The Sunday Times - February 26, 2006
Barefoot pirates in Turkey
Secret anchorages, smooth sailing and absolutely no need for shoes whatsoever: Brian Jackman couldn’t be more relaxed on a gulet cruise of the Turquoise Coast.
Seated at a candlelit dinner table on the terrace of the Regency, in Kalkan, you can see why it’s one of the most popular luxury hotels on the Med. The service is impeccable, the classic Ottoman cuisine fit for a sultan and the view of the bay and its necklace of lights as perfect as you could wish.
How times change. When I first came to Kalkan a quarter of a century ago, the tarmac stopped at Fethiye and such upmarket comforts simply did not exist. But Turkey’s gorgeous Lycian coast was too rich a secret to hide for ever. Soon, the summer visitors began to arrive in ever-increasing numbers, from Marmaris to Dalyan, from Gocek beyond the Seven Capes to Patara, and all the way to Kekova, transforming the sleepy harbour at Kalkan into an oasis of sophistication.
Yet it is still possible to recapture the solitude and tranquillity of yesteryear. Cruising is the way to go, on board a gulet, one of the traditional, twin-masted ketches that will take you on what the Turks call a “Blue Voyage” along the shores of the long-vanished Lycians.
Gulet cruising is a uniquely Turkish experience that cannot be repeated elsewhere, and it happens here because only the south-facing Lycian coast offers the right winds, the right depths and an abundance of safe and sheltered anchorages. It’s pure serendipity and, as a result, the number of gulets plying these waters has mushroomed in recent years.
The 89ft Aleyna is such a vessel. Built in Fethiye and launched in May last year, she is among the latest examples of her kind, with a crew of three and a maximum of just eight passengers in four deluxe master cabins.
I joined her in Kalkan for a cruise to Olympos, putting out to sea on a glorious October morning, the sun scorching hot on the scrubbed wooden deck and the water as blue as a kingfisher’s back.
Like all gulets, Aleyna is absurdly romantic, with her rakish lines and piratical poop deck, blue canvas awnings and gleaming varnish thick as barley sugar. My first act on coming aboard was to kick off my shoes, and that is how we lived for the next three days, barefoot sea gypsies adrift in a world of pine-scented coves and turquoise bays.
Ahmet, our captain, had been a sailor for most of his life. “I started as a fisherman when I was nine years old,” he told me. “I learnt fast,” he continued. “And this,” he said, with a sweep of his arm that took in the stark capes and headlands, the fleets of islands and the sea around us, “this was my school room.”
On our port side, limestone mountains, faintly rusted and specked with scrub, slid into the sea. At one point, we seemed to be steering for a head-on collision with a brutal wall of savage rock that opened up at the last moment to reveal a narrow passage between two islands, and on we went, gliding across yet another dreamy bay with flying fish skimming beneath our bows.
At midday, we hove to in a secret cove. The anchor dropped through 20ft of limpid water and we slipped over the side to swim and snorkel before lunch.
Afterwards, as we motored on past Kekova, the coast became wilder, with huge, pine-clad mountains tumbling into the sea and the uninhabited Devecitasi islands away to starboard. The air was warm, as if the mountains were a living body, and the scent of the pines flew out to us across the water.
That night, we anchored in Geneviz Limani — the Bay of the Genoese — and dined on the poop deck as the moon rose and the sound of the lapping tide echoed against the towering cliffs.
The highlight of the cruise was undoubtedly Olympos, where we came ashore by Zodiac inflatable to explore the ruined city. The bay itself, framed by the wooded mountains of the Olympos National Park, is probably the loveliest on the entire Lycian coast, and a great favourite with walkers.
Like most of Turkey’s famous classical sites, Olympos was founded in the Hellenistic age. It became a notorious pirates’ lair until the Romans came, and in the Middle Ages it enjoyed a brief renaissance under the Venetians and the Genoese, only to be abandoned for ever with the arrival of the Ottoman invaders.
Today, overgrown by bay laurel and oleanders, all that remains is a tumbled ruin; an amphitheatre, baths, tombs, and the doorway of a temple. But the site itself — a clear stream trickling down to the beach, with kingfishers flashing among the reeds — is idyllic.
