Cotton Castle of Turkey--Pamukkale
Merhaba from Turkey! (it means hello!) Let me just start by saying that Antalya, Turkey is not what I expected at all. I couldn’t really tell you what I was expecting, just not this. It is absolutely stunning. There are beaches everywhere and the water is extremely blue! I can’t believe I had never heard of Antalya until SAS considering it is the third top tourist place in the world behind Paris and London (look mommy I learned something educational from my tour guide)
So on the first day… My friend Nicole and I decided we wanted to go to Pamukkale where it is known to be the "Cotton Castle" of Turkey because there are hot springs that resemble cotton. Once we got off the ship, we headed to the center of town to get some Turkish Lira and to find the otogar, the bus station (Shrek kept popping up in my mind because the word looks like ogre) While walking down the street we saw some Turkish delight in the window of a shop and the nice little man came out and let us have a sample of it. Turkish delight= quite delightful. After that we were on our way to the bus station… well we thought.. again no one speaks English so it was quite difficult. We went into the bank and the guy pointed us in the direction of the tram. We asked the guy at the tram station and he said we had to take the tram up one to the otogar and then from there take a bus and then a mini bus. Well we got on the tram in the direction he pointed in and then we realized that the tram was going in the opposite direction. So we quickly jumped off at the next station and (probably illegally) ran across the tracks about to die by another tram to the tram going the other way. At the Otogar: to our surprise, the bus we caught was a luxurious, Mercedes bus with wifi and they served us ice cream, included in the price right when we got on! We were stoked considering it was so hot outside. The bus ride was about 3.5 hours and they served us more refreshments including some Turkish lemon cookies and a Turkish juice that tasted like Mountain Dew.. that being said we felt like fat pigs waddling off that bus. Once we got off, we took a mini-bus.The mini bus was sketch as hell.. and we kept picking up random people on the side of the road, but we eventually made it to the hot springs.
The hot springs looked like a big block of ice cause they were so white compared to everything around them, but they aren’t! You have to take off your shoes and the whole thing had water running down it (pictures don’t do it justice). So we walked up this rock like material in water and swam a little in a hot spring too, which to my disappointment wasn’t actually hot, but kind of chilly. We climbed up the entire thing and found TONS of ruins of an entire city at the top. Sadly since it took us so long to actually get there, we didn't have too much time to explore all the ruins. Side Note to self: don’t step on rose bushes.. or else you might ruin your shoes with blood and have to use a piece of paper in your purse to clean it up.
Once we were ready to leave Pamukkale, we repeated the whole process again, except this time when we got back to the Otogar, we took a taxi instead of dealing with the tram again since it was late. When we told the taxi driver that we wanted to go to the Port of Antayla, he thought we meant the airport and drove us 120 mph there. We had to show him pictures on our cameras of areas around the port and pointed to it on a map and then he had to pull over and ask for help STILL. It was a nightmare. But we finally made it back to the boat by 2 am.
xoxo,
Em