Mr and Mrs Bumble visit the Ephesus Ruins

Building rubble waiting around to be catalogued or rebuilt.
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We arrived at about midnight to Selcuk and a tout at the bus station offered a hotel at a decent price. And it included a shuttle service. So we got on and checked in to the hotel, a short 5 minute drive from the station. We fell asleep in a moment, although we found it strange that the bed did not rock at all.

In the morning we were going to check out and enquire about any shuttle buses to the Ephesus ruins outside of town. Right at that moment the shuttle was leaving, so we dropped our bags with the front desk clerk and jumped in with a bunch of Koreans. As the bus sped off we laughed and commented on how we did not even know the name of the hotel, and how it was going to be difficult to find it and retrieve our bags before we caught that night’s bus. Why didn’t we ask the driver or the Koreans what the name of the hotel was? I don’t know, maybe we believed it close enough to the bus station to be easy to find. Ha ha, we shouldn’t consider ourselves experienced travelers!

An angel flying on the Ephesus ruins.
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I’m getting ahead of the story, we were driving to the ruins, aware but uncaring about the potential headache we faced that evening. The ruins were quite spectacular. They had made very handy toilets with a running water system to keep them clean. Lots of good mosaics and nearly complete buildings. You can really scramble all over them, except for those roped off because they are still undergoing excavation. The heat was high that day and when we got to the Sarcophagi at the end, I wanted to crawl inside and let the stone (they are carved out of a single entire block of stone) cool me off. Instead we took a bus back to town and debated in which direction the hotel was.

A long mosaic walkway.
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We asked at the tourist office if they knew of a hotel about a 5 minutes drive away that began with an M or an N. No, they suggested it might be an unregistered hotel. So we went to dinner and thought we might look a little on the way down some of the alleys and streets. Dinner was delicious, as it always was in Turkey. We ate mezes, the equivalent of tapas. Such fresh ingredients, prepared simply and in good complement of each other. Yum. We also bumped into the French Canadians on the street. I wanted to ask if anything had gone missing from their bags, but my pride was not so strong that I had to prove my innocence.

Ancient toilets: with running water!
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With about an hour and half left till the bus left, our minds turned again to the questions of where our hotel was and what was it’s name? There followed a brief period of 3 Stooges humour as we ran up some streets and then ran down the cross streets. We were quite close in our search, but we did not go far enough. We found a hotel where the door man knew of the tout that picked us up the night before. He phoned him after realizing that we did not want get a room for the night in his hotel, and quite baffled at the thought of our predicament. The tout told us the name of the hotel and the doorman pointed us in the right direction. How silly we felt. But we caught the bus on time and told ourselves that we would never reveal this idiotic episode to any one.