An easy stroll from Fethiye to Ölüdeniz via Kayaköy

Saturday morning, I set out for Kayaköy, the abandoned Greek village. The road goes behind the kale, which I hadn’t visited before, so I spent some time exploring the ruins there.

It's supposed to take an hour and a half but I must have missed a turnoff or something and ended up climbin up a clear firetrail to about 475m before I met a guy named Ibrahim, who pointed out I was going the wrong way and showed me a trail that would take me back to the right road. On the way, I ran into two of Ibrahim’s fancy goats and a tortoise . I had been following yellow blazes. The trail joined the bitumen road at one point and there was a bent blaze indicating a left turn just beyond the circular structure, behind the cemetery.

After about three hours bashing through scrub, I hit a road, which soon butted into another, bigger road. I wasn't sure which way to go, so checked my position against David Carter's waypoints and determined I had to go west. From there, it was a bit of a slog and I again took a wrong fork, although it took me into Kayaköy eventually, as well, by a longer route. I stopped at a restaurant and had a nice, but overpriced gözleme. I stopped by 'Muzzy's Place'/Gavuşoğlu Yeri to enquire about accommodation. As I was the only guest, I talked him down to YTL20, including breakfast. The room was nice with a little balcony overlooking the pool. There was hot water in the afternoon.

In the morning, it was not ice cold, but not really warm enough to qualify as tepid. The breakfast was good, but Muzzy wasn't there and the old man charged me for it, after all. I had a vegie caserole there for dinner, as well, and that was very nice. There are now at least ten restaurants in Kayaköy, including some new upmarket ones. In fact, one fish place directly opposite Muzzy's appeared to be having their opening night that night and there was live music going until about 2AM. I think it kept waking me up, but I didn't mind. There was one band that I was pretty sure sucked, but I was only partially conscious.

On Sunday, I planned another easy warmup day with the 2 hour walk to Ölüdeniz. I followed the red dots and arrows through the old village as instructed in both the LP guide and the LW guide and ended up at a wine bar at a completely different bay . As you look up at the hillside from Kayaköy’s main road, you can see two passes out of the valley. The one on the right has a small chapel on each hill overlooking it. This is the one on the right. There is an easy trail up to it and it’s worth a look, at least for the view. I couldn’t find a trail to the much higher one on the left. If you follow the red dots and arrows, this is the pass you will go through. There is no trail from there to Ölüdeniz.

I had to walk all the way back up to the pass into Kayaköy. There was a tour group wandering through that part of the village, so I asked the guide, who told me to go back through the same pass, only take every left fork. After a couple of such forks I again found myself on the side of a cliff deep in scrub. I made my way back and traversed across through thick, prickly scrub until I eventually found, a couple of hours later, a very neatly marked trail, with glossy red and yellow blazes that takes you through the pass on the left, not the one on the right that the red dots go through. Apart from a little confusion over the significance of the chevron shaped blazes, which turn out not to be arrows pointing in the apparent direction, but signals to make a sharp turn, it was an easy walk to Ölüdeniz . Or would have been, if I hadn’t been buggered already.

As soon as I got to the water’s edge, I found a spot concealed by shrubs, changed, and dived into the cold water. It was a refreshing dip, but regrettably, I didn’t manage to get every grain of sand off before dressing. I stopped at the very first caravan park to replenish my lost carcinogens and electrolytes with a cold coke and met a Glaswegian woman who worked there or owned the place. As I recall, she wouldn’t go below YTL 25 for a cabin without its own shower and toilet. It seemed a long slog along a row of caravan parks to get to the centre of Ölüdeniz, which is a jumping place full of bars, restaurants, and tour operators, all very expensive. I didn’t even bother to check motel prices there, although a couple of Germans I later met in Kalkan, who were coming the other way from Olympos, but had been there before, told me there are cheap places. I considered trying to find a place to stay in Ovacık, right near the beginning of the trail, but had heard that it was quite expensive, too. So I just hopped on the dolmuş (YTL3) back to Fethiye.

By this time, I was thoroughly exhausted and wasn’t looking forward to a long walk, fully loaded, looking for a place to stay. I stopped at a nice pide place around the corner from the dolmuş depot and had a spinach pide and waited for the rain, which started while I was there, to subside.

Fortunately, the very first hotel I came to, the Funya, right near the Tourist Information Centre, had a room with bath for YTL20, without breakfast. The room they were going to put me in had a bogus light that kept flashing, so they ended up giving me a big room with a double bed, a single bed and its very own balcony, and tv. There was this scary show on the tellie that I couldn’t take my eyes off. A woman was hanging by her fingernails on the edge of a cliff, pulled herself up, and lodged some kind of clip in a crack in the rock. She got the rope into the caribiner, and then somehow slipped and the clip pulled free of the rock and she plummeted quite some way, but another rope caught her. Then something else pulled loose and she fell even further. She was swinging back and forth, apparently helpless, when somebody threw her a line. Then all of a sudden, a guy jumps off the top of a butte and starts hang gliding through these narrow canyons for quite some way.