… but if I did, Ephesus in Turkey would be on it. Along with other incredible ancient sites I’ve visited such as the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.
The reason for this is that I remember my dad telling me about Ephesus when I was a little girl. I was quite fascinated by archaeology when I was young and often got books out of the library on the subject. In one of these books, I remember seeing one photograph of a very elegant building, which my father told me was the library of Celsus in Ephesus.
Well, fast forward several er-hum decades, and I find myself in Kuşadası. Apparently Ephesus was little more than a stone’s throw away by car. So of course we were going to visit!
We ended up getting a little mini bus (dolmuş) from the centre of Kusadasi town, which was about a 2.5 Km walk. It was already getting hot, being the end of July and Turkey was experiencing a heat wave, so I was quite glad that we had to wait for 10 minutes for the dolmuş to Selçuk to arrive.
Selçuk is the town very close to the ancient ruins of Ephesus and we were expecting to have to transfer to another bus to get to the site. But the driver stopped close to the lower gate at Ephesus and we got off for a further 1 Km hike.
We were passed by a horse and buggy, which is another way to travel between Selçuk and Ephesus and wondered about getting one to the bus station in Selçuk once we’d done our sight- seeing.
Despite the heat, where at one point I got quite light headed and my heart began palpitating (despite drinking gallons of water), we explored most of the major parts of this well spread out ancient town.
Of course, the library which made me feel quite emotional when I saw it, was just beautiful. There was also an amphitheatre which is the largest one Baz and I have ever visited. With a seating capacity of 24,000 people, it is comparable in size to the modern stadium at Dortmund in Germany, or the modern stadium in Antakya (ancient Antioch) in Turkey. There is a lot of restoration taking place on site and some of the amphitheatre was cordoned off, but standing two thirds of the way up and looking down, the people gave a good understanding of the scale of the structure.
There were also several mosaics, one of which was the largest tiled floor area that I’ve seen so far.
I won’t go into huge details now, because you can see our tour in this week’s video . I am also working on putting a full tour video together in a separate video for people who want to see all of the areas of Ephesus that we visited that day.
Two dolmuş, lunch and one taxi
After visiting much of this very interesting site our stomachs told us very clearly that it was way past lunch time. We decided that on our budget we were wiser to get a dolmuş (at 5 TL each) to Selçuk rather than the horse and carriage (at 100 TL). It was a good decision because what we saved in fare, we were able to put towards our lunch. We had a very tasty Adana kebab at Keşim restaurant that was a short walk from the bus station. The proprietor was very kind and seated us underneath a ceiling fan that he put on high.
Well watered and fed, we returned to the bus station and were soon back in the centre of Kuşadası town. We were then faced with another 2.5 Km walk and the ambient temperature was still in the high 30s (degrees centigrade). Barry’s feet and my hips were also complaining loudly so Baz suggested we splash out on a taxi (a rare occurrence for us). You can see my relief at that idea in the video!
The short taxi ride back to the marina was about the same cost as all of the dolmuş that we’d taken that day. But we did compare that with the cost of a taxi ride from Kuşadası to Ephesus itself which was 50 Euros!
All in all, we’d had a great day. And if I had a bucket list, that was another one off it.
Boat jobs
Baz also fixed a mistake he’d made when replacing the cover on the headsail furling mechanism when he’d worked on it a little while ago.
And he also sorted out an insurance that is better suited to where we are over-wintering in Turkey. You can find out the details of both of these as well in our video this week.
To view this week’s video just click here.
Until next week, I wish you health, wealth and courage, as you take the actions to bring your dreams to life.
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