We left Demre at the crack of dawn knowing it was going to be a long day, it started with a 14km, 2 hour climb. Nice to encounter at 6:30am in the cool.
Up, up and up!
After that we spent the day going up and down over the mountains. The mountains are rugged looking semi alpine with low shrubs and ice cracked rocks. It looked like a land that has seen humanity wear it down over the eons, with shallow topsoil and hard living among extremes of temperatures.
It was darn hard work but very beautiful. The frequent encounters with shepherds and their goats, the sound of goat bells and bird song, frequent ruins and tombs, old people and nature in its finest, made it a wonderful if incredibly tiring mountain ride. After 50km of hard riding we dropped down into Kas.
Kas is a tourist town. Its the sort of place where you could remove the turks and replace with any nationality and it would still be the same. Its made for tourists as an island of westernism in a land of the Near East.
Sorry but we didn"t take any photo's I am sure that there are heaps of tourists pics on the net from it.
Frequently we find these oasis’s of western ideals on the coast. People stay there, often off yachts, and comment about what a wonderful place Turkey is. They haven’t even visited Turkey, they are still in a western outpost.
Just the sort of model villages that Mao and Stalin made to impress their international visitors. Sure they are nice, but they are not Turkish. They are there for the tourist dollar, and now for foreign investment, homes for sale in English give evidence of the huge investment by the British in particular in this part of Turkey.
The town we arrived in a few days later, Fethiye, is a case in point. To get into the city you drive through the typical dusty roads of Turkey past semi derelict buildings, goats, chickens and motor scooters. A chaos of vehicles and people, with shopkeepers outside of small densely stocked shops, talking, drinking tea, smoking.
Then like changing a scene in a movie cobbled streets appear, the dust magically disappears, the shops become more classier, the people better dressed, and in the blink of an eye you are in a western enclave of cool streets, shade trees, and stereotypical shopping areas. Here is 'the bazaar', here are 'the ethnic shops' (accepting visa, bankcard and euros), here are ethic foods (at high prices and altered for the western palette).
Anyway after Kas we cycled another 40 km along the coast the strikingly beautiful agean sea on our left and the barren scrub filled rock faces on the right.
That day we did over 90km of the hardest ride I have ever done.
We ended up in Patara a beautiful little throwback to the hippie 60's with dirt streets and small shops.
Roman ruins cohabited with the farmers and their animals as they had for centuries before. This was the birth place of St Nicolas and mentioned in the bible being visited by Paul.
Patara is the site of a famous Lycian city, the whole place is a giant archeological site, as a result they can't build any more there and nothing can be changed about the town. We camped on the lawn of an elderly couple who looked after us as if we were their kids.
From there we did another 80km to Fethiye (mentioned above) in a day we hardly recalled afterwards, drizzly and boring, we were still sore from the previous day and getting saddle sores as well, it was one of those long hard days that just left with exhaustion. We needed a break.
We got one. Today we did 40km to Gocek, another nice western yacht enclave, then contemplating the 350 meter climb in 30 Degree Celsius heat we thought "Sod it, lets take the bus".
Ok we cheated, but we are so lucky we did, they are in the process of finishing a tunnel through the mountain, as a result the road is terrible. It would have been murder on the bike. Now here we are in a Turkish resort town (for a change) of Köycegiz.