Travertine marvel

We were up and going promptly this morning as we were keen to explore. However our first problem was bare feet. The main entrance to the thermal area and ruins from the town of Pamukkale starts in the village main area and ascends across the travertines (mineral deposits) on the hill side. To protect those deposits from the hordes of visitors one is required to walk across the travetine in bare feet. Now us old guys are beginning to feel the effects of age and skeletal deterioration and hence bare feet are not our forte. So after some negotiation with the entrance staff we were allowed onto an alternate path that took us to the top of the hill. However as you will see later this did not entirely get past the bare feet topic.

From the top of the hill we looked down on the village and the travertines and marveled at the large rim pools formed by the flowing water and settling minerals. Equally or maybe even more marvelous were the gardens on the hill top and the extensive ruins of magnificent stone bulding dating back to BC. We spent a couple of hours wandering through the ruins examining the architecture and reading about roads with sewers running underneath, bath houses outside the city gates so travelers could get clean before entering the city and examining the "latrines" to see how people "did their business" 2000 years ago.

Now back to the bare feet. Nina could not abide the idea that we would "not walk on the travertines" like all the other tourists so when it was time to descend the hill we found the top of the path, removed our footware as all the signs instructed us and started our descent. It took us much longer than the more spritely younger visitors but we eventually made our way down the hill to the couple of seats provided to assist with the re-shoeing process. It was satisfying to get an up-close view of the rim-pool formations and to feel the smoothness of the travertines. It was also interesting to walk in some of the pools and stir up the mineral sediment that has settled out of the water but has not had time to solidify into that white crust.

All in all a very interesting place and well worth the visit even if it is a big tourist draw.

We eventually found the camping ground whose signpost we saw yesterday afternoon. It was right across the road from the entrance to the travertines and would have been a cleaner place to stay and probably the showers would have worked. But that's life.

Back on the road we retraced our steps a little before eventually hooking up with a major highway heading back to the coast towards the town/city Selcuk. This gave us our first experience with Turkish toll roads and unfortunately the first encouter took us by surprise and a very loud alarm sounded as we drove through the automated collection gate without the required sticker on our vehicle. However at the second one we were a little more observant and noticed the PTT office just beside the gates. It took a few minutes but we eventualy got our windscreen sticker and now could pass through those toll gates without any alarms. By the way PTT is the local post office and also a Bank.