Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Aphrodisias and beyond
Turkey blog 7-13
So hot last night. Mosquitoes and humidity - almost like camping in Texas. I got an early start thanks to the barking dogs that began their canine chorus as the sun (and the temperature) began to rise.
Today, a dolmush tour to the Roman ruins at Aphrodisias 100km away. It's supposedly a fantastic site, but little visited, so I'm excited to see it.
----
After Haçer serves up a simple “Turkish” breakfast of fruit, bread and cheese, a little run-down panel van pulls up to the courtyard and toots its horn.
Philippe, the lone Frenchman from dinner and my silent confrère for the day, joins me in the van. Another couple already lazes in the back seat. The rotund, mustachioed driver flashes a broad grin over his shoulder and we speed off, up into the village streets. We zoom around the town in the battered old van, picking up couples at pensions as we go:
three couples, three singles. I'm the only English speaker. Some German, some French maybe Russians in the back... The van is full, but comfortable. No A/C, but the windows are open and we drive so fast the wind is deafening.
About 30 minutes into the ride suddenly the driver reaches back and slips on his seatbelt. What does this mean? I look down to the cushion of my rocking, death-seat of a bench. I spot several springs poking out of the wool blankets that serve as seat covers, but certainly no seatbelts. Are we near a treacherous stretch of curvy road? Planning to accelerate to Nimrod-like velocity?
No. There's another much less perilous explanation: A police car passes in the opposite direction, and once it dwindles in the rear-view mirror, the driver tugs at his belt and casts it off with disgust. It was just the fuzz…
----
Along the way, we make a quick stop at one of the ubiquitous water-spouts that line the Turkish roads: little stone markers about a two feet high, with a constantly running faucet spewing water into a small basin below. The driver washes his face, re-fills his water bottle, and climbs back in. "Good water." he says. "Cold.” It seems all too obvious that none of use would dare take a sip, but he enjoys it so much it’s almost tempting.
----
After an hour or so in the van, I finally get to wander around the ancient city of Aphrodisias. As advertised, it’s nearly deserted; there's just one group of Japanese tourists, brightly colored parasols bobbing above their heads - and they don't seem the slightest bit ridiculous. Well, maybe a little, but only in juxtaposition to the crumbled ruins. When they emerge through the gate to the massive, well preserved stadium, it makes quite the picture.
But there's no denying the heat. It's literally 100 degrees in the shade - I just measured it. My trusty emergency-whistle/compass/thermometer (a three-bird/one-stone kind of device) reads 107 degrees in the sun.
Hoping to avoid the only other tourists, I end up taking a wrong turn and end up smack-in-the-middle of the ongoing excavation. It’s the comfortably familiar tableau of traditionally dressed men hauling buckets of dirt, obediently following the instructions of foreign looking grad-students in GAP t-shirts. (Aphrodisias has been excavated since 1961 by Kenan T Erim, an NYU professor who was so devoted to the site that when he died in 1990, he was buried here along with the ancient people he spent his life digging up.) None of the excavators seems to notice me, but a tour-guide leading another small group atop a ridge starts to yell in my direction. No-one seems to know what language I speak (“German?” “French?” "Turkish?" Never English. Never American.), so I just take advantage of my seemingly indistinct heritage and pretend to understand nothing. Eventually he gives up and stops screaming. Finally left to my own devices, I make my way along a little path back to the approved tourist trail.
----
As with most ancient ruins, the best statuary is housed in a little on-site museum. In the Aphrodisias museum I encounter the predictable line-up of somber looking busts, and a few magnificent ones. One fantastic group is labeled simply “Intellectuals” because of "their long hair". Soldiers, the label tells me, have short hair. I wonder if this is the case at K's conference. I try to recall if the more militant “intellectuals” have closer-cropped styles. And it might work out that way. At least for the men… I'll have to do a proper survey when I get back to Istanbul.
My favorite pieces in the museum are a collection of 5th century shield-portraits: wise looking heads mounted on the wall like hunting trophies: Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Pinderos - philosophers and their famous students. Poor Alexander the Great's visage has had its throat savagely cut with a chisel. It's a gruesome sight that a quick repair-job has failed to conceal.
