Pamukkale: Economics, Adventures, and Lots of Russians

We got on the highway and headed inland, passing through lots of towns with strange names like Bukharkent and Köşk. In Turkey, the smaller towns are all built around main roads, with extremely inefficient traffic lights at all major intersections. This makes for rather frustrating driving, having to stop and continue nearly every time we entered a town. We made a series of hair-raising 180-degree turns to leave the main road and drove down some very pretty farm roads in the Menderes River valley until we reached the town of Pamukkale, where we were spending the night.

We had dinner at a restaurant which did not live up to the stellar reviews it had on Google Maps, though it did have the most impressive collection of squeeze-bottle sauces I have ever seen. Pamukkale is a fairly popular backpacker destination, but it did not have any decent hostels, so we checked in to Hotel Mustafa, charging $18 a night. The receptionist, who for some reason was Russian, was surprised to see our Israeli passports, and said we were the first Israelis she had seen at the hotel in 3 years of working there. I wonder whether the hotel’s name has anything to do with that.

We sat on the hotel’s terrace and watched the sun set, the sounds of trumpets, drums, and chanting in Turkish just out of sight (I could only make out the words “Allahu Akbar”. It was probably an event marketed to tourists as a “Turkish night,” but we couldn’t find it. We were in need of some ice cream and headed to the corner shop, braving gale-force winds to get there.

Roman Ruin Saturation

Pamukkale is famous for terrace-shaped travertine formations caused by mineral deposits from spring water flowing down the hillside towards the river. The Greek and later Roman city of Hierapolis was built on the springs, and the terraces were largely ignored. In the mid-20th century, spa hotels were built on the ruins of Hierapolis, and both the ruins and the terraces were nearly ruined. In 1988, the city and terraces were declared a World Heritage Site, and both are now much better protected.

When we had arrived the previous afternoon, we saw enormous crowds on the slopes above the terraces, and vowed to come as early as we could to beat the crowds. We showed up at the gate at 7:58, and learned that they opened at 8:00, meaning that we were the first people through the gate. We had to take our shoes off, and walked up the hill through the warm water over the very soft calcium carbonate surface. The pools and terraces were beautiful, and the daytime weather was actually comfortable for the first time in memory, but the most impressive ones were dried up in the heat and off-limits for walking and the lighting was terrible for taking pictures. This didn’t prevent several women who looked like wannabe Instagram influencers from posing in the pools for endless photo shoots, identically dressed in the classic influencer outfit of white bikinis, white sarongs, and wide-brimmed hats.

We made it to the top and toured the ruins of Hierapolis. We basically had the place to ourselves, and it was quite the place to explore. The city gates, baths, and several market buildings were all in remarkably good shape, as was a system of fresh water canals crisscrossing the city. Again, there were piles of archaeological artifacts simply strewn about everywhere we looked, suggesting promising reconstruction in the future. The sun was starting to beat down on us at this point and we were very desensitized by the other sites we had seen, so we didn’t even bother to see the large theater up on the hill before heading down on the road, a much longer way than the path with the pools. The site was starting to fill up with tourists, nearly all of whom seemed to be Russian, with tour buses (including at least one in Intourist livery!) arriving by the minute to the upper gate to unload new groups.

Some Help from Sunk Costs

Almost on a whim, we had made a reservation to go paragliding later in the morning. The pilot had told us to come to a certain address at the edge of town at 10, and we waited for him there. At 10:30, he still hadn’t showed up, and we called to ask where he was. He told us to look up and find the red paraglider, which seemed awfully far away. We had stopped for snacks earlier, and a man in a Pornhub t-shirt had asked us if we wanted to go paragliding (the whole interaction was made even stranger by multiple shopkeepers wishing us “auf Wiedersehen”). We drove back to him and told him we would book it with him if our man didn’t show up ASAP. Just as I was filling in the registration form, the pilot called and said he was at the spot.