If you are into Greek myths and legends, you’ll want to walk up through the pines to the bare hillside, where natural flames flare up from fissures in the rock. These eternal fires, so the ancients believed, were once the home of the chimera, a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent, which dwelt in this wild place until it was slain by Bellerophon.
At the end of the cruise, I was so taken with the coast at Olympos that I returned by road to Cavus, a fruit-growing village on a sheltered bay between pine-covered headlands.
The route I followed started out as a new dual carriageway, but as it led deeper into the Turkish countryside, unfolding across wide valleys where tall poplars shone like green flames against the light, it shrank to a ribbon of potholed tarmac and finally became a dirt road that came to a halt outside the Arkadas Hotel.
The Arkadas (its name means “friend” in Turkish) is not the only place to stay in Cavus, but it is the best. It sits all by itself just a field’s length away from the beach, with the mountains of the Olympos National Park as a backdrop.
The hotel itself is nothing fancy: just a clean and simple family hotel, with 22 rooms and a swimming pool, owned and managed by Tahir Arslan, his wife, Neslihan, and his grandparents, Yusuf and Fatma. But the welcome you receive is as warm as the mellow sunshine, reinforcing the Turkish saying that “a visitor on the doorstep is a gift from God”.
Twenty-five years ago, this bay was the end of the hippie trail from Germany. “Ah,” sighed Tahir. “Those were the days. In summer, we stayed in a hut by the beach and ate fish from the sea. We had a free life.”
Then, 16 years ago, Tahir built the Arkadas Hotel on the family’s seven-acre farm, where Yusuf and Fatma still keep goats and chickens, and grow the tomatoes and cucumbers you eat at lunchtime. There are also two house cows, whose milk is churned by Neslihan each morning to produce the butter and yoghurt placed on your breakfast table an hour later.
Decades of toil have transformed the surrounding fields into a gigantic fruit bowl, with row upon row of ripening melons and pomegranates glowing like russet lanterns in every roadside orchard, while the Arkadas Hotel itself has almost disappeared under a riot of hibiscus, palms and morning-glories.
There isn’t much to do except swim and sunbathe, but Tahir has acquired a boat, a comfortable old wooden motor cruiser that he uses to take his guests on bay-hopping trips up the coast to Olympos. On the way there, you can fish for mackerel before stopping for a swim and a barbecue lunch at Geneviz Limani. “Often,” says Tahir, “we meet up with dolphins, and once in a while, if we are lucky, we spot a monk seal, although they are now extremely rare.”
If you wish, on the return journey, Tahir will put you ashore so that you can walk back to the hotel — a three-hour stroll through resinous forests of Calabrian pines where autumn- flowering cyclamen bloom and foxtail lilies nod in the breeze.
Every summer, a few more visitors — mostly British and German — find their way down the dusty road to the sea. Yet Cavus remains a deeply rural corner of Turkey, with the slightly ramshackle charm of a backpackers’ resort.
A shallow river trickles out into the bay, its clear waters home to terrapins, crabs and countless frogs, and along its tree-lined banks, a handful of simple pansiyons and restaurants have sprung up in recent years, including one called Paradise, reached by a suspension bridge that leads to tables set out on wooden platforms in midstream, where you can eat guzleme — savoury, 3ft-wide Turkish pancakes.
Paradise it is. But how long will it stay the same if Turkey joins the European Union? What chance of milk and butter fresh from the cow when the bureaucrats arrive? My advice is to go now, while you can.
• Brian Jackman travelled as a guest of Exclusive Escapes
Gulet Hoildays - Prices & Availability:
Land & Sea:
7 nights at sea & 7 nights on land
4 nights at sea & 3 nights on land (or vice versa)
Exclusive Escapes has seven nights on the luxury gulet Aleyna from £500pp, full-board, including flights to Dalaman from Heathrow or Manchester and transfers.
Alternatively, four nights on the gulet Baba Veli VII, followed by three nights, B&B, at the Kalkan Regency, start at £525pp (6 & 13 May), including flights and transfers as above.
View this article on The Sunday Times Travel website.