Greetings from my french travel friends Manon and Celine

Teatime with Manon (left) and Celine (right)

 
Manon:

After some fun days in Izmir, we arrived to Fethiye during the night of Friday (11.01). Ali came to pick us up at the "otogar" and we arrived in a very nice (despite cold) place. Our host was very welcoming and fond of "permaculture philosophy". He may be a better joker than a philosopher, except if you consider joke as a philosophy which may actually be the best of all.



Sunset at Fethiye's harbour

We woke up quite late and went to visit Fethiye and its surroundings with Ali and his Kangoo. "Kayaköy", the gost village, was a nice discovery. Greek people deserted the place after the end of the war in the 1920s and the village stayed empty. It is now almost in ruins but you can imagine people walking in the streets, going to the church. It is a place where time seems to have stopped and a kind of melancholy is lurking. At the top of the village, you can see the sea and it was so windy that we nearly took off! We improvised an antic play about a girl who left her love in these old stones and it appeared that she mostly just  had taken too much drugs!



Celine:



The Failed Escape

Sunday night (13.01), Manon, moved by a sudden urge to get herself lost in the streets of Fethiye, decided to take me on a trip in the city without maps, compasses or brains. In less than 30 minutes, we were completely loss. Originally, we wanted to see the seaside. We asked a lady "Where is deniz? (=sea)" but she didn't understand. Manon gestured her the water by doing silly wave mimics! Embarrased, we finally found an english speaking girl who explained us that the sea was 30min walk from there. We had promissed to come home soon so we decided to head back towards "Ali the joker farmer" 's place. But first, we enjoyed a fresh ayran. It's a salted drinking yogurt, a local specialty that I seem to have develloped a severe addiction to.




Orange break

At the olive fields, working until sunset.

Because we are clever girls, we decided to take another road to come back. Bad idea: we got completely lost and ended up wondering endlessly in the cold streets. We asked one guy where was the mosque with a green roof and a slide (it was close to Ali's place). What we didn't know, is that there are dozens of mosques in the city, and the colour of the roof can only be seen from far away. The slide is not there because it's a children's mosque, it's just that next to it there is a hotel with a slide ("toboggan"). The guy was completely comfused and didn't understand what we were talking about, so Manon started to imitate the mosque's minaret towers, without success.


Ella the olive picker



Just when I was about to imitate the muezin's prayer sing, Manon decided to gesture the muslim prayer by kneeling over the sidewalk. The guy finally understood and he said we could follow him, but he lead us to a mosque that wasn't ours. We ended up asking every shop if they knew a green mosque with a green roof and a slide. In a phoneshop they tried to help us and started to call every seller in the neighbourhood "hey, Ahmet, come here, you speak english! The ladies need help!"




 
Finally, we put our pride aside and called Ali to pick us up. He didn't even know we were lost because Ella had stayed at the hostel with the light on in our room so he thought we were all home. He spent the whole car ride laughing loudly at us: "Sooo girls, you tried to escape, huh? The olives were too much for you? And you thought shouting "mosque mosque imam imam" would get you back home? What if I was in french streets asking people for a priest? Did you want to marry somebody urgently?"





 

 

 

 

 

 





Ella:

So we stayed one week at Ali the joker farmer's place. He was the nicest host you can imagine, welcoming, very funny and caring. He was always calling us "my dear", "my friend", "my love" etc. and we spent our entire days laughing with him, sharing everyday life. In total we only did two days of "real work" at the olive fields because we were hosted in a hotel in Fethiye town (he takes care of the hotel for the owners), and to go to the olive fields we needed a 45 minutes car ride. So it always depended on our mood and on the weather if we went to the farm or not. But the 2 days we went, we spent the entire day there, taking a meal with us to heat up in the wood oven.

 

The farm is relatively new, only 3 years old, last year was first olive harvest season. There is a little house there but it's not really ready for someone to live there, that's why we were hosted in the hotel. But in the future Ali and his helper friends will probably have the oportunity to stay sleeping directly next to the fields. When it's ready, it will be an amazing place to stay, the nature is breathtakenly beautiful, there is amazing sunsets and you can gaze at a wonderful moonshine and a sky full of stars...

 

 

 

P.S. I apologize for the shitty way these pictures are disposed but blogger is making my life difficult right now and it's a shitty computer without antivirus. But at least you get a feel of what we were doing last week. Next time, a post about our next, less joyful adventures at a horse farm. Cheers everybody!