Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 14th of March and I have the great pleasure to be overlooking the harbour at Bodrum. You can hear there's a main road down there about six lanes altogether a bit of a bypass for

Bodrum and a little bit noisy and a bit annoying but I am looking out over a serrated horizon

looking basically west and I think I can even see part of the Greek island of Coz which is very

close to here and today I want to talk about the exploration I have made around Bodrum and the

very joyful things I have found here I've been to Bodrum before but I haven't sort of stayed for days on end

and previously I hadn't properly explored what's available and of great interest. So first thing

about Bodrum is that yeah it's a lovely resort. The beaches tend not to be too close to the town itself. There is a lovely

harbour for wandering around, but it's on its own peninsula, which is pretty much the far

southwestern extreme of Anatolian Turkey. So really quite exotic, crumpled landscape draped with woodland. And let's start

in the city centre because there is a castle. But it's not just any old castle of the sort that

you would expect to find dotted around the Mediterranean. Yes, it is a Crusader's castle put up, I think, in the 15th century

and ultimately taken over by the Ottomans when they took over this part of the world,

understandably partly ruined, and that's a great shame, but what's inside it is amazing.

The oldest, they claim, shipwreck in the world they have got all

the finds from a ship that went down in the 12th century bc right at the end of the bronze age and

on display in what's called a museum of underwater archaeology, although don't get it

wrong, a number of people think that it's actually going to be underwater, it's not, it's in a room

in the castle, you can see these amphora, these great pottery jars which were there,

you can see ingots of copper and of tin and those in the proportions

about nine or ten tons of copper and a ton or so of tin in the proportions that you need to make

bronze an alloy which really helped to start proper technology and this ship was sailing off the

coast at cache slightly east from here it sank to the bottom about 50 metres down it was found by

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