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After a fairly short bus ride we arrived in Olympos. We had already decided where we were going to stay however as we got off the bus we were intercepted yet again, this time by Mike, who was a true blue Aussie. And he sure did have the gift of the gab, we're sure he could talked a shark into becoming a vegetarian. We said we'd take a look and see what he had to offer. He showed us one of their tree houses and for the right price we said we'd stay for one night with the intention of checking out some of the other tree houses in the area the next night- the plan was to spend two nights in Olympos. No sooner had we said yes and Mike had thrust a cold beer into our hands, we knew we were going to like Olympos. Olympos can best be described as a chilled out hippy town, everyone who comes here stays longer than they intended and you just seem to become lazy, quite content to laze around in hammocks, reading books and chatting the afternoon away, catching up on the local gossip and politics. The most we managed to do was drag ourselves to the beach, the walk did consist of wandering through ruins along the way which were quite spectacular sprouting out through green trees and meandering stream. We had expected the beach to be a nice golden sandy one, but was in fact pebbles, so you needed to keep your jandals on to walk down to the waters edge, but once you were in, the water was magnificent, a beautiful turquoise blue. We did also manage to climb up the side of a mountain to take a photo of the beach - obviously this was still day one for us, as we were still quite energetic and the wave of laziness hadn't quite washed over us just yet, Olympos seems to suck you in, our intention of staying 2 nights turned into 5 and our intention of staying at other tree houses fell by the wayside, we were quite content with staying at Saban - a family run business headed up by Meryl, with Aussie Mike as her side kick to talk the punters into staying (he sure does a great job) and the homecooked meals which are the best in town. The cost of the treehouse per night also included breakfast (traditional Turkish breakfast but with a fried egg or omelet) and dinner. But the dinner was a buffet all you can eat of the most amazing food we've tasted and about 5-6 different dishes each night - yummo!! So next time you are in Olympos be sure to look Meryl up, just make sure you bring a stomach for vodka as she tends to make them super strong and downs hers in one and expects you to keep up with her. She certainly drank one Kiwi boy under the table, she just kept winking at us and pouring him stronger and stronger drinks. Poor Colin,that will teach him for calling Meryl soft!!
On our last night in Olympos we thought we should at least go and see the eternal flames (we kept putting it off each night as we settled in for another evening of just chilling outside with everyone or watching the footy). We decided not to go on the tour and actually do it ourselves. We managed to rope two other people into coming with us and we set off around 9pm at night armed with a torch and a bottle of water each. We were told it was going to take a 3-4 hour round trip and that we had to walk through the ruins, along the beach and then the directions got a bit vague from here on in, but we figured it would be a bit of an adventure. We were about 45mins into the walk when we were walking along a road with no street lights and no cars whatsoever, when a tractor pulled up alongside us and the driver asked us where we were going. We said Olympos and then he motioned for us to get on, so we did. He only took us as far as his house but we did shave off a few kilometers from our walk and quite a bit of time. We figured he would charge us money for the ride, so it was a bit awkward when we got off and thanked him but he wouldn't accept anything, which was very nice of him. We continued our walk and finally got to the entrance of the eternal flame,not knowing that we had about half an hour of walking up a steep rocky hill. Thank goodness we all had torches as there was no lighting at all going up and it would have been quite easy to make a wrong turn and gone off the path. We eventually made it to the top, all out of breath and rather hot and sweaty, the last thing we wanted to do was to stand in front of a fire - the eternal flames were pretty hot. They were quite amazing, apparently if you cover up the flame and then uncover it the flame will ignite again, hence the name eternal flame. Once we'd caught our breath and taken a few photos we made the walk back, getting back to our accommodation around midnight, unfortunately we weren't able to hitch a ride back on the tractor. The next afternoon we packed up our things and bid farewell to Olympos, our next stop being Goreme.
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