Alternative Living

We got to Cappadocia in the heart of Turkey and the small town of Göreme early in the morning and decided to start exploring the area straight away. It really is an amazing albeit very peculiar place, giant stone pillars rise out of the desert landscape and for thousands of years people have hollowed them out to make everything from small pigeon-huts to huge Monasteries. We stayed in a cave-room (rumoured to have accommodated Jimi Hendrix back in the sixties) which was very warm and cozy, and took two days to check this mysterious location with all it's fairy-chimneys and underground cities out. However Cappadocia was freezing cold and despite my efforts to escape the snow it turns out I got to see it before Stockholm did this winter. We decided to seek warmer climates and opted for the small Goa or Thailand-esque hamlet called Olympos on the Mediterranean coast. Once again though Mother Nature trumped us and the 23°C and sun we were lured with had turned into lower teen degrees and rain by the time we arrived. Still it was a great place offering some very interesting sights. First of all you have the ruins of the ancient Roman city Olympos and for a mere 3 Turkish Lira (roughly 12kr or 1£) you are allowed to wander the forests freely among collapsed churches, theatres and roman baths without some guide telling you what not to touch and what not to take photographs of. Also roughly an hours trek away you have the strange phenomena known as Yanartaş, where flames come straight out of the mountain rock-face. For at least 2500 years these flames have kept burning, once large enough to be seen from the ocean they used to be used for sea-navigation today they have shrunk considerably, still they are a baffling and impressive sight.

Our two nights in Olympos were spent in a tree-house and if the cave-room was warm and cozy this was quite the opposite, allthough I guess that is to be expected from a room with no heating and gaping holes in the walls. We then caught three buses heading East, first to Antalya then Silifke and Taşucu where we continued our tradition of odd dwellings for the week, with a few hours rest at bus-station cafes and docks. From Taşucu we hope to catch a ferry to Cyprus, but more about that when I know how it goes.