10 Days in Turkey: Oludeniz & Pamukkale (2/3)

We spent the next 3 nights in Oludeniz, a beautiful pebble beach in the southwest of Turkey flanked by the Babadag mountains — and is one of the most popular paragliding spots in the world.

Our accommodation in Oludeniz.

Our room was super spacious! It was a relief especially for Faz, who was like a big bear in small cave in Cappadocia. And it was surprisingly affordable too. I think it may have something to do with the fact that the beach wasn’t within walking distance — and we know this firsthand because we tried! I got scolded for this and I’ll tell you later what happened…

Big tubs are almost like a staple now in our holidays!

Explored the very touristy Hisaronu town centre for a place to have dinner.

Not spared from slopes in Oludeniz either. This was what we had to overcome to get back to our hotel. And the hill is steeper than it looks here!

The view from the hotel room balcony.

Paragliding in Oludeniz

Ever since I saw a photo of a paraglider flying above Oludeniz, my heart was set that that was exactly what I was going to do if I ever made it to Turkey. Well, I made it there, so I went! It was breathtaking. It was the closest I’ll ever feel to being a bird flying — at 6,000 feet, no less!

The scariest moment for me was being up on the mountain seeing other people before me run off the edge of the cliff. That was the moment I started asking myself: SERIOUSLY, ARE YOU REALLY DOING THIS?! I said a little prayer to ask that I reach the ground again safely in one piece and before I knew it I, too, was running off the cliff. It was surreal being so high up with my feet simply dangling in the air but the initial shock quickly passed as I became fixated on how beautiful everything was from up above.

Midway during the flight, my pilot asked if I wanted to do some acrobatics. My inner adrenaline junkie told him yes but I almost wished I hadn’t because we did some spins which made me feel so dizzy I felt like throwing up. I was so relieved when our little performance was over! Nevertheless, it was quite the experience!

Having said all that, my experience was actually tarnished a little by my pilot. I don’t know if he’s just naturally unpleasant or if he got up on the wrong side of the bed that day but he was barking at people from the time we met at their office, and was also on occasion rude to me. I was upset but didn’t want to kick up a fuss (which might result in me not being able to paraglide altogether) so I pushed it aside at the time. But thinking about it now makes me feel quite peeved. I mean, we spent thousands to holiday in Turkey and do all these activities — why does he feel that it’s ok to let people down?!

Faz on the other hand had such an awesome pilot from the same company and enjoyed his paragliding experience to bits. Glad that at least one of us enjoyed the experience thoroughly!

It was a long and winding drive up to the top of the Babadag mountains but we made it.

Setting up

I got lumps in my throat seeing other people running off the edge of the cliff.

Off they went!

Faz having a ball of a time up in the air. Love how colourful his pictures turned out!

Waiting for my turn. I know it doesn’t look like it but I was already upset with my pilot. I’m pretty sure that half-smile of his was just for the camera because he was back to his surly self after this photo was taken. And me? Well, I wasn’t going to look unhappy in photos if I’m going to be paying for them later.

Surly pilot aside, it really was an amazing feeling to be up there. And cold, too! My fingers were freezing!

Pretty sure this was before the acrobatics because I could still smile.

Miniature houses

You don’t get water this blue in Singapore!

Upon landing (and landing was a bit rough — it had quite an impact on my ankles), we were brought back to the office to have a look at the photo and video footage our pilots had taken, and basically got ripped off paying for them, even after playing the honeymoon card (technically there was some truth to that — it was our second honeymoon). I wish we would’ve bargained some more but we had a boat waiting to take us island hopping. We ended up paying something like SGD60+ per CD when I think we could’ve gotten them at perhaps the ranges of SGD40+. But we did feel better about it later on after coming back from Turkey because we discovered that the footage Faz had taken on our own GoPro was overexposed. Damn, I knew we should’ve gotten that LCD BacPac!

Well, better to have expensive footage than none at all….right? =/

Oludeniz boat trip

Our boat was a double-decker with water slides which by default sounds fun — if you can swim. Here’s a “fun” fact about me: I can’t. So there was no way I was going to slide into OPEN FREAKING SEA! The boat took us to about 6 different spots/islands and we’d spend about 30mins to an hour at each spot. In between, we spent most of our time on the lower deck because we didn’t want to fight the sunbathers for space, and plus I wasn’t looking to get a tan. Closing in on 30 real soon, I’m so not looking to speed up the ageing process! All in all it was a relaxing trip, despite the harsh sun. The waters were so unbelievably blue!

All the different boats belonging to different tour operators.

Our boat approaching the Butterfly Valley. Though famous for tiger butterflies, we only saw a few when we were walking up to the Selale waterfall.

After exploring the island, we were delighted to come back to the sight of our chef preparing our lunch. We were famished!

This was at Camel Bay, I think.

Faz going all GERONIMO while the two guys in the water were scrambling to get out of the way. LOL.

Ok a little embarrassed about my bright blue foam noodle, but I wasn’t going to let it prevent me from having my fun. Better to look silly than dead drowning! They said this area was supposed to be a hot spring, but the waters were FREEZING! It was a cold spring bay!

One of the stops we made was at St Nicholas Island, the place believed to have been home to St Nicholas (or better known as Santa Claus) for a period of time, and the original site of his tomb.

