. The hotel owner, Attila, welcomed us, took us up to our room, gave us the password for the hotel wi-fi, and asked if we would like a drink now that we had arrived. We ordered 3 Efes, dumped our bags, and headed down to the pool side area.
We crashed on some of the couches by the pool and checked e-mails and whatnot, and heaved a great sigh of satisfaction once our beers were brought out to us.
There was a German family that came back to the hotel and sat with their feet in the pool while they also had a night cap. One of their group started taking group photos of everybody, and I decided to test out my German and offered to take a group photo of them. I quickly discovered just how limited my German is, as after about 30 seconds I had to switch back to English. They were quite happy that I had made the effort to start speaking to them in German, though. And were quite chuffed with the photos I took, if I do say so myself.

Returning to my seat, I was engrossed in checking my emails when Shakira let out a shout, quickly followed by Sparkles. I looked up to see that there was a rat that had jumped up on the back of their couch, run from Shakira to Sparkles, leapt off the back of the couch and scaled a nearby tree.
Attila told us that the rat had made a booking for that night, but it was checking out the next morning. We had a bit of a look at the rat, perched precariously up on the end of a branch, and then left it alone, confident that it wouldn’t annoy us any longer.
Later, we headed upstairs and cranked up (down) the air-conditioning for a comfortable night’s sleep.