aegean ambles

I spent a week skirting down the Aegean Coast. It provided me with an abundance of bus travel and resultant reading time while otherwise injecting me with relative disdain for the endeavour.

In the small harbour town of Ayvalik highlights included a really friendly guy at the büfe that served me çorba (soup) every few hours for a day and a half. In Fethiye I bought a postcard with a painted representation of Ataturk, the coin I paid with dropped into the sewer shortly after it left my possession.

Selçuk, whilst a dusty town, wins for being surrounded by historical epics dating back to the Hellenistic period; sometime before BC tipped its hat to AD and Greece was still at the helm.



The remains of the Basilica of St. John hung like a little power plant on the horizon and centered around a rather epic baptistery carcus that appeared like the jigsaw shuffle of a cross.




3 km beyond is Ephesus, the sprawling remains of a city built by the Greeks and eventually taken over by the Romans, dating back to 10th century BC and becoming the second largest city of the Roman Empire after Rome.


I entered at the opposite side of the tour buses and often felt charged like a pin by a wave.

On my last night in Selcuk we drank Turkey's ubiquitous Efes beer and talked of rearraging world maps. I contimplated moving Canada into the Indian Ocean.