After tasting a little Turkish Delight (the national treasure -- candy similar to, but much better than, gummy bears) at the Istanbul airport, we flew directly to Bodrum on the Southern Aegean coast. While it is a major tourist trap (bars and clubs line the beaches) there are also two impressive sites that we visited on our first day in Turkey. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus is one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, but there isn’t much left here except strewn-about marble and a nice display about its history. Most of the materials were taken to build a beautiful Castle in the 15th century when a group of Crusading knights fled Jerusalem and set up shop here and on the nearby Greek island of Rhodes for more than 200 years.
