We stopped on the way to the mountains at a small hidden beach cove which had a nice cave that you could swim to.
Then it was back on the bus, and we made our way into the mountains of Turkey on the southern coast. This drive turned out to be fairly scary as we went along the cliffs I had been a little worried since I left for the bus trip since I had heard of many bus crashes in Turkey and the day before I left I read of a fatal crash in the east where 22 people lost their lives. After starting off in Turkey on the bus, I was actually anticipating some sort of crash when you notice the speeds at which the buses and cars travel and the lack of safety measures on the roads.
There are no guardrails along the cliffs in the mountains, so often times you are looking straight down into oblivion. I remember thinking that this is the absolutely worse place we could have a crash, but we did just that.
We had climbed the last mountain before Olympus and were heading down steep switchbacks, and the driver started going very fast. We were stuck behind a caravan of 4 jeeps in a row, and the driver of our bus was growing impatient because he wanted to go faster. He sped up, passing all four jeeps in a row, also blindly passing them around a corner. I remember taking notice of this idiotic move, but I saw that a lot of the others either hadn't noticed or just thought it was par for the course of a Turkish driver.
Passing the jeeps, I think he wanted to make sure they wouldn't pass him again, so he sped up. He was going way too fast down the hill, and I grabbed onto the seat in front of me (there are no seatbelts on turkish buses).
Then ahead I saw a very steep curve. It was 180 degrees. I also saw we weren't slowing down near enough. We were going way to fast for the curve and only made it about halfway through it. I saw it happen as we started to turn hard and he slammed the brakes. Fortunately he didn't jerk the wheel, or we would have rolled it. We slammed HARD into the embankment and I hit my face on the plastic part of the seat in front of me. One girl, Sarah, flew from her seat behind me, to the floor below my seat. I reached down to grab her and saw she was bleeding very badly about her face. She had a cut above her nose and it looked like was bleeding out of her nose and mouth. We grabbed her and started pulling her off the bus, not knowing how close we were to the edge of the cliff. The driver started madly trying to back the stuck bus out of the embankment and we screamed at him to stop so we could get off. The bus was completely stuck anyways.
In the aftermath of the crash we saw that no one was badly injured, just a lot of cuts and bruises. People were very shaken though, including myself. It was a good crew to get in a crash with as we had both a doctor and a nurse in our group and on board. t turned out Sarah was okay, but the blood made it look much worse than it actually was. Sarah is a real sweetheart and kind of the little sister of the group, so to see her like that really got to me.
I walked up to the tour guide and the driver and told him pointing at the driver that we weren't going anywhere else with that a-hole. I was full of adrenaline and so pissed that the driver was so unconscionable to put other lives at stake. He kind of shrugged as if to say, "that's turkey, what can you do?", but we did fortunately get a new driver.
Looking down the cliff where we could have gone, we saw they were building a mosque a few hundred feet below. This was a strange sight after just being in a crash like we were.
We were fortunately only 15 minutes from Olympus when we crashed, so a couple of vans came to pick us up and take us to the place we were staying called "Kadir's Treehouses", a pretty cool little resort. We were hardly in a mood to enjoy it, as we all just kind of laid around that night, still in shock.
It was also pretty freaky when we heard that the embankment that we hit had just been put up a month prior when a truck had gone off the ledge.
Having a bus crash in Turkey was very strange for me, since it was having my fears realized, but was just glad it wasn't a lot worse than it was.