Too many photos! We took over 100 photos yesterday. I've whittled them down, but there is so much interesting stuff to show you that this is going to be a long blog post.
Sunday morning we made our way over to the ancient city of Kaunos, which is located beside the modern town of Dalyan. For whatever reason, not many people visit Kaunos. It's a little difficult to get to, and most tourists who go to Dalyan seem to go for the river boat tours.
Thanks for your responses and comments regarding yesterday's post. It feels good to know that most of you will find our daily blog posts without clicking through facebook. Because we post every single day when we're traveling, all you have to do is to manually check in here (either by booking marking this site, or typing www.travelwithkevinandruth.com into the address bar above, or searching "Kevin and Ruth" on Google)... and you will be brought right here without the need for facebook. If you do that every day at around the same time, you can't miss a post!
Most of you will know by now that parts of Turkey and Greece experienced a fairly bad earthquake on Friday afternoon at around 1:50pm local time.
I wouldn't normally talk about something like this, but other than our 5km (3 mile) power walk we didn't do much due to the weather yesterday. And I think this is important.
We've been using Facebook for more than 10 years. We keep in touch with our kids and friends through their messaging system. We join various discussion groups that we might be interested in. We operate an RV'ing in Mexico group that has over 5,000 members. We operate a Travel with Kevin and Ruth page that directs people to this blog. And lastly, we make money from an Amazon group that has over 24,000 members.
We've only been in the country for two and a half weeks, but we wanted to go over with you some of the interesting things we have learned during that time.
Admittedly, we did not know very much about the country prior to our arrival. And really, we didn't even know we were coming here until three days before we arrived. So we didn't have much time to educate ourselves about our destination.
For quite a few days, the weather forecast had been calling for a 100% chance of rain on Wednesday afternoon in Marmaris, Turkey. They kept on changing the projected start time of the rain, varying it between 3:00pm and 5:00pm. But either way, they were 100% sure it was coming.
And they were right. But it started a bit early at about 2:30pm. Fortunately we had already completed our 10 km (6.2 mile) hike in the hills behind Marmaris, and were just finishing doing a quick grocery shop when it started coming down.
Thanks for all of the suggestions and comments regarding yesterday's blog post. We have decided that we will not go to Cappadocia on this trip. It's too much driving and we would feel too rushed. We are confident that we will return someday with a motorhome when we will be able to explore more of what Turkey has to offer (including the northern area closer to the Black Sea), at a better time of year related to the weather, and at our own pace.
On Tuesday, we took a drive down a coastal road to a viewpoint overlooking the town of Oren. We left at about 10:30am did some exploring and made a couple of stops along the way and didn't make it back to the cottage until almost3:30pm!
On Monday, we took a touring day off. So we relaxed for the morning and did some research about onward travels. We have to be out of our current location on Wednesday November 4th and we don't yet know where we're going. More about that further down!
After lunch, we went out for a walk. There are still quite a few back roads around here that are worth exploring... gravel roads that we can walk to right from our location here in the village.
We tried to get an early start, and managed to get on the road by 8:40am. It was supposed to be a non stop drive of just over two hours to get to the tip of the Datça Peninsula where the ancient city of Knidos is located.
Some cities in Turkey are among the oldest in the world. They say the capital city of Ankara has been continuously inhabited for over 3,000 years. But some very vibrant cities did not last despite being inhabited for very long periods themselves. Knidos is a perfect example.
The village where we are staying is called Gökçe. I would try and tell you how to pronounce it, but we would only be guessing ourselves! Gökçe is actually bigger than a village... I would say it's probably about 1,200 people. A small town.
We went out for a walk Saturday just to explore the area. We ended up on a dirt road and we had no idea where it went, so we just went and did some exploring. The dirt road led us to a really neat spot!
On Friday we drove inland, up into the mountains. I had scouted out three possible things to see along a route of about 100 kms (62 miles).
From our village, we can see the first ridge of mountains rising 3000' above the Mediterranean Sea. We had seen a major roadway leading up into that area, and I used the maps.me app and google satellite view to find things to do in the area that we might not otherwise know about.
Friends Heather and Volkan had invited us to join them for lunch in the seaside resort town of Marmaris, Turkey. I say "town", but really it's a small city and quite a bustling place.
It's located only a 20 minute drive from our cottage. One of the reasons we chose this location is that there are a lot of places to go and things to see within a 100 km (62 mile) radius, so we have lots of day trips to do over the next couple of weeks.
Wednesday was a travel day but in order to travel, we first had to pick up our rental car.
We have rented cars in various countries and the procedure isn't always as standard as what you would expect. When we were in Romania, we rented a car and the guy came to meet us in a grocery store parking lot where I gave him some cash and he gave me the keys!
Yes, we could have paid the big bucks and done a standard tourist rental with Avis or one of the other brand names. But that wouldn't be like us.
Another busy day for us yesterday. We finally made the effort to get a reasonably early start, and we left the apartment just before 9:00am. It was only a five minute walk to the dolmuş stop. Dolmuş is the turkish name for a local minibus. The ones we were in seat perhaps 16 people. Because of Covid, they do not take cash payments right now, nor do they take standing passengers. Apparently in normal times they can get quite crowded.
There is a regular route between Fethiye and Ölüdeniz so we didn't have to wait any longer than five minutes. For payment, most people buy a prepaid "tap" card and then top it up with credit as necessary. But I had read that you can also tap your credit card, and sure enough it accepted my Visa card and I instantly got an email notification from my bank that my my account was charged. What a great system!
You might notice at the bottom of each daily post we are now listing the total distance we have walked while in Turkey. I'm not quite sure why, but we are keeping track of it. We always think that the best way to see an area is to walk it... and we are doing a lot of walking so it will be interesting to see how many kms (miles) we actually do!
On Tuesday, we decided to walk down to the other side of the Fethiye harbor area. Ruth had read of an old Roman amphitheater that we wanted to see.
We had a nice relaxing morning on Sunday, then after lunch we decided to walk along the waterfront up to Çalış Beach. This beach is another area that is popular with British tourists. So much so that you see signs that advertise "Full British Breakfast" with all the writing in English.
We knew it was going to be a fairly long walk because the beginning of Çalış Beach is 8 kms (5 miles) one way from our apartment. But other than the one steep stretch leading back up to our apartment, it was mostly flat.
