Another busy day, and a feast for lunch!

Lots of exploring to do in this area, and it was another nice day. Plus, it's an easy bike riding area with a good network of bike paths. 

So I got the bikes off and we went for a ride. First destination was the ancient fortress of Selinus.

The fortress is located at the top of a steep craggy rock. Around the base of the rock are some other ruins. There's really not much left of them. It's a free ruins site, and there you pretty much have to go through a local farmer's property to access them.

The ancient baths.

The cenataph.

Ruth, at the ancient baths.

Like I said, there's not much left.

Then, we made our way up to the fortress. Again, there's not much left of the fortress, but the attraction is the view. They've built fairly modern steps leading up to the top. We had read online that there were somewhere around 650 steps, so we decided to count them for ourselves!

Heading up the steps!

Looking down at the harbor.

It took us about 20 minutes to get to the top, and we counted 670 steps! We took one break of about two minutes. After the 670 steps, there is still a few meters of uphill climb through the rubble of the fortress.

The fortress entrance.

You don't have to look very far for broken pottery.

Max is parked at the far end of the beachfront roadway.

There he is, at the far end!

Gazipasa is famous for it's banana production.

Most of it is done in greenhouses.

The city of Gazipasa.

Looking west.

Looking east.

Me, standing on the highest point.

I'm the king of the castle!

Ruth, and the view looking out to sea.

There is a sheer drop to the sea on the other side of that railing!

You can make out the ancient aqueduct from way up there.

Zoomed in.

The west beach at Gazipasa.

You can clearly see part of the cycling path in blue. We'll head there next.

Me, and the view looking west.

Looking east..

We headed back down to the bikes, and took off towards the west beach.

The aqueduct.

The cycle path runs right through it.

Stopped beside the cycle path.

We've observed a really odd thing here in Turkiye. Notice how there is a wide pedestrian area running alongside the blue bicycle path? It would be logical to think that pedestrians would stay on that side, and bikes on the other. Well, bikes do tend to stay on the blue path. But often, you find pedestrians on the blue path as well. We can't figure this out. I have a bell on my bike so as we're riding along, if there is someone on the path, I tap my bell. It means nothing! They just continue walking on the cycle path, oblivious. Even if they are walking in the oncoming direction and can clearly see us coming. We noticed this while on the cycle path in Fethiye as well.

Very strange. It used to bother me, but I've decided now that it must be some kind of cultural thing, and we are visitors. So now, I still tap my bell, with the expectation that they aren't going to move and I will have to ride around them somehow. 

We made our way to the end of the west beach where there was a restaurant and a small cave... and some puppies!

The small cave.

Puppies!

Ruth, having a puppy fix.

He's got a funny scrunchy face!

Everybody loves a puppy!

While there, we met an older couple who live nearby. He's from Netherlands, and she is from Germany. They've been living here full time for 7 years. They said there used to be six or seven puppies here, but yesterday there were only three around. The mom showed up eventually, and she wasn't a whole lot bigger than the puppies! The father must have been a big dog.

From there, we rode downtown. I found a local kebab restaurant that got good reviews, and we stopped in for lunch. It was a pretty basic, family run place with no menus, no prices, and no English. We were trying to communicate, but it was difficult so they brought us into the other room and showed us the uncooked selection that was ready for the grill!

Some kind of ground beef kebabs.

Chicken wings and chicken.

Beef and liver kebabs.

So I asked for two of the ground beef ones, and one chicken, and Ruth asked for two chicken ones. We had no idea what else we were going to end up with. They brought us each a bottle of water, and then a big plate of salad and some other appetizers.

A feast!

We were stuffed. We almost couldn't eat it all, but we did a good job of it.

Total cost for all of this including tip was 100 lira ($9.00 CAD, $7.00 USD). Wow. 

We picked up a couple of beers and a bottle of wine and headed back to Max.

Sunset view from our front window.

We woke up to a steady rain this Sunday morning, but it's supposed to clear up after lunch. We're thinking we're going to do one more night here.

We're also thinking we're not going to make it to Cyprus. It's hard to justify the additional expense when there is so much to see here as it is. The only benefit would be extending the time so that our exit from Turkiye would be later and possibly better weather. Still, we won't decide for sure until we get to the ferry port and check out the prices etc. 

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