I’ve been missing following the Sox simulated games so got up at 4 am to watch. I’d confused myself thinking we were 9 hours ahead rather than 7, so the game was in the 5th inning. By the middle of the 8th I went back to bed since the Sox were getting creamed. It seems every time I wake up to watch, they lose, so no more. At a more reasonable hour Randal and I motorbiked to Marmaris for lunch at our favorite chicken wrap spot. With all of our travels we haven’t been there for a while. The wraps are as good as ever, maybe a little spicier. After lunch it was off to the Turkcell office to have my phone fixed. It had suddenly stopped working the day we returned from Bodrum, though thankfully, Randal’s did not. Turkcell was open but the tech people don’t work Sunday so we’ll have to go back. But not tomorrow since we’re off for Dacta 70 or so miles down the coast heading west. Extra socks and underwear will be packed and we’ll probably stay over night. There are carpets to see and ruins to visit. The weather should be good. Before returning to the boat today we went to the Sunday Market in Beldibi, the next town over from Marmaris. We bought tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli and radishes, and then proceeded to bash the tomatoes and strawberries over the bumpy roads to the Marina. Normally our jackets would have padded the plastic "trunk" carrier but we’d left them on the boat to make room for our purchases. Live and learn. We’ll know better next time.
Here is part 3 of our Milas/Bodrum tour. I’m saving the best for the final installment.
Ru
DoraMac
Milas and Bodrum by Motorbike 3
Just short of Bodrum Randal started to coast down a long hill. I asked why. “Almost out of gas” was his answer. We had just passed a gas station on the wrong side of the divided highway so exited down an entrance (you can do that on a small motorbike) and crossed the highway and got fuel. Our gas mileage chugging up the mountains just isn’t as good as it was riding the coastal roads of Malaysia. There do seem to be enough stations to fill up; we just have to fill up at ¼ tank rather than wait until we’re closer empty!
Bodrum looks like what you would expect a seaside Mediterranean city to look like. Whitewashed houses built from the hillside down to the water. The population is about 28,000 which is similar to Marmaris, but the city center is a bit more upscale if you know what I mean. It’s not better, it just looks newer and more, well, “upscale.” Lonely Planet says building height is restricted. “And even when its seafront bars are spilling over with people and its clubs are pumping, there’s still something rather refined about the place.” We’d not planned to come to Bodrum so had done no research about hotels or even where the hotels might be located. Pretty quickly we were able to find our way to the center of “tourist Bodrum” and to a hotel on the waterfront. We knew we’d pay more for the location but had no idea where other hotels might be. It was there; we were there; and the price was okay for the location. The room wasn’t worth the money but the view was. And for all the “waterfront bars and pumping clubs” we heard no night noise or karaoke singers. Only the early morning prayers from the nearby Mosque woke us. The light from the waterfront and the hotel lit our room so that when I woke in the middle of the night I didn’t know if it was still night or if it was morning light. The drapes were lovely flimsy affairs which would have been perfect in a secluded country setting but not on the main drag.
The view from our balcony in the morning light.
Just down below the stripped awning were small souvenir stalls. Between the stalls and the boats along the water was a walkway that went around the coast through Bodrum.
Castle of St. Peter is the Bodrum landmark which we only saw from a distance
The Vatican attached great importance to the building of the Castle and sent Christians to work there. In 1409 the Papal Office issued a decree that all those who assisted in the construction would receive a guaranteed reservation in Heaven.
http://www.bodrum-bodrum.com/v2/History/Bodrum-s-Castle-of-St.Peter.html
I just read that Bodrum was the home of Herodotus, the ‘Father of History.’ I was a history major so one day will have to go back and pay homage. Bodrum has a marina so maybe one day we’ll bring the boat for a stay and actually see some of the sites. We did visit one carpet shop but I wasn’t wild about his carpets; much of it made to order and too “hotel lobby” for me. The internet café was a challenge. I never could get yahoo to accept my email address and password. Turkish keyboard have all of the extra keys for the two sets of vowels and extra consonants with their diacritic markings. (Reading about all the different diacritic markings can make your head spin!) Some keys have 3 uses and I kept guessing wrong so not getting what I needed. The young kid working there spoke no English and was too busy with his own computer to take time to help me. I couldn’t get into my email account but I could check on the Red Sox so all was not lost.
Around the corner from our hotel and just across the street from the waterfront were the restaurants and bars. We never did see this chandelier lit up at night but it must have been something! It was something in daylight. I think the restaurant’s name was Pink!
The town square with the huge red Turkish flag, the big banner of Ataturk and the mosque. I don’t know if the flag and banner are always there. Thursday was a holiday and there was a short program of only about 20 minutes where something like our Taps was played and I’m sure the Turkish National Anthem. And some men made speeches. Our hotel is just around the corner so we could hear it as we ate breakfast on the terrace.
Dollar is still top dog! Dollar, Euro, British Pound and the Turkish Lira
Evening view from our hotel balcony. Morning view of Randal.
Breakfast on the patio, bread, cheese, olives, tomato, cucumber, butter, and fruit spread. And coffee.
Stuff to buy.
The awning visible from our balcony is the covering for these stalls. Unfortunately or thankfully the back box on the motorbike is too small for “stuff” other than a change of clothes, backpacks and a book or two. Randal is working on a design that would let us hook our bicycle panniers to the motorbike and then it will take will power not to come back to the boat with more stuff. Luckily our goal at the moment is just carpets.
We ate breakfast, brushed our teeth, paid the bill off we went. We weren’t far out of town when we passed a carpet shop.
I really liked this small carpet (the furthest one in the photo) but it cost 600TL=$400 and the long runner would have fit perfectly in the galley. The 4 carpets would have cost a total of almost $2,000 and we weren’t ready to spend that much money this early in the search. The one if front of it, which would have gone in the saloon was a favorite too. I liked the runner colors the least though in dimmer light, and the galley gets little light, the colors didn’t look so pink.
We’re getting used to these motifs which don’t say “Turkey” to us but most certainly are. Different villages have different motifs and colors and can be more geometric than the more traditional “prayer rug” motifs like the rugs below. In real life the colors of the two pieces above worked together because they both had some of the orange-rust looking color and the patterns worked together
These two rugs came from the same area, Hereke, a coastal town about 50 miles from Istanbul. They say “Turkey” to us because they are what we are more accustomed to seeing in the US as Turkish rugs.
Wiser, no poorer, a bit disappointed but eager to continue our search, we left the carpet shop and continued on our way to the “carpet village” of Karacahisar. To be continued….
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