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Holiday in Kas:
Phew! Back again.
Hardly a sunburn or scar to show for our week in Kas. We got back on the Saturday
evening after a very long drive up the country. Sunday was a day spent
recovering and Zinta went off to work at 7:30am as usual on Monday. The
holiday almost seemed unreal as I’m writing this.
But we had a good time.
So that, I will relate.
Saturday the 1st of
July, we drove off from home, leaving at 8:30 or so. The route down to
Afyon, about halfway down the country, we'd driven last year. The motorway
is very easy and even after we turned off, it was fairly easy sailing.
Aware that this was the road where we cracked a windscreen last year, we
took it easy and gave a wide berth to the trucks whenever possible.
We arrived in Afyon
just after lunch and found our hotel easily. Despite trying with the agency
to find a boutique, small hotel, we were booked into a large 'Thermal'
hotel which rose out of the surrounding dusty plain like a monstrous
carbuncle. The inside was no more engaging but the room was relatively
clean, relatively quiet and the food innocuous to the point of
tastelessness. The watermelon was rather nice however.
After a quick drive
around Afyon, with no intense desire to stop, we visited a shopping centre
near the hotel and then went back to the place for a swim. Copious water
was the hotel's main selling point. Rather salty and mineral, it was
nevertheless pleasant after a long drive.
Sunday we made the rest
of the journey to Kas. We first made our way south-east to Egider
(Eh-ir-dear) which is a small town that sits on a lake. Indeed, some of the
town actually sits on an island in the lake connected by a causeway. I had
read about it in the guidebook and wanted to make the diversion to see what
it was like and see if it was worth staying there on the way back from Kas.
We both agreed that we would rather have stayed there than the 'Thermal'. I
think one book said that this was where the young men who bought there way
out of the full army service were expected to spend a month getting a
taster. Seemed rather a nice place to do military service. The base had a
fantastic view over the lake.
We had lunch, meatballs
and bread at a lakeside restaurant on the island. Lovely location and cool
compared to the rest of the surroundings.
We then drove onwards
to Antalya
and then followed the coast road. This is a bit circuitous but is a road
I've already taken, so there weren't any surprises. Oooh. Apart from the
large boat that they were trying to drive out along the harbour road. It
was sliughtly smaller than the Queen Mary and just as manouverable. They
were being forced to dismantle the traffic lights as we edged past
following a policemen’s directions. You’d
think you’d measure it before taking it out for a test drive.
The road follows the
coast and is a long set of hairpins with vertiginous drops off the side. On
some of these hairpins, you can park and make your way down to tiny
beaches. Something to remember when cars and trucks are swinging wide
around the corners.
When we finally got to
Kas, we were pretty tired after driving for most of the day, so we decided
to stay in our hotel for the evening. The hotel, the Tamara, is on a
peninsula a few kilometres out of town and the driveway down to the parking
lot is enough to scare anyone. Zinta bravely went down it on arrival but
wasn't quite so willing to drive back up.
The Tamara is supposed
to be one of the nicest hotels in the area and I would certainly concur. We
had a very nice room, huge with two seating areas in addition to the bed.
The view via a huge picture window was stunning as was the view from
anywhere in the hotel and restaurant areas. The only two bugbears were the
bathroom and the air conditioning. The bathroom, although absolutely huge
with double sliding glass doors on two sides, contained no shower. The bath
had a shower attachment but nowhere to put it on the wall. Even if we'd
managed, there was no shower curtain and the vast floor would have been
swimming after one shower. We spent the week sitting in the bath and using
the shower nozzle carefully with one hand. It obviously looks good in the brochures
but was completely impractical.
The air con was also a
bit lacking in functionality. While it was good at cooling the room down,
it had only two settings. Full on and really full on. It was also directly
over the bed so it meant that it was impossible to use it while we were
sleeping. We would have been blown out of bed. We ended up using it in the
evening when we were out to cool the room and then turning it off last
thing after we'd gone to bed. Then about 3 or 4am, one of us would get up
and open the windows after it had got too stuffy. This would actually make
the room warmer but at least a little more habitable. As temperatures
during the day were as high as 32 degrees (cooler than Antalya) and 25-27 at night, sleep wasn't
always easy.
But that aside, Kas was
a great location and the hotel was quiet and very restful. There was a salt
water pool, a freshwater pool (by our room) and a swimming and sunbathing
terrace down by the sea. Kas is 'blessed' with copious amounts of rocks and
no sand so there are no beaches. 'Blessed' because this means the big
tourist influx has never arrived. Kas, while full of hotels and pensions,
is still relatively quite compared to Bodrum, Marmaris and Antalya. The hotels have a limit on how
many floors they can have so most hotels are less than 5 stories.
I like the town of Kas with its’
large number of jewellery and antique shops which are in better taste than
most tourist towns. There are a large number of English residents and they
mean that you can get English papers but haven't turned the whole place
into a 'fish and chip' zone. Saying that, we were disappointed that the
food was pretty boring. Apart from our last night when we went to the only
restaurant I had read positive reports about, the food was very uniform.
Not bad, just bland and the same everywhere.
Monday we spent walking
around the town and then spent the end of the afternoon 'swimming'. I say
we went swimming... mostly me but Zinta did go in the pools a few times. I
couldn't persuade her to go into the sea. I can see her point. You had to
step off a ladder descending into the sea (which could be a little rough)
and the water was immediately 3 or 4 meters deep. Great for snorkelling as
there were tons of fish and very clear but still a little intimidating if
you're used to bathing in nice, quiet, sandy bays. I don't think Zinta
feels hard done by as she is naturally reluctant to touch water. Her
previous life as a cat, perhaps.
