Wednesday, June 18

Dislcaimer to the Reader: Sorry once again for the barrenness of this post. Per my usual luck with cameras, I accidentally deleted all my pictures from Pamukkale.

We went from Selcuk to Pamukkale today in a rented minibus, and arrived at our next beautiful guesthouse, The Venus Hotel, right before lunch. After playing with the two very cute dogs there and throwing our luggage into our respective rooms, we struck out on the town to hunt down some lunch. We quickly realized that Pamukkale is the definition of a one-horse town. After lunch, we swam/napped at the hotel as we waited for the temperature to go down a bit before hiking up the calcium deposit-encrusted mountain.

After a bit of class time, most of us went up the mountain to go to the Antique Pool, which is a thermal pool with ancient Roman columns submerged in it. There was even one column that we could swim underneath, thanks to Yekta’s goggles. The water was effervescent and bubbled around your skin – and the top of the water looked like Coke fizzing in a glass. Also, on the way up we got to see the hot springs that run over the mountain, depositing calcium. This makes Pamukkale look like a glacier in Antarctica. There are also pools all around the mountain, but we only saw the man-made concrete ones. But they still looked legitimate because the water flowed over them and deposited calcium on top of the concrete. There were some weird foreigners doing a whole shoot in one of the waterfalls into the pools – the guy was in a Speedo and did about 80 different poses.

After the Antique Pool we actually entered into Hierapolis. To clarify, Hierapolis and the Antique Pool were on top of the calcium-deposited mountain. It was the perfect time to poke around Hierapolis, right as the sun was setting. This city was not as intact as Pergamum or Ephesus, but the theatre was amazing and we sat in there for a while.

When we got down the mountain the sun had already set (the pools looked very cool on the way down) and we had a wonderful dinner at our hotel. We tried to back to the mountain to go swimming in the hotsprings at midnight, but the guards told us that it was closed, so we went back to the hotel for some much-needed rest.