Monthly Archive

We arrived in Güzelcamli, expecting to stay a day or two. But as you can see by the title of this post, two days has turned into nearly two weeks. What the heck happened?

We felt very comfortable in next to the beach cafe in Pamulcak with our new friend Idel, but we were running very low on clean clothes (had none) and clean bodies (didn’t exist). A while back we had been thinking it would be nice to find a farmstay sort of place where you can work and stay in an agricultural environment for relatively cheap. Tobias had told us about a farm on the Dilek Penninsula in Turkey he was thinking about working at for some time. We like the idea and the location and thought we take a look. Of course, some simple research on the internet turned up that you have to endure a whole bunch of procedural BS we didn’t have time for. Instead, we decided we will just drop in and see what happens. Besides, it was surely going to be a small family run farm that could always use a couple extra pairs of hands right? Oh how wrong we were!! This was no small family farm, oh no! It was a serious, big business and our request to speak to Julide, the chief, was recieved with a look of shock! “You want to speak to the Chief??” Oh yes, this was akward.

We were excited to find they had no accomodation available, and we quickly hit high tail to the road. We went for plan B, the Ecer Pension near the national park in Güzelcamli. The moment we walked through the gate, the garden greated us with warmth. THe owner, Necip (Knee-jip), walked with us to the fishmers coop to pick out fish for the night. We bought a barracuda and fed like kings. The next night Necip made us lamb, we were hooked. Suddenly we found ourselves here for five nights and just when we were about to leave, Necip made us an offer we couldn’t refuse — work in the garden every other day, pay half price. We walked to the soccer game, came home, and accepted his offer. At this point we were hooked on drawing at the harbor and the food the three of us had been preparing every night. We had always planned on taking some time somewhere, and this is what we were looking for.

It took us a while to realize it, but we are now on vacation, hence the total lack of email checking, status updates, and until now, blog updates. The downside of being away from the internet is however, our missed opportunity to see Tobias again. He passed within 15km of us, and because we hadn#t checked all of our email accounts in a week and a half, we missed his message. THis bums us out, but such is life. Sorry Tobias, we screwed up. We miss you.

On Tuesday morning we will resume riding, now in the direction of Istanbul and the end of our journey. This is not going to be easy especially after two weeks of “vacation”. It is not the riding that is going to be difficult, of course, but knowing that we are headed to the close of this journey. We are excited to see our families, no doubt, but we feel as though we are just breaking the surface here and how easy it would be to just continue eastward. Oh how we want to go east, to taste and smell, to see and meet, to hear and be heard, to live and learn. but we head towards Istanbul, and it will be good.

Near Pamulcak (which is most likely being misspelled in these lazy posts) is the very well known Ionian/Roman city of Efes or Ephesus. We went to visit it on our first day in the area but were scared by the hoards of tourists pouring through it, and the number of men hawking their cheap goods, (except for the fresh fig man, he was good). A taxi driver over heard us and suggested we come back the next day because their will be no cruise ship in the Kusadesi harbor and consequently much less tourists. We took his advice and were very happy for it. It is a beautiful site, but maybe a little too well done for our taste. After having such an intimate experince with Teos, seeing all of the theatricality of the tour groups was a touch off putting.

One of the seven wonders of the world