Friday five: fun in (and around) Fethiye.

Fethiye is a coastal town on the western Mediterranean side of Turkey. It's surrounded on three sides by mountain peaks, and one side by a gorgeous bay. It's definitely a summer tourist destination but we managed to find good hikes and good eats before and after our five-week farmstay with the horses in Üzümlü. We also managed some fun during our farmstay...

Five Fethiye(ish) outings in between poo duty over the last six weeks, in chronological order:

1. The ghost town in Kayaköy. The trek from Fethiye to Kayaköy (8km one way) started just a few blocks from our pension, meandered along an ancient Roman road in the hills, wound through the dirt roads of a tiny agricultural village, and ended right in front of the ghost town entrance.

ancient Roman turtle
(he'd moved about two feet
when we walked back through)

We spent over an hour wandering among just a handful of the 500 homes built to house thousands of Greeks who would abandon them in the 1920s when they were relocated back to their home country.

lots of churches too

Just like the wild west ghost towns we've visited, Kayaköy was simultaneously spooky and fascinating. And the layout of the village was impressive. Not only was it incredibly compact, it was also constructed so that no building cast a full shadow on another building at any time of the day.

vampires would love it

The magnitude of the ghost town surprised us and the recent occupation added to the eerie feel. And like many of our forthcoming hikes, it smelled wonderful from all the wild oregano and thyme!

2. The ruins of Kadyanda (Cadianda). This trek started about a quarter mile from our horse hosts' villa in Üzümlü. We and The Czech headed out after chores one morning and, a few hours later, had a picnic lunch near the ancient baths.

Uzumlu panorama

waiting for the show

The site was really nicely laid out with helpful signs at each major section.  There was more to it than we expected, including unprotected 15-foot deep holes where they once stored water.  Don't take your toddlers on this one.

3. The watchtower hike. We really have no idea how far we trekked; we also don't know if the mountain actually has a name. All we know is that we left our hosts' villa shortly after 8am and didn't get back until 3:30pm. And that it was all uphill and downhill. And that three quarters of the way through it, we started to get that familiar Tunnel Falls "seems like a good idea until you hit mile 10 and still have 2 miles to go" feeling... all of which led us to put this watchtower hike at about 10 miles.

the challenge, as seen from our balcony

(your challenge: find the watchtower)

We stared at the watchtower at the top of the mountain from the horse paddock for three weeks, plotting and scheming our route (there is no set trail most of the way up the mountain). We even made one half-hearted attempt before setting our minds to it Christmas Eve. The trek up was somewhat strenuous but the forest was peaceful and green, so we didn't mind the effort. About three quarters of the way up, we reached a large pasture where goats were grazing and we followed the dirt road from there up to the watchtower.

our lunch spot
(it was alright)

We opted to follow the creek bed on the way down. It was upper arm and knee-bending bouldering work the entire way, but it was a whole lot of fun.

fun until hour #2 of this, anyway

4. The whirlwind day trip around Üzümlü. New Year's Eve, we and The Aussie had two destinations in mind; everything else we could squeeze in was gravy. With a rental car at our disposal we found a lot of gravy.

Tlos was one destination. All the ruins we've encountered have been unique; this was one of the largest that was inhabited fairly recently (if three centuries counts as "recent"). It was fairly well-preserved, expanse, and possibly due to the holiday, free! Our favorite word.

he lives to fight another day

Saklikent Gorge, one of the deepest canyons in the world, was the other planned destination. In the summer you can wade through shallower parts and hike almost 20km. In the winter, not so much - unless you are crazy, have a wetsuit, or don't mind freezing to death. What little we were able to see was still totally worth the ~$3 admission though.

skinny canyon

means bad lighting

trust us - it's awe-inspiring

The canyon walls were narrower and taller than any we'd seen, and the water rushing through the gorge drowned out any other noise. We couldn't hike so we absorbed the sights and sounds for a while and moved on.

