This softly bub­bling brook runs through the forest-covered ruins of ancient Olympos. Yeah, it’s pretty here.

First of all, I want to reas­sure every­one that we were well away from the zone of last night’s earth­quake. We didn’t feel so much as a tremor, although when I stomp up the steps of our rickety wooden tree­house after the types of huge and deli­cious dinners we get here, it can feel like a 1.0 on the Richter Scale.

Also, after the gen­er­ous advice of our new friend Brenda here in Olympos, we set up a profile this morning on Couchsurfing.org, a world-wide online com­munity for hosting trav­el­ers. The idea is bril­liantly simple: trav­el­ers get beds and local insights, and hosts get to enter­tain house guests from new and inter­est­ing cultures.

There are thou­sands of users around the world willing to open their spare bed­rooms and couches up to strangers based on their online profile and a simple, effect­ive rating and refer­ral system. Users create an online account and load it with info about themselves. They network online with other users, and through the refer­ral system (similar to Facebook friends), hosts and couch­surfers can rate and eval­u­ate each other.

We’ve decided to give it a shot. If you’re already a couch­surfer, please link up with us. We could use the refer­rals. You can see our profile here, and read more about it all here.

I was going to blog about our hike in Dilek National Park, but I think I’ll work on that and publish it tomor­row. In the mean­time, here are a few pretty pic­tures from Olympos.

Our new friends Ben and Pen, from Tazmania, Australia. They’re in the couch­surf­ing network. These two were ambi­tiously hiking a big chunk of the the 500 km Lykian Way. As of today, they fin­ished. Congrats guys!

I stole a shot of them as they left Olympos.

The eternal flames of the Chimaera. We hiked up to it on our first night here. The ancients believed that these fires sprout­ing from the rocks were due to a giant fire-breathing creature Zeus trapped under the earth. Modern sci­ent­ists believe it’s a type of methane gas that com­busts when exposed to oxygen. Who knows? Maybe they’re both right. It bleeds silently from out of the moun­tain­side. For scale, these are about the size of a medium campfire.

Sunset in the river valley that leads from our camp to the ruins, about 500m down the road.