Tuesday we went into
the valley behind the hills that front Kas. We'd read about a Byzantine
castle and church and decided it might be cooler in the hills. We found the
place with only a little uncertainty. There are no signs pointing out the
entrance to the site so we relied on the book and set off on a faint goat
trail. It quickly went uphill and petered out before long. I set off to
look for a better trail and left Zinta sitting on a rock. I couldn't find
any sight of a road so I just set off in as straight a line as possible up
the hill. With a lot of slipping and sliding I got to the top and inside
the walls.
The site, Dereagzi,
sits on a hill between two branches of a river. It was obviously a
fantastic defensive position until the advent of gunpowder. Two of the
walls were on top of several hundred metres of vertical rock face and
seemed designed to stop people falling off rather than getting in. They
were now getting pretty defunct so I tried to keep my distance and watch my
footing. After an hour of waling up and down, looking for the proper way
in, I eventually had to retreat back the way I came. I traversed the face
of the slope looking for a better route but ended up going back down a
nearly vertical face. At one point I was pretty sure I couldn't descend
further and didn't have the energy to go back up. Just before I summoned
the helicopters I spotted a route using a few handholds on the rock face.
I got back to the car,
without spotting Zinta, completely wrecked and bleeding from lots of
bramble cuts. Fortunately we had cell phones so I was able to send a message
to Zinta to return to the car. Thank God for that technology. Even though I
was tired and shaking after making it down, I would still fancy going back
with a 'team' to look around properly.
We took a back road to
the next town on the coast Kalkan for some lunch and a look around. The back
road to the town was pretty but a little taxing. Lots of twists and turns
but It got cooler the hgiher we went. In one valley we realised the steep
rocky hillside we were looking at was full of entrances as for an old city.
We left investigation for a later trip.
Kalkan itself is very
pretty although with very steep streets but we still prefer Kas. More
normal if such a thing can exist on the coast nowadays.
The next day, we
resolved to take it easy and have a rest day. We thought we';d go into town to get the paper and then maybe drive to
a beach. On the way we decided to drop into the amphitheatre which is just
on the outskirts of the town proper. I'd seen it before and it's no great
shakes although the view sitting in the stand in fantastic. Kas actually
looks out on a Greek
Island (Kastellorizo)
just off the coast. It was only a kilometre or so from our hotel and maybe
3 kilometres from Kas itself. I wondered that if they had an identical
amphitheatre on the island, whether they could have talked to each other as
with a parabolic mirror. Not too far fetched for ancient technology.
We then walked out the
back of the theatre to see some 4BC Doric tombs that are hidden in the
scrub. A little old lady pointed us to the tombs but I wanted to go another
way, as is my want. I headed straight up the hill and despite aching legs
from the previous day, bounced up a stone mound to get a better view.
However....
... missing
my step I quickly bounced down again on my butt. In the process I added to
the legend of the Smith shins with a nice set of cuts (oddly complementing
the cuts on the other leg from the day before), put a large bruise on my
buttock, twisted my ankle and stuck my hand in a thorn bush. Of these the
hand was the worst with myriad thorns embedded. I bounced quickly up and
saw the tombs with Zinta and her elderly guide (who constantly shook her
head at the foolishness of men and tourists and male tourists
particularly). After than we went to the car for some quick repairs. The
leg was OK although bleeding but the hand was hurting.
After a walk around
town looking for some tweezers we eventually went to a doctor. He had some
difficulty imagining how I was injured as normally it's
sea urchins that do this damage. But he eventually got a lot of the spines
out. I got the rest out over the next couple of days. Zinta and he had a
nice chat about company reps and the doctor introduced his wife who was a
Pharmaceutical product manager in Ankara
before she married. All loads of fun when you are having a syringe stuck
into your hand to cut out thorns.
All in all, we decided
to retreat to the hotel and have a quiet swim.
Wednesday we went to Myra along the coast.
After a diversion to get petrol in Finike, we went back to Demre, (Kale)
and into it's back blocks to find the site. I
remember it from our last trip and disliked the protection racket they were
running in the car park. Very aggressive and unpleasant. This time someone
actually flung themselves into the road to try to get us to stop in their
'free car park'. They want you to buy their overpriced drinks and tourist
tat and are very heavy about it. I swerved around them and parked in the
main car park with only some minor harassing from a shopkeeper.
Myra has a great amphitheatre, which
you can walk around and up and over, and some very nice rock tombs which
you can't. Still it's only a half hour site seeing trip and so we didn't
linger. Like everywhere else in Turkey, the archaeology is just
so overwhelming that you get overloaded.
We drove back via
another site but it was around a town that had submitted to the almighty
dollar and we lingered for only enough time to turn the car around and head
out.
I think Thursday we
rested, with me healing some of my injuries. I've forgotten already,
perhaps conveniently.
Friday was our official
rest day to get prepared for the drive back. We hung around the hotel and
went into town in the evening. Our meal in the Evy Restaurant was very nice
with a great little garden terrace with a hanging vine on a trellis above.
Memorable for the foods and the cats that climbed nimbly above our heads
checking out the food and the opposition. Kas is full of cats and every
restaurant, even our hotel, having a full complement.
So after a pretty
restful week, even with the small list of injuries, we headed back up
country on Saturday. We had sussed out a route going overland rather than
via the coast and this proved quick and very picturesque. The inland part
of Turkey
is often neglected by the tourists but some of it is lovely. Bits are like Tuscany while other parts could be the best parts of New Zealand.
It was very easy driving until we got to within a couple of hours of the
motorway. Then we got into a line a trucks and cars that just seemed to
crawl up country. It was a great relief to get to the motorway finally and
the trip into Istanbul
after that was very quick.
So like most holidays,
it was fun, stressful, infuriating, dangerous, and relaxing in parts. One
of our better holidays here and we would both go to Kas again which says a
lot.
Bruce
20th July 2006
2585 Words
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