Lycian Way Day 9: Small clearing 1000m up in the mountains north of Kas to Coban Beach

Campsite in the mountains Waaay up above Bogazcik Adask to Coban Beach

Starting km: 163

Finishing km: 184

Distance walked: 21km

My memories of this day are clearly coloured by the end.  We (or I at least) thought we had plenty of time to make the final 3km walk to our campsite at Coban beach (actually a pair of little rocky beaches, each at the end of its own little bay).  But I hadn't reckoned on the fact that Sarah was already pretty tired and that the last kilometre was very rough going over bouldery and heavily eroded rocky coastline. We ended up arriving with Sarah exhausted and very unhappy.  We hadn't quite needed to walk in the true dark, but we did need our headlamps to find a spot for the tent and set it up.

With that unpleasantness behind us, I'll talk about the good bits of the day.

In the morning we had a fairly easy walk down, then briefly up to the ruins of Phellos.  This was a small Lycian garrison town high up on a ridgetop. We sat and had breakfast looking one way down to the Mediterranean, another way back to the mountains we'd come through and all around us at the ruins of the town walls and the Lycian tombs.  The tombs are the most robust of all Lycian structures, surviving neven when little else does. There seem to be two main types, those carved straight into the rock of hill or cliffisdes, and the massive stone sarcophagi that are raised up on platforms.

From there we had a looooong way down to the city of Kas, so it was a little surprising that, after a quick couple of hundred metres down from Phellos, we spent most of our time cruising along a red earth plateau.

The reason for this was that we had a great big cliff to first sit and admire the view from (along with a herd of wild goats that wandered past [I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether we were admiring both the view and the goats, or whether we and the goats were admiring the view]) and then walk down to the bottom of ourselves.

When we finally did, we were in Kas.  It's pretty much just as tourism focussed as Kalkan, but I liked it way better.  It still feels much more lived in, and the tourism businesses aren't quite as fancy/overpriced.

We spent a long time in Kas, doing some grocery shopping, drinking some ayran, eating some borek, drinking a coffee and a tea and charging my phone.

Following all this, we carried on walking along the coast, stopping at Limanagzi public beach (which had a shower) for a refreshing afternoon  swim. Which, since we've already discussed what happened next, and will discuss it no further, is the end.