Kalkan, Kas tries and Fethiye isn't given a chance.

12/15 - 12/22

Having never travelled with a mobile phone before I was all excited at the prospect of the extra connectivity that the phone given to me by Simon in the UK would provide. After three messages sent over the course of a day failed to arrive at Altan's phone until an hour after we were meant to meet I was less excited, but resolved to buy local SIM cards everywhere we went. That's worked out OK for us so far, as some countries give them away and local numbers are much cheaper to use. In Turkey however, we got royally ripped off for the card, and two weeks later got disconnected for not registering our phone.
Still, without a phone Couchsurfing just wouldn't have been possible, so it was worth it.

Altan and Beyza were excellent hosts, taking us out for fine food, beach-combing and ruin-viewing, and treating us in to fine food, company, coffee, tea, desserts and Rakı. We stayed in Kalkan for a week (too long) and Fethiye two days (not long enough).

Best kebaps evar.

Patara. We have now seen more Romanesque theatres than anyone else alive, but this was the first.

A hidden swimming spot in better weather with Jami, a Taiwanese traveller.

Cliff-side tombs.

Altan's family runs a growing business, so their customers are mostly farmers. One day a farmer wanted to thank him for something so we drove up into the mountains to pick up a huge crate of the tastiest apples we've ever had. It wasn't just a matter of picking up the crate and leaving though, as everything in Turkey takes at least three glasses of tea to complete. In this case three glasses of tea, a plate of pastries and a plate of fruit for each of us. On the way back we picked up some fresh fish, rice vinegar and a few other bits and bobs, as apparently Altan was really excited about the prospect of trying sushi for the first time ever.

Now, neither of us have ever made sushi before, let alone filleted fishes of dubious origin and served them up  raw to someone else. Altan was suitably nervous, but excited enough to film his first bites to upload to Facebook. Unfortunately he didn't take to the taste of soy sauce or rice vinegar, and immediately started to speculate on how to improve sushi with Turkish flavours. Oh well, at least the fish didn't kill us!

Nearby Kas was much nicer than Kalkan, but equally quiet off-season.

Bye bye, sleepy Kalkan! Hope the hordes of Brits don't cause too much trouble this summer.

Turkish coffee isn't complete without a centimetre of sludge at the bottom. The word for breakfast means 'before coffee' and brown is 'coffee colour'.

Xanthos was our last stop before Fethiye. Quite nice in the dawn light and free since the ticket vendors hadn't turned up yet!

Tasty fruit juice in Fethiye.

To our surprise, the Taiwanese girl we met at Patara was staying in the hostel next door to ours. She invited us to try out a Turkish hammam her hostel had recommended, so we piled into a car and drove out of town to get ourselves steamed and scrubbed. Half an hour sweat in the sauna, then a few hard-to-bear minutes in the steam room then the three of us lay down on the huge stone slab in the main room. Scrub, soap and massage. The guy scrubbing me showed me how much skin he was taking off my back and laughed, saying 'what is this, my teacher?' Apparently Hozumi and Jami got very mediocre massages, but my guy really went for it and cracked my spine so hard I yelped out loud. Twice.

When I had recovered and changed I went to pay for the water we'd drunk and got told it was free. When Jami and Hozumi emerged 15 minutes later Jami went to pay for her cola and water and got charged for both. When I looked at the staff who had told me it was free she shrugged, nodded at the guy ripping Jami off and said 'my boss'.

The other highlight of Fethiye was neighbouring Kayakoy, a village that had housed about 3,000, mostly dating back to the 18th century and totally abandoned in the 1923 population swap after the Greco-Turkish war. We gave up on walking to Oludeniz because it was pissing down, but the ghost town was all the more ghostly devoid of other tourists and cloaked in mist. We got totally drenched that evening in Fethiye, and cut our stay short in hope of finding drier climes.