We tried to find Xanthos but couldn't (and we were even sadder about this when we learned it was a UNESCO World Heritage Site), so we turned left at Esen and wound our way up narrow canyon roads to the lesser-visited ruins at Sidyma. A little old woman greeted us and, after changing her shoes, gave us a brief tour of the ruins while she collected firewood.

our guide and The Aussie

The ruins were spread out around the site, and we appreciated her random pointing and one-word explanations ("church", "medusa", "Roman") as she led us through mucky trails and goat poo. She invited us for lunch afterward but we were losing daylight so we politely declined, gave her a few lire for her trouble, and moved on.

Lunch and a beach visit in picturesque Ölüdeniz, where we may have also seen the Blue Lagoon, back through Kayaköy to show The Aussie the ghost town, and a sunset stop to end our New Year's Eve adventure. All in all, a great day.

5. Last but not least, the Aktas Beach hike right before we left town. The bus ride alone was worth the $13 round trip for this outing.

somewhere on that cliff is the road

the bus drove along

Faralya is an easy day trip from Fethiye. It's home to Butterfly Valley and you can also hike there, but we opted to turn left at the fork instead. The views from the coastal cliffs (and of the opposite coastal cliffs) were breathtaking.

happy hikers

We ended up meandering down a forest trail toward the beach but because of a late start and an early last bus back to Fethiye, we didn't make it all the way to the coast. We did see the hippie camp in Butterfly Valley from above... and agreed that we'd made the right choice for our hike.

Fethye(sh) food notes - SO MUCH DELICIOUSNESS!

our "welcome to Fethiye" treat -

cay at the marina

an amazing and colorful thanksgiving
dinner at Mozaic Bahce

eggplant kebap at Altın şiş

the wonderful Fethiye fruit and veggie market (open every day)
where we got a hundred packs of lovely figs

pide and kebaps at Paşa Kebap

(our least favorite meal, actually -

but even it was pretty good)

banana honey pancake
at Fethiye's Saturday market

homemade pancakes at our

Üzümlü farmstay

delicious meze before our main course

at Pasamzade

and back to Mozaic on our last night
("enough with the pictures -

CAN I JUST EAT ALREADY??")

Fethiye(sh) lodging notes:

• Our first few nights we stayed at Ideal Pension. Nothing about it was ideal, other than the price. And maybe the location. Our private room was tiny, the breakfast was okay, we had hot water in the shower if we were lucky, and the entire place was pretty dirty. The common area was freezing and no one seemed to mind if people smoked even though there were "no smoking" signs everywhere. We chalked it up to the off-season, enjoyed the price, and vowed to stay somewhere else if we were ever back in Fethiye.
• So, for our last few nights in Fethiye we "splurged" on Yildirim Guesthouse. For just a few dollars more we had our own spacious private room, hot water all the time, and a really friendly owner. The wifi in the room was the only challenge but we made it work.
  

and the breakfast was lovely!

There was just too much to see and do... and EAT! But this is true for Turkey in general, actually. Really hoping to come back to this part of the world someday.  Before we leave, though, we've got more ruins to see!

"Hey, remember when Jen tried to be gluten-free in Central Europe?"

{Ed. note: this is directed at search engines producing results for words in the subject. I didn't really find much guidance online earlier this year, so I thought I'd throw my own experience out there. In other words, if you *can* eat bread and/or don't plan to visit this part of the world, you probably won't care about any of this...}

A year and a half ago I found out I was potato- and wheat-intolerant. So when I told people our first Phase Two stop was Central Europe, the land of bread and potatoes, it was always with a laugh... and also a tiny prayer to The Universe that I wouldn't wither away from malnutrition.

Our first few days in Poland I meticulously avoided everything wheat- or potato-related. Armed with a Polish translation food list, we would carefully scan ingredients on grocery store packages and restaurant menus. It wasn't too different from being back home, actually.

Turns out that "no potatoes no wheat" in Central Europe really is a pretty ambitious endeavor. At first this meant a diet of corn flakes or oatmeal or yogurt for breakfast; a salad for lunch (pre-packaged from the grocery store or from a cafe); rice/rice noodles and veggies/canned tuna/kielbasa for dinner; fruit (fresh or dried), carrots, peanut butter, peanuts, and chocolate for snacks.

our intro to Warsaw

his: pierogies

hers: chef salad

... sooooo not fair

sausage:

welcome to Prague!

