Day 1 – March 17th 06 – Antalya – Olmypos (52 miles +800m)
We started late today because Matt had a sickness bug. We left at around 11.30am and cycled out of Antalya Old Town (Kaleci) to pick up the tramline, this, according to the brothers Mavi and Ani (who ran the guesthouse) would lead us out of the city by the best route, avoiding closed roads and one way streets. We rode on the tramlines (literally)for a few kilometers and had to get out of the way of a tram on at least two occasions. We then got back on the road and headed down to the beach area where we followed the promenade for a few km and then joined the main highway out of Antalya.
We were given countless beeps and waves from everyone along the road and from cars and trucks, we weren’t sure whether it was because we were cyclists / foreigners or both, but it was a nice gesture and we always reciprocated. The road itself was rather dull and quite busy (and this is “off” season, though for cyclists “on” season wouldn’t be fun due to the extreme temperatures, 45Deg C is not uncommon), but it did have a good shoulder all the way, and the drivers were always courteous.
We left the main road after about 18 miles to go though a “resort town” (I use the term loosely as it was a bit of a dump) called Bebedi, by now we were quite hungry and looking for lunch as it was 4 hrs since we’d eaten (a nice Turkish) breakfast at the guesthouse in Antalya. We eventually found a restaurant amidst the concrete of hotels and apartments and tacky shops and sat down for lunch, what happened next was rather surreal. The waiter came over, he spoke no English, and just a little German and took our order of 3 coffees and a tea (I was going to have a beer but Brown convinced me otherwise). The coffee arrived and it was lukewarm and didn’t taste too good. After a 30 min wait the waiter returned and by pointing at the menu we asked for 2 shish kebabs and a pizza. 30 mins later the waiter returned with our food, consisting of 2 chicken burgers (eh?) and a very small pizza. This was never enough food for 4 hungry cyclists (let alone he bought us the wrong food!) so by more gesticulating and pointing we ordered some chips. He then came back with 4 lamb shish kebab, so we cancelled the chips and I ordered that beer. The food was quite poor (compared to what we’d had inA ntalya the night before) and the price was a rip-off. After about 2 ½ hours since entering this dull/expensive little town, we were on our way cycling out of Bebedi, with a slightly bad taste in our mouths.
It was gone 3pm and we still had over 30 miles to cover, and we weren’t exactly sure how much light we had, as we were still on winter time. We got back on the main road and made good progress for about 10 – 15 miles, then we hit our first big climb, which we weren’t really expecting, considering we were just supposed to be following the coast today. The climb took nearly an hour and as we started running out of daylight and with the temperature dropping we came to our turn off the main road and looked forward to a long descent back down to sea level (from about 500 metres). After taking a few snaps of the snow-capped Mt.Olympos we began what we thought would be an easy 7km cruise down to our guesthouse, how wrong we were….
At the end of the descent, with no sign of the Olympos resort village, and the light almost gone, the road became a river, which we had no choice but to ford, barefoot (the water was over our knees) as we were told by a local that Olympos was on the other side. We put our shoes and socks back on and were told by another local to follow the beach along to Olympos, it was now pitch black! We trudged our heavy bikes through the soft sand for about a km when we reached a more severe river which we weren’t going to ford.
Antony and I decided to go off on foot, following the river back inland to see if we could find Olympos, was it real, or was it a myth? we were starting to think that maybe we would be spending the night on the beach, which wouldn’t have been so bad, as the night sky was fantastic, although it was getting quite cold by now. After about 5mins we realized we were on some kind of path, then after about 15 mins of following a distant light, we bumped into some divers who confirmed that the resort village was just a bit further up the path and that we’d been walking through the ancient city of Olympos since the beach! We walked back with the divers, who had a better torch and gathered up our bikes and the 4 of us pushed our bikes into the resort village, finally arriving at the first bar we saw at about 8.30pm. We found our accommodation, had a well earned dinner of soup and vegetarian casserole and couscous followed by a couple more beers while we sat warming ourselves by the wood burner and joking that our first (easy?) day had turned into a bit of an epic.
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