Visiting Kas

After Cappadocia, we took our Canadian friends to Kas for a couple of days. If you follow my blog, this should not come as I surprise as I've gone on and on about Kas' fabulousness in the past. (Our trip last summer starts here.)

Kas is a rare jewel on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, and I cannot say enough good things about it. There isn't a direct connection by road or air, so if you want to get there, you have to drive a few hours from either Antalya to the east or the town of Fethiye or the Dalaman airport to the west, which has kept Kas delightfully quiet and laid-back. At the same time, it's also a great base for exploring the area -- there are a number of restaurants and hotels in town, and it's close enough to popular places like the St. Nicholas Church in Demre, Saklikent Gorge, Patara beach, the Kekova sunken city ruins where you can go kayaking, and the above-water ruins at Xanthos, Letoon, Myra, Patara and Tlos. In Kas, you can also go scuba diving, hang gliding and take a day-trip to a Greek island. [I suppose I should also point out that Kas is actually Kaş -- I usually can't be bothered to add the Turkish accents on my American keyboard -- and pronounced Kah-shh.] 

Anyway, so on this trip, we spent three lovely nights in Kas. Since we'd been multiple times before, we let our friends decide what we would do, and in the end, they didn't want to do anything but just enjoy the ambiance (and the gloriously warm weather, a marked change from both Cappadocia and Canada). Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in such a lovely town.

Not surprisingly, the locals agree...

Our first full day there was April 23, National Sovereignty and Children's Day in Turkey. Although the holiday actually commemorates the establishment of the Turkish parliament in 1920, it's become about children and most people have the day off from work. So, appropriately, there were little children playing in the square and dancing to music.

We spent a lot of time eating and drinking. The oranges were in abundance and we enjoyed many glasses of freshly squeezed juice. Cagatay and our friends also enjoyed Turkish coffee, and we had some fun playing fortune-teller with the leftover coffee grounds. This is a real thing -- to start, you place the saucer over the finished cup and make a wish, and then you flip the cup/saucer over and let it sit for awhile. Cagatay suggested that they put their wedding rings on top of the flipped cup because it helps the cup cool faster, though one source I found said that it also helps to dispel bad omens.  After awhile, you flip open your coffee cup and begin interpreting the patterns left by the grounds, which have migrated up along the sides and probably onto the saucer. That's all I know about it, but go here for details on how to interpret the grounds patterns. With this cup, we felt like it had something to do with Cappadocia...don't those look like the rock formations at Pasabaglari?

We also spent a lot of time poking around the shops...

...and just wandering around. Seriously, isn't Kas just gorgeous?

In Photos: Hot-Air Balloons in Cappadocia

I've spent two posts discussing our Cappadocia trip (here and here), but the hot-air balloons deserve their own mention and a host of photos. I went on one of the balloons three summers ago and while it was a lot of fun*, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that watching the hot-air balloons might actually be more breathtaking. We had a spectacular view of the balloons going up in the morning from the various outdoor areas of our hotel, the Kelebek Cave Hotel, and our friends could even see them floating across the horizon from their room (Arch room #3). Watching the balloons, even at 6:30am, was just unforgettable and another experience that outshone ordinary sightseeing.

*Shortly after I wrote this post, a balloon hit another balloon during a morning ride in Cappadocia on May 20, causing the lower balloon -- belonging to Anatolian Balloons, the red balloon company that happens to appear a number of times in these photos -- to fall from the air, which resulted in the deaths of three Brazilian tourists and injuries to a number of the other passengers. According to the newspaper, this is the first hot-air balloon accident since 2009, which is a pretty good safety record but no doubt little consolation to the Brazilians' families or the other injured tourists. Not surprisingly, hot-air balloon bookings in Cappadocia are reportedly down 20 percent.

