We're going to Oludeniz!

Up and out pretty early for the promised 3 hour hike that Nina sort of badgered and shamed me into going on despite my difficulties at Nemrut and on the Goreme hike. We started in the old ghost town of Kayakoy, cleared out in the population exchange in 1924 and later abandoned by the transplanted Macedonian Muslims sent to replace them. It's all stone, and at just that level of ruin where you can still see everything very clearly, quite creepy. It's the only town we've seen with no minarets, and it's incredible just how startling that looks. Lovely basilica with intact mosaic on the floor.

Our guide was just some local teenager Nina roped in, far more interested in canoodling his girlfriend than in us. The actual hike was beautiful but a complete bitch, and if we hadn't been tackling it so early in the morning I never would have made it. It's incredible how much more exhausting than just walking it is, when you have to carefully plant and brace every individual footfall. I ended up glad I'd done it in hindsight, of course, but only barely.

Wonderful day on the public beach at Oludeniz at the end. Watching the storms of paragliders like dandelion seeds off a cliff the brochures say is 6500 feet. Whole day there, giving myself a quite satisfying sunburn. Got chatted up by a really hot Turkish guy who teaches English in the Black Sea area during the year and works the paragliding shops in the summer.

Completely random book scavenged on trip.

Antipodes, short stories by David Malouf (the Australian guy).

 

These shorts remind me of nothing so much as the Dubliners.  They are small, self-contained, sparse and brightly polished, centering on moments of epiphany (So pretty much exactly the Dubliners).  I sometimes think that they are a little too overwrought for the depth of the epiphany they are actually dealing with, and some of them are a little too concerned with being deep and obscure, I think.  But thought provoking and at times beautiful.