Last update: Monday, September 05, 2005

Wednesday, August 16

The past few days were mostly spend by driving around the area of Canakkale and Ezine. It took us both a little time to get used to Turkey, especially where to look for places to sleep, where to look for places to get fresh water and so on. We've been driving around in little villages, where we became the talk of the town for the next few weeks I think. Most people (men) first were enormously surprised by the look of our camper, but after a short while they enthusiastic started to wave at us. And of course, we waved back. We noticed that the few women we saw were mostly elderly women, traditional dressed with some sort of "chador". Maybe the young people left the little villages and started a new and less traditional life in the big towns.
 

Every village or town has at least one mosque, but strangely enough, till now we only heard the prayer calls only once. And although we are in a Muslim country, we don't notice very much of it (except for the mosques and the traditional clothing).
Today we went to a little village to see the remains of Chryse/Palemedion. The site itself was interesting, but not spectacular. But the guard certainly is. A very cute man who brought flowers to me immediately. That's not because he liked me, but because he wanted to get his picture taken with me and the flowers. It seemed that he gathered pictures taken from him with people all over the world who visited the site. And he had quite a lot. He showed us around, explaining every single detail in Turkish, so we couldn't understand any of it. But that didn't seem to bother him at all. From the trees around the area he picked all sorts of fruit, which we ate with him in the shadows of an olive tree. What a wonderful morning.
That same day we drove to Assos and camped on a small parking lot near the small water-side town Behran at the foot of the mountain. The small town was packed with tourists but felt rather cosy with the small water-side restaurants and taverna's.

On thursday we visited the ruins of Assos. The temple of Assos was magnificently located on the top of the mountain overlooking the sea and a large part of the Greek Island Lesbos. A really nice view so early in the morning! Too bad the archaeological site is closed in the evening, the sunset and the nightview on the island of Lesbos would be stunning. But again military presence in this area is apparent, in fact this stretch of coast is border area imposing all sorts of night-time regulations as we would soon notice.

The afternoon we drove in the direction of Ayvalik hoping to find a spot to camp for the night. Unfortunately the whole coastal area was packed with hotels, campingplaces and private resorts. Ayvalik itself is a rather busy place and not a particular good spot to park a camper overnight. Late in the afternoon we found an entrance to a stretch of open space (Setansoffas on the map) with beaches all around. A really bad bumpy dirt road took us there and we decided that this was a marvellous place to stay for the night.
In the evening we had dinner with Greek salad and cheap Turkish wine. At some point we noticed military police setting up some gear for fishing a few hundred meters away from us at the beach. Just after sunset we lost track of them and almost forgot their presence. When we where about to start doing the dishes suddenly a car pulled up next to us and the next moment somebody was banging on our door. We opened the door and there were two soldiers who gestured to come out. Just when Arno stepped out their officer came out of the car and started yelling and pointing "Ayvalik ! Ayvalik!".
Well, suddenly all became clear, the land was military and off-limits after sunset. So simply said: go to Ayvalik again and stay there somewhere. So we packed our gear in just a few minutes and we where escorted out of the area really fast. No bumpy road this time since there was a far more better dirt road just a few 100 meters away. We thought the soldiers were escorting us to an official campingplace, but we didn't feel like staying there. So, at a busy junction we turned left and got rid of them.
So there we where, around 9pm in the centre of Ayvalik, not the place where we wanted to stay for the night. We decided to go to the other side of Ayvalik to see if we could camp there. After searching for a nice spot for almost two hours in the dark, we finally decided to stay at a camping after all. So that was it. No camp site in the wild that night, a commercial spot for 9 million Turkish lira's
 

Friday we got in touch with Arno's parents who where driving around in Turkey also. They stayed in Oren on a camping, some 30 minutes of driving to the north of Ayvalik. For them the end of a 5 week car trip through the centre of Turkey almost touching the Syrian border. In the afternoon we met them and catched up with their adventures in Turkey. We soon noticed that there would be more adventures ahead when we'll be driving through the interior of Turkey. Saturday was a rest day for all of us and we decided to leave Oren on Sunday heading for the ruins of Pergamon.

Pergamon is an impressive archaeological site on the top of a hill overlooking the city of Bergama. Too bad that Sunday was just too hot to do anything so we camped at a camp-site in Bergama. The next day we toured the whole archaeological site wandering through the huge remains of an once important city. Lot's of pictures and enough food for thought about how these people managed to build such huge buildings on a top of a hill.
The rest of the day we spend driving to Izmir, the 3rd largest city of Turkey. Again it was a hot and humid day, 38 degrees, not a day to do more than sitting in the shade. We reached a campsite near the centre of Izmir around 4pm completely worn out by the chaotic traffic of Izmir