All tours must have 1-day prior reservation. We intended to go for Adventure tour but could not confirm the number of people going from our contingent because some of our players slept early on Day 6. We try our luck to see whether can we join the tour by making reservation on Day 7 itself but no luck since there are too many people made last minute reservation from Limra hotel. Again, Limra Hotel guests have the advantage over other hotels.
However, this is a blessing in disguise because we manage to find the same package (minus the lunch) for €16 and €13 for adult and child below 11 y.o respectively in one of many travel agencies near the hotel. It is much cheaper than €28 organised by 2007 WYCC travel agency. We did not need the lunch anyway since the hotel already provide us with the 3 meals on the free day.
Also, our tour agent said that it is better to visit the underground fire flame around 5 to 6pm since the day start to get dark around 5pm. So, we began our journey at 3pm. Our first stop was the Phaselis. Phaselis was an important mediterranean trading city as far backed in 7th Century BC. It was an important port until the pirates attacked this place in the 7th Century A.D. Later, it enjoy a brisk revival but this place was abandoned completely in the early 13th Century. We spent 50 minutes snapping lots of photos.
Our next stop was Chimera (also known as Chimeara or the "burning mountain" to the locals) in Cirali village. In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a monster, depicted as an animal with the head of a lion, the body of a she-goat, and the tail of a dragon (sometimes it has multiple heads).
In a more scientific explaination, Chimeara is a “yanartaşi” (a rock that burns eternally) which means a water-rock interaction in which serpentine, magnetite and methane are produced. Olivine, a magnesium / iron bearing silicate reacts with water and CO2 at low temperatures to serpentine and a carbonate. In this process methane is released. So, that is how the fire starts.
Some pictures that we took on free day as below:
The contingent posing with our national flag
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Zhuo Ren is treating Rifqah the way he treats her 5 y.o. sister by offering piggy-back ride. Rifqah loves it very much.
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The two sibling in action, Rifqah and Syakir.
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This is what I called the real adventure trip. Unlike other travel agency, the one we signed up provide many different adventure packages.
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Our first stop - Phaselis. Nine of us (included the camera man, me of course) join this tour. Five others had opted to stay in hotel for relaxation and prepare for the Day 8 opponent.
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Little Rifqah posing for a shot.
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This is how Turkey looks like. We continue our journey to Chimeara.
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We took a rest after climbing 300m up the hill, the whole journey is 700m to reach the top where the burning flame locates. We were told to walk for 800m by our travel agency but were not told that we need to climb steep stairway up the hill.
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Finally, we reached the top after 30 minutes of hill climbing. The experience of watching the burning flames come out underneath the rock alone is worth the price we paid for this trip and the energy spent in climbing the hill.
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P/S: I can only upload these few pictures because every picture upload (<400KB) is 5 minutes long. This is how GREAT the connection speed @ Press Centre, Tournament Hall which equip with 54Mbps connectivity. Theoretically, each photo should take few seconds only to upload but waiting for 5 minutes for 1 photo is too much.
