(Not) Aphrodisias

The weather was once again acting up, so I decided to wander very far afield. This day-trip was going to be to Aphrodisias. I've been there many times before, but not this time, so what the hell? When I got to Ortaca, I talked with a bus driver and he told me it was a complicated process of getting there and back and that I should plan on returning to Dalyan at around 11:00 that night. That was fine. I didn't care. It was way far away and I was going to make it there and back. So I got comfortable and let the buses do the work. By my estimate, I'd be traveling about 400km today.

Well, the coast gave way to the mountains. And after those mountains there were more mountains. I switched buses and we found still more mountains and after three hours of travel, I was in Tavas, a small town at the crossroads to Aphrodisias. With Turkey being Turkey, I thought that the last part of the process was to catch a dolmuş down the road to Aphrodisias. I'd done it in the past and expected that was how things still worked. Wrong! For some reason, there was no service to Aphrodisias that day. As they told me at the local otogar, there was totally a bus the following day. Yeah, I went all that way to have to turn around. I did get to see mountains, but otherwise, it was something of a pointless travel exercise. Here's the best picture I got of Aphrodisias:

About 50km down that road and you can't miss it. OK, I had to accept the situation. That's what all the nice people at the otogar urged me to do. Since I wasn't going to Aphrodisias, I decided to take some pictures of Tavas and its fine otogar. Here they are:


There was this great guy at the Metro counter. His name was Veli. He had nice shoes. He wanted me to take a picture of him and here it is:

He put on that hat special for the picture. I'm supposed to send him the photo. I'll do it next week for sure.

I even made two short films about Tavas. This first one is called Guy Sweeping Up:

The other one is about many things. It has no title:

At 3:00, the bus showed up. I caught it and was back in Dalyan at 6:30. I traveled a long way just to take pictures of a bus station parking lot. Yes, it was disappointing, but at least I got to see a little of the countryside.