No Frills Ephesus Tours - Oct.8–10 Selcuk, Turkey
The Red Lobster Journals for 2014
To get to Selcuk we used a rather circuitous but seemingly necessary route. We first flew to Athens, then Istanbul, then to Izmir where we had arranged for a rental car. I had read about driving in Turkey and the people who said it was no big deal were right. With a large scale road map and our Garmin GPS driving turned out to be fine. After getting our car, we drove south to Selcuk, which was about an hour away. We had booked the Nazar Hotel and it turned out to be very good.
For our first day our hotel arranged for us to go on a day tour with No Frills Ephesus Tours to Ephesus and a number of other places in the area. This turned out to be a very enjoyable and worthwhile day. Our guide was very knowledgable and friendly. After our tour of Ephesus we had a lunch break and then we met at their office again for a tour to “Mary’s House”. As the story goes, the virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, was looked after by Saint John until her assumption (her body taken up into heaven). As it turns out Mary is mentioned more in the Quran than the new testament so there are also a lot of Muslims who visit the site as well. We also visited the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the world, or what is left of it, and the Bascilica of St. John.
The next day we walked back up the hill to the fortress and basilica for a more thorough look. It was also a very good vantage point to see the surrounding country side. In the afternoon we drove up to Silence, a very old small village in the hills east of Selcuk. It was supposedly first settled by freed Greek slaves when Ephesus broke up. It was interesting but quite the tourist trap.
Selcuk was a very pleasant surprise and an introduction to Turkey. The people were very friendly, language was not a problem, and towns like this catered to tourism without losing too much of their cultural identity. The calls to prayer were broadcast of the loudspeakers of the minarets, but daily life carried on. Modern cars cruised the streets, but tractors pulled their wagons through towns on their way to the farms as well. Vodaphone had an office, numerous good restaurants were easily available, but it was also easy to walk down a street and get the feeling that things had not changed there for a long time. We were very glad we were able to spend some time here and get to know the place a little.
The next day we packed up the car, fired up the Garmin, and headed for Pamukkale.