The previous group of paragliders came in to land, the equipment was folded, and we piled into a van back up the mountain to the launch site. The van had Chinese writing on it, and the pilot said that most of their customers before the pandemic had been Chinese tourists. His name was Tayfur, which I had initially misheard as the rather more pretentious Typhoon. I had never been paragliding before, and the whole process was very impressive in how simple it was. We strapped into harnesses with emergency parachutes, the sails were unfolded on a hillside, and let into the breeze where they puffed up with air. When the wind picked up a little, the pilot and I ran down the hill with the sail behind us until we had generated enough lift to simply rise up into the air. No cliffs, no engine, no frills (also, no insurance waivers or documents at all).

The sensation of unpowered flight was amazing, and the pilot was very talented at catching thermals. Within a few minutes, we were already several hundred meters above the takeoff point with a panoramic view of Pamukkale, Hierapolis, and the whole Menderes River valley below us. From the air, the plan of the Roman city was much more clearly visible, the piles of stones strewn about in a clear grid shape. Despite the swelling crowds, the pools also looked amazing from above, until the pilot launched into some crazy aerobatic maneuvers to lose altitude above the site. I let out an involuntary “sheesh”, and we straightened out to smoothly land at the same site. No markings, no lights, just a couple mats of grass to avoid bruised knees.

The pilot had given me a GoPro to hold during the flight, and I couldn’t take any pictures of my own for fear of dropping my phone out of the sky. After landing, the price of the photos was suddenly revealed to be $40, nearly as much as the flight itself. I flat-out refused, and said the most I would pay for each batch of photos was 100 TL ($11.5), to make the price of the whole deal 500 TL ($58) per person. The company manager scoffed and tried to haggle, but I wouldn’t budge, knowing that I had all the power since the photos were already taken.

I had to go get money from the ATM to pay for the flight, so Yotam stayed at the landing site as collateral and I walked up the road towards the town center. Mid-way there, a motorbike pulled up and the helmet less rider nodded at me. “You go to ATM? Pilot my friend. Come.” I hopped on, and we rode the several hundred meters to the ATM, where I withdrew precisely 1,000 liras. The rider was waiting for me and dropped me back at the field, where Yotam and the manager were sitting under a tree with a third man wearing a ponytail while an older woman made gözleme on a metal stove nearby. It was like a scene from a prejudiced movie, and it was only going to get worse.

The manager offered me a bottle of water, and we resumed negotiations. He started, showing me different pictures and videos taken on both our flights. I nodded my approval, and he offered a “final price” of 150 TL each. Ponytail shook his head and said he had never heard such a low price before. I told him my price was 100 TL and I wouldn’t budge.

I peeled off eight 100 notes and handed them to him as payment for the flight, holding two in my hand. I then put on my best serious face, and Ponytail began a simultaneous translation in Turkish of everything I was saying for the benefit of the others. “Look, I study economics, so let me explain this in economic terms. The photos already exist, so the way I see it is that you have two options - you either delete the photos and get yok (nothing), or I pay you 200 lira and you still delete the photos, but with 200 liras more. Either way, I will leave and you will delete the photos.” I pulled out the notes and held them out for effect, hoping that cash would trump pride. “Your choice.” He relented, and I was ecstatic at having beat a Turkish salesman at his own game, knowing the photos were a sunk cost for him, and he would sell them to me at any price that didn’t bruise his pride. Thank you, Prof. Berry, for teaching me the concept of sunk costs so well (who said economics doesn’t hold up in the real world?).

That smile came back later

We sat and spoke to the two men, who wanted to hear about life in America, which they called “dream land”. They asked me how much a basic American salary was, and were very impressed when I said almost $2,000, but Ponytail physically recoiled when I told them that cigarettes were 5 times as expensive in the US, and life in Turkey was much cheaper. “But where are better girls?” I laughed and said goodbye. As we walked away, Ponytail called out behind us: “say hello to Jerusalem for me!” I said I would. “Look - yani, bi’ruh bi’dam...” I completed the sentence: “tahrir Falastin!” (As far as I know, this roughly translates to “with our souls and our blood, we will free Palestine”) He almost rolled over with laughter. It was a fitting end to the most absurd interaction of the trip.

The impromptu gözleme operation behind the negotiations table