Life's short and then you die - but life goes on

That's the way I feel after all the ruins and things we've seen recently. People think they're building for eternity, but eventually the plants and the critters take over anyway.

We spent a couple of days last week in Pamukkale, Aphrodisias, and places like that around Denizli in southwestern Anatolia. Although we thought we'd be going to Denizli by train and getting around by bus, we ended up driving (I still find it hard getting up at a decent hour in the morning). That turned out to be a good thing because it allowed us to stop when we felt like it and explore back roads - always worth doing.

The first unscheduled stop was in the ancient city of Tire about an hour southeast of Izmir. To get there we drove through the market garden area of Izmir, even passing a couple of artichoke fields but missing our chance to get a picture of these oversized thistles. Tire goes back several thousand years, but most of its oldest buildings are "just" 5 or 6 hundred years old.The "new mosque" dates from the 18th century and is particularly lovely.

We had lunch in Tire outside a restaurant in a park above the city, then continued through the valley of the Küçük Menderes, takıng off cross-country at an appropriate point to get to the Büyük Menderes valley. The Menderes River was known as the Meander in antiquity and lives up to its name, wandering back and forth across its fertile flood plain. The mountains we went through are the same sort as we had in the Kootenays (mica schist with quartz intrusıons), and I kept looking at them and saying "There's gold in them-thar hills." Not surprisingly the main city of the area is Aydın, which means gold. We went through vıllages that surely haven't changed much in the past few centuries (except for the satellite dishes), and past men and women working near-vertical fields with oxen pulling ancient ploughs. That's surely the only way they could cultivate land like that.

The area between Aydın and Denizli is a major cotton-growing area, producing the world's best quality cotton because it's still picked by very skillful hands and not machines. But the industry is suffering from cheaper Chinese and Indian competition. One of the cotton spinning mills was bought by an Indian company recently and physically moved to India.

We got to Pamukkale by evening and settled into a pleasant pension - the Allgau - run by a woman who was born in Germany but moved to the area as a teenager when her parents went back to their home village. She's a lovely person, does everything at the place and speaks English fluently. She's the reason we'd be happy to stay there again.

Pamukkale (cotton castle) is an amazing sight. From a distance it looks like a white gash across the hillside. Close up you can see it's a huge travertime (a form of calcium carbonate) deposit laid down over millennia by thermal springs. In Hellenistic and Roman times there was a huge city - Hierapolis - above the springs where people came for rest and healing. Until recently there were modern hotels among the ruins and people came from all over, especially eastern Europe, to bathe in the mineral pools. They were damaging the site so badly that the government closed and removed the hotels and people can swim only in artificial pools at the bottom of the hill. There's some grumbling about that, but it was a good move because those deposits are a world treasure.

We prowled around Pamukkale and Hierapolis for most of a day, then explored the village Karahayıt to the north, where the thermal deposits are red and black. Next time that might be the place we stay, Lonely Planet to the contrary. It seems quiet and friendly and very pretty.

The next day on our way home we prowled through more ruins. Laodicea first, one of the churches mentioned in Revelation. That's where the futility of building for eternity began to hit home. Exploration and excavation are barely underway. A major commercial center of the Greco-Roman world is now a huge deserted hillside. And Colossae confirmed that in a really big way. All that's left is a barren mound. The people St. Paul wrote to are buried somewhere under there, as are many, many thousands of years of others. Life's short, and then you die...

Everyone said we shouldn't miss Aphrosisias, so we didn't. It is indeed a fine archaeological site, Greco-Roman again, the home of a sculpture school so full of magnificent carvings. But we're close to experiencing ruin burnout. One theatre is pretty much like another. Each one is amazing, but they're all so much the same. What we'd like is something like Barkerville or Williamsburg, where you can see and talk to people living as they did in ancient times. The ruin of an ancient theatre would come to life if you could see people rehearsing and setting up to stage a play there; the ruin of a tavern would come to life if you could try some wine made the ancient way... Maybe it would take too much time and money to do something like that, but it would be a huge attraction.

So we drove back down the Büyük Menderes valley to Selçuk next to Ephesus and found the Basilica of St. John, which we'd missed on our last visit. That was a place I liked very much. It was built in early Byzantine times where St. John is supposed to have written his gospel, on a hill overlooking Ephesus. His supposed grave is under where the high altar would have been. Pope Paul VI celebrated mass there in the 1960's, and it felt to me like a holy place. I'm glad we got there.

It was a beautiful trip. This is the time of year to travel in Turkey, while the weather is still cool and everything is green and flowering - and there are no tourists! If you don't have kids to hold you back and restrict your travels to July and August, why wouldn't you come now? The locals say the weather changes from rainy winter to sunny summer on April 15, and it certainly did this year. So if you've been thinking of coming to Turkey, don't wait for summer - do it now!

We're going to Bergama again in a few minutes to buy some rugs from the co-operative there (they say 90% of the money goes to the women who make the rugs, and I hope they're right). Then it's off to Ankara for our godson Timur's confirmation this Sunday and the rest of the week exploring the east (God and the PKK permitting). Back for a weekend, then we're going to the Phyrigian Valley to see some more ruins. Begüm comes back soon, and we hope to do Cappadocia and the south with her. And then we go home :-(

Stay tuned for further adventures.