Trafik, Fire, Athena, Pregnant

POSITION: 36°45’23N 28°15’56″E

“Turkish isn’t a particularly difficult language once you’ve mastered the alphabet”, our waiter advised, in lightly accented English. Diving into Google Translate and YouTube later yielded some practical advice on pronunciation. After two weeks our vocabulary now extends to, thank you (teşekkürler), bye bye (güle güle), and hello (merhaba). It’s a start. Plus, I can now spell cedilla without a dictionary.

TRAFIK

Besides, we don’t want too much fluency. It can lead to problems. Particularly when directed into one of the Trafik Polisi’s frequent roadblocks. Looking and speaking like dumb tourists usually gets you waved on. For the locals, failure to produce your license, registration and proof of insurance is a sure ticket. Turks are generally polite and skilful drivers. The constant police oversight, I’m sure, helps keep them that way.

Driving here is relatively stress free. Building new roads and paving old ones has paid off in recent years. What used to take days, we’re told by locals with knowledge, in many areas now takes only hours. Twisting mountain passes and steep grades focus your attention. Thankfully, an unending parade of speed limit signs give a good indication of what’s ahead.

Turkey’s relationship with car making has a long history. Name any major auto manufacturer and they’ll have some sort of factory here. We’ve been driving a Oyak-Renault Clio for the past three weeks. It’s a competent little car. It would be even better if Sixt Budget hadn’t installed an obscure Chinese aftermarket radio/navigation unit. Whoever installed it didn’t wire up the USB cables properly, so our smartphones won’t connect. Its default maps are in Chinese and give directions to places like 成都 and 杭州. Neither of which is in Turkey.

FIRE

Back at our marina, we’ve begun exploring the area. A recent trip took us up a long and winding road to the far side of the bay. Fires earlier this year scorched hundreds of acres of mountainside and came (quite literally) within a couple of metres of the local towns. The hills to the west of Marmaris were burned bare. Forestry crews are busily bulldozing access roads and clearing debris. America’s National Forest Service would find many kindred spirits here. As fast as work has progressed, recent rains began washing the deep red clay soil down the mountains into the waters of the harbour. Let’s hope they can start replanting before the erosion clogs things up entirely.

ATHENA

I may have mentioned you can’t swing a cat around here without bumping into an animal rights activist (Carol). Moreover, you can’t move 100 metres before running into a 3,000-year-old archaeological site or two. One of the local favourites is famous Amos.

Perched high on a bluff south of the beach resort of Turunç (that c has a cedilla forming a ‘ch’ sound – Turunch. See? Easy.), this compact 500 BCE Hellenistic village has all the hallmarks of an entertainment complex. Into an area about the size of a WalMart, it packed a necropolis, a 1,300 seat amphitheatre, and a temple for worshipping Athena. Sheer cliffs on either side of the headland lean out over protected anchorages. Below us a lone sailboat bobbed at anchor, just beyond any potential rockfall. The views are magnificent. Watch your footing, though. There’s nothing between you and the clear jade waters 200 feet down.

Further along the road at Kumlubük, the tarmac petered out. Bright red signage pointed us towards a steadily rising footpath. Or at least where the path was. Muddy from a couple of days rain, the barren valley echoed with the howl of chainsaws and thrum of earth movers. We tracked along newly graded dirt until our GPS indicated it was time to turn right and head uphill.

From the outset, we clambered over fallen and felled tree trunks. New forest roads cut the path at right angles, making for amusing orienteering. Trails here are marked by red-white-red tricolours painted on rocks. As we like to say in defence of our out-of-date nautical charts, rocks don’t move. Or burn. We just had to keep our eyes peeled.

Pregnant

At the crest of the hill, we looked southwest across the strait towards Rhodes, some 17 miles distant. Pine trees with blackened trunks stood defiantly. The stubbornly green overstory gave an impression of how fast the fires rushed through the steep rocky undergrowth. Thick beds of needles crinkled and pillowed under our footsteps. Few hikers had passed this way recently.

About a mile on, as the terrain leveled off, we walked through the charred remains of a pine grove and arrived at our second ancient monument of the day, the Byzantine ‘pregnant’ church (Gebe Kilisesi). Local belief says the church was built on a ancient site where rituals to ‘help’ barren women took place. Hence, pregnant church. (Sounds a bit και εγώ, no? – ed.)

Heading back to Aleta we paused at a farmer’s market. None of the frou frou accoutréments found in American farmer’s markets here. Just splendid white cauliflowers and deep green broccolis taken straight from the ground. Beans and tomatoes and fresh carrots were all available for liras on the dollar. That evening we tossed the cauliflower in olive oil from Italy and garlic from Greece, and roasted it in our oven with Turkish propane. It felt like our crusade in favour of multicultural coexistence was finally paying off.