Earthquake Update and a Couchsurfer’s Plea

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.

Comments

4 responses to “Earthquake Update and a Couchsurfer’s Plea”

  1. Consider yourselves referred!

  2. You guys need some site navigation links, bad usability bad.

    1. You need to provide more specific criticism. Bad communication, bad. Which links are missing in your opinion Heath?

    2. Love you too Heath. 🙂

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