We arrived in Side later than we had planned due to some buses going less often than we had thought, but feeling positive.  This feeling was somewhat challenged when we carefully followed the map provided by booking.com only to end up staring at an empty field.  We tried calling the hotel. No answer. We asked for directions but misunderstood them and wandered in circles.  Finally after about 40 minutes of wandering in the dark we found our hotel…no-one there! We sat outside and waited for another 20 minutes until the owners showed up…happily since they were feeling apologetic they let us keep our room until 6pm the following day, which was great as it left us a whole day to explore Side!

We hadn’t planned on this but our first stop was a barber for Reuben.  He just needed a simple cut but this led to some highlights:

• How many times have you had a haircut with a cat called Monkey sitting on your lap?
• Apple tea for me while I waited. (None offered to Reubs for some reason).
• The look of terror on Reuben’s face when they literally brought out a cotton ball dipped in meths and set it on fire to burn away his ear and nose hairs. I am kicking myself that I don’t have a photo of this moment!

After this unplanned excitement, we headed into Side, a coastal town.  We had thought we were coming to a little town with a couple of things to see. We were totally not expecting everything we found!

Walking down the main road to the old town, we saw the old fountain, gate and city wall, colonnaded streets, an old hospital, the agora and the amazing theatre.

It was such a beautiful city with so many ruins to explore – we hadn’t realised it would be on such a big scale!

After lunch, we wandered by the ocean to see the temple of Apollo and the temple of Athena before jumping in for a swim on the beach.  We then headed back to catch our overnight bus to Goreme in Cappadocia.