Remains of churches from the Byzantine era.

Turned out we did quite a bit of walking during this boat trip as well, exploring the islands we stopped at.

Lovely, lovely view

Back at the Oludeniz beach after the boat trip, we contemplated whether to walk or take the public bus back to our hotel. I suggested walking so that we could see more of Oludeniz, and insisted with 200% confidence that it wouldn’t be that long of a walk. It turned out that my memory of how long the journey from our hotel to the beach took when the paragliding company fetched us that morning was MAJORLY skewed.

We ended up walking for a little over an hour — and before you exclaim “Yek eleh one hour jer”, let me add that it was over an hour of PURE UPHILL CLIMBING. Everytime Faz would ask in frustration “Bila nak sampai ni?!“, I’d say “Lagi sikit jer” but that always wasn’t the case. You should have seen him sulking and trudging along angrily. Man, he was pissed.

I thought I’d try to be positive by asking him to treat it as training for Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka — to which he responded: “Screw Adam’s Peak!“. That didn’t work, so I tried another method — to motivate him by bruising his ego a little, telling him not to be weak. That actually went down worse.

I started to feel bad, and was hoping we could hail a cab or take a bus from the next bus stop but there were none in sight! In fact the next bus stop turned out to be the one near our hotel!

It was no easy feat, I’ll admit. I felt bad for “forcing” him into walking, but secretly I was kinda pleased that we got a good workout after all that bread we had in Cappadocia.

Day trip to Pamukkale + Hierapolis

On another day, we signed up for day trip out to Pamukkale, a place with beautiful white terraced travertine hot springs. We almost didn’t make it there because we didn’t know how to fit it into our itinerary, but I’m glad we managed to. Pamukkale is a natural phenomenon — a mountain of white amidst the greens and browns. The white looks like snow from afar, only it isn’t. They’re actually terraces formed by calcium carbonate mineral deposits left by flowing hot spring water over the years.

The day trip to Pamukkale was packaged together with a visit to an ancient Greek city called “Hierapolis”. We didn’t know much about Hierapolis, where it was exactly and quite honestly we didn’t even know if we were going to appreciate the ruins, but the trip gave us a chance to find out.

It turned out Pamukkale was within walking distance of Hierapolis (it did actually seem like Pamukkale was within Hierapolis but I’m not sure if it would be accurate to say so), and a ticket gives you access to both attractions. The ruins in Hierapolis were alright, though I would think Ephesus would’ve been a better choice (more impressive) if you had time to visit just one site. But Ephesus was out of the way for us.

Pamukkale from afar.

Look Ma, I’m standing barefoot on snow!

Enjoying a cooling dip in the hot weather. The water wasn’t hot at all for a hot spring.

I’m not sure if going on a weekday would be any different, but we went on a Saturday and it was crowded! It was quite amusing to see on one end of the spectrum bikini clad women and covered Middle Eastern ladies on the other, and all the various permutations in between — all in one place.

Some of the ruins of Hierapolis.

The gymnasium. Without all the equipment we have today, I shudder to think what their workouts consisted of!

Picture perfect backdrop.

Climbing more slopes to see the amphitheatre.

The grand amphitheatre — worth the climb!

It was too much of hassle to go out for dinner with all that walking and climbing, so we settled for dinner back at the hotel.

Quite a romantic ambience, wouldn’t you say? We hadn’t gone for nice dinners like this since Sri Lanka, so this was quite welcome!

All in all I enjoyed the activities we did and the gorgeous views of Oludeniz but truth be told I had mixed feelings about the vibe it exuded. For some reason Oludeniz is very popular with British tourists and over the years I suppose the place had been moulded to cater to them, making the place less Turkish in its ways and more of a British tourist trap. I had read about this Little Britain in Oludeniz prior, but still decided to go mainly for the activities which led us out of town most of the time anyway, so luckily there was no love lost.

However, Oludeniz was the only place in Turkey that we went in which we felt some uncertainty about the “halalness” of our food. Generally all meat in Turkey is halal because majority of the Turkish are muslims, despite it being a secular state. But walking in Hisaronu town we saw a lot of pork in the menus — nevermind that the other meat sold were halal. We had to recce Hisaronu town quite a bit before we found a restaurant that didn’t serve pork.

Alcohol is a separate matter. Muslims in Turkey (not all, but more so in Istanbul and along the Aegean Coast) seem to prescribe to a different belief about alcohol. Some believe it’s permissible, some believe it’s permissible as long as you don’t get drunk, and some just don’t care. In fact, almost all the restaurants we went to in Turkey sold alcohol. We’d still patronise them, but avoided those selling pork and alcohol because that proved to be a bit too much for our sensibilities.

Anyway, since we’d seen so much pork in Hisaronu, we felt doubtful if our hotel food was halal. So Faz went to ask the nearest staff he could find, which happened to be the bartenders, and they were offended! Genuine or feigned, I don’t know but they were like: What do you mean halal? Of course the food is halal! We’re Muslims! And then they happily started singing “Thola’al badru alaina min thaaniyyatil wada’….”

The juxtaposition of the scene was hilarious. I hope they weren’t high.

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Of course, no trip to Turkey would be complete without visiting the legendary Istanbul — and that’s what I’ll be writing about in my next post!