Ayvalik and Bergama ruins

Ayvalik market
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Ayvalik is an old Greek Ottoman village set around a small sheltered bay looking toward the Greek island of Lesvos.  The guidebook sold it as 'crumbling charm' which sounded appealing and was certainly true (the 'crumbling' part anyway)...I think we wondered whether it was such a great idea after all when our taxi bumped it's way through potholed cobbled streets past row after row of houses in varying states of falling down.

Luckily enough, our accommodation seemed to be standing with 4 walls AND a roof, so we settled in fairly quickly and headed in to town to check out the weekly market.  The market was mobbed!  All of the streets in Ayvalik seemed to be taken over by stall after stall selling everything you could ever want and a heap of stuff you never knew you needed too.  Our favourite was the fruit and vegetable market - the smells, the colours, the feverish buzz in the air with buyers zipping from stall to stall, the marketeers shouting prices and praise for the produce to the crowds.  Another favourite was down in the bay, where fisherman had literally backed their boats up to the pavement and were selling fish straight off the boats to customers (not many food miles there).

Fishmonger 'Ayvalik styly'
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Ayvalik (apparently) attracts Turkish tourists rather than 'foreigners' like us, so we caused a bit of a buzz in a local restaurant on our first night.  One woman even moved chairs so that she could watch us eat with an unimpeded view.  The local restaurant was 'lokanta' style, which means that the food is already prepared and all you have to do is walk around the different serving areas and point.  Sounds terrible I know (buffet anyone?), but the food is actually really really good and when you can't read a menu is a god-send.

View of Ayvalik from our pansyion
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We set aside a day to visit the town of Bergama where you can visit the ancient ruins of Pergamon (about 300AD).  Bergama is only 60 kms from Ayvalik, but when you take a local bus rather than an organised tour such as we did, and that local bus stops every 2 minutes for customers (including 5 metres from the bus station, and at apparently random points on the motorway), the journey takes 1.5 hours.  Another annoyance is that buses very rarely take you to the centre of town, instead depositing you at a bus station on the edge of town, or on a street corner 'somewhere' in the village from where you have to fend for yourself.

Crumbling rubble chic
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Tired (already) and hungry by the time we got to Bergama we were lucky to run into friendly locals who fed us free 'doughnuts' with cheese and honey.  OK, it wasn't just us, the locals seemed to be feeding the whole village for free and there were mobs of people waiting for their 'doughnuts' (sorry, have forgotten the Turkish name).  Apparently a family will provide this free meal to the village if a wish comes true or if they get lucky in some way.

Fortified with some breakfast and armed with directions from a local of how to get up to Pergamon by foot we wound our way up through the old town of Bergama toward Pergamon.  3 kms later another local took pity on us, picked us up and drove us there.

The theatre at Pergamon
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Pergamon was very impressive.  The location at the top of the mountain overlooking the plains for miles around was stunning.  Unfortunately, some of the more impressive temples have been removed and are now in Berlin (presumably keeping the temples from Troy company), however with the exception of actually giving the temples back to the Turks, the Germans have pumped some money into the site trying to restore some parts to their former splendour.

Best part of all was the theatre which, being built on such a steep hill, is unique in that is it round (instead of the normal oval), narrow and very high with 80 rows of seats.

Dramatic setting of Pergamon (where's Wally)
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Actually, the very best part of all was avoiding the overpriced mini-buses which trawl the 5 km road back in to town which were charging more than our fare from Ayvalik to Bergama.  We went  offroad and simply walked, slid and rock hopped down the side of the site and in to town.  In hindsight, we probably could have gone to Pergamon for free by taking the same route up, but we're not that cash-strapped (yet).

Leaving Ayvalik proved as difficult as all transport in Turkey has.  We missed the bus we were aiming for - not a huge problem as there was another one in an hour and a nice man at the bus station bought us chairs and tea (by intercom from the bus company offices directly to the tea shop down the road - quality!).  After putting our bags on the bus, we settled down to our teas and were not very happy (to put it mildly...there may have been a few swear words shouted - by Simon not me, I'm a lady) to see our bus disappear down the road.  Another nice man at the bus station told us everything was going to be ok and surely enough 20 mins later the bus came back, our bags were still on board, and we jumped on to our next stop - Selcuk.