Fethiye

First, again no photos. I'm using a lethargic XP laptop, and it's just not worth it. I'll post pretty pictures tomorrow.
Well, this is the first time I think something has gone wrong in my favour. After dilligently getting up at 7 this morning to catch my 9 o'clock ferry to Mamaris in Turkey, I arrived at the port at about quarter past 8 to discover the ferry had already left. Apparently due to heavy sea traffic they decided last night to push it forward, calling up all the people who had booked to let them know. I had booked about 3 or 4 months ago before I had any European phone number. So, after having a quick heart attack, I asked when the next ferry was going. Apparently it was leaving at five that afternoon. However, there was another ferry heading to Fethiye at 8:30. I had originally planned to transfer via bus from Mamaris to Fethiye anyway, so this was superb. And to top it off, I could simply transfer my old ticket straight across. So, I got an earlier ferry to even closer to my destination. Win.
In Fethiye one of the first things I did was to check out the Lycian tombs. I have to admit, I have to defer to Wikipedia for almost everything about them, because it seems ancient sites in Turkey are very impoverished in informational signs. Lycia was an area in Turkey (okay, the area obviously still exists, it's just called something else now) in the southwest. It has a complicated history, and I'm still not entirely sure I understand it's full relationship with the other cultures of the time, but it seems by about the third or second century BC its culture had been largely replaced by the Greek culture. It's from this period and the following Roman period that most of the ruins come. This was immediately apparent when I saw the rock-cut tombs in the cliff above Fethiye. Obviously the Lycian culture of the time wasn't an exact carbon copy of the Greek, because I've never seen these type of tombs in Greece. The architecture of them, however, was very Hellenic. And again, like in Rhodes, there were very few tourists. Also, in addition to the lack of signage, there was also a distinct lack of things like handrails and paths. There was only one wide, concrete set of steps leading up to the biggest and main rock tomb, but the others were accessed by beating my way through scrub and clambering up steep rocks. In short, just the way I like it. In fact, I felt like Indiana Jones (helped by the presence of my Indy purse)
Back at the entrace to the site I saw a poster of an imposing theatre at a place called Pinar. I had that morning picked up my hire car for Turkey, and being on speaking terms with Karen again I plugged her in (get your mind out of the gutter) and looked up the site. It was about 50 kilometres from Fethiye, so away I went.
Driving in Turkey, by the way, hasn't been as bad as I expected. So far. It does feel very foreign, and I sense that there are some unspoken road rules I'm unaware of, but overall it's not much more chaotic than Greece.
The last two or three kilometres, while easy on traffic, almost made me wish I had hired a 4x4. Still I got there will all my hubcaps still on, and I was glad I did. Pinar was supposed to be one of the biggest city in the Lycian league (Lycia was a sort of early Federation with 23 cities). The first thing you notice when you approach the ruined city is the imposing mountain dominating the skyline, honeycombed by scores of rock-cut graves. These, however, were simple rectangular holes unlike the Ionian style tombs in Fethiye. The complex more than sated my Indiana Jones appetite - it was huge, and there was only one other German couple there. To give you an idea of its size, it has two Acropoli - one of them right on top of the mountain with the tombs I just mentioned. And all of it thickly vegetated and strewn with rocks to scramble over. It was here that I wouldn't have minded a little bit more of a setup for tourists. Hunting for paths amongst scrub to find ancient ruins is something I like, but I wouldn't mind knowing what I'm looking at when I get there. The well preserved Theatre had a sign (as if it wasn't obvious what it was), so did the Agora and the Baths, but apart from that there would have been about a dozen sites of strewn rubble around the foundations of walls that I would have liked to know what they were.
Even so, I spent three or four hours scrambling amongst the ruins, imagining I was the first to see them in two thousand years and that at any moment I would have to run away from a giant boulder. I even saw a tortoise. Not quite a snake pit or a room full of giant bugs or even a bunch of skeletons on spikes, but it was something. But after all that I didn't even get to the second Agora on top of the mountain. There were a bunch of Ionian style rock tombs I saw on the other side of the site I wanted to visit as well, but by that stage I was tired, hot, thirsty and poked to bits by spiky bushes. As much as I regretted it I had to go back to Fethiye.