Yesterday morning, all the charter boats left Bozburun, so we pretty much had the entire place to ourselves. We had visited Bozburun purely by chance and ended up liking it so much that we stayed a second night.

I read in one of the guidebooks yesterday that Bill Gates had visited here a couple times and that his favorite place to eat was the Möwe Bar. We figured that if it was good enough for him, it was probably good enough for us, so we went searching for it and found it right smack dab in the middle of the public square, overlooking the harbor.

Now, before you start thinking, “Wow, that Bozburun must be an expensive, jet-set place,” let me tell you that it’s not; in fact, our room here was only 60 Lira ($33) per night, the least expensive of our entire trip! No, the rich and famous would not come here for the hip and exclusive restaurants and clubs – there aren’t any. They would come here for the privacy and relative anonymity this place would afford them because of the seclusion that results from Bozburun being so inaccessible.

Here’s our view of the harbor from our dinner table at Möwe. Besides one other table, this old woman and that sleeping dog, we were the only ones out last night.

This morning, we left mid-morning for a five-hour drive inland to see the travertine pools at Pamukkale. Our drove took us up numerous switchbacks to the top of the mountains that drop straight into the sea near Marmaris.

Finally, at around 4,500 feet, we reached the mountain pass. About an hour inland, I pulled over to take a couple pictures of wild Turkey.

The temperature was about 15° cooler up here in the mountains and the smell of the pines was exhilarating.

After a while, we dropped down about 1,000 feet and continued across the plateau. The colors were amazingly vivid.

The highways in Turkey are quite good and the government is making a tremendous investment in them. Most of the roads we traveled between cities were four-lane, divided highways, similar to our Interstate Highways.

Outside of town, the highways were always uncrowded, but driving in the cities is a challenging experience since lanes are not usually marked, and when they are, everybody ignores the markings anyway and drives where they want. It seemed like every time we came to a stoplight, what seemed to be two lanes suddenly turned into four or five and it was like the start of the Daytona 500 when the light turned green.

But, amazingly, we’ve only seen one minor fender-bender the entire time we’ve been here. Allah be praised.