I was so sad to leave Kas, I loved it there so much I wanted to stay longer, but we had to move because we're meeting my mother in Selcuk on the west coast in a few short days, so we need to make our way west of here. When we woke up, Jade was a little sick. I think she drank too much of the salt water yesterday, so she and I stayed behind and I started our packing while Jason explored the ruins we saw yesterday. If you look at the picture with the sunset from yesterday's post, you will see a stone wall next to our hotel. We looked on our map to see what it was and it was another theater!
We were supposed to take a one hour hike along the way to see something called the butterfly valley, but since Jade wasn't feeling all that well, we decided to drive to Oludeniz instead, a touristy resort town, to see if we could take a boat there instead. That way Jade wouldn't have to hike and if she felt like she couldn't swim either, she could just sit on the boat. I'm sure our GPS took us the wrong way to get there, but it was fine by us, we drove up and over some mountains, past some beautiful small farming villages with iron gates to their homes covered in blooming flowers, rows and rows of crops that I didn't recognize, some kids riding dirt bikes down the road, and everyone we passed looked at us as if to say, "What are tourists doing here?" It was really such a nice drive.
Unfortunately, after that lovely quiet ride, Oludeniz sucked. It's literally filled with tourists crowding the streets, everything is expensive, all we wanted to do was get out of there. I don't know why anyone would want to go to a place like that when towns like Kas exist. We found out that the tour boats to Butterfly Valley all left in the mornings, but there was a shuttle that would drop you off there at 2, so we decided to get some lunch and wait, but after all that, it was full and we never made it. That was fine by me, I just wanted to get out of there so badly, it was claustrophobic.
So we moved on toward Gocek (pronounced gochek). I didn't know what to expect from this town, I wanted to stop someplace halfway between Kas and Bodrum for one night to break up the drive, and I thought Oludeniz would be too touristy (boy I was right), and heard of Gocek, a small yacht harbor town. I found a hotel that had some nice reviews, and rolled the dice. Now getting to a hotel in these towns in Turkey is kind of tricky, you need to GPS yourself to the center of town and then look for small signs for your hotel and follow them. The GPS generally doesn't know these little streets. We did that for the Forest Gate Hotel and when we drove up to it, we were astonished. It was a little oasis in this small town.
Lush with flowers, a beautiful pool and bar, friendly staff, they even upgraded our room. We had a huge patio and lovely room decorated with flowers on the beds. I can't express enough how much we loved it here. There was an immediate feeling of calm, the sounds of the cicadas in the forest next to us and the lovely music coming from the bar were the only things to be heard while dipping in the warm, calming pool. I wanted to stay here forever. Seriously. Jade said that she wanted to plan a vacation for me someday so that I could be surprised by each place we stopped being better than the next. So sweet, but I'm the planner!
We decided to pry ourselves away from the calmness of this place and check out the downtown area. It really is a yachting town. The downtown is a stretch of stores lining the harbor selling expensive clothes and trinkets. There was an abundance of markets selling fruit and groceries and restaurant after restaurant after restaurant.
At the harbor, some boats were letting people off and I approached and asked where they just came from, they said they toured the islands in the area, so I asked if they were going out again this evening and they were not going until the next day from 3 to 9pm, too late for us, so we decided to walk along the marina there to see if any other boats had tours that fit our schedule better. It's about a 2 hour drive to Bodrum tomorrow, so we needed to get out of here sooner than 9pm. Many of them were full, but we found one that would take us from 10am-6pm, seeing 12 islands, stopping to swim and explore 6 of them, includes food (Jade and Jason ordered the chicken, I chose fish) for about $30 per person. How could we say no? We bought our seats on that tour and headed back to the hotel for dinner. Even though the town is filled with restaurants, our hotel restaurant manager told us about this fish that they caught, a large sturgeon, which has been marinated for almost a whole day, that they were planning on kebabing for dinner. I didn't want to pass that up and I'm glad I didn't. It was fantastic. We ate poolside with some wine and candlelight. It was absolutely perfect. Why would anyone go to Oludeniz?
No comments:
Post a Comment