Pamukkale
Pamukkale was the one big tourist site I had not visited on previous trips to Turkey, and so I made sure to visit on this trip. Honestly, Pamukkale was a bit of a disappointment. 2,000 years ago all the pools had water. Ten years or so ago, all the pools had water. Today, there are only a handful of travertines with water, all of them artificially fed, I think. There is a lot of speculation about why the pools dried up. Drought? Water diverted for resort spas? Whatever the reason, the dry travertines are heartbreaking. None of that stops the steady flow of Instagram influencers and tour buses, though. The place is a zoo.
Pamuk-kale (Cotton Castle ) has always been a popular destination for tourists. Last time I visited 1990ish and it was full of people. I can only expect it is only worse. Turkish policymakers have only a single priority: Economical growth and how it is distributed. Nature, history etc are all trivial things
This is as close as I could get to the classic view of the travertines. It's a couple of fake pools at the bottom of the hill.
The hike up from the village of Pamukkale was uncrowded at first. I loved the otherworldly quality of it, even though it was cloudy and cold. The air temperature was 5°C and one had to hike barefoot.
The crowds had arrived by the time I got to the top of the hill.
Although there are a handful of pools with water, the vast majority, thousands of them, are bone dry.
There were really deep ones, deeper than waist level- once upon a time-
The theater at Hierapolis, the ancient city adjacent to the the travertines, was one of the best I saw on this trip -- and I saw a lot of theaters. It was, of course, full of Instagrammers, and it took a while to get a reasonably clean shot of the theater.
A small but pleasant surprise was Kaklik Cave, underground travertines in a semi-industrial area about 40 minutes from Pamukkale. I was the only person there.
