Obliging Olympos

Arriving in the seaside village of Olympos after what would be our last overnight bus we checked into Bayrams hostel and got ourselves a tree house. The town is on the backpacker route for 3 reasons, funky tree houses, a great beach and an amazing natural phenomena where fire burns continuously from holes in a nearby mountain. Despite having a few days in Goreme to rest, the overnight bus completely wrecked us and a few days in hammocks and a treehouse was required. Turkey was fast moving out of tourist season and the town was almost deserted. Compared to a month earlier when Pasq was here (and five thousand or so others) the two hundred odd people in town now made for a quiet few days. The plan was to catch a boat cruise from here around the coast for a few days but due to the lack of tourists there weren’t any running to our schedule. Not that a few more days relaxing in this incredibly chill out place would do any harm.

Kel’s birthday fell on our first night here though, so celebrations were in order. We managed to find two young Brits willing to stay up and party with us, so the little group of four ate, drank and were merry late into the night. Several shopping expeditions had failed to find anything worth buying Kel for her birthday so she got a limerick and a poem, both of incredible wit and intellect. Unfortunately she didn’t see it that way. Probably the inclusion of one of Kel’s childhood nicknames “smelly booger” didn’t help the cause. Even the offer to buy her a washing machine when we got back home failed to improved the situation. Sometimes you just can’t win!

To have a break from lying on the beach, or lying in a hammock we walked the couple of kms to the fires of Olympos. Apparently burning for as long as anyone can remember these small fires appear out of the rocks on the slopes of a nearby mountain. Methane from well below the crust seeps up to the surface and escapes through small holes in the rocks. It then ignites spontaneously according to the locals selling tickets at the bottom of the mountain. Spontaneous or otherwise, it makes for an amazing site at night. A Turkish family obliged with a lift back into town and after a good nights sleep we were on another bus (but this time during the day) and bound for the brilliant white pools of Pamukkale.