Oh... Olympos...

Go to Olympos, go to Olympos... stay in the tree houses, you'll love it. This was the consistent answer I got when asking about where to take my friend and her daughter when they came to Turkey to visit. People talked to me as if Olympos would be the summer mecca of beach, ruins and awesome location. My friend (from Canada) heard the same from those she spoke to that had been to Turkey before. So we made sure to put it on our list and booked into the recommended tree house pension (hostel) and made our way there. As we drove down the incredibly windy road, my friend began to hum the song from Deliverance... you know, the one with the banjo. We kept driving and it didn't get much better. The road was narrow and had loads of pensions on either side. We found ours near the bottom, parked and then checked in. Thankfully we had booked into a bungalow (they had their own bathrooms and air conditioning, which in 45 degree heat was a must), although 3 single beds in a room big enough for just one double bed was a tight squeeze. Then we went to look at the ruins and the beach (we were eager to cool down in the beautiful Mediterranean sea and to lay out and relax on what we thought would be a sandy beach). So off we went, down the dirt road to the area with the ruins and the beach. We paid for our entrance (it's a protected historical area so you have to pay a small fee to get in), walked through the ruins which were super cool and onto a VERY rocky beach. It wasn't like the pictures but we tried to make the best of it and just enjoy our time out there. After a couple of hours, we were done with rocks being imbedded in our skin and wandered back to our room. Our pension offered half board, so you got breakfast and dinner, which was brilliant. The food there was excellent and they had oodles of back gammon games to play while you killed time, which was pretty much what we did all the time. There was no pool or anything else to do there. One day we took a short drive down to a neighbouring village (Andrasan) just to see what it was like and it was GORGEOUS! They had beautiful boutique hotels (that were CHEAPER than our HOSTEL) that had pools and were across the street from a beautiful, sandy beach. Much more my style!
Olympos is beautiful but it's more for the backpackers and backpacker, I am NOT. When we were leaving I had a conversation with one of the workers:
Him: Leaving? Already?
Me: Yes, we've been here for 3 days, time to get to the next location
Him: Ah... will you come back again?
Me: Probably not (this was at 6:15 am because we'd been up since about 4 am with roosters crowing)
Him: what?! why?
Me: well... this is kind of a backpacker kind of place (he nods) and I'm kind of a resort kind of girl.
We both laughed. So if you are looking for a GREAT backpacker experience with lots of late teen and early twenty-somethings that party late and roosters that start at 4 am, then go to Olympos... but if you are a little more like me, then head to Andrasan but go to Olympos for a day to see the gorgeous ruins.