Selçuk, and I saw breasts too...

Well they're just not common in Turkey... anyway...

Making it to Selçuk I depart the air conditioned stuffiness of the bus and crash headlong in to a wall of heat, sweating as I head for the shade in the park across the road I am met by a smiling Turkish feller who walks me a block or two to the 'Australia New Zealand Guesthouse'. Fittingly the owner is Turkish/Aussie/Kiwi/Korean etc. well basically he has the accents down to perfection.

The evening BBQ and beer hits the spot, but I'm shattered so I hit the sack only to wake at about 5am to the airy loudspeaker broadcasted morning prayers that somehow seemed louder here than elsewhere.

Breakfast turned out to be a fair reason for getting out of bed I thought as I greedily munched down the decent sized omlette on the roof top terrace. Now lets get one thing straight, if there is one thing that I'll take home from Turkey its the roof top terrace concept but understand this: I'm a fan of omlettes and as you know I'm a fan of the roof top terrace concept but combine the two? Genius.

This hearty breakfast inspired me to borrow one of the hostel bikes and have a beach day, the beach being about 8kms away. I picked what I thought was one of the better bikes, ie. the one where the pedal didn't fall off when I touched it, and I thought to my self that this will be a good little half hour work out right? Well it took about 40 minutes but the beach was fantastically worth it.

I did howver feel a look of puzzlement cross my face as I observed the odd Muslim woman swimming in her clothes with full on head scarf, but I thought to myself 'Don't knock it to you try it Ben', but lacking a head scarf there was to be no trying that today so I biked off.

Twenty minutes later I realised that the bike I had chosen was, (while being one of the better ones) not exactly road worthy and I ground to a halt with a flat tyre and no front breaks. After sweating my ass off walking 20 minutes and then running out of water my soft ass decided to hail down an extortionly priced taxi rather than walk back.

The following day I went to the ancient city of Ephesus with another Kiwi and some Aussies. The ruins were impressive and I got the odd good photo. The hostel drove us there and then back to a resturant where we lazed on carpet and cushions eating Turkish pancakes, drinking Efes beer and snoozing.

As the sun set I tucked in to the hostel BBQ and the cold beers that I had bought from a curious old man who in halting English promised me a small refund on the glass bottles if I brought them back once empty. Laughing and drinking followed as we played a stupid drinking game until finally pulling out the MP3 players and speakers and rocking out to some tunes until the early hours of the morning.

In my mind I had designated the next day as another beach day, fortunatly there were others who had the same idea so we headed to a different beach nearer Kuşadasi where the girls treated us to a rather spectacular (i.e. bare breasted) sychonised swimming routine, don't tell their mothers, or more to the point the thousands of surrounding Muslim people that shun that kinda thing, but a round of applause duely followed all the same.

Oh yeah and a weird old Turkish guy pinched my ass... twice. I was mildly disturbed.

Finally picked up some new shorts from the Selçuk market on the Saturday and life was good.

And so are photos so look at them.