It
was with a heavy heart that I pulled away from winning the Nobel Prize for
Economics and woke up. It was with a different heavy heart that we got ready
that day as we were leaving the first leg of our trip from the beaches and
venturing out. My wife had prudently enquired the day before as to the timings
of trains departing from Selçuk and we had planned accordingly as outlined in
the VIP brief below,
09:30
AM: Depart from Selçuk bound for
Denizli
12:30
AM: Catch a bus from Denizli to the North
Entrance
01:00
PM: Walk down to Pamukkale
05:00
PM: Catch a bus back to Denizli
05:30 PM: Stare at Turkish chicks
05:33 PM: Get beaten up by wife
05:35 PM: Nurse wounds
10:00
PM: Overnight trip to Cappadocia
Now,
even though I would like to attribute this brilliant one-day plan to our highly
sharpened travelling acumen, it is with deep disdain that I have to force
myself to acknowledge this link. It gives absolutely full details on how to do
it. And we followed it word by word, like the time my friend Manhar from
engineering copied the answer to describing a 3-phase Synchronous Motor and
promptly forgot to return my sheet, ensuring I had to rewrite the answer from
scratch.
After
a rather heavy, dispassionate and slightly redundant breakfast with the same
menu, we bade a cheery farewell to our host and left for the railway station.
En route, we exchanged some currency at a jewelry store as advised by the
hotelier.
TIP 1: Exchange at jewelry stores only, across Turkey. They give the best rates. The first time we did, that was the best rate we got and we rued for the rest of the trip, wishing we had done more.
At
the railway station, we spent a good 20 minutes figuring out where the platform
was. There were two railway tracks, but only one platform – the one that we had
got off on. Logic suggested that the same train cannot go in two directions and
the one going to Denizli must be on the second track. But there was no other
platform. A daily commuter on the Mumbai local who would have started with a
full crop of hair would have ended up resembling Agassi by the end of
deconstructing this conundrum.
We
eventually located a small raised concrete thingummy, 1 ft in height 2 ft in
width, snugly built between the two tracks. We quickly crossed the tracks and
stood on, made to understand that this was it. It was, as they say, it, when
soon enough around 50 odd people crowded around the narrow concrete pathway.
The train came, we boarded and off we were.
The train journey
The
train journey was uneventful. Apart from the fact that I forgot my book –
Bartimaeus The Golem’s Eye, while getting off. It was a sad thing to happen.
Very sad. Very very sad. Very very very sad.
DENIZLI
Denizli
was a stale breath of fresh air, with its skyscrapers and huge buildings. It
took us back to our European travails where the stark contrast between country
and city had often befuddled and unsettled us. We followed the instructions as
given in the link above, deposited our luggage, booked the night bus tickets
from one of the several service providers (all of them are the same) and then
waited for the minibus to the Northern Entrance of the necropolis at
Hierapolis.
PAMUKKALE
The Necropolis
The
Hierapolis cemetery is one of the most thrilling and scariest places I have
seen in my life. The minibus took us through Pamukkale town and up a small
hill, winding through a vast expanse of what looked like the shooting spots of
Mad Max Fury Road (it was not) ejecting us out at the even more desolate
Northern Entrance to the Hierapolis.
TIP 2: Since the shuttle goes through the town and has a stop there, there will be travel agents who will urge you to get down so that they can accommodate their folks in the van. They will tell you that it is the same thing and that the travertines can be accessed. All hogwash. The same logic as applied at Ephesus applies here - easy coming down than going up.
Walking
between the sarcophagi, the tumulus graves, and other scary looking ruins gave
us the heebie-jeebies. The darkly clouded weather made it look even spookier,
we were almost expecting some ghost to jump up out of a grave and offer us HDFC
credit cards. Speaking of depressing, funny things, did I mention the Gujarati
couple whom we met in the van along with their two children? We did not make conversation, obviously. But
they thought we were from another country and went on fighting unabashedly; the
wife doing most of the talking, as in most marriages, blasting the husband to
kingdom come for making them walk so much. The husband was mute – what else can
the poor chap do? It was a forbearance that I missed and later paid the price.
We
made quick time reaching the colossal colosseum within 40 minutes; the walk was
peppered with glimpses of the calcified landscape that we were to see later.