... now that's fair

Eating the same things over and over again got kinda boring. One day a guy at a hostel made eggs for dinner, and that opened up a lot of new ideas for us.  But even that got boring after a while.

also boring?

"English" breakfasts in foreign lands

I was thrilled to find rice cakes, rice vermicelli, bean noodles, dried soy products, and of course peanut butter in Polish grocery stores. Up until we got to Turkey these items were actually pretty easy to find in all the countries we visited (though for some reason the rice products got more expensive the further south we went, and peanut butter was more scarce in Romania).

sometimes the labels
were even in English -

neat!

A chain called Carrefour - kind of like the Safeway of Central Europe, slightly overpriced with a decent variety of food - carried everything I needed and their markets were in all the major cities. Even tiny markets in Bialowieza and Nemcicky had rice snacks and dried soy.

Bialowieza makeshift dinner by tea kettle:

rice noodles, rehydrated soy, mystery spices

Fruit stands were also easy to find; plums and apples during fall harvest season were fantastic.

Krakow fruit stand:

part one

Krakow fruit stand:

part two

Nemcicky rule:

pick one, eat one

After a few weeks in Poland I got curious and tried bread. Nothing terrible happened so I continued to experiment. Turns out that for whatever reason, wheat has not been as offensive to my system here.

the first offender:

thanks, little old pastry shop lady

it was all downhill from there

It could be that the wheat strain here is more pure. But my guess is that it's everything *other than* the wheat, yeast, salt, water and sometimes egg that goes into packaged wheat products in the US that caused me the real trouble. (I'm talking to you, potato starch, guar gum, xanthum gum, and everything I can't pronounce!) Here, I can't always read the ingredients but when there are just three or four listed on a package, that's a good sign that the product is not going to have too negative an impact on me. And bread is baked each morning, sold so fast that it's not even individually wrapped, and stale by day three.

we must've eaten 847

of these fresh-baked rolls

in Central Europe

Wheat products are not always fun on my system but they are almost always tolerable, and this has made life so much easier. Leftover hostel breakfasts of bread, cheese and meats became free lunch.

whereas pierogies become

not free lunch...

... so did dumplings

Cheap eats from doner kebap stands became viable snack options.

our first kebap -

thank you, Olomouc!

our 53rd kebap -

thank you, Bucharest!

So did bagel carts and pastry shop snacks, which ended up being lifesavers in some cases. Like that day in Budapest when we were starving and a two-mile walk from any signs of a supermarket. Of course, they weren't exactly the tastiest options...

best when purchased at 6am -

otherwise, for them there birds

... or the healthiest.

as the was the case

in Brasov

and Olomouc

and Krakow

But with all that walking it really didn't matter.

Pasta (which I can mostly also eat) became dinner. And garlic bread was often involved too.

Budapest hostel livin'

Lisinia farmstay livin'

Bucharest homemade pasta livin'

And all these lovely cheeses and jams now included bread accompaniment!

homemade cheese: even better

And beer was back on the menu!

Prague beer

Olomouc beer

Brasov beer

... you get the point.

Sometimes I even got to make AND eat bread made from scratch - something I have really missed.

There is still the mysterious yeast/potato connection... But I'm not doing a science fair project, I'm just trying to eat pain-free. So whatevs, we'll just roll with it.

Have not tried potato yet... Not intentionally, anyway. It's hard to avoid in soups and for some reason doner kebaps often include a topping of "chips" ("fries" to you US folks). I definitely know when I have had it and I still suffer afterward. But it's much easier to explain a potato allergy to a new volunteer host or restaurateur than to rattle off the list of things I can and cannot eat.

I shouldn't eat bread with every single meal but I still do. BECAUSE I CAN. But less bread and less sugar (mainly via honey in my yogurt and tea) are in my future - I'm starting to need less weight so that I don't need more pants.

luckily, we are past Krakow's zapiekanki

unluckily we are still in the land of pide

(OK, this is not exactly a bad thing)

However. When we get to Vietnam, I dare say all bets on "less bread" are off... but at least I will be able to counter the bánh mì with loads of delicious vegetables!