Antalya- Fethiye

295.72 km, 4036 vertical metres, 6 days

We had another rest day in Antalya, which was extremely floppy, occupied with the irritation and complexity of travelling. Planning things as you go, dealing with horribly rendered airline websites and non-functional plumbing can be wearisome! it was a public holiday in Türkiye, National Children’s and Sovereignty day (real two in one celebration) so the Turkish flags on display were even more giant than usual.

It was a much better feeling to be properly on the go the day after, panniers full of food. After a cruisy bike lane out of the city, we started encountering our first challenge: tunnels. There is a system where you can push a button so flashing lights tell drivers there are cyclists inside but it is still noisy and overwhelming to go through.

We reached the town of Kemer for a late lunch and went to the beach for our first Mediterranean swim. Sadly it was a pretty disappointing beach, surrounded by resorts and piles of sand that block many parts of the beach from public access. This makes me so angry, I firmly believe beaches are for the public. We found a campsite on the other side of the hill near some beehives, and I walked to the nearby town to buy water – we need about 3 litres if there is no water source. Between the beach, tunnels and being on the right side of the road and not able to see the nice views of the sea, I was feeling worried that the edge of the Mediterranean would be lots of hostile tourist infrastructure and nothing to be excited about.

But in fact this leg of biking just kept getting better. On the second day, we climbed a huge hill on the highway, then turned off to an unpaved road that was increasingly overgrown, more like biking through a wildflower meadow than a road. I turned my suspension on and looked at the river below. There’s a passage in Prince Caspian along the lines of ‘it was a perfect river with deep pools, and mossy rocks, and shadowy gorges. It would have been ideal for a leisurely picnic, but was horrible to go through fast’. This is what I thought of a few minutes later when it became evident that the road we were on…. went through the river.

The first ford was OK, smooth and gravelly underneath and only just above my knees. 150 metres later, there was another: about hip deep on me and twice as wide, with bigger rocks and a more uneven riverbed. For about 10 minutes we debated whether to go back, although pushing our bikes up the steep and bumpy road would have been horrible. In my last post, I said ten metres feels the longest when it’s full of cars… but actually it might be when it is full of deep fast river? I changed into sandals, swapped my bike shorts for togs, and started stripping all the bags off my bike, so there wouldn’t be so much water resistance. The first crossing, with my bike, was stressful – the frame and wheels are surprisingly buoyant when it gets deep, and I felt like I had to wrestle the ungainly frame through the water, everything but my seat and handlebars submerged. Only a few steps, and we were free of the current. It took about 6 more trips to get the panniers and second bike across the river, but it was easier in a slightly shallower section accessible by leaning around a tree. I spend a lot of bike time thinking about things, but the river crossing demanded my complete attention, Shreyas and I in synchrony. I couldn’t say how long it took, just wet legs and rushing water and carefully placed feet until it was over.

And then we were at the perfect gravelly beach of Çirali, turquoise Mediterranean water swirling, the saltiest Eastern end of this salty sea. After two hours of water, sun and books in alternation, we pushed our bikes two kilometres across the sand to the gorgeous ruins of the Lycian city of Olympos. The trees growing up through the buildings, at least a millennia younger than the stone and mortar, felt miraculous, as did the glowing poppies. We camped in an orange grove and I felt like I had reached my true purpose: bikes and history and swimming and citrus and rivers to overcome and gravelly rocks the tent floor didn’t really stop us from experiencing.

In the morning, we did a perfect climb over a hill to Mavikent, and I achieved the winning feeling of plucking a mulberry from a tree overhanging the road without needing to stop. Shreyas commented on my drenched shirt: for those of you who know Jeph Mathias, the ability to generate wobbly rims of salt from sweating through my clothes is even more definitive proof of paternity than DNA.

The valley was filled with white greenhouses, an extraordinary landscape of produce production, and the flat road along the coast was fast, bar a few stops to put on and take off raincoats with flurries of hot rain. Shreyas and I discussed the nature of shade: does riding through a patch of shadow feel soft (my metaphor) or like you are suddenly less heavy (Shreyas’s metaphor)?

Trying to get ahead on some of the climbing, we camped above the town of Demre with cliffs above and the deep blue of the ocean and lines of trucks on the highway below. It was a sadly mosquito riddled campsite and we didn’t have quite enough noodles for dinner so it was quick work to get into the tent. As I fell asleep, the stereo sound of the adhan drifting from distant mosques in three different directions. I finished The Witch of Prague, an excellent book about the shape power can take, and a good distraction from the rock digging into my kidneys through my sleeping mat.

