Lycian Way Epilogue: Return to Antalya

Relatively little had changed in Antalya since we left, a bit over two weeks previously.

The bus ride back was shorter of course.  While the trail is much longer than the 150km straight line distance between Fethiye and Antalya, our 350km of walking had brought us to within about an hour's bus ride.

We did most of the same things again, walking the strip through the old town and out to the beach twice.  Things had slowed down a little at some of the tourist sites. The beachside cafes had closed for the season at the end of October.  But I sent for a swim one day anyway, and found the water to be very pleasant (it was apparently 24°C).

We made a visit to the kitty park.  We'd actually been through it before, but hadn't quite realized what it was.  There were just dozens of cats in the park at the top of the bluffs above the beach.  Unlike many feral cats, these ones were very handsome and well looked after. People come to the park to watch them, pet them, feed them.  There's even a solar powered cat food dispenser installed by the local council.

On our second day we visited the Antalya museum.  Wow! I think it must almost be to Roman statuary what the Bardo in Tunis is to Roman mosaics.  Many of the dozens of big emperors, gods, mythical figures or ornately decorated sarcophagi would have been the highlights of many other museums.  But the parade of them in the Antalya museum seemed almost never ending. I don't know exactly how many times I left one room full of beautiful sculpture only to walk into (yet) another and say to myself "my god, there's more!?"

And (according to Sarah) there was a final, most important change.  A couple of days after we'd left our wondey hosts Robin and Feirha had acquired Kawaii, a kitten who had been abandoned by its mother and who couldn't have been more than six weeks old when we arrived. They'd nursed him into a healthy, very playfil little fellow.

A couple of days' rest after the big walk was just what we needed, and left us feeling fine and excited for our spur-of-the-moment trip to Cyprus.  Sadly the fast passenger ferries had also finished up for the year, so the only sea connection still running departed from Tasucu, nine hours(!) to the east by bus.  Much as we would have liked to travel by sea, it was actually cheaper to fly (and avoided the aforementioned long bus trip). So on Wednesday afternoon we caught the tram back out to Antalya airport for the short trip southeast into the Mediterranean.