----
The museum seems to be the coolest place to stop and jot down some thoughts in my notebook. At the only available table there's another guy doing the same. It seems ALL lone travelers have journals. Any uncomfortable, lonely moment can be averted by a decisive extraction of the notebook and pen, followed by purposeful scribbling. But their journals are all much nicer than mine: evocative leather-bound volumes instead of the child's spiral-bound notebook I bought in a local market for 25 cents.
----
Riding back from the site, I realize I’ve hardly seen or read the news since I arrived in Turkey. There could have been 3 bombs at the airport and I wouldn't know unless I'd caught a blurb during the 30 minutes that I watched CNN in the hotel in Istanbul. Again, I'm struck by how exaggerated things can seem from afar - how quickly misperceptions can be engendered - how the notion of Turkey as a dangerous foreign place seemed almost sensible before I left, but ridiculous now. I couldn't feel more safe or more welcome here (except for the lack of seatbelts, but that's hardly a problem indigenous to Turkey). Regardless of the overly cautious faux-Canadian Americans in K's group, I haven't had one bad experience after telling people I'm American. No obvious ill will.
But one also realizes that the converse must be true - that just as the filtered news out of Turkey makes for a strangely skewed conception of it as a country, in the same way the notion of America to the rest of the world is exaggerated and flavored by the “news” that they have available. And everyone is looking to America, but always through the lens of a satellite broadcast.
----
We're almost back to Pamukkale in the dolmush when the driver pulls over into a service station. “Petrol.” he explains. Naturally. Why fill up during the 4 hours we spent wandering around Aphrodisias? He hops out and has a quick conversation with the station attendant who's pumping the gas. The attendant motions to the far side of the car-park, where two young men are blasting a rusted old Renault with garden hoses. Our driver nods and slides open the passenger door with a necessarily violent tug. “I must to wash bus. Please to have chai. No charge.”
Yes, we've encountered the apparently universal notion of a “free car-wash with fill-up.”
As the van rolls over towards the garden hoses, we're escorted to a corner of the car-park, just past the gas pumps, where a little miniature fence cordons off an area with two umbrellas and eight chairs - the BP Service Station Tea Garden. The driver smiles and waddles over, delivering glasses of warm apple tea and a roll of biscuits for our trouble. We sip the hot tea in the 100 degree heat, the sweet scent of apples and refined petroleum wafting in the air.
The French guys have finally figured out that they're both French. They've formed a new couple, so I'm now officially alone. My confrère has gone back to his people. Now it's just me and the driver. Everyone else is pared off. I listen in on the French, catching heavily accented computer terms like “see ploos ploos” and “leenix booox” - again recognizing techno-babble as the Lingua Franca of the coming age.
----
We return to the pension at 4:00 - plenty of time to hike back up the hill to Hieropolis, take in the museum and then hike around until sunset. But first Haçer, arms full of laundry, clearly exhausted from a day of cleaning, wants to have a word:
“Hello! You have good trip? Aphrodisias çok güzel. Very beautiful. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“You talk to Frenchman? What does he do?”
No - the Frenchman stuck to his own. “Sorry, I didn't talk to him.”
“Oh...” she seems disappointed. “You know what is his business? Travel writer?”
Again with the travel-writer obsession. He's a lone traveler, so naturally he has a notebook…
“You find out? Ask? I think maybe travel writer.”
Philippe couldn't look more like a dirt-poor backpacker at the end of a sixth-month global trek if he had every costume-designer in Hollywood to help him. Scruffy beard. Threadbare clothes. Patched canvass knapsack. But what do travel writers really look like, anyway?
“I don't think he's a writer.” I say. But it does make me think: I should always travel alone, scribble obsessively in little notebooks, and then bask in the resulting royal service afforded only restaurant critics, the ostentatiously rich, and travel writers…
“You will stay here for a while?” she starts up again. “I was thinking, maybe you read e-mail for me? Mail come today. I no understand”
“Sure.” I say. It was easy enough yesterday. I really did want to hike back up to Hieropolis and see the museum, but this shouldn't take too long…
I follow Haçer down to the “house” - really just several hotel-rooms joined together as a residence - and sit at the computer. The e-mail is spam, so it's easily dismissed. It did contain the number “35” prominently for some reason, and she’s disappointed to discover that it isn’t a reservation request for 35 people.
“No reservation?”
“No. Sorry. A mistake. Bad e-mail.”
