On The Road

Olympos - Fethiye

How wrong we were about Olympos. We thought we'd last at most two nights, bored out of our minds and disgusted by the partying backpacker scene. In the end we had to force ourselves to leave after four days. It was wonderful.

Although it would have been easy to spend our days lounging on comfy cushions, we actually managed to keep ourselves fairly active. One afternoon was spent rock climbing on a wall behind one of the pensions. Another was spent swimming for two hours along the rocky shoreline. On our most active day, we climbed (with rope and gear) a 900 ft. rock behind our pension. But despite these spurts of activity, we did do a lot of relaxing. During the hottest times of the day, it was easier to just read in the shade.

Our pension, Saban, was great. We wisely avoided the larger, more party-prone pensions and opted for this smaller, family-run place. For about $14/night, we had our own treehouse, plus got breakfast and dinner. The dinners were excellent. It was served buffet-style, and because you were allowed to go up for seconds (or thirds), we often stuffed ourselves.

Evenings were spent sitting in one of the pillow-lined open-air huts, drinking beer and chatting with other travellers. Meral, the friendly woman who seemed to be in charge most of the time, would often come around and hang out with us (even kicking my (Brad's) butt in backgammon one evening).

We could have spent longer there but the end of the trip was looming, and we still had a fair amount we wanted to see.

We headed to the village of Kas next, not quite sure what we were going to do there. I wanted to do some scuba diving, and I knew they did dives from there. Kas was a cute town, although definitely geared towards tourists. It has a small cobblestone walking district, situated around the harbor, with a lot of boutique jewelry and small art shops, and quite a few restaurants. We had a great dinner at a little family restaurant where they invited us to come to the kitchen and showed us their dishes, and we ordered by just pointing at what we wanted.

We left the next morning, though, as we decided (after a bit of research on the Internet) that the diving would be better out of Fethiye, about 2 1/2 hours further west along the coast. Everything we wanted to see was more accessible from there anyway.

We picked a great pension in Fethiye: Tan Pension. It's run by a very sweet elderly couple and is the cheapest place we've stayed on this trip--only about $7/night. It's also got a great top-floor terrace overlooking the bay.

We walked around a bit and paid a visit to European Diving Centre, the dive shop for which I had found recommendeations. Since it had been a year and a half since I had been diving, they required a refresher dive before going on one of their real dives. This was Monday, and they suggested the dives they were doing on Friday were some of their better dives, so we worked out a plan where I would take my refresher dive they next day, on Tuesday, in Butterfly Valley, a place we were planning on visiting anyway, and they would just drop us off there.

The dive went well, although there wasn't much to see. They dropped us and our packs off on the beach as promised. We were planning on spending the night there, but after finding out that it would cost almost $30/night, even to just pitch our own tent, we decided to just spend the afternoon there and head out on the last boat.

Butterfly Valley is a small, very steep mountain valley leading down to a beach. The name comes from the rare Jersey Tiger butterfly (which we think we saw...we're not entirely sure what it looks like, though :-), which can be found there from July-September. There are pretty much only two things to do in the valley--either hang out, either at the beach or at the overpriced restaurant/bar on the beach, or hike up to the waterfall at the head of the valley. We did a little of the first, then headed up to the waterfall. The first waterfall you get to is nice, but small, and you can actually climb up past it and up the somewhat steep river to get to the top, and a much bigger, very beautiful waterfall. Not everyone ventures up that far because it is slightly dangerous, and certainly wet, but being the experienced adventurers we are, it was a piece of cake. Well worth the trip to dance in the verdant fall, the mist throwing rainbows in the air.

When we got back down to the beach we rewarded ourselves with an absurdly overpriced beer, and chatted with a British traveller who convinced us (well, me--J. was already convinced) that we had to visit India on our trip.

The next day was a bum-around-Fethiye day. We saw some more ruins, and some 4th century BC tombs that are cut into the cliffs above the city. We also ate some more ice cream (actually, it's a rare day when we don't eat ice cream).

The next day, Thursday, we went to Saklikent Gorge, about 50km away. It's a narrow gorge about 18km long, although we only slogged up the river about 1km before we got to a section that looked pretty hairy (even for us), and we headed back. Still, it was a lot of fun.

Today we actually spent most of the day apart--probably the first time we've done that in months. I had my diving--which was good--and Jacqueline took a hike to a ghost town, abandoned when Greece and Turkey had an organized population exchange after WWI and the Turkish War of Independence.

Actually, the day was almost a disaster, as we both woke up in the morning with a bit of the runs. We had had no problems up until now, and we were thinking it was particularly evil timing. Fortunately, it was short-lived. We don't know what caused it, as we both share almost everything we eat.

Tomorrow we start our journey back to Athens, via the Turkish port town of Marmaris, then to the Greek island of rhodes, then a ferry to Athens. We'll probably have a full day to kill in Athens, so we'll try to post again from there.

Cheers,

- b & j

Posted by brad at June 27, 2003 10:58 AM