After the sweet silence of Kapadodya and the unforgettable natural hospitality that welcomes all the travelers into those unreal desert spaces, the arrival at Pamukkale is quite hard. Even if it takes about 8 hours to get from Kapadokya until here, enveloped by never ending views where nature is fighting everyday harder against the dazzling sun.
Pamukkale literally means “cotton castle”, a fascinating and soft name for a world heritage site and one of the most spectacular places in the world. It is closed inside a blast of tourists from every part of the world, that makes the climbing difficult. Once, pamukkale was rich of clear thermal pools, now most of them is empty because all the nearby hotel dried them out. But when you get the change to stay away from the crowd even for few moments, it seems to be on a different planet, made of white hills where you can walk with bare feet, warm creeks and dancing waterfalls.
If Istanbul‘s chaotic blast drives people to uncertainty and then, to ask questions in order to understand better themselves and the rest of the world, in Pamukkale chaos is not a blast, rather it is static and it only drives people to see the decline of tourism.
We go back on the road and after a little bit more than 2 hours, we arrive in Selcuk where the ancient Ephesus ruins are and the details become protagonists again. What we see are stones on the ground, standing monuments and thousand-year old libraries still expressing the majesty of Mediterranean culture even if they have been restored recently.
The rest of the trip is on the road towards Istanbul, back to the origins, back to where everything was started, across a whole country made of harmony and disorder. Turkey is a mix of contrasting emotions, a mix of looks and moments to capture.
