I wake up early, but turn over and go back to sleep for an hour. yay! After breakfast in the garden, the car gets packed up and we are on our way.
This is certainly a different kind of travel than usual for me – both the pace and the spontaneity. No reservations and no particular timing, although my usual hurriedness to get everything done does rear its ugly head and get bossy on a regular basis.
Driving along the highway is incredibly fun; particularly because most of the time it snakes along the coast and speedlimits are nowhere to be found. It seems that everyone goes at the pace that works for them and the passing lane is actually used only for passing. Imagine that! I love going fast in our manual little ford with its fat steering wheel cover. One hand on the wheel and the other on the stick and i am racing around mountain curves like Parnelli Jones! I think of Ida and Leo, my paternal grandparents, who used to “motor” through Europe…spotting a mountaintop village and going to check it out. No plan and no obligations, just going wherever the road takes them.
After an hour or so of appreciating beautiful scenery, with occasional peeks at the coastline:
we spot the turnoff for Ucagiz (road signage is spectacularly well done..which is a good thing, since our GPS sucks. Next acquisition for me!), and off we go, down and around until we pull into the little village (still, tour buses EVERYWHERE). As we wind slowly through the streets, trying to get close to the marina and find a place to park, an older gentleman in a white Greek fisherman’s cap motions us into a place. As I get the car tucked into place, we step out and he tells us to come with him because he has a boat to take us (quelle surprise!). A little hesitant, but game, we follow him down to check it out
and pass some Brits who toured with him last year. With their assurance, we decide to sign up and take time first to have a light lunch of gozleme. I have been yakking about them for a couple of days, and evidently we have stumbled onto ground zero for the best of the best, sir (proven when the boat captain shows us the entry in Lonely Planet guide that states his wife makes the best!).
We sit down and watch while she pulls out dough, rolls it into a ball, and then uses a very long wooden rolling pin to roll it thinner than you can imagine. She has a large metal, inverted shallow wok-type metal pan that is turned upside down on top of a coal fire, and then she slaps the paper-thin dough on top to cook.
As she turns it over, she fills it with a mixture of salty cheese, grain, mint chiffon date and who knows what else. She folds it again, and when it’s toasty on both sides, she slaps it down on a board for hubby to slather with butter and cut in fat wedges for drooling customers.
Appetites sated, we hop on the boat and our congenial captain putts us out to a couple of sites where there a ruins above and some below the surface. We snorkel a bit, but not too much under the water that is recognizable as this or that. Very cool fort on the hillside and just lovely being out on the water.
The captain lets the lady man the wheel and presents me with a hand-tied rope necklace with some polished amber rocks.
Very sweet. Back on shore after a couple hours,
we smile at the good fortune of finding such a wonderful way to see the Kekova ruins.
Its getting late in the afternoon, so we head on to Kas, our destination for the evening. We check out a couple places on one side of town and rooms booked or too expensive (relatively speaking…most are about $65/night with breakfast). We drive over to the other side of town, where sits a hotel I researched. The room is okay, but when we walk up to the rooftop terrace, we seal the deal. In fact, after showering, we spend the next few hours up there, enjoying the view, the sunset and the dinner buffet.
After dinner, we walk into town, which is def chock full of tourists, but in a lively, fun way. We grab and ice cream and check out some of the Turkish backgammon boards with beautiful inlaid wood. So easy to get carried away, which I do (once again) in a pocketbook store – the purses are beautiful and the copies are so well done. I am looking and considering and modeling for about an hour.
And of course had stated earlier that we needed to go to bed early so we could get an earlier start to the day! Decisions made, I pack up and we head back to the Hideaway hotel and fall into bed. I bounce right up to check into hotels for our next destination (bad dog), and subsequently don’t fall asleep for hours.