South Pacific and Santa Claus

So yesterday we walked all day through the rain.  The scenery was like this:

So what I'm saying is we were in Indonesia.  Did you know they speak Turkish in Indonesia?  We passed a lot of these:

They smell pretty good, and I was wise to premedicate with claritin.  At last, we ended up here:

Which is a treehouse in Olympos where we had tea, coffee, and gin and tonics.  It was exhausting.

Today, we went to some SURPRISING places.

First, we drove 2 hours and went to the church of St. Nicholas.  Yes, THE St. Nicholas.  The 2nd century bishop from Lycia who became well-known for delivering gifts of dried apricots to poor children.  THE St. Nicholas who was subsequently adopted as the patron saint of children, fisherman, and, apparently, the city of New York (I just know what they tell me).  THE St. Nicholas whose legend was subsequently spread via Genghis Khan's hordes to Hungary and Finland, where his legend grew and acquired some reindeer.  Truly, the original celebrity saint.  His church was built over an older shrine in mid Byzantine times, so this isn't an original early Christian monument, just only a bit more than a thousand years old.  Anyhow, in the church there are domes with frescoes:

A tunnel for elves:

And, of course, Byzantine mosaics for you to walk on:

After St. Nicholas, we went to an even more surprising thing:  A city that sunk in the ocean, but is still poking out just a little.  This is in Kekova, and you have to take a boat to see it.  Apparently, during an earthquake, or some other mighty geologic catastrophe, this whole city, which held a few thousand people, sunk enough that the coastal hill it was on became an island, and most of the city ended up underwater.  The parts above water became goat enclosures.  It is really quite remarkable.  Here is a place where you can clearly see the walls of a very large building a few feet below the surface.  The water is quite clear.

From here we went on a fine hike, with minimal getting lost, through some coastal pastureland.  Pictures:

Second to lastly, we went to the ruins of Myra, which was a large Lycian capitol.  The Lycians, as I may have mentioned and forgotten, are quite famous for carving great tombs of limestone for their ancestors right inside their cities, and often right into the ground, hill, or cliff their cities are built on.  Myra is the finest such example, and they also had a very large Greek-style theater that is the largest in Turkey, and in the best condition:

Lastly, for this brief and picture-heavy update, the people who owned a cafe let Katy hold their puppy: