We slept at the side of the road beside a brick factory and left early before the brick workers arrived. Fond memories of some delicious cheese and potato gozleme which we ate last night at a sweet little cafe next to a filling station in Kusidasi.
On 7th May I set the satnav for Pamukkale and a very busy and boring road took us through a succession of medium-sized towns and the major Aydin with 288,000 inhabitants. Turned off up a side lane for breakfast in the middle of strawberry-growing territory with vast fields of polytunnels. Continuing towards Pamukkale we saw a sign for Afrodisia and thought we might go there. Saw a beautiful stork flying in front of the car with its long neck and long legs trailing behind it. We stopped at a car park for the Afrodisia museum which was full of tour group buses.
Very nice museum with an interesting pic of this man whose torso was discovered in the 19th century by French archaeologists, taken to Paris, pinched by the Nazis and taken to Berlin in 1939, returned to Paris in 1945. The head was then discovered in the 1950’s and re-united with its body. The sarcophagi here are beautifully carved.
There are many statues showing mythological scenes. This one shows Prometheus screaming in pain. Zeus had given him a terrible punishment for giving fire to man. He was tied to the Caucasus mountains and had his liver pecked out daily by an eagle. Herakles has shot the eagle and is undoing the first manacle. He wears his trademark lion skin and has thrown his club aside. A small mountain nymph, holding a throwing stick, appears among the rocks above.
We drove slowly to Pamukkale due to a torrential rainstorm, stopping at one place because the road was covered in huge pools of rain. We reached Pamukkale in the early evening and found a large flat field to spend the night overlooking the spectacular magnesium deposits.
We met two lovely people from Bayonne in south-west France, Lorush Truck-Mush and Lea Louist. We drank their wine and ouzo in the evening and had breakfast with them in the morning. Gave them a jar of fig jam from Greece.
Pamukkale is expensive and they told us the warm magnesium impregnated water had been turned off so we decided not to go, having been in October 2015. These pics were taken then.
