Kaş via Gökçeören and Pinarbaşi

If you don’t want to take the coast road to Kaş you can go up the Yayla Yol towards Bezirgan and then turn right at the first junction. This takes you towards Saribelen and away from the ascent to the top of Yumrutepe, the road going up the hill here.

Saribelen’s mosque has a very distinctive minaret.

The road runs along a plateau running between the coast and the Bezirgan plain so there are few views. There are rock features.

And some Lycian ruins and rock tombs.

There were very few people about in any of the villages on the route. In Gökçeören a goatherd had put his flock under cover out of the sun. The village itself seemed to consist mainly of storehouses, and a mosque.

The long climb out of Gökçeören brought me to the top of the hill overlooking Kaş bay and its islands.

And the Greek island of Meis.

Çukurbağ’s mosque has also had a coat of paint.

A climb up to another pass and then a long descent down into the Kasaba valley. It was very quiet on this road. When I stopped the only sound was the leaves rustling in the breeze. Slightly unnerving because the night before I’d watched M. Night Shyamalan’s the Happening, which deals with a conspiracy between trees, bushes, plants and grass to break down the self-preservation instinct of people and leads them to commit suicide.

A stop at a fountain to join a family who’d decided that it was the best place to clean the mats from their car.

Then along the main road from Elmalı to Kaş to the junction with the Antalya road.

The new road in Kaş on the right and the old one on the left down by the sea.

Until it’s finished the new marina can’t officially open.

A Trip to Bezirgan

More beautification. The mosque by the market has had a coat of paint and a new roof.

I don’t think the belediye has paid for this. Mosques in Turkey are run by a government department. The market was pretty empty this week but I’d got there late and most of the tourists had been and gone and were probably back by their pools or at the beach.

Even the the stalls the Turks use had few customers.

I went up to Bezirgan to see Hasan and his family. They move up there from Fethiye at the end of June when the school holidays start. This year the school holidays have been extended till the end of September to include Şeker Bayram at the end of Ramadan. It’s alright for the teachers, he said. But what about the parents? I stopped off at Mrs T’s on the Yayla Yol.

And on the way whenever I saw a good view. Which was most of the time. Mouse Island and Snake Island in the bay.

At the top of Yumrutepe.

And the view over Bezirgan valley.

And of course the Bezirgan barbeque area, which, as well as the new fence, now has a mescit, a small mosque or prayer room for passing travellers.

And a soap dish, nailed to the side of the seating area. Although people were still leaving the soap on top of the fountain.

Outside Hasan’s the fields were still green.
 
And his garden was doing well. Peach trees.

Straight from tree to plate. Plums behind the peaches. The plums are a bit sore, he said. I have to pick them before the birds get them. Ermmm, Hasan, I said after I took a bite, I think you mean sour. And what looked like giant foxglove, now going to seed.

But then I’m no gardener.

The islands off the Kaş road by Kaputaş beach on the way back.

Linda, over at Dave and Linda’s, has just got her new bike. A Mondial MCT250. Very nice. Maybe I’ll get to try it out.

Lazy

The promised heatwave failed to materialise but we still have a forecast high tomorrow of 98°F/37°C and humid. I take the laptop up to the roof in the mornings but as soon as the sun arrives I go back downstairs inside. My early morning home office.

The dynamism of the new mayor never ceases to amaze. This morning the mosquito sprayers were out doing their job by boat. I’ve never seen that before.

I’m still suspicious of the cloud they leave, though. It lingers like poison gas.

He’s also had a fence installed round the roundabout at the top of the village.
The new parking system seems to be working as well.

When it’s as hot as it has been lately the choice is between staying indoors, taking the scooter up into the mountains or going out on a boat. I’ve done a lot of the first, none of the second and hardly any of the third. This boat was anchored in one of the coves off the bay this morning.
I went down to see Kemal on the Moby Dick to find out why he hadn’t been phoning me to fill up his boat. He said he’s been getting families who’ve been hiring the whole boat rather than trippers paying per head. He asked me to take a photo of the boat for next year’s brochure. He caught me by surprise so I took a quick one but I think I can do better than that. The sun was in the wrong place for a start.

I got a better one of the Anil, our neighbour Ali’s boat, with a water taxi pulling in alongside.

This bloke was fishing while he was babysitting.

This trawler was a long way from home.

Shade is at a premium down at the harbour.

As is parking.

But now that the quayside has been cleared of those unsightly scooters there was room for the crane to come down and deliver a new mast.

