Patara to Kaş

After breakfast, we set out together. Nicole and Marleen were going to head back to Akbel the long way, around Yalıburun, then hitch back to Kınık and try to get to Pydnai, Letoon, and Xanthos. I decided that it was becoming too much of a slog and I had stopped enjoying the walking. As for those other ruins, I’m not an archaeology buff and for the most part one pile of stones looks about the same as another to me. If there are inscriptions, it can be kind of fun trying to remember enough Greek to figure out what they’re on about, but this, too, has its limits, particularly after a day in the sun.

So my plan was to explore the Patara ruins, have a quick dip at the beach, go back to the pansiyon for a shower, and hitch on to Kaş. We stopped off in the village to pick up some stuff for Marleen and Nicole’s lunch, then set off out of town. Although the sign says the park opens at 7:30 from May, there was nobody at the gate house, although there was a drunk soliciting cigarettes not far from there. They were relieved, as they feared getting hit up for another entrance fee just to get back to the trail. Anyway, when we got to the turnoff, I bade them a fond farewell.

First I went to the obtrusive ruin that I believe was the baths and had a look around. Since it is only about 100 metres from there over to the main amphitheatre, I decided to walk across, rather than all the way back out to the road and then in again. That turned out to be a mistake. I did find a comparatively uninteresting ruin that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, but it was very hard going through scrub that was not quite impenetrable until I found myself surrounded by blackberry brambles that I didn’t want to deal with. I couldn’t find a way around and ended up bashing through scrub all the way back to where I’d started. In the course of all this, something must have pried my camera case loose. The belt loop is secured with a double Velcro closure that’s usually quite robust, but clearly not for this type of scrub. I had the camera in my pocket, so that wasn’t at issue, but there was a SD card with some photos on it in the case that I didn’t want to part with, so back I went to find it. Fortunately, it did turn up before too long.

Before I got to the main amphitheatre, I followed a side road and found some kind of avenue flanked by columns and a smaller amphitheatre that was worth looking around. It’s gated off from the front, but it’s open from the back.

The main amphitheatre is quite large and impressive. The main thing I’ve learnt from wandering around all these amphitheatres is that amphitheatre design doesn’t appear to have progressed a great deal in the last two and a half millennia.

There were a few other stones lying around, but I didn’t notice any other actual structures, so went down to the beach for a quick dip. I hoped the sea water would ease the new scratches I’d acquired in the scrub. It did, a bit, actually, but seemed to bring out a nasty rash on my arms, presumably from some horrible plant I’d brushed up against.

It took less than half an hour to get back to the pansiyon. I had a quick shower and headed for the road. A guy with a truckload of tomatoes dropped me on the main road and a few minutes later a guy with a kayak paddle in the back picked me up. Burcin had been a white water rafting guide and such. He had moved to Istanbul, where he was marketing artwork or something, but the big city life didn’t suit him and a friend had offered him work leading sea kayaking expeditions, so he was on his way to look into it. I told him my idea for a rafting expedition down the Neelam River. I thought an enterprising person could market it to crazy Americans or Europeans who might be keen to have the distinction of being the first ever to navigate the river in any kind of watercraft. To my completely naïve eye, it looked exciting, but doable. There are no actual falls, but the water is fast, without the real wildness of the Upper Indus or the Hunza.

He dropped me at the harbour in Kaş, after stopping by the Kaş campground, where they offered me the special friend of a friend price of YTL30 for a bungalow without toilet or shower. I offered them YTL10, and off we went. As I wandered through the Meydan, I came across a pide place, the Marina restaurant, I think, and couldn’t resist the lunch special – pide, salad, and coke for YTL5. It was nice. The salad was quite impressive, much more elaborate than I had expected.

After I ate, I set off to find a pansiyon. I was planning to check out the Anı Pansiyon, but along came one of the guys who had picked us up hitching a couple of days earlier on a motorscooter. He rang his mate, who came to pick me up in his ute. After the big song and dance he had given me about how much cheaper it was in Kaş than in Kalkan, he tried to charge me YTL30 for a single room. We eventually settled on YTL20, including breakfast. The Ateş Motel is a strange place comprising two three storey structures connected by a bridge from one roof to the other. There was a young Australian kid there and we had a nice yarn before he headed off to the eczane to find a pumice and some antibiotic ointment for his cracked heel. I had a shower and went off to explore the area of Kaş closed to traffic. It’s quite touristy. A woman invited me to have a tea at her restaurant.

I was looking for the Hi-Jazz bar I’d read about in Lonely Planet. It took a while. I think the scale on the LP map must be wrong as all the distances seemed a lot shorter than I expected. It seems to show the bar on a street parallel to the street that intersects the street with the Chez Evy restaurant. It may have moved, of course, but in any case, it’s now on the street the intersects the street with Chez Evy, and indeed, the entrances of the two places are not more than five metres apart. When I walked in, it sure wasn’t jazz they were playing, but I started talking to the guy behind the bar. He complained that after midnight none of the customers would tolerate jazz and he had to play Turkish music. Tunc had returned fairly recently from 32 years in Vienna and taken over management of the bar with a woman named Nana, who turned up much later. I was the only customer. The staff came in one by one to announce they’d be late, as they had to go somewhere to watch the soccer match. So Tunc turned me on to some of his 5000 cds. Unfortunately, he discovered that he couldn’t find any of his Sidney Bechet or Monty Alexander cds and he got quite upset about it and went off at the bartender when he came around. I was pretty sloshed by then and tried to counsel him to let it go, it was just stuff, and in any case, not to blame the staff. I don’t think it helped.

It must have been after 10 when I stumbled back to the pansiyon and went pretty well straight to bed. Asher, the kid I’d met earlier, was watching the match on tv. In the morning, he told me that there had been quite a lot of noise when whoever it was who won had won. I never heard a thing.