We arrived in Turkey the end of May and have been concentrating on things that needed to be done on the boat. Now we decided we needed to take time to see someplace other than Marmaris. We had originally planned to take a few months to travel extensively through Turkey, but as we have known from past experience, plans can change in a minute.
With Bob trying to turn on the just to check it out, he found out that even though it was getting 12V of power, it would not turn on. Not good at all. we had bought it from has always had great customer support, therefore Bob touched base with them and found that they suggested sending it to their facility in the UK. We could indeed send it to them, but as we have heard numerous times (and remember from our time in Tunisia the problems of receiving a package of books we ordered) it was not a great idea to have returned to us in Turkey. This sounded like a trip to the UK was in our future.
and John, that we had made years ago in Botswana. We checked with them to see about the closest airport to fly into that would be close to where needed to go. Soon after that we got another message back from Sandra informing us on the QT that they were planning a surprise birthday party for John on July 2nd and wondered if we could make it. With this new information, our plan now was to go to the UK in time to help celebrate.
The question was now, do forget about doing any touring of Turkey now and just pull together the trip to the UK OR do we change again and try to take just a few days to travel nearby to another town. We decided our priority should be exploring so the decision was made – now where to? Quickly we came up with the idea of going to Antalya and travel there by bus. Antalya is by the coast and we could possibly get there by boat sometime, but decided, what the heck, lets go for it anyway.
able to enjoy the wonderful views which included numerous agricultural areas, forested areas and amazing mountains. As Bob said on the trip over, it really hardly matters if we enjoy Antalya, as the trip over is well worth it with this magnificent scenery.
In the end, the time in Antalya was very enjoyable as well. As with so many places here there is a rich history to absorb. Fortunately, they have some excellent museums that help with explaining the history of this area. We spent only 4 nights in Antalya, but we definitely were not lacking in things to do. We were fortunate to have arrived in Antalya early enough to check in to our and still have plenty of time to walk around to get a lay of the land which took us to the old city area which was lovely to walk through at night. We had a bus stop where we were able to get a tasty but simple lunch so decided wed find something for dinner in this area of town. We noticed numerous places that catered to the German tourists with snitzel on numerous menus we saw posted. We finally decided on
a place for dinner that had a lovely inner garden dining area where we enjoyed a lovely meal. They even provided an appetizer of various types of nuts at the start and surprised us at the end with a plate of fresh fruit. A lovely way to end our first day in Antalya.
With so much to learn about this area we decided the best place to start the next day would be with a visit to the Antalya Museum. There is a great tram system here and we made great use of it while here. We found there was one that went to the museum directly which was handy and gave us more time to spend inside the museum. We easily spent the day there absorbing as much as we could.
One of the rooms was filled with sarcophus with explanations about the meaning of many of the carvings that decorate them. One in particular that we remember was one that had a marble carving of 2 people on the top – the carving of the woman was quite detailed and the other, a man with his head carved leaving it as unidentifiable.