Visiting Cappadocia, Day Two

So, Cappadocia... Our second day and the morning following were a lot more fun, mostly because we went more for experiences rather than sightseeing. As I said in the last post, to me, Cappadocia is a one-hit wonder -- at every site, you're going to see a rock-cut something. And while it is really amazing and interesting that people had the tenacity to carve into these rocks and then live in them, at the end of the day, it's still a lot of rocks.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that everyone in our group agreed one of the best parts about the trip was the (free!) organic breakfast tour we went on through the delightful Kelebek Cave Hotel, which housed us for two nights. (The hotel was awesome -- I would probably come back just to stay there again and swim in the pool.) We took an open-air tractor-buggy to the owner's family farm, where we had an amazing Turkish breakfast of olives, tomatoes, menemen, cucumbers, cheese, dried apricots, strawberries, and more. We all really enjoyed this glimpse into Cappadocia's agricultural life, and the food was delicious.

We even got an up-close look at a couple of Kangal dogs, which are these huge Turkish mastiffs. As I recall, someone said this particular dog is only about a year old.

We spent the afternoon sightseeing around the area south of Goreme. We started at the seven-level Derinkuyu underground city, which was built more than 1,000 years ago by the area's Christian inhabitants as a hiding spot for when invaders swept through. Information seems to vary on the interwebs, but according to Lonely Planet, there were more than 130 underground cities in the region, and Derinkuyu had about 10,000 inhabitants.

Derinkuyu had a church, wine vats, a baptism pool, bedrooms and clever rolling stone doors, but there aren't any informational signs, so it's best to either go on a tour or hire a guide at the site. Otherwise, you'll have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to be looking at, and the site will seem like nothing more than -- wait for it -- rocks.

After Derinkuyu, we drove to the town of Sahinefendi and the archaeological excavation site of Sobessos. Although the Cappadocia tours include Sobessos, there's not a lot to the site and at the moment, it's not very well signed. The Internet tells me that it was a fourth-century Roman settlement and that excavations began in 2002, but I can't confirm that either bit is true. When compared to the rest of Turkey's ancient sites, Sobessos is a disappointment, but the drive there and beyond was lovely -- if you go, it's probably best to think of it as a pit-stop on an afternoon's road trip.

After Sobessos, we headed to Urgup for a very late lunch (or, perhaps more correctly, an early dinner). Since we were all starving, we didn't spend any time looking around, but from what I briefly saw, Urgup looked charming and probably deserved a bit more of our time. We spent the rest of our evening in Goreme, another charming town and our base. It was surprisingly quiet considering the amount of big tours we saw, but I fondly remember its mid-summer laid-back atmosphere from three summers ago. There's just something about it, some intangible quality, that I just love.

Of course, Cappadocia is famous for its hot-air balloons tours*, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention them. I went on one of the balloons three summers ago -- it was a lot of fun, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that watching the hot-air balloons might actually be more breathtaking. We had a spectacular view of the balloons going up in the morning from the various outdoor areas of our hotel, and our friends could even see them floating across the horizon from their room (Arch room #3). Watching the balloons, even at 6:30am, was just unforgettable and another experience that outshone ordinary sightseeing, so much so that I'm devoting another post just to photos. (Having said that, you should still totally go on a balloon ride...consider this an extra option.)

*Shortly after I wrote this post, a balloon hit another balloon during a morning ride in Cappadocia on May 20, causing the lower balloon to fall from the air, which resulted in the deaths of three Brazilian tourists and injuries to a number of the other passengers. According to the newspaper, this is the first hot-air balloon accident since 2009, which is a pretty good safety record but no doubt little consolation to the Brazilians' families or the other injured tourists. Not surprisingly, hot-air balloon bookings in Cappadocia are reportedly down 20 percent.

