Turkey - Day 6 - Travel

Turkey Day 6
Mar. 24th, 2006 | 10:56 pm
music: Road to Nowhere
Today was a travel day. We got up at 7.30, had breakfast, went out to the shuttle at 9.08, it was waiting for us to take us to the main bus station. The bus to Izmir was waiting for us there, we got on, and half an hour later as expected, we took off.

The country side was much like most rural countryside, except with more terraces, more twisty pine trees, more olive trees, and smaller farms. There were herds of sheep with clearly visible shepherds, lots of orchard pruning, and more construction than you would expect. Most of the buildings consisted of a concrete box with the wall made out of a red ceramic brick with 9 or 12 squarish holes in the middle. Buildings often have an extra story of rebar ready to go, but not apparently under current construction. This apparently works up to 4 floors an then the roof goes on.

Many building are painted in bright colours and there are a lot more 5-12 story buildings than you would think there would be. Even in fairly rural areas. A fair amount of the agricultural land is irrigated and there are some interesting aqueducts I tried to take a picture of, probably not entirely successfully.

We transfered buses at Izmir without difficulty, for a change, and the hour long short bus (very cramped, very crowded, and 5 lira) was uneventful. The ANZAC hostel was very close to the bus station and the hostel is very nice, bright clean rooms, nice bathroom, extremely friendly helpful staff, amazing views from the terrace. We found a pretty authentic place for dinner, found Nikita some pain killers and me some sunscreen, as he has my bug from yesterday and I have had my limit on sun, to say nothing of Lenore.

We spent a few minutes on the computers and then crashed. I'm sending this the next morning while I wait for them to shower.