Wednesday 9th December – Olympos

We need to be careful as we’re starting to get used to having breakfast and evening meals prepared for us!  Our host even made spinach and cheese pancakes for a mid afternoon snack once we got back from looking around the ruins of Olympos.

Olympos is very different to the other Roman sites we have visited, located along either side of a river where it flows out from a narrow valley into the sea and being largely overgrown by dense shrubs and trees.

Much is in ruins and hidden by vegetation,

but this adds to the atmosphere of the site, as you push through the bushes to see what lies beyond.

We’ve taken to having cereals at lunchtime when we’re in pensions as Turkish breakfast is more like lunch, so we enjoyed a bowl by the river before returning to our log cabin to put on a load of washing.

Later we set out for the road to Çirali, the next village along the beach, above which is Chimaera, a cluster of flames which blaze from cracks in the rocks.  The idea was to arrive as it was getting dark, but unsurprisingly we failed to find the road as it does not exist, which we discovered when we returned to our pension to ask for directions; you need to return the 10km to the main road, then after 1km you turn back off toward the coast again for another 10km.  It’s rather hilly round here so roads have to follow the valleys.

After another delicious meal we drove the 40 minutes to Chimaera, with a 1km walk uphill from the car park in the dark.  Well worth the effort and it went into Anne’s top three things done so far (the others being the travertine pools at Pamukkale and the hot tub at Thermes).

The flames are meant to spontaneously reignite if they blow out, which Anne decided to put to the test.  We started with a little one, which required my lighter to get it going again, so we tried a bigger one.  Still no spontaneous combustion and reigniting by hand was somewhat explosive so we thought we had better stop the experiment (although pyromania got the better of us a bit later when we searched for unlit escaping gas - scorched rocks were the key - and had a fun half hour reigniting flames, fortunately with minimal singeing).  Sitting in the dark with the flames glowing you can see why ancient peoples attributed these flames to the breath of a monster and myths grew up, as did a temple and later a church (both now little more than piles of rubble).