Showing posts with label Kas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kas. Show all posts

Thursday, 31 October 2019

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.






Lycian Way Day 8: Campsite in the mountains Waaay up above Bogazcik Adask to Small clearing 1000m up in the mountains north of Kas

Campsite in the mountains Waaay up above Bogazcik Adask to Small clearing 1000m up in the mountains north of Kas
Starting km: 141
Finishing km: 161
Distance walked: 20km

Another lovely day of walking.  This one probably felt more like actual tramping than any other.

We left early, before the sun was over the horizon and at a shepherds' home in the next pasture downhill were met by a huuuuge dog.  Sheep dogs in the mountains are often scary, so I was I I initially scared, but as it turned out, this one was a giant puppy and just wanted to play.  Its mom was much lazier, but no more scary.

A while later we saw a giant parade of a few hundred goats being moved by three similar (in appearance… they weren't quite as friendly) dogs.  Several of the goats were standing on their hind legs as they reached up to get at the more tender leaves of the trees.

A bit of road walking (and a couple of Lycian tombs just sitting there by a road cut) and we were in a scaled down replica of the charming farming valley we'd been in the previous day, right down to the wooden granaries built on the Lycian/Roman model.

We headed down what quickly turned into a logging road and around 10:45 saw our last other person of the day.  From there it was all just walking through pleasantly cool pine forest. First down a river valley (with a stop at a delightful and unexpected spring, complete with fireplace and picnic area), then sidling up a hillside.  Over 500m climbing to finish the day, but it was a gentle slope and shady almost all the way up and I even kind of enjoyed it.

By the time we were up at 1000m asl, the vegetation had changed to mostly scrub oak and the ground was hard and rocky.  There were still enough clearings, and even some with softish flat ground that we could stop for a nice long rest, dinner, and a giagantic pomegranate before bed.