Thursday, June 5, 2008

May 21, 2008: Bafa Lake, Turkey

Bafa Lake is an interesting mix of ruins, cows, excellent bouldering, and very nice locals (the pension owner let us camp for free).

Hot Rock style camping. You can just make out the orange tent dome on the roof next to the electricity pole on the far right:
There was also an extraordinary amount of insect life, including some creepy spiders that looked like fat black jellybeans teetering along on stilt legs. They had an unhealthy fascination with my tent and I woke one morning to see 12 of them doing their best to join me in my sleeping bag as they crawled over the mesh searching for a way in. At first I thought they weren't too bad -- mostly because they are pretty slow moving. Then I discovered that they feasted on each other when I saw one actually dragging another one across the road. At first I hoped it was some type of rescue mission, but closer inspection revealed that spider 1 was indeed sucking the fluids out of spider 2 while moving. ugh. Talk about eating on the go. Spider cannibalism is one step removed from eating human flesh, really (or at least in my mind), and it became clear that they were vicious, man-eating arachnids. They were next to impossible to avoid and I found myself constantly staring at the ground as I attempted to gingerly step around them.

Spiders were completely inescapable at Bafa Lake. Several people almost walked into this lovely specimen, which was about the size of my hand. Not my palm, my entire hand. There was not a chance in Hell that I was going to put my hand next to that behemoth to give a sense of scale. You'll just have to take my word for it. There was another, marginally smaller version of the same species that made for some cool pics on this bouldering problem.

One of the best boulderers in Turkey, Goktug Aydemir (AKA "Curly" because none of us could pronounce his name) puts on a clinic:I don't look nearly as cool on the same problem...:
Which just so happened to be called "Yellow Scorpions." So named because the fellow who found the problem noticed he had a yellow scorpion on his foot while he was climbing. If it's not one thing, it's another around these parts.

Thankfully, we were only in Bafa Lake for a day and a half so I didn't have to deal with the creepy-crawlies for too long. Hannah, though, had to deal with more than a few mosquito bites for awhile.

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