Turkey Part 3 - Ephesus

It was a 7 hour bus ride down from Cannakale to Kusadasi, where we were basing ourselves for the next couple of days, and so by the time we arrived at our hotel (the Liman Hotel) we were pretty exhausted. Fortunately, Hasan (Mr Happy) who ran the hotel lived up to his name, and encouraged us to have dinner on the roof terrace – being too tired to think we asked them to just cook us whatever was nice, and we ended up sampling a little bit of everything on the menu over great views of the town (and all for 40 Lira, or less that 20 quid).

The next morning we had our last real day in Turkey, and we used it to visit Ephesus, the best preserved Roman city in Asia (or 'the world's largest open air museum'). It was really impressive – I don't know if words can do it justice so I'll leave that to the photos. Because the river silted up (a common theme in cities in this area, it happened to Troy as well) it was abandoned rather than being constantly evolved, which means that it is a great insight into how 250,000 people might have lived in 500AD.

Sarah with the original Nike, goddess of victory

Sarah outside the library of Ephesus

Stephen on the library steps

The view from about half-way up the 25,000-seat stadium

Turkey was a really interesting place to visit – although they are a Muslim country, at least in the parts we visited the feel is very Western (the local beer was good, and people dress the same as you would see anywhere else in Europe) - I have heard it is a little different further east. The 'hassle' factor was a lot lower than we'd expected, too – even in Istanbul it was only a minor irritation, rather than the overwhelming intensity of Cairo, and the people were really hospitable, taking a lot of pride in the quality of their service. We only scratched the surface, too – it would be the equivalent of someone visiting Sydney and Brisbane and saying that they had 'done' Australia – we have seen so much, but there is so much more to see...