The
theatre was very similar to what we had seen in Ephesus, only bigger. If the
two theatres in Ephesus had a baby and that baby had another baby with the
colosseum in Rome, then it would be this baby theatre. The climb is slightly
steep and the topmost point is definite to give vertigo. But the view is
stupendous, the valley towards the west, the ruins that we had just passed to
the north, the town a bit beyond, on the south west.
Suffice
to say, we spent a lot of time taking photos.
The Antique Pool and Lunch
After
around two hours of walking and taking snaps, we entered the Antique pool. The
pool was a complete fraud. It was nothing more than
that-blight-of-water-theme-parks, the lazy river. But I wanted to take a dip
and so I did. My wife was comfortable sitting it out and taking James Bond-level
photos of my rock-solid abs, wading into the pool, wading awkwardly amongst
octogenarians in bikinis, wading over half-sunk ruins and wading generally
while clutching a toe that I had just scraped painfully against a pretty sharp
stone. The water was evenly warm, not hot, and there was this nagging feeling
that somebody had just peed in it. With the multitude of kids around, I was
really skeptical. But having grudgingly shelled out 40 TL for this, I was not
going to waste even one minute. I had a leisurely swim.
After
I was done, I was ravenous. We ordered a döner kebab that was exorbitantly
priced and tasted like sandpaper wrapped around a brick. Disappointment notwithstanding,
lunch was redeemed by the ever-awesome Efes pilsner. We then strode to the
final highlight of our day – the travertines.
The Travertines
My
brother had long nurtured an ambition of driving all the way to Ooty from
Coimbatore on a two-wheeler. The foolhardiness of this goal was obviously lost
on him even though highly mature adults (read me and my mother) advised him.
But all thanks to an ever-understanding father, he surprised him with a Royal
Enfield on his birthday. I can vividly picture that day, when he came home from
office to see this brand new RE standing in front of the house with dad holding
out the bike keys, mom frothing at the mouth and me eating paniyaraams with
coconut chutney. Even after 40 minutes, his jaws were still in take-off mode.
We
had a similar reaction.
The
travertines is awe-inspiring to say the least and to believe that nature could
be so brutal in creating something so increasingly beautiful with every passing
second of seeing, was too tough to take in one go. Like kashayam. We were
numbed for some time, around 5 seconds after which I took out my camera and
started taking pictures.
The
next 1 hour or so, we spent descending ever so slowly evading the numerous
selfie sticks, a gang of boisterous Telugu people with whom my wife wanted to
quickly have a chat and I gave her a look that would have shriveled a tortoise,
and other locals who wanted to take pictures with me for some reason. All the
way down to the town, we squelched our way through pools and pools of
water-filled calcium deposits. We reached the bus stop and ruminated what we
had just experienced, while slowly munching authentic Turkish Kwality Walls ice
cream.
We
reached Denizli as the evening shadows lengthened. It had started drizzling.
DENIZLI
The Best Baklava
We
did not mind the pitter-patter and strolled around the city, taking in the
smells of baklava and meat sizzling at corner stores, the colorful streamers
waving across the roads, trucks emptying electronic goods, cars and bikes
waiting at signals and the women with neatly embroidered scarves, girls with
tattoos and piercings, men who were selling cheap imitations of mobile phones
and jewelry, and kids just returning from school. Out of sheer boredom, we
stepped into a bakery at a corner that was run by a small lady who spoke very
bad English.
She
was just taking out steaming baklava from the oven and ladling them out to trays.
Wife suggested that we taste one. We did. And that was the best, softest,
wettest and sweetest baklava I had tasted in my entire trip in Turkey. It was
highly regrettable that I did not buy there and wasted a lot of money in
Istanbul buying the same sweet for a steep price. It was criminal.
And
also stupid.
We
reached the bus station with an hour to eat dinner and have tea. We walked into
one of those many outlets at the station and had another one of those İskender kebabs that tasted quite awful compared to what we had throughout our trip so
far. But it was one of those days when the food was not so good but we had
already eaten our fill of beauty.
TIP 3: Do not eat anything at any bus station. There are better restaurants outside with better menus at cheaper prices. Always.
The
bus was nothing more than a normal KSRTC Volvo bus and was actually slightly
worse off. Nevertheless, we were too tired to complain and dozed off.
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