We had a shore excursion booked for today, Ephesus and the Terraced Houses, and when we checked the departure times we were dismayed do see it was an early start 08:45 leaving with and 08:15 meetup in the Royal Court Theatre. So I set the my alarm for 07:00 and Jane ordered room service for 07:00 as well. Just as my alarm went off there was a knock at our door announcing the arrival of the butler with Jane’s croissants. I crawled into the shower before heading to the Queen’s Grill restaurant for breakfast. I was back in the room before too long and we grabbed our stuff to head down to the theatre to book in for the tour. They must have told everyone to come at 08:15 as the area around the Casino was rammed with a highly disorganised snake queuing around the gaming tables.
We were eventually given our number and headed down to the dock to meet up with our tour guide and coach. The tour guide was excellent and fed us non-stop facts about the local area, Turkey in general and the upcoming archaeological site of Ephesus. The journey itself was about 40 minutes from the port when we arrived and disembarked. We were given 10 minutes for a comfort break as there are no facilities on site until the end, so we stopped for a 50 cent pee while the guide went to find her tech guy as we were having some comms issues initially, but a little reprogramming for the receivers and all was good.
The site at Ephesus is huge with an immense amount of things to see and photograph, it’s not preserved as well as Pompeii but there is a lot of it and it took a good hour to walk from the entrance down to the Library where we entered the Terraced Houses, this is a separate part of the site and needs an ticket/fee to enter. This site is much better preserved, with frescoes and mosaics up the ying yang, but be aware, there are a lot of stairs involved and a lot of glass walkways some of which are vertigo inducing. When we finished there we walked through the Library to the Agora and onwards in the footsteps of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra to the tat market before boarding our coach back to Kusadasi. The tour ended with a trip to a carpet weaver where we were given a cup of apple tea and a bit of a hard sell to buy a rug, which was never going to happen. We were too late for lunch aboard the ship so we had a very nice kebab in Kusadasi which was soured by the feeling that we’d been ripped off as it was very expensive.
When we got back to the ship we just went up to the Grills Terrace and lay down on one of those comfy sun loungers to relax and recuperate. I had my book/kindle to read but it kept hitting me on the forhead, so I realised I was losing the battle to stay awake and headed back to the stateroom to rest. We never made the quiz, slackers.
It has been freezing in the stateroom ever since Jane has taken charge of the aircon, so I decided to have a bath instead of a shower. Baths are not something I usually do, as I’m a big old unit at 6’6″ (198cm) and baths tend not to be long enough, ours at home isn’t and the last one I tried on QM2 I had to fold myself up to wash may hair, but this one in the Q3 stateroom looks quite large. Well, it certainly is, I can stretch my legs out fully and wash my hair just by bending my knees. Unfortunately, my bath was over far too soon as Jane decided that she wanted one and kicked me out.
Dinner was was very nice, I’d chosen fully from the main menu tonight, warm chicken livers, red prawn curry (extra spicy) and tonka bean creme brulee – yum!