But having said that, I'm ending with the Goreme Open-Air Museum, arguably the region's most popular sightseeing attraction and absolutely its best, even if it does involve, yes, rocks. Even though we had to rush to the airport, we ducked in here for about 45 minutes on our last morning. There are perhaps about 12 churches and chapels that you can pop into at this UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a number of them still feature beautiful and colorful frescoes. We went around 9am this trip, and the museum was unbearably packed -- when I went three years ago, I visited late in the afternoon, and it was nearly empty. Just a little tip from me to you. :)

Visiting Cappadocia, Day One

We had some friends visiting from Canada at the end of April, so we took them on a mini-tour around Turkey, starting with Cappadocia. I went there when I came backpacking in Turkey in 2010, and to be honest, I wasn't all that excited about a return trip -- Cappadocia is beautiful and definitely worth a visit, but it's a one-hit wonder. But no one else had been, so off we went. :)

BASIC INFO: Cappadocia is a region located in the middle of Turkey and to get there, you can either take the bus or fly into the Kayseri or Nevsehir airports. The Nevsehir airport is significantly closer, but it doesn't see a lot of flights; Kayseri is about an hour 15 minutes from Goreme, Cappadocia's main hub, but it seems to offer more options. (However, from both airports, the only option is to fly to and from Istanbul.) We rented a car at the airport since the daily rental price (TL 90) was the same amount the four of us would have paid for the shuttle to take us into Goreme -- everything in Cappadocia is really spread out, so renting a car was actually one of the best choices we made.

In terms of sightseeing, we used the group tour itineraries as our guide. There are three main on-the-ground tours around Cappadocia, organized by location -- one takes in the area around Goreme (a hike in Rose Valley, Pasabag, maybe the open-air museum), one goes to the area directly south of Goreme (a hike in Soganli Valley, Sobessos), and one goes to the area to the southwest (a hike in Ilhara Valley, Selime rock monastery). Most include a visit to one of the underground cities, where villagers used to hide when invaders were passing through. Because of the distances and few roads, it's easiest to plan a day around a small section of the map, rather than drive around in all directions trying to see the highlights.

On our first day in Cappadocia, we stuck to the sights around Goreme. We started in the small town of Cavusin, which was only about a 10-minute drive away. At street level was the modern town, but perched above it in the rocks was the old, abandoned part of town. It was fun to poke around, but there weren't any signs, so you didn't know what you were looking at.

After that, we visited the Zelve Open-Air Museum, which one of the guys at the hotel had recommended to us as a good alternative to the very crowded Goreme Open-Air Museum. But I don't think it's really comparable -- the Goreme Open-Air Museum has a lot of beautiful frescoes while the Zelve Open-Air Museum gives the region's best glimpse, I think, of what it would have been like to actually live in a rock-cut community. There's nothing left but the rocks, but with the few churches, a mosque and the mill stone, it felt the most authentic to me. That might also be because it was fairly recently inhabited -- the last residents moved out in the 1950s.

After, we went to one of my favorite spots of the trip, Pasabaglari. It was just a relatively small area of __________-shaped fairy chimneys (fill in your own word based on the photo below), but I enjoyed walking along the paths.

To be honest, I wasn't all that enthused by what we saw on the first day. It was a lot of rocks. (Clearly I was not meant to be a geologist.) It also rained most of the day -- it even hailed at one point. We did have a lovely dinner at the grill restaurant Dayinin Yeri in Avanos, though.

Kas trip: Across to Kastellorizo, Greece

We went to Kas at the end of Ramadan, when everyone has off from work, and since the hotels there were all fully booked for our last two days, we decided to spend the end of our trip across the way in Greece, on the island of Kastellorizo. (It seems like the Greeks also refer to it as Megisti, and the Turks call it Meis.) If you look at a map of Turkey, you'll see that all of the islands, with only two exceptions, belong to Greece, even though a number of them are just a stone's throw from Turkey. Kastellorizo, Greece's easternmost island, is only about 20 minutes by ferry from Kas, out in the harbor.

