After our Greek city adventures, we began heading south. We stopped for the night in quaint Koycegiz and then made our way to Fethiye. Before we arrived in the city, we had a four hour stop in Saklikent Gorge. Saklikent Gorge was formed during one of the many Turkish earthquakes when a mountain literally split in half.
This is one of those places that you just can't find at home. In safety-obsessed America, no one would be allowed to go hiking through a mountain with no sturdy paths where you had to cross a rushing, glacial river that was about waist-deep (for short people like me, anyways!) and then clamber around, climbing up rocks, trudging through muddy water.
But the highlight was a tubing ride down the frigid river. The water was quite shallow, which made it easy to get stuck, which of course I did. Apart from the one incident where I couldn't stop my tube and plowed into a poor fellow tuber who had also gotten stuck, it was great fun!
At the end, there was a natural mud bath that we played around in and put all over our bodies. It may have been a great natural cleanser, but I was finding caked bits of mud for days afterwards.
We had planned to spend quite a few days in Fethiye to spend time with our lovely friend Jane, who we had lived with for a brief time in Istanbul and was our unofficial guide to the city when we first arrived. Jane showed us true Turkish hospitality by driving us around, arranging Jon's paragliding and scuba diving trips, taking us on a lovely gullet cruise, and going to fabulous local restaurants where you order by weight and cook your own meat at a little grill by the table. Tesekkuler Jane!
Fethiye is a gorgeous Mediterranean harbor town in southern Turkey. We were treated to yet another coulda-been-a-five-star-hotel hostel. This hostel's main problem was the steep, mountainous climb to get to and from the city center.
But there was air-conditioning, which was absolutely essential in the humid, 40 C weather.
Jon had a great time scuba diving and para-sailing,
which I gladly watched from a safe place on the ground. We also had time for a day-long gulet cruise, where, again with no regard for safety, you could jump off from any part of the boat into the warm, Mediterranean sea.
We docked in some shallow places too where you could gently wade into the water, which was more of my preference. It was so relaxing and wonderful, except for the actual boarding on and off the boat. Apparently, some Turkish law prevents the building of docks in this area, so you had to board the boat in the waviest, most turbulent part of the water. They had a catwalk that would bounce up and down in the air as you tried to get on,
which was luckily quiet when we got on, but decidedly more violent for the disembarking. We watched as fellow cruisers fell head first into the water. When my turn came up, I stupidly brought my purse along, waiting for the Turkish boys who were helping people off the boat cry "Gel! Gel! Gel!" (Come! Come! Come!) and while I managed to get off somewhat gracefully, I then got hot by a wave and fell with my purse into the sea. My camera somehow escaped unharmed but my faithful cell phone didn't make it.
There was so much to see and do here. We hiked up to the Indiana Jones-esque Lycian Rock Tombs at the edge of the city,
visited the ghost town of Kayakoy, which was abandoned after a forced resettlement agreement between Turkey and Greece,
sunbathed on the unbelievably beautiful beach of Oludeniz
and wandered around the typical Turkish bazaars and markets. I was sad to leave behind the beautiful coastline of Turkey as we made our way inland to the mysterious region of Cappadocia.
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