Getting Lost
On Thursday, our last full day in Fethiye, Kate and I decided to make our way over to the ghost town of Kayakoy. We were both looking forward to this - probably more than we should have been to be honest. After all, this wasn’t an old ghost town like, say… the ones in California. Oh no, in this land of ancient ruins the age of the town we’d be visiting was around 80 years old. That’s right, I was excited about visiting an empty town about half the age of my childhood house.
Basically, the town of Kayakoy was abandoned after the Turkish War of Independence, when all the people of Greek descent (and practicing Ottoman Christians) moved to Greece, and all the Turkish people living in Greece returned here. Apparently, there were more people moving out of Turkey than into Turkey, so a number of towns were abandoned. Then, there were earthquakes and “natural phenomona” that aged the houses, and now it’s a big tourist destination! And I have lots of pictures, none of them very good, and all of them far to big to actually put up here. How hard is it to resize pictures, you ask? Well, right now it’s a pain and I’m working on that. But on with the blog!
To get there we got to take a dolmus (small bus) from the center of Fethiye. Now this bus was basically awesome, because the driver apparently didn’t understand that you could drive faster than 15mph. So we’re slowly chugging away, cement trucks and tractors and runners are passing us at extremely fast paces, and we’re freezing cold because the bus driver also seemed to like driving with the door open. Fortunately after about 30 minutes of this (and approximately 7.5 miles) the driver sped up to at least 30mph and we drove through… my favorite English resort town ever! Seriously, it’s hideous. All signs in English, no non-British people that I could see in town, restaurants with names like “The Fish and Chips Place” and “English Food Restaurant” and stores called “The Midas Touch” and “Ali Baba Carpets” - ugh. It made me cringe. I guess I shouldn’t be hypocritical because at a lot of the small towns we’ve stayed at (and I’ve really liked) everyone spoke English, tourism is the only reason the town is still around, etc… but this one just seemed different.
Eventually, despite our bus driver’s best efforts, we arrived at the ghost town. It was pretty cool, lots of empty stone buildings - but I was imagining there would be more there to remind you that 80 years ago people were actually living there. Instead, it looked like no one had lived there for hundreds of years. No childrens’ toys left on shaggy lawns, no rusted bikes lacking drivers, etc. I guess since lots of tourists come through anything like that would have been picked over long ago. So we walked around, took a few pictures, and then noticed that there were mysterious trails marked on the rocks with red and yellow paint marks. Thinking this would lead to a new church, or maybe the school, we followed the trail up the mountain, through bushes of swarming bees, occasionally losing it in the brush. And the trail just kept going, and going… until we were out of Kayakoy altogether. We decided we might as well keep following it even though we had no idea where it ended up… which was a fantastic idea until we lost the trail. Hooray for being adventurous?
Now, the best part about losing the trail was that we basically had to go up and down these steep ravines, climbing over rocks, skidding down hills, etc. It was a lot of fun and very exciting. Eventually, we caught sight of Oludeniz beach, the one where we went paragliding, and decided the trail must lead that way… if only we could find the trail. So we headed in that direction, handily aided by my compass (be prepared!) slipping and falling the whole way. My right hand suffered a tragic injury, as did the seat of my pants. Eventually (miracle of miracles!) we did find the trail again, and I think we even figured out how we veered off in the first place… (picture incoming!)
So after a nice invigorating stroll, we arrived back at the very same beach we were at 3 days ago. With our very special friend there, Hector, who had not only sold us on the paragliding but had also taken a picture of the two of us, with him, enjoying a beer post-flight, apparently to put on his webpage. We were very excited. If by excited I mean mildly freaked out, especially we he revealed he had STOPPED BY OUR HOSTEL ROOM THE NIGHT BEFORE TO SEE US. Then he started showing off his muscles and talking about how in shape he was. Fortunately, when we started playing rummy and didn’t invite him along he sort of left us alone. So we got to people-watch on the beach another day - it was really very pleasant. (Well, except for when the people-watching included the return of skanky Speedo man from the boat the day before.)
Tags: 01 - Turkey
