We hiked 5km uphill to the akropolis of Pergamon. This was one of the views that rewar­ded us near the top. The ancient ruins are dra­mat­ic­ally perched on the top of a moun­tain over­look­ing modern Bergama. We enjoyed the ruins and the modern city very much.

The gravity-defying theatre at Pergamon, with modern Bergama far below. You can see our hotel if you look closely. It’s the one with the red chimney... Okay, no you can’t. But still, it’s down there somewhere.

The neigh­bour­hood we stayed in was a maze of streets like this one. It was charm­ing, if a bit con­fus­ing to navigate.

Another street scene in Bergama.

And another. This time with Bonus Old Lady!

Laura dips her feet at Pamukkale. We ducked inland to visit this site, where Roman ruins lie at the top of a mag­ni­fi­cent ridge covered in built-up calcium depos­its from thou­sands of years of natural hot spring activ­ity. Yeah, it was as nice as it sounds.

One of the travertine pools on the Pamukkale ridge. Pamukkale trans­lates as “cotton castle,” for reasons too obvious too explain.

The “Antique Pool” among the Hierapolis ruins of Pamukkale. Although it cost us about $15 CDN on top of the $15 we paid to get into the site, we had to swim in the nat­ur­ally warm waters of the pool among the sub­merged stones and columns. These col­lapsed into the waters due to an earth­quake about 1300 years ago (if I’m remem­ber­ing cor­rectly). Because we are trav­el­ing in the off-season, we had the pool to ourselves for a bit.

Laura dips her feet, AGAIN. Sheesh. She’s always taking breaks. The water was a pleas­ant 30 degrees or so. It was magic.

Some couple enjoys the view from the theatre at Hierapolis, above of the white travertine ridge. I like this shot.

We saw some tombs over­look­ing the valley. This one was the first mound tomb I’ve ever been in. Spooooky!

Tombs down low. Tombs up high. There were tombs all over the place. I think I may have more to say about tombs in another post.

The next day, we struck off blindly into the Turkish coun­tryside for a bit of a hike. We saw several flocks of sheep and their shep­herds. As we were walking through the barren scrub, we sud­denly crossed a line and were in green, irrig­ated grass. I turned around and shot this in the dir­ec­tion from which we came.

I’m no Ansel Adams, but here’s another black and white land­scape from our walk. For the photo nerds: the vign­et­ting is from stack­ing an ND8 filter with my CPL.

Another land­scape from that day. Believe it or not, these are all sep­ar­ate olive trees.

I’ve never been the greatest land­scape pho­to­grapher but I hope to get better. We found this cairn at the top of a long, gently sloping farmer’s field. We spec­u­lated whether it marks someone’s grave. I think it prob­ably does. From here, we could see all the way across the valley, some 60 to 100km away. I can think of worse places to be buried.

We found these frogs in the flooded bottom of the Odeon. There were dozens of them swim­ming among the maple leaves.

Dozens, I say!

Another Ansel Adams wannabe shot.

And one last ancient ruin: The stadium of Afrodisias is cer­tainly one of the best pre­served Roman sta­di­ums in the world. This thing is HUGE. Laura is the tiny black spec you can see just to the left of centre in the open green space.

Here’s a crop of the last picture to show you I’m not joking. The place is huge. Like, ‘it-could-seat-80,000-people’ huge. By the way, they held gla­di­ator games here. Men and beasts com­peted on the field of battle for the glory and esteem of the people. Or maybe it was just grue­some enter­tain­ment. Either way, it was pretty badass.