Kastellorizo was AMAZING. Heavenly and divine. It's pretty small -- according to Wikipedia, the current population is only 430, and everything is centered around the harbor, the hills just above it, or the small cove just on the other side. Not surprisingly, there's not a lot to do, but that was one of the things that was so great about it -- we spent our two afternoons by the water, lounging or looking for turtles, and our evenings strolling and eating good food. (Not a lot to do was good for us, but of course, not so great for the island. It seems like there wouldn't be much job opportunity there outside of tourism, and a good number of the islanders have resettled in Australia. As a comparison to the current 430, 9,000 people lived on Kastellorizo in 1910.)

We stayed at Poseidon Hotels, which were actually little apartments on the other side of the harbor, directly across from the ferry. We didn't know what to expect; I'd had a hard time finding someplace to stay in Kastellorizo (there are only three places listed on Trip Advisor), and a travel agent in Kas had found this place for us. But it was really great, and I'd highly recommend Poseidon Hotels. It's a street back from the water (although we could see the harbor from our balcony), but they've set up a "beach"-side area with chaise lounges, umbrellas and kayaks, so it didn't make a difference.

On our first afternoon there, we took advantage of the chaise lounges. It was divine. The only interruption came around 5pm, when this huge ferry came sailing in, completely taking up the entire harbor. I actually felt incredibly sorry for everyone who was leaving.

On the second day, we woke up early to take a short boat trip to see the Blue Grotto, a small cave where the light emanates this eerie blue. You have to go early because of the tide, and when we got there, around 9am, the tide was already too high for the boat to go in. But no problem -- we put on our scuba masks and swam in. It was cool, but it was also kinda creepy, and for a little while, I was freaked out by what might be in the water. (In the end, I decided nothing much was in the water.)

We spent the rest of that day in the chaise lounges. Then, in the late afternoon, we decided to do a little exploring. We'd seen a Lycian tomb in the hillside as we were going to the Blue Grotto, and we decided to try and find it. It turned out to be pretty easy -- there's a little walkway that clings to the side of the island, and we just followed it along. After, buoyed by our success, we decided to try and make it up to the 14th-century Castle of the Knights, a ruined fortress visible at the top of the hill. We got up to it pretty easily -- once there, you can climb up about 30 steps, to where the flag is. Next to it was a 15th-century chapel, St. Nicholas, but it was closed. As we walked up, we felt like we were walking through people's backyards, but once you're at the top, there's a clear paved pathway -- we followed this down, and it led us to a couple more churches and then through the back alleyways of the harbor area. It was fun just to go wandering around -- Kastellorizo is too small to get lost, so you can pretty much go any way you want and feel sure that you'll find your way back.

We had a great holiday overall, but our two-day trip to Kastellorizo was a definite highlight. I'm hoping we'll go again next summer, it was just that fantastic. :)

Kas trip: Ruins of Tlos and Patara

I really love traipsing around Turkey's ancient ruins; we'd visited Myra and Andriake on our first full afternoon in Kas, and we'd gone to Xanthos, Letoon and Patara two years ago, so that really only left one major set of ruins in the general area: Tlos. Our plan for the day was ambitious -- we'd visit Tlos in the morning, spend the early afternoon at Saklikent Gorge, and end the day at Patara. It turned out that our plan was too ambitious, mostly because the drive to/from Tlos, mostly along a two-lane road through fields and farms once you get off the highway, takes much longer than the mileage would indicate.

Tlos was another important Lycian city, though the Rough Guide says little is known of its history (which might explain why there's little information about it on the interwebs or at the site itself). It's old, apparently referred to in 14th-century BC Hittite records. But even unexplained, Tlos is pretty amazing. Driving up from the Xanthos Valley, suddenly the road turns, and there it is, the acropolis and rock tombs perched dramatically on the hill. It's quite the introduction.

At the main part of the site, you can walk up the hill, past stone sarcophagi (Lonely Planet says this was the necropolis) to check out the rock tombs -- you can even go into one -- and wander around the ruins on top, the residence of a 19th-century Ottoman governor, which is nothing more than bare walls now. When we were there, archaeologists were working on the Roman stadium at the bottom of the hill, where the stands have been excavated on one side. Further down the road, there are the remains of a church and public baths, which you can wander around, and the theater, which was fenced off.

