Seasonal affective disorder (even the acronym is Sad) cuts a glum swathe through Britain most years because Brits endure nine months of cloud to enjoy three of sun. Anyone who left their passport in the drawer throughout the summer of 2004, though, will remember that last year we missed out on the sun. My year-end travel objective, therefore, was simple: find somewhere cheap, sunny and interesting to pass the days between Christmas and the New Year. Explore’s seven-night Lycian Coastal Trails, a ramble around southern Turkey’s most attractive shorelines, seemed ideal.
As a Sad sufferer, the trip was a mixed success. In contrast to the bright winter sunshine with which Heathrow was lavished on Boxing Day, the unlovely southern Turkish coastal city of Antalya was, on arrival, cloudy and dark. Not only that but the cars seemed to be creeping along in a cinematic recreation of the London pea-soupers of the 1950s and every room in the hotel smelled, oddly, as if there was an open fire smouldering in the wardrobe. The coke used to keep Mediterranean Turks warm in the winter turned out to be the culprit. Fethiye, the door hinge between the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, was similarly afflicted; only the two nights we passed in pretty Kas, a much smaller and breezier community, were smog-free. The Explore dossier claimed that winter days hereabouts were “usually clear and mild”. Astute wording, with hindsight, since only one of the six was actually sunny.
Happily, all of this mattered less and less as the week unfolded. The Explore formula (this was my second holiday with the company, and I have sat happily through the exegetical slide shows of my father’s nine different tours) involves an energetic, frontal assault on whatever scenic or cultural wealth an area possesses, so we were quickly whisked away from the urban smogs each morning and set loose on the prolific ruins with which Anatolia abounds. Particularly unforgettable was the mountain fastness of Termessos, a kind of Helleno-Roman Machu Picchu, whose amphitheatre must sometimes lie above the the clouds and whose memorably disorderly necropolis seemed as if it had been robbed just the week earlier. Helped by our exuberant Turkish guide, we slowly learned to tell our Pisidians from our Pamphilians. By the end of the trip, we were even getting the invasions in the right order.
Every day was meant to involve a couple of hours’ walking, though the short daylight hours meant that this was sometimes reduced to a half-hour scamper; the visit to Turkey’s Olympos had to be abandoned, too, because the road had been washed away: a winter hazard in a land of mountains.
Unquestionably the best walk took us up through the ruins of Kaya Köyü, a Greek town vacated and never reoccupied in the population exchanges of 1923 (these events are likely to become as famous as those in Cephalonia now that the holiday-reading public can devour Louis de Bernières Birds without Wings in paperback). We then walked over a rocky crest of sighing pine trees and walked down, via a picnic lunch, towards the marine lagoon of Olüdeniz, whose laundry-white sand-spit beach surrounded by a turquoise sea is one of the most beautiful in the Mediterranean. Few visitors would ever see it deserted at two in the afternoon, as we did, which made it all the more galling that my camera batteries chose to expire at that point.
An Explore boast is that you will not only see the sights but also touch the lives of those whose country you are visiting. Such encounters can sometimes be slightly stagey, with the mutual exploitation of photo op and souvenir sales throwing sincerity into shadow. There was more spontaneity on this trip, though. During the first day’s short, sage-scented walk near the ancient city of Selge in the Köprülü Canyon National Park we passed by a shepherd’s house hidden in the rocks, far from any running water or electricity supply. The owner, who was at home, had the most leathery hands I had even shaken; his boots were upended on fence posts to dry and he offered us grapes grown on poles against a tree, just as they would have been hereabouts 3,000 years ago.
On the long and austerely Asian drive from Termessos to Fethiye, we stopped at a place called Sögüt. Dark local men were eating pancakes (gözelme) at a roadhouse and the owner’s wife showed us how they were made, sitting cross-legged next to her domed griddle outside. She rolled, flipped and filled in a series of seamless and easy gestures while her husband ferried them back in to the table. Up above the bare poplar trees, white clouds hung like cuttlefish bones in the sky, their undersides gilded by the setting sun.
Almost as moving was treating myself to an early-evening shave in a barber’s shop in Kas: a 20-minute experience chez Kerim (whose premises are decorated not with Page Three girls but with pictures of fluffy kittens), and perhaps the best £1.25 I have ever spent. The procedural detail would be lost on half of humanity, so I will not recount it all, save to point out that the shave is repeated for that super-fine finish, that every topographical nook and cranny merits a different razor angle, that you even get your nasal and ear hairs trimmed, and that the whole process ends with a vigorous head, neck, shoulder, arm and finger massage. I took a Turkish bath, too, but because this unfolded within the spa facilities of a tourist hotel, it felt less memorably authentic.
What I had forgotten since my last Explore trip to Egypt in 2000 was that the discovery of one’s fellow travellers can be every bit as enjoyable as the encounter with of a new land. Our 14-strong group included two Naples-based Americans, two London-based New Zealanders and an Australian as well as a trio from Dublin; our ages spanned five decades. There was a huge range of experiences and interests to draw on, and (unless I was the insupportable exception) we seemed to blend and gel as harmoniously as the ingredients in a chocolate mousse.
Explore Worldwide, tel: +44 (0)1252 760000; www.exploreworldwide.com
www.tourismturkey.org
