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Serendipity of Travel : Kalkan and Patara Unplanned

If you trust to serendipity rather than to your original plan, sometimes it works out better!

This email would have been called Kas by Motorbike because that’s what we intended to do. Go to Kas, check out the marina, stay overnight and return to Marmaris or maybe who knows what. But that’s not what happened. We stayed in Kas long enough to visit the marina and find it to be the most expensive marina on the coast and who needs that! It was huge and mostly empty; serves them right and I hope it stays that way! Then on our way back towards Marmaris Randal made a serendipitous decision to visit the small marina in Kalkan and we made a fortunate discovery. Not that the marina was cheap and wonderful; it was even more expensive than Kas. But we met some really nice people, stayed overnight in a lovely small hotel, and were encouraged to visit Patara just down the road to see ancient ruins and the beautiful beach. Serendipity Tours is what we might have to call our motorbike travels.

“Serendipity: The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.”

Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity, which he coined in one of the 3,000 or more letters on which his literary reputation primarily rests. In a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that "this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word." Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of "a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of…." http://www.thefreedictionary.com/serendipity

(Interestingly we ended up in Sri Lanka as a totally unplanned stop on our voyage to India)….

We left Marmaris at 8:30 am Friday morning with beautiful sunny skies and less humidity in the air. We’d had thunder, lightning and hail a few days before so maybe the weather system was cleaned out of any turmoil for a bit. We have landmarks now on the route 400 along the coast since we’ve traveled on it both east and west of here several times. We know where to find gas stations, the tunnel and toll we’ll encounter just before Gocek and a few places to eat along the way. We stopped for gas just short of Fethiye and had Nescafe which is what coffee is called. Then we started into new territory and became even more enamored of Turkey as we drove through beautiful farmland between the mountains and the sea. By noon I was hungry so we stopped for lunch at a complex of gas station, restaurant and small café where men play with tiles marked like playing cards. I thought we’d head for the restaurant but a man stopped us and pointed to the tables where the men were playing tiles and told us to sit and eat lunch. Randal said OK so we did. Randal asked of sandwiches and mentioned chicken, I said cheese and vegetables and we ordered cans of Coke Light. The Coke Light came from the big restaurant but our sandwiches came from a small shed where the “owner” made food for unsuspecting tourists. Not that it was bad; it just wasn’t so good. Very little cheese, no chicken, super hot peppers we had to pick off, and more ketchup than tomatoes. It would have cost me about 4 TL if I’d made it on the boat. We paid 15TL.

The bread was really good and the Coke was cold….

This dog was very friendly and helped eat some of the bread.

Hundreds and hundreds of greenhouses.

A banner saying Ziraat was on most of the greenhouses so I looked it up. The Agricultural Bank of Turkey (Ziraat Bankasi) is probably the reason but Ziraat is also some kind of Sufi agricultural philosophy.

http://www.allaboutturkey.com/agriculture.htm . The vegetables in Turkey are wonderful and plentiful.

We rode through beautiful farmland and then the highway turned back to the coast.

Looking down on the small harbor of Kalkan where we would eventually return to have dinner and spend a wonderful night.

Highway 400 on the coast nearing Kas

Looking down on the beach

We continued on to Kas and arrived at the marina; the very empty marina. There were few boats and fewer cruisers…..

No boats on these docks..

No people and no boats on the docks at the mid left side of the photo beyond the grass area.

Kas charges 1,000 Euro per month for our size boat. Our marina charges about 200 Euro. Our marina stays pretty full…. So now we’re thinking about leaving the boat here for July and taking the motorbike and going traveling because we’d rather see Turkey than the same marina view for a month anyway.

Riding away from Kas to ….?

You can see our red bicycle panniers that Randal mounted to the motorbike. We really didn’t want to ride the whole way back to Marmaris. We’d left the boat at 8:30 am and had arrived in Kas at about 2:15 pm. We thought about going back to Fethiye but Randal decided to make a detour to Kalkan and check out their small harbour berthing rates.

Kalkan harbor.

Until the early 1920s, the majority of its inhabitants were Greeks. They left in 1923 because of the Exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey after the Greco-Turkish War.

Mountains surrounding Kalkan

"Kalkan is a stylish hillside harbour town that slides steeply into a sparkling blue bay.  It’s as rightly famous for its restaurants as its sublimely pretty beach."  Lonely Planet

Randal and Jemal

Jemal is retired Turkish Navy. He has a sailboat that he is refurbishing here in Kalkan. His nephew is a part owner of the Coast Restaurant. Jemal suggested we go talk with Billy and he find us a reasonable hotel for the night. Jemal reminded us of Anthony Quinn but I don’t have a good photo of him. Randal asked where Jemal had learned English as he sounded “American.” Jemal said in the Turkish navy they learn American English.

We met Billie whose family moved from Turkey to near Newark, New Jersey. Billy went to school in Bloomfield (to avoid Newark) and then worked for Xerox but recently moved back to Turkey to work in the restaurant business (I think that’s the story.) His lovely wife Esra was originally from Munich but spent time in London. They speak three languages to each other. Billie drove Esra home on their motorbike and stopped along the way to introduce us to Mark and Imelda who owned Pasha Hotel

Pasha Hotel and Apart

http://www.pasha-apartments.co.uk/

Next email Coast Bar and Restaurant and Pasha Hotel