A restorative Hot Springs visit in the mountains

Tomorrow, were doing something we've never done in our travels. We're taking a tour. Or rather, we're hiring a van and driver to take us on a 200 kilometer tour of some outlying areas. When Keelin--savvy negotiator she is balked at the price, our friendly local scooter renter (who we also spent the night with watching the Turkey v Germany match) offered to take us at nine o'clock tonight to a hot springs. Of course we jumped at the chance. If you've read All This Is That long, you know I am a hot water aficionado and this would be an awesome chance to soak in the geothermal waters of Turkey. Of course there are hot springs here--there have to be if you have seen the utter devastation the three volcanoes wrought as they exploded and created the fantastic tufa towers of the Goreme.






The springs were about 25 Km. and a somewhat harrowing van ride away. We passed dozens of slow moving trucks crawling up the mountain pass, and finally hit a reasonably smooth dirt and gravel road. When we arrived the place looked closed. It was. But they gladly opened it for us (opening it consisted largely of taking some Lira from us). The facility was extremely rustic in the best sense of the word.

The hot springs were piped into an Olympic sized pool, and the water was perfect, although cooler than I keep my my own backyard hot springs. It was about 100 degrees. At one end a chute funneled in water at about 130 degrees. Naturally I spent most of my time at that end of the pool. We got them to turn off the lights and we could see billions of stars--even more than you see in the heart of Montana. With zero light pollution, dark skies rule the day. You could see the stars so clearly that in spots they looked like a picture of the Milky Way, with dense star formations that almost looked like fog or clouds. We could also see satellites and shooting stars and more constellations than I have ever seen in my life. We soaked, talked, star gazed and swam for about an hour and a half.

The water was perfect, and unlike most hot springs, there was almost no sulphur smell at all. The highly mineralized (I'm pretty dubious this is actually a word) water felt great on the skin, and extremely soothing on our weary limbs after another day of tromping up and down hills in the mid-day sun.
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