“I understand.” she says after a brief pause. “Also, I was thinking. Not now, but tomorrow… Since you have ticket for six o'clock bus, I was thinking, maybe, you make us website?” She studies my reaction. “This is easy, yes?”
What is it with me? Do I just ooze computer knowledge? Does silicon seep out through my pores? Or does she just ask this of everyone? I'd even tried a preemptive strike yesterday, when she asked about my job. Computer - no. I'm a writer. Writer - i.e. artist - i.e. aloof and non-technical. Guess that's a stereotype I can't rely on anymore.
“Well,” I explain, “it's not easy. And not hard. Sort of in-between. But it can take a lot of time.”
“But you have much time tomorrow, yes? It is not easy?”
Meanwhile, precious museum time is ticking away. Has she still no concept of my demanding itinerary: Tues, 7-13-04, 4:00-7:00 - Hieropolis Museum and Necropolis.
“Do you know what you'd like the website to say?” I ask, hoping to imply the amount of thought that must first go into such an endeavor.
“Yes. Just say good things. So we have website and can give to Pat Yale from Lonely Planet.” Ah. Now I understand the urgency. And I do have a really hard time telling anyone “no.”
“Well, maybe, tomorrow, we can see.” I offer. “I could take photos maybe. We'll see. But I need to go to the museum…”
“Okay. Tamam. Tomorrow.”
----
The one really fascinating thing about the Hieropolis museum is that the museum itself is as old as the things is contains: the three exhibition halls are actually housed beneath the shored-up arches of the ancient roman baths. Trendy halogen track-lighting hangs from age-old brickwork. The ceilings, ash-black from 1,000 years of campfires and torches, loom over humidity controlled display cases.
This would have K's conference whipped into a jargon-laden frenzy - Dual Temporalities to be sure.
----
The museum was wonderful but small, so I've got plenty of time to explore before heading back for dinner. Needing to catch up on my blog, and knowing web-work awaits me at the hotel, I decide to bite the financial bullet and have a drink by the Termal Pool, typing away beside the submerged ruins and the corpulent buoys in the form of Eastern European tourists. I'm sure the Romans price-gouged just as much as the locals do now. But it's a pleasant, shady place to work, and the ruin-littered hills above the trees are starting to glow amber in the late afternoon light.
----
I'm always at Hieropolis at sunset. Of course, this only amounts to two times, but it feels like it must always be this way. The ruins aren't the same "quality" as Pompeii or (presumably) Ephesus, but the quantity can't be beat. Vast fields of ancient stone poking up from the brown grass and tangled thorns. Every little hill yields another mini-valley of temples and mausoleums. Unlike most ancient cities, where you're told the obligatory "And if you can believe it...this is only ten percent of the old city! Ninety percent is still buried under the modern town!" at Hieropolis, you really can get a sense of the vastness of the ancient boundaries, and hike from one district to the next. You can wander the tops of the city walls (now just brick pathways at ground-level) and walk along nearly 3km of crumbling tombs. The convoy of tour-buses rumbles out along the road, and I'm left nearly alone, with just the odd bikini-clad tourist wandering amongst the circular tumulous tombs and crumbling vaulted churches. Literally thousands of jumbled sarcophagi, toppled and jumbled as if a tornado had lifted the entire necropolis and then strewn it back down across the hill.
----
I just can't take another barefoot hike down the Travertines, so I follow along the top, hoping to find a road back into town. I come across a little channel running along the edge of the white cliffs - the mysterious source of water for the pools. They've shut off the supply, and the last of the liquid trickles down through man-made openings to the pools below. Just beyond the channel, the ruined foundations of all the raised motels. Their cracked tile courtyards and dry, over-grown swimming pools appear perfectly in concert with their Roman predecessors.
As I hike, I encounter local villagers making their way to the backside of the cliffs, where less visited pools still retain a little of their mineral-laden water. Each family carries plastic bags with sandwiches and Pepsi for their picnics. They mill about and change into bathing suits as they crouch in the shelter of open Roman sarcophagi.
My narrow path eventually becomes the old city wall, and I navigate the top carefully as the ground drops away on either side. Suddenly I'm crossing a valley via the narrow, ancient stones. But they've lasted this long, so I trust I won't be the one to bring them down.
More ruins to be seen below. More ancient city in every direction.
