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Published: November 3rd 2013
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Cirali
The home of Olympus and the eternal flame Turkey, my new love!!! It's been so long since my last blog that I'm going to cram 5 weeks into this one. After this blog, there will only be one final entry to go. Oh dear, so sad!
Turkey is a place where;
• Smoking is almost more popular then breathing
• Old men hangout in coffeehouses, play board games and drink tea, not coffee.
• Everything is so old that cities have been built on cities of past civilisations, and
• Money can buy you anything, everything is negotiable.
I really love Turkey!
My Turkey experience started with a whirling tour which was followed by a 500km trek called the Lycian Way and finished with a week in the old city in Antalya.
WHIRLING TURKEY - THE TOUR First, I must say, I hate tours. While tours are great for getting you to all the touristy highlights, they lack authentic experiences. You are a mere pleb, one of the thousand of other tourists on that same day doing the same thing. And it's this reason I find things to be a little, shall we say 'fake' or 'exaggerated'. It also means people
Start of the trek
Serdar, Me, Ebru, Adil aren't as friendly because they have already dealt with hundreds of the same tourists that day and are out of energy and patience by the time you show up.
The good thing about our tour was that even though it was still high season, our group consisted of only 4 people which included my sister Amanda, a Kiwi accountant Kelly who was probably a few years younger than me and a 50 year old British cop who was re-living his youth and I found it funny that he read comic books.
On the tour we
• Discovered all things wonderful about Istanbul including the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia, the Grand Bizzare and kebabs.
• Immersed ourselves in the history and beauty on the shores of Gallipoli
• Explored the site of ancient Troy.
• Marvelled in the beauty of the Ephesus ruins, the greatest Greco-Roman site in the world where Anthony and Cleopatra lived as well as the Virgin Mary.
• Walked through the natural pools in Pamukkle.
• Were hypnotised by the tranquility of the Whirling Dervishes in Konya
• Visited the erie under ground city and marvelled at the ant hill like landscape in a hot air
balloon.
While all those things were wonderful, it's really just not my style of travelling. Trekking is more my thing, so that's what I did next.
LYCIAN WAY - THE TREK The Lycian Way, Turkey's first longest walking route, stretches over 500kms along the south coast between the cities of Fethiye and Antalya. You know I love my trekking and I'd been looking forward to this trek the most. I found my trekking partners online, again absolute strangers, though this time no one had any trekking experience
Ebru was born and raised in Turkey but has spent the last 15 years in America where she is a professor in Finance. She recently quit her job to travel the world, while she has no trekking experience, she has camped before and has been training using her gear and recently did some trekking in Crete in Greece.
Adil, from India, works in the fashion industry designing men's clothing. He had no trekking or camping experience and all new gear. He'd done plenty of research on the trek and was very enthusiastic to begin.
Serdar, from Turkey, joined our
Patara
View from above over the ruins to the beach trekking group only 2 weeks before we started. His time was limited so would only trek with us for the first 2 weeks. An engineer in the automotive industry, he had no camping or trekking experience and like Adil, all his gear was fresh from the store.
We made an interesting mix which was half the fun. Between us, we had 2 people who could speak Turkish, 1 person with trekking experience and 4 people who were eager to see what the Lycian Way was all about
Being 2 girls and 2 boys it was natural that the girls shared a room and the boys shared a room. To all the locals we met along the way they assumed we were couples. Naturally they matched Ebru and Serdar as they were both Turkish, which left Adil and I, and that meant, of course, that I was Indian. Funny!
There was kind of a 5th trekking partner, Kate, our trekking guide book (This was the name of the lady who wrote guide we carried), she contributed mostly to us getting lost!! Every day without fail, we'd get lost at some point. Kate, in all her words of wisdom,
often failed to leave a way mark or appropriate notes at major junctions which would leave us taking a gamble on the right way to go. Getting lost just became part of the experience.
After the first week the boys pulled out, It was to physicaly demanding for Adil and I think he was home sick. Serdar decided he'd spend more time at the beach relaxing, which I don't blame him as the beaches were beautiful. Ebru and I continued on until we reached the finish. In the end we skipped some sections of the trek to make the most of the time we had, so we never walked the whole 500km, maybe 2/3's.
The trek was amazing, the coast is spectacular, mountains rise from the sea and there are many hidden places to swim in the sparkling blue sea. The track ranged from goat paths to tractor tracks which ascended or descended for hours over rocky rough terrain. But each day would offer the reward of new views along the pristine coast. There were plenty of challenges and special moments and i really enjoyed the friendly culture of small rural villages.
Some of my
favourite moments included;
• Our night in a tiny village called Bel where we stayed with a family who made us feel very welcome and cooked us yummy food from their garden.
• Our first night camping on the trip, or the boys first night camping ever. Adil was so scared to walk out in the dark that when I asked him to move the rubbish bags away from our tents (so that no animals wouldn't annoy us) he got up, took 2 steps from our fire, whirled the bag around with his arm until it was spinning fast, then released the bag so it would shoot off into the distance. It still makes me giggle thinking about it.
• Visiting the Greek island Mais for a day. (While this was never planned a bad case of food poisoning stopped Ebru and I from walking, but it never stops us from still having fun )
• Seeing the ruins at Myra ( same place Saint Nicholas was born ) and the ruins at Olympus.
• Camping on the beach and watching the sunrise the next morning.
• Taking a boat ride to see the sunken city.
• Visiting the eternal flame on the night of
a full moon with an electrical storm taking place in the distance. And
• The final evening of the trek, sharing a bottle of red with Ebru and reminiscing on our wonderful trip!!
It was truly a wonderful trek that I would highly recommended to experienced Trekkers!!
One final blog to go! Which will tell my story of my final week in Antalya in Turkey before I return home!
Get excited for it, it's almost ready!
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Jo Roberts
Got it in One!
It really is the most amazing country, if you are still in the Antayla region see if you can get to Perge. Well worth a trip and strangely ignored by most tour companies.