But the highlight of our trip to Tlos was finding Bellerophon's tomb, no easy task. Bellerophon is a hero in the Greek myths -- riding Pegasus, he managed to kill the Chimera, a three-headed monster with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. When he died, legend says he was buried in Tlos. The myth says he was disgraced because he thought he was worthy of flying to Mount Olympos, but his tomb -- sporting a temple facade -- is huge.

There aren't any signs on how to get there -- we used Lonely Planet's slightly vague directions and lucked out. Basically, when you're standing at the entrance booth to go up to the acropolis, there are some rock-cut tombs to the right. You walk to them, and then follow the path down along the rock face -- it goes all the way to the bottom of the rock and back up again. About halfway back up, you'll see a flimsy wooden ladder and a spray-painted red arrow -- you go up the ladder and the tomb is right there, to the left. It only takes about 5 minutes to walk there, but it's a pretty steep up/downhill, and we had it to ourselves.

There's nothing in the tomb (or in any of the tombs), but Bellerophon's does have some reliefs on the outer walls, including one of him riding Pegasus. (You can see it on the wall behind me.)

We left Tlos early afternoon and headed toward Saklikent Gorge. This area of Turkey is largely agricultural, and as we drove along the two-lane road, past stands of trees and up and down mini-mountains, we saw beehives, sundried tomatoes actually being sundried on metal roofs, a zillion pomegranate trees, melons growing in fields... It took longer than expected to get to Saklikent (and back to the main road), so we decided to leave the gorge for another trip and just go to Patara.

 

Patara is known as the birthplace of St. Nicholas, but these days, it's more famous for its long, sandy beach, a rarity in Turkey. From what I've seen, most people just pass the ruins on their way to the beach, and you can't really blame them -- the ruins at Patara are pretty spread out, and like Tlos, there's almost no information at the site to help you navigate them or figure out what you're seeing. The triumphal arch and amphitheater are pretty obvious; most everything else is not. (However, unlike Tlos, there is quite a bit of information available on the Internet.)

 

We started our little tour at the crumbling amphitheater, which is interestingly built into a hill -- you can't tell at the bottom, but if you climb to the top, you see that the stones of the theater start blending into the natural rock. Next to the theater is an odd building, one that appears to be a theater but also looks brand-new. It turns out that this is the Bouleuterion, the world's first democratic parliamentary building and where the Lycian League met. According to the Fethiye Times, the US Founding Fathers were inspired by the Lycian League when writing the Constitution; "Documents show that both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison referred to the League as a good model." The Bouleuterion was discovered in 1991, excavated between 2000 and 2006, and then rebuilt by the Turkish government at a cost TL 7.5 million (about $4.1 mil) and opened to the public in May 2012. There's an incredible difference between old and new; check out this Flickr photo from 2006.)

 

The Lycian League, which was formed in approximately 205 BC, had 23 known members. The six biggest cities -- Tlos, Xanthos, Pinara, Patara, Myra and Olympos -- sent three representatives, while other location sent one or two representatives, depending on their size. The League elected its president, called a lyciarch, annually; you can still see the semi-circular seat, in the photo above and to the right, where he (or she?) would sit.

 

After we walked through both the amphitheater and the Bouleuterion, we strolled down the path to the column-lined Main Avenue, which was once bordered with shops. In one, we found the broken-up pieces of a mosaic.

 

After that, we called it a day. There are a number of other ruins at Patara, most notably what's been called the oldest lighthouse in the world, but we had no idea how to get over to it, and it was getting pretty late. Oh well, next time.

 

On the way back, we drove past the gorgeous Kaputas Beach. It's located in a cleft between two mountainsides, and you have to climb down what looks like at least 100 stairs to get to it. We still, unfortunely, have not been down there. So I suppose once again I have to say, oh well, next time. :)