And finally the dirt road and my way back into town…
|
So hot last night. Mosquitoes and humidity - almost like camping in Texas. I got an early start thanks to the barking dogs that began their canine chorus as the sun (and the temperature) began to rise.
Today, a dolmush tour to the Roman ruins at Aphrodisias 100km away. It's supposedly a fantastic site, but little visited, so I'm excited to see it.
----
After Haçer serves up a simple “Turkish” breakfast of fruit, bread and cheese, a little run-down panel van pulls up to the courtyard and toots its horn.
Philippe, the lone Frenchman from dinner and my silent confrère for the day, joins me in the van. Another couple already lazes in the back seat. The rotund, mustachioed driver flashes a broad grin over his shoulder and we speed off, up into the village streets. We zoom around the town in the battered old van, picking up couples at pensions as we go:
three couples, three singles. I'm the only English speaker. Some German, some French maybe Russians in the back... The van is full, but comfortable. No A/C, but the windows are open and we drive so fast the wind is deafening.
About 30 minutes into the ride suddenly the driver reaches back and slips on his seatbelt. What does this mean? I look down to the cushion of my rocking, death-seat of a bench. I spot several springs poking out of the wool blankets that serve as seat covers, but certainly no seatbelts. Are we near a treacherous stretch of curvy road? Planning to accelerate to Nimrod-like velocity?
No. There's another much less perilous explanation: A police car passes in the opposite direction, and once it dwindles in the rear-view mirror, the driver tugs at his belt and casts it off with disgust. It was just the fuzz…
----
Along the way, we make a quick stop at one of the ubiquitous water-spouts that line the Turkish roads: little stone markers about a two feet high, with a constantly running faucet spewing water into a small basin below. The driver washes his face, re-fills his water bottle, and climbs back in. "Good water." he says. "Cold.” It seems all too obvious that none of use would dare take a sip, but he enjoys it so much it’s almost tempting.
----
After an hour or so in the van, I finally get to wander around the ancient city of Aphrodisias. As advertised, it’s nearly deserted; there's just one group of Japanese tourists, brightly colored parasols bobbing above their heads - and they don't seem the slightest bit ridiculous. Well, maybe a little, but only in juxtaposition to the crumbled ruins. When they emerge through the gate to the massive, well preserved stadium, it makes quite the picture.
But there's no denying the heat. It's literally 100 degrees in the shade - I just measured it. My trusty emergency-whistle/compass/thermometer (a three-bird/one-stone kind of device) reads 107 degrees in the sun.
Hoping to avoid the only other tourists, I end up taking a wrong turn and end up smack-in-the-middle of the ongoing excavation. It’s the comfortably familiar tableau of traditionally dressed men hauling buckets of dirt, obediently following the instructions of foreign looking grad-students in GAP t-shirts. (Aphrodisias has been excavated since 1961 by Kenan T Erim, an NYU professor who was so devoted to the site that when he died in 1990, he was buried here along with the ancient people he spent his life digging up.) None of the excavators seems to notice me, but a tour-guide leading another small group atop a ridge starts to yell in my direction. No-one seems to know what language I speak (“German?” “French?” "Turkish?" Never English. Never American.), so I just take advantage of my seemingly indistinct heritage and pretend to understand nothing. Eventually he gives up and stops screaming. Finally left to my own devices, I make my way along a little path back to the approved tourist trail.
----
As with most ancient ruins, the best statuary is housed in a little on-site museum. In the Aphrodisias museum I encounter the predictable line-up of somber looking busts, and a few magnificent ones. One fantastic group is labeled simply “Intellectuals” because of "their long hair". Soldiers, the label tells me, have short hair. I wonder if this is the case at K's conference. I try to recall if the more militant “intellectuals” have closer-cropped styles. And it might work out that way. At least for the men… I'll have to do a proper survey when I get back to Istanbul.
My favorite pieces in the museum are a collection of 5th century shield-portraits: wise looking heads mounted on the wall like hunting trophies: Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Pinderos - philosophers and their famous students. Poor Alexander the Great's visage has had its throat savagely cut with a chisel. It's a gruesome sight that a quick repair-job has failed to conceal.
