Be warned, however, that we didn’t go to either Greece or Armenia. We could see the Greek island of Samos from Özdere, where we spent the kurban bayramı holiday with Ferda’s parents. Does that count?
Defne and I had a short 5:30am self-guided tour of Selçuk when we switched buses between Antalya and Özdere.
My notes from this section keep saying “another great day of bicycle touring!” Even though we had a 200m climb through Kayabaşı, the day that Ahmet and I rode through Yeşildağ was the flattest of our 10-day trip.
My first bicycle tour of 2023. It has been 10 months since Ferda and I finished our long (four-month) spring/summer tour in Munich last year. For this 10-day tour Ahmet and I headed into the mountains to the NE of Antalya, at least my fourth bicycle tour intothisfantasticarea.
I’ll start with a map. This year’s route is in purple. Ahmet and I rode the red route together two years earlier. This year Ahmet had the idea to take the tram from Antalya east passed Aksu, avoiding about 25km of city and highway riding. That worked well.
We were quickly off the highway and into a fairly flat agricultural area — veggies, olives, and pomegranate mostly — before the climbing started.
Bozburun Dağı at 2504m is the highest peak that we can regularly see looking east from our apartment in Antalya, and I had never climbed it. (On very clear days we can see higher stuff even farther to the east, and of course looking west there are many closer and higher summits.) Philipp can also see Bozburun from his apartment, and he’s been trying to summit every peak near Antalya so it’s a bit surprising that he hadn’t been up Bozburun either. (BTW, Sivri Dağı is still on his list!) Özgür had probably been up Bozburun before, but he’s not really sure as he followed his father up heaps of mountains around Antalya when he was a kid.
The drive is kind of far (over two hours), but with Özgür’s fancy car we were able to continue up the forest road all the way to about 1300m.
The walk ended up taking about 7.5 hours, half in the forest and (the funner) half above treeline. It didn’t seem so steep going up, but it felt surprisingly steep the whole way going down. I was the only one to bring poles, and I was glad I did.