Fethiye “rest day”

Prior to our rest day we had compiled a long list of tasks that we were hoping to complete – a rest day perhaps from biking but not from a multitude of tasks to complete, which included the dreaded booking flights home via terribly designed aviation company websites.We still made it to the beach though! And Shanti got to use a well-equipped kitchen which after weeks of camp kitchens was a sight for sore eyes (and hungry stomachs).

On the road again

I find there’s a bit of apprehension getting going after a rest day – it’s been nice to be settled for a couple of days and you’re unsure what you’re going to face in the days ahead. But once you load the panniers with their familiar contents on the bike and start pedalling, that all kind of melts away and you get to just bike.

Soon into our departure, we ticked over 1000km cycled on our trip and so we celebrated with dondurma in Dalaman, famous for its… airport. It seems like most tourists just go through Dalaman because it has an airport and they can get to the coast faster, so it felt more like a working town similar to the numerous towns we passed through in central Anatolia.

One of the tourist destinations in the area is a place called Sarıgerme. This place was a bit unfortunate for us, as we arrived later than we expected, had to pay to enter the beach, and had to find a wild camp on top of all that.

After vetoing a mosquito-ridden campsite which took a minute to reach a decision resulting in a dozen bites, we found a dusty field surrounded by reeds. That’ll do.

puding power

Eating well in Fethiye was a reminder that more calories are good, actually! We have often been supplementing our dinners with Puding, a universally available cornstarch and sugar mix which thickens gelatinously when heated with milk. A review of the flavours:

• Hazelnut and chocolate. Shanti’s favourite, great with foraged orange zest
• Chocolate. Shreyas’s favourite, simple and creamy.
• Strawberry. Extremely synthetic and pink. Never again!
• Banana. Much better than you might think, great with porridge the next morning.

We get to swim for free

The morning started with cold gruel because I underestimated the minimum amount of fuel required for the stove to operate. Oops.

After an economical kahvaltı (breakfast) and resupply in our first town, Dalyan, we skirted Köyceğiz Gölü and took a rocky path that led us to lakeside thermal pools as well as access to the lake. Undoubtedly it would have required an entry fee, but because we entered it from the opposite side to the toll booth, Shanti had a quick dip and we strolled past on our bikes without issue. Redemption for Sarıgerme!

We then slogged up some more hills to what I thought was a lake viewpoint but it was missing a wooden platform and some benches. Turns out we had the wrong promontory. Oops.

We continued our trend of eating into the next day’s route, and so we covered more ground towards Marmaris and camped in a nice pine forest.

We get a bit soaked (but not from swimming)

We were up before 7 and had our site all packed up with breakfast eaten and teeth brushed in time for the family call at 8, where we each talked about someone we had met that other people in the call didn’t know about. There was rain in the forecast so we were anxious to get going. As we climbed the highways to get to Marmaris it started raining, and by the time we descended to the city we were quite soaked.

Again, we had the itch to keep going and make the next day easier, so we climbed out of Marmaris (tıp for new players: if you’re not that keen on Marmaris you can bypass it via Yeşilbelde and do 200m less climbing) and headed toward Datça, camping along the way for our third consecutive night in a tent.

Shanti’s guide to wild camping when bikepacking the Turkish coast

A few years ago I watched The Long Way Home, about three New Zealand women cycling from Geneva to Aotearoa. At one point they camped in a highway underpass in Kyrgyzstan since it seemed like the best option. “How could that possibly have been the best option?” I thought at the time, naively. Well, after a month of bikepacking I completely understand the answer to that question. We haven’t yet had to camp in an underpass but we have camped next to a sand quarry, in a field surrounded by barking dogs, in a restaurant garden and with lots and lots of rocks.

1. Carry water. We have two 1.5 litres bottles which with the two normal bottles we carry is nearly 5 litres. We fill this up at a mosque in the last hour or two or riding and find that if we’re economical doing dishes this is about enough for cooking and drinking.

2. Get on the lookout. Usually one of us says ‘let’s find something in the next 5 kilometres’ which is more like the next 2 kilometres because once you start thinking about stopping a lot of places start looking like campsites. Usually I’m looking for:

2a. A side road- ideally gravel or dirt, since this is a sign it won’t be too loud and will be out of the way. We have found a lot of good camp spots in pine forest, so if the road is going along one of those it’s a particularly likely idea. A few times we have asked in villages for a good place to camp but mostly I’ve found that slightly away from houses offers more options and fewer barky dogs. The cycling app Rolling Around also has campsite waypoints (although this was how we got in trouble with the police).

2b. A flat spot – an uncultivated field is good (don’t sleep on someone’s crops!), and trees are good for protecting bikes. I try to find somewhere with as few lumps and rocks as possible – long grass can be especially deceiving in this regard. 

3. Read The Wager by David Grann as a book club book for your bikepacking group. This is a major source of encouragement since no matter how slopey/rocky/noisy your campsite is at least you are not shipwrecked on an icy Patagonian island in the eighteenth century. 

4. Remove as many rocks from your campsite floor as possible, find a tent position not in the way of branches or other poly things, and find a flat spot for cooking with as little vegetation as possible. 

5. Pack up all your rubbish! we have usually waited to go to the toilet at the first petrol station in the morning so we don’t have to dig holes or deal with toilet paper. 

6. Prepare for lots of noises – insects, owls, the azan, random rustling, the highway, dogs. I really get the ‘dawn chorus’ now and also all of those stats about how much biomass is insects. Shreyas gets more worked up about nighttime noises than me but both of us are usually too tired to investigate. 

7. Do it all in reverse in the morning! In university I could stay out late at parties, wake up at 10 am, get dressed and eat some toast in 15 minutes flat and still make it to church on time. This ability completely abandons me when packing up a campsite and it takes at least an hour, usually more.

Headlong in the headwind on the headland

The ride along the Datça peninsula can be characterised as: big hills (we did 1000m+ of climbing), lots of sea (Aegean to the north and Akdeniz to the south), and punishing headwind (the prevailing northwesterly ensured we had to pedal at all times on the descents).

If the descents were not a reward this time, our Warmshowers host definitely was. Edip and Meltem are seasoned hosts who have a very nice apartment looking out to the Mediterranean Sea and the Greek island, Simi.

As a fun cultural exchange we made Edip and Meltem some palak paneer and date scones, and received lots of useful route advice and cups of tea. Datça is a cute town, and since it’s on a peninsula, we could get a ferry to Bodrum, on the other side of the bay. A morning hanging out at the beach then a brisk ride to the ferry in the evening was a perfect rest day.