More beautiful, hot climbs the next day, broken up by a stop at an excellent bakery for filled rolls called pogaça (yes, like the professional cyclist) and to see Mustafa’s goats. Mustafa was standing at the side of the road near the top of our biggest climbs and waved us over to photograph his caprines, then us, then him. He asked us about the political situation in New Zealand, suggested an alliance between the countries, pointed in the direction of the sea (Akdeniz means Mediterranean!) and Greece, said we should become pilots to fly back and visit him, and said he sung the call to prayer at the local mosque, and started singing it for us to demonstrate. When we said we had to keep climbing, he pulled out his lunch from a plastic bag, exclaiming that from my sweatiness we clearly needed the sustenance. Some dusty green beans, half a loaf of bread and an orange meant that I was sticky and covered in crumbs, but very grateful – about as close as it gets to communion while bikepacking.

After a delicious swooping descent, and excellent swim, we paid about $50 NZD for a pretty mid campsite that seemed like the only option with all the “no camping” signs near hotels and steep hills in the resorty town of Kaş. Feeling rather like Lucy with her Baedeker in A Room with a View, I read Shreyas facts about the Lycian city of Xanthos we were on our way to see as we fell asleep.

The call to prayer woke up all the local dogs for a chorus of 5am howls, which didn’t really motivate me to get up. But a morning on the Kaş to Kalkan coastal road was exquisite, though speedy road cyclists kept over taking us. Oh the big ocean! Oh the orange rocks!

Kalkan is full of villas with dark windows like gaping eyes. The builders are clearly running low on names: we spotted a Villa Bitcoin and a Villa Jurassic World. We largely bypassed the town, but made full use of the fruit trees, juicy longan and sweet astringent mulberries are helping me achieve my dream of grazing around the Mediterranean. At one point, the route directed us past some more recently constructed greenhouses. There may once have been a path here but what we found was a concrete wall and a big drop off to the road -nearly, but not quite, possible to pull our bikes over. With hot and humid air pouring out of the tomato greenhouses, I got very grumpy pushing my bike back uphill, and the next few kilometres of up and down were fuelled by thoughts of hacking plastic open and smashing ice apart. But it’s hard to take a bad mood too seriously in the sunshine, and Shreyas got me to eat some snacks to help me calm down.

Another of the Lycian cities is Xanthos, which has a huge theatre and acropolis on a hill, a stark contrast to the greenhouses around the corner. We wandered the main street and tried to translate the Greek inscriptions with our phones to no avail. Shreyas liked how we could still see how the streets were laid out, where the city had truly lived. I liked leaning against the cool stone, the flourishing flowers, a tortoise and stray dogs wandering through the corners.

Our last day into Fethiye was about as close as it gets to perfect cycling. It was sunny but not too hot, as we were inland, following the Antik Pedal route. There was a silt-filled khaki river weaving out of the mountains, which still had small crowns of snow. Some dogs leaped out of long grass to chase us in several of the villages, but I was thinking about elegance and control. Even counting my pedals, grinding up a hill, it felt so obvious that bikes are an exquisite way to travel, to glide and soar down, to know that my heart and legs were strong up, and then again, the rhythm of it. This is another way to say that I felt so happy and free, grateful that I get to be here at all.

I’ve been hearing lots of unusual animal noises – an owl at one campsite, insistent owooo, and pairs of cooking brown pigeons in the eaves, and crickling-creaking from little ditches. I had assumed these were frogs, and at a rest before the last uphill I was able to investigate. I found three darting amphibians in a water ditch, and I was amazed how well their mottled skin camouflaged them in slimy concrete.

We hadn’t gone 100 metres from our stop when we were called over again, to a group of 8 or 9 people cooking under a tree. They were from Fethiye, they said, and having a picnic. Did we want some? After receiving an ice block at the top of a hill in Banks Peninsula I didn’t think the free hill food could get better – but peppery gozleme, Fanta and çay just before a climb is nearly as good. Typically, all the men were chatting on chairs while the four women had set up a production line on some mats, rolling the dough thin, filling it with pepper and cheese, cooking it on a rounded pan over the fire, and cutting up olives and tomatoes to serve it with. I love how easy it is to stop and talk to people while biking, it really feels like the central gift of this journey.

The last 20 km to Fethiye were a lovely downhill and long stretch next to an irrigation canal, rural villages again yielding to beachy tourist infrastructure. Again the rest day pattern of buying food and planning routes and washing clothes and cleaning bikes and writing blogs. And at the end of the street where we are staying is still the Akdeniz and its glinting waters, waiting for us to start climbing its hills again.