----
The museum seems to be the coolest place to stop and jot down some thoughts in my notebook. At the only available table there's another guy doing the same. It seems ALL lone travelers have journals. Any uncomfortable, lonely moment can be averted by a decisive extraction of the notebook and pen, followed by purposeful scribbling. But their journals are all much nicer than mine: evocative leather-bound volumes instead of the child's spiral-bound notebook I bought in a local market for 25 cents.
----
Riding back from the site, I realize I’ve hardly seen or read the news since I arrived in Turkey. There could have been 3 bombs at the airport and I wouldn't know unless I'd caught a blurb during the 30 minutes that I watched CNN in the hotel in Istanbul. Again, I'm struck by how exaggerated things can seem from afar - how quickly misperceptions can be engendered - how the notion of Turkey as a dangerous foreign place seemed almost sensible before I left, but ridiculous now. I couldn't feel more safe or more welcome here (except for the lack of seatbelts, but that's hardly a problem indigenous to Turkey). Regardless of the overly cautious faux-Canadian Americans in K's group, I haven't had one bad experience after telling people I'm American. No obvious ill will.
But one also realizes that the converse must be true - that just as the filtered news out of Turkey makes for a strangely skewed conception of it as a country, in the same way the notion of America to the rest of the world is exaggerated and flavored by the “news” that they have available. And everyone is looking to America, but always through the lens of a satellite broadcast.
----
We're almost back to Pamukkale in the dolmush when the driver pulls over into a service station. “Petrol.” he explains. Naturally. Why fill up during the 4 hours we spent wandering around Aphrodisias? He hops out and has a quick conversation with the station attendant who's pumping the gas. The attendant motions to the far side of the car-park, where two young men are blasting a rusted old Renault with garden hoses. Our driver nods and slides open the passenger door with a necessarily violent tug. “I must to wash bus. Please to have chai. No charge.”
Yes, we've encountered the apparently universal notion of a “free car-wash with fill-up.”
As the van rolls over towards the garden hoses, we're escorted to a corner of the car-park, just past the gas pumps, where a little miniature fence cordons off an area with two umbrellas and eight chairs - the BP Service Station Tea Garden. The driver smiles and waddles over, delivering glasses of warm apple tea and a roll of biscuits for our trouble. We sip the hot tea in the 100 degree heat, the sweet scent of apples and refined petroleum wafting in the air.
The French guys have finally figured out that they're both French. They've formed a new couple, so I'm now officially alone. My confrère has gone back to his people. Now it's just me and the driver. Everyone else is pared off. I listen in on the French, catching heavily accented computer terms like “see ploos ploos” and “leenix booox” - again recognizing techno-babble as the Lingua Franca of the coming age.
----
We return to the pension at 4:00 - plenty of time to hike back up the hill to Hieropolis, take in the museum and then hike around until sunset. But first Haçer, arms full of laundry, clearly exhausted from a day of cleaning, wants to have a word:
“Hello! You have good trip? Aphrodisias çok güzel. Very beautiful. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“You talk to Frenchman? What does he do?”
No - the Frenchman stuck to his own. “Sorry, I didn't talk to him.”
“Oh...” she seems disappointed. “You know what is his business? Travel writer?”
Again with the travel-writer obsession. He's a lone traveler, so naturally he has a notebook…
“You find out? Ask? I think maybe travel writer.”
Philippe couldn't look more like a dirt-poor backpacker at the end of a sixth-month global trek if he had every costume-designer in Hollywood to help him. Scruffy beard. Threadbare clothes. Patched canvass knapsack. But what do travel writers really look like, anyway?
“I don't think he's a writer.” I say. But it does make me think: I should always travel alone, scribble obsessively in little notebooks, and then bask in the resulting royal service afforded only restaurant critics, the ostentatiously rich, and travel writers…
“You will stay here for a while?” she starts up again. “I was thinking, maybe you read e-mail for me? Mail come today. I no understand”
“Sure.” I say. It was easy enough yesterday. I really did want to hike back up to Hieropolis and see the museum, but this shouldn't take too long…
I follow Haçer down to the “house” - really just several hotel-rooms joined together as a residence - and sit at the computer. The e-mail is spam, so it's easily dismissed. It did contain the number “35” prominently for some reason, and she’s disappointed to discover that it isn’t a reservation request for 35 people.
“No reservation?”
“No. Sorry. A mistake. Bad e-mail.”
