Pumukkale means cotton castle in Turkish but it really is sexy, amateur, eastern European (taking a stab in the dark here) photo-shoot castle.
Pumukkale is an ancient hot spring in turkey. It is beautiful with its blinding white travertine’s and is turquoise water and stunning views. But the beauty only last so long. Your tour bus allotted 3 hours seems like an age away while you are sitting in knee high lukewarm mineral water getting prunie. I did see the odd band-aid too. It was kind of like a super beautiful public wadding pool or if you have been there, the lagoon in Airlie Beach. You know then one. Slightly warm and full of backpacker syphilis.
Anyway, luckily for Sam and I, our boredom abated when we started to spot a strange trend. Everywhere you looked there were people, tourist, posing for photos. This may not seem strange as this was a tourist spot full of tourist in varyingly different shades of tan, in there swimwear taking photos of each other. Like tourist do. But these tourists were posing like they were in the next issue of Picture or some other amateur nudie zine. Some giant, middle-aged, overweight, what I can only guess as Italian, tanned men were stretched out on the white clay deposit with only black DTs to hide their shame from the camera. Lets say ‘fuller figured’ girls in string bikinis leaning forward with the right angle to get the best shot of their bronzed boobies for the lens and facebook.
We took plenty of photos for you to get the picture.
This has taken sometime, promise we will be more active from now on, because there is nothing like being jobless and not wanting to spend money to eventually motivate you.
We went to an expat Canadian thanks giving in the United Arab Emerits. Expat crews are always strange. The mix of foreigners is similar to an Asian hotel buffet breakfast. It doesn’t always go together but you try and make the most of it. We met Hanz. He was tall with blonde hair. He had bootstrap style blonde beard. He wore red pants with a navy v-neck designer shirt and those shoes that aren’t runners but aren’t skate shoes, those weird Euro trainers. He was from Austria and he made no sense. His English was a broken mix of English slang with a thick Austrian accent and he misunderstood everything you said. I caught maybe every third word that tumbled from his mouth. He was also the most wasted person there.
We were some of the last to leave the party. On our walk down the dusty street trying to hail a taxi Hanz pulled up in his sleek silver car, voice muffled by the techno from his stereo. He offered us a lift back to our hotel. In the UAE drink driving is not done. The legal limit is 0. If you are caught drink driving you are often jailed for as long as the police decide. If you were in an accident and they found out you had been drinking, no matter how little, everything will be your fault. As we were driving the short distance back to the hotel a police car drove past us. ‘Oh no’ Hanz casually exclaimed, then reached for his pint size can of Heineken, which we had not seen was resting in the cup holder and takes a swig.
At the round about to our hotel he swerved and just missed an Indian woman, then he took the hotels speed bumps like a drunken equestrian on a thoroughbred, all the while trying to light a cigarette. In broken English he told us about this booze they brew back in Austria. He said it is around 80%. When describing the taste he holds an imaginary lighter to his mouth and says ‘its taste like Zis. It burns all your face. Your cheeks, your throat’. I said that sounded like it tastes dreadful. To his reply, ‘No, its taste good!’. I said Sam brews beer. ‘Brisbane?’ Yeah, I been to Brisbane. You know the backpackers? I saw the queen’.
@font-face { font-family: “Cambria”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
Abroad. Lets rewind a little to when we were in the desert.
It’s hot in the desert.
It’s soooo hot and super dry. There is a haze that settles over the skyline so you can’t see anything clearly. The water is crazy blue. When the wind blows there is dust that rises and settles on everything. There are date trees everywhere. I ate a bunch off the ground. They were sweet and awesome and better then any I have bought at home. I don’t know why we don’t have date trees everywhere like here. And everybody wears black, well manly every lady. It seems insane to me, every day I do my best to cover my rack, shoulders and my knees out of respect for the culture here (I don’t want to be a shit tourist, well I try not to be), and I manage most days but this heat kills you. It was 39 degrees on our first day. One day we went to the grand mosque in Adu Dhabi and all the women have to wear an ibiya to enter, which is a long black dress and head scarf, so they lend you one at the entrance. It was like at school when you didn’t wear your uniform, instead some tarty skirt, you were sent to the uniform shop to don some old weathered long school skirt, to cover you up and make you modest. Make you respectable, except this time the clothes I was given were clean and new looking and covered me from tip to toe. As soon as I put them on I broke out in the most insane sweat and I wasn’t even in the sun. The mosque was ok.