I had a reply from Cihan Karadağ, who you remember took his Vespa to Iran. He’s just back from his trip round the Middle East. He got a KLR650 in case he wanted to go offroad in the Sudan and Ethiopia but in the end went by plane and hitched, because of visa and border issues and also because it was more expensive to go by bike than it had been in Iran. He spent three months travelling round Muscat, Oman, the Yemen, Jordan and Syria. I’m still jealous, even though he didn’t go by bike, because I want to go to the Yemen. I can get a cheap flight but they will let English in only if they travel as part of a group, because of the risk of kidnapping. He says that the Vespa’s 12” wheels were comfortable enough on the road. One day soon I'm going to take a picture like this.

A Dream Reborn. Maybe.

Just in case you think we missed out on it here.Omercem, who lives in İstanbul, and a mate caught the ferry from Yenikapi to Bursa and then toured from Bursa to Bilecik and back. A 500km trip. On a red Suzuki AN125HK.

His ride report and his pictures are on motosiklet.net. His report’s in Turkish, though. I hope he doesn’t mind me putting up some of his pictures.

A familiar sight in Turkey, and on an AN125HK you stop and think, why the hell did I come this way?

İznik lake.
On the trip they met a couple of bikers on Harleys.

Halfway down the page Toksom posted a link to this blog, which is how I found out about Omercem’s trip. I’ve yet to work out exactly what Toksom says about it, but he does say, very nice photos. Unless a double positive is a negative. Another journey worth a look is Sezgihan and Berk’s, by pushbike from Cappadocia to Antalya. Pictures here.

And here. It’s a Turkish language blog. And again I ‘borrowed’ some of his pictures.

There are also some great pictures here of webSTer’s tour round the Mediterranean coast of Turkey last month.
In November 2007 Cihan Karadağ took his 150cc Vespa with its 12” wheels from İstanbul through Turkey to tour Iran. His photos are here. Fantastic pictures of Iranian Islamic architecture. And Iranian life in general. His photos of people, especially women, are very good.

There are gravel roads in Iran, just like those in Turkey.

But I’ve yet to see anything like this on a Turkish roadside. What’s left of a camel.
He was planning to leave last month on a tour of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Yemen, Oman and the United Arab Emirates then by ferry to Iran and back to Turkey. For that trip he was upgrading to a Kawasaki KLR650. Maybe those 12” wheels were just too uncomfortable. Newspaper article in English here. I’m jealous.



Update: I emailed Cihan to find out whether he'd gone on his trip and where he was but so far no reply.

A Trip to Kaş

The harbour from the Kaş road.
And the village. The ev McClane is right there in the foreground.

Two views that may shortly be difficult to get. I was talking to a local councillor who told me the mayor and the council had spent a full day, ‘not even time for lunch’, revising the previous mayor’s plans to turn at least this end of the Kaş road into a dual carriageway. There were no plans for junctions with the dual carriageway for traffic going to Kaş so all the traffic from around the bay would have had to come into the village and join the Kaş road at the main junction here. That amount of traffic, he said, ‘would have killed the village’. Now the planned road has junctions. The downside, he said, is that three very expensive villas up on the hillside will have the village-bound carriageway one metre from their front doors. Kaputaş beach was busy.

It’s a long walk down from the road to the beach. Sue-Lee and I only ever go there by boat so have never done the climb back up.

Behind the beach is Kaputaş gorge.

The Kaş road is probably my favourite ride. Most of the road is down by the sea.

It has a few gradients and turns, just enough to slow traffic down.

And make you think that a scooter is really the ideal form of transport for this road. You certainly don’t need a bigger bike because it wouldn’t be able to go much faster.

The Kaş road was built in 1962, and once the new road is finished at Kaş itself will be the last unimproved stretch of the D400 between the Uğurllu roundabout with the D350 near Fethiye and Finike, on the way to Antalya.

It looked to me that some of it will be simply widened rather than dual carriageway. Either way, it will be the end of a great ride. Some people say you can't stand in the way of progress, but I think, why not? You can have too much of a good thing. The island on the right in the distance is part of Greece.

The Greek Orthodox church in Kaş, now a mosque.

I found out from Dave and Linda that now I’ve been in Turkey for more than a year I need to get a Turkish driving licence. They said try and wangle an A2 licence then you can get a bigger scooter. This Kymco Grand Dink 250 was from İstanbul. A 2006 model with 8200km on the clock is for sale in Marmaris for 5,250TL, just over £2,000. Affordable.

But why get a scooter when I could have a Yamaha like this?

Kaş belediye has also been beautifying their town. A flower bed and new paving in the main square.

But apparently made a mistake. Their frankness in owning up to it suggests it was the last mayor who made the wrong choice, not the new one.

Cars have been banned from parking down at the harbour in Kaş, but unlike the village here, scooters are still allowed.

It is the inalienable right of every scooterist to park where they want.

Especially if it happens to be outside your place of work. The Post Office scooter.

No scooters in this picture. Just bougainvillea.