“I understand.” she says after a brief pause. “Also, I was thinking. Not now, but tomorrow… Since you have ticket for six o'clock bus, I was thinking, maybe, you make us website?” She studies my reaction. “This is easy, yes?”
What is it with me? Do I just ooze computer knowledge? Does silicon seep out through my pores? Or does she just ask this of everyone? I'd even tried a preemptive strike yesterday, when she asked about my job. Computer - no. I'm a writer. Writer - i.e. artist - i.e. aloof and non-technical. Guess that's a stereotype I can't rely on anymore.
“Well,” I explain, “it's not easy. And not hard. Sort of in-between. But it can take a lot of time.”
“But you have much time tomorrow, yes? It is not easy?”
Meanwhile, precious museum time is ticking away. Has she still no concept of my demanding itinerary: Tues, 7-13-04, 4:00-7:00 - Hieropolis Museum and Necropolis.
“Do you know what you'd like the website to say?” I ask, hoping to imply the amount of thought that must first go into such an endeavor.
“Yes. Just say good things. So we have website and can give to Pat Yale from Lonely Planet.” Ah. Now I understand the urgency. And I do have a really hard time telling anyone “no.”
“Well, maybe, tomorrow, we can see.” I offer. “I could take photos maybe. We'll see. But I need to go to the museum…”
“Okay. Tamam. Tomorrow.”
----
The one really fascinating thing about the Hieropolis museum is that the museum itself is as old as the things is contains: the three exhibition halls are actually housed beneath the shored-up arches of the ancient roman baths. Trendy halogen track-lighting hangs from age-old brickwork. The ceilings, ash-black from 1,000 years of campfires and torches, loom over humidity controlled display cases.
This would have K's conference whipped into a jargon-laden frenzy - Dual Temporalities to be sure.
----
The museum was wonderful but small, so I've got plenty of time to explore before heading back for dinner. Needing to catch up on my blog, and knowing web-work awaits me at the hotel, I decide to bite the financial bullet and have a drink by the Termal Pool, typing away beside the submerged ruins and the corpulent buoys in the form of Eastern European tourists. I'm sure the Romans price-gouged just as much as the locals do now. But it's a pleasant, shady place to work, and the ruin-littered hills above the trees are starting to glow amber in the late afternoon light.
----
I'm always at Hieropolis at sunset. Of course, this only amounts to two times, but it feels like it must always be this way. The ruins aren't the same "quality" as Pompeii or (presumably) Ephesus, but the quantity can't be beat. Vast fields of ancient stone poking up from the brown grass and tangled thorns. Every little hill yields another mini-valley of temples and mausoleums. Unlike most ancient cities, where you're told the obligatory "And if you can believe it...this is only ten percent of the old city! Ninety percent is still buried under the modern town!" at Hieropolis, you really can get a sense of the vastness of the ancient boundaries, and hike from one district to the next. You can wander the tops of the city walls (now just brick pathways at ground-level) and walk along nearly 3km of crumbling tombs. The convoy of tour-buses rumbles out along the road, and I'm left nearly alone, with just the odd bikini-clad tourist wandering amongst the circular tumulous tombs and crumbling vaulted churches. Literally thousands of jumbled sarcophagi, toppled and jumbled as if a tornado had lifted the entire necropolis and then strewn it back down across the hill.
----
I just can't take another barefoot hike down the Travertines, so I follow along the top, hoping to find a road back into town. I come across a little channel running along the edge of the white cliffs - the mysterious source of water for the pools. They've shut off the supply, and the last of the liquid trickles down through man-made openings to the pools below. Just beyond the channel, the ruined foundations of all the raised motels. Their cracked tile courtyards and dry, over-grown swimming pools appear perfectly in concert with their Roman predecessors.
As I hike, I encounter local villagers making their way to the backside of the cliffs, where less visited pools still retain a little of their mineral-laden water. Each family carries plastic bags with sandwiches and Pepsi for their picnics. They mill about and change into bathing suits as they crouch in the shelter of open Roman sarcophagi.
My narrow path eventually becomes the old city wall, and I navigate the top carefully as the ground drops away on either side. Suddenly I'm crossing a valley via the narrow, ancient stones. But they've lasted this long, so I trust I won't be the one to bring them down.
More ruins to be seen below. More ancient city in every direction.
And finally the dirt road and my way back into town…
|
