Olympos ("Heaven" as some would say)

I am back from Olympos and not looking forward to working on homework or my transportation project. After relaxing on the beach, swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, and climbing mountains and ruins it is hard to get back into the swing of things...but that's life.

We left on Thursday around 11:30pm and arrived in Olympos at 8am. We ate breakfast consisting of bread, hard boiled eggs, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, olives, and cubed cheese. This was served every day. Excited to see the sites we quickly changed into our bathing suits and headed to the Mediterranean. To our surprise, the beach was not sandy but rocky. This was pretty cool because I have never really been to a rocky beach and I don’t like getting sand everywhere and on everything. The one downside was that the rocks got extremely hot, to the point that you couldn’t touch them for more than a few seconds.

We swam out to the cliffs and jumped off

Rocky beach and beyond

The colors of the sea were amazing

We were down at the beach for a majority of the day and surprisingly not too many people got burnt. Later that night we went to Yanartaş (Chimera Mountain). This mountain is very unique in that it has naturally occurring fires on it. These fires have been burning for centuries (possibly for 2500 years) and are caused from natural gases seeping out of vents in the Earth’s crust. The fires even relight themselves. Needing to test this, one of the guys I was with poured water on one of the fires, putting it out. Sure enough, a few minutes later, it was relit.

Crappy picture but you can kind of see what I'm talking about (maybe)

I just stole this from one of the other guys, hopefully you can see what I'm talking about

On Saturday, we went for a six hour boat ride on the Mediterranean. We stopped at an island, where we swam, jumped off the boat, and climbed on the cliffs. The boat ride was really enjoyable and the scenery was unbelievable. I could not believe how blue and clear the sea was, I could still see the bottom when swimming in 20+ foot waters!

About to get on the boat.

One of the places we got off and swam

The island and one of the beached we stopped at

We returned to our Pansiyon where we hung out in some bungalows until dinner. Some of us decided to stay up until the sunrise (which was surprisingly easy to do) and this is what we saw…

I don’t know if it was the dinner from the previous night or what, but a total of five people got sick the next day before and during the ride to Eskisehir (fortunately I wasn’t one of them). One of the stops that we made on the way back was to the ancient city of Phaselis. We saw some more ruins, swam in the sea, and even played Euchre. 

Ancient theater

And after about 10 hours on the bus, we finally made it back!