Also, there were a thousand children in the back of the bus when we left, and then a thousand children sleeping on the floor of the bus when we arrived. When Leah bent to get her purse, six tiny feet peeked out from under her chair.
Anyways, we got on a night-bus in Cappadocia and woke up in Pamukkale, which is sort of here.
We'd had zero intentions of visiting Pamukkale because we didn't know it was there (the world is full of crazy shit you do not know is there), but the insanely helpful Tourism Guy at our Istanbul hostel showed us pictures and then we needed to go to there. Pamukkale looks like this.
And like this.
They look like ice pools, but are in fact hot springs. Ultra-psyche.
We did a lot of this.
And some this.
And at some point I was a Swamp Monster?
I am sort of getting ahead of myself. So we roll in at 5 am, but we're in a stinking bus station and not at the terraces. Also, we have no hostel to go to, because we are bussing out in the evening, so we're stuck with our bags for the day. Also, it's 5 am.
We find a bus to take us to the terraces on the cheap, but it turns out to be a sort of public transit and we putt along at 30 k/h with one of the doors open until we're full of people. This guy takes us to the gates of some ruins, where another bus takes us to the gates of the terraces, where we drag our bags until we collapse in a pool.
And then we're just, you know, in those pools for the day. Because it's 47 degrees outside of the pools. It's sort of boring to talk about, but awesome to do.
And then we took the shuttle back to the bus back to the bus station, again with our bags. It was altogether the worst day to be hauling your bags from bus to bus, on account of the many degrees hot it was. But for most of the day we were in a naturally-occuring pool, or beside a naturally-occuring pool, or walking from naturally-occuring pool to naturally-occuring pool. It very not horrible.
2 comments:
When I was a child-bride (which was obviously not long ago) I spent my honeymoon in Turkey and did the night bus from Istanbul to Pamukkale. We spent most of the holiday in uber-cheap and very dubious hotels but at Pamukkale we stayed in a hotel on the edge of the springs. The bar man did the biggest gin and tonic I have ever drunk in my life. It was amazing. I don't remember much of the weekend after that.
This is just like my trip from a couple years ago in reverse. I arrived in Pamukkale from Istanbul by train, and headed out that night on an overnight bus to Cappadocia. I have vague memories of the bus cutting through industrial parks in Konya at around 2am, as well as the bus driver's horrible movie choice of Little Man (the biggest crime was stupidity, but I think it was the lewdness that got the bus driver to turn it off).
Pamukkale was awesome! Glad you got some time to sit in the pools there.
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