The Ancient Ruins of Tlos, and discovering Narnia

 Now, where were we?

Oh yes, driving back from Marmaris to Finike...   you may need a bigger cuppa for this one.

Having a four hour drive in front of him, it did take me a little bit of cajoling to get Mike to agree to take short diversion on our way home to visit an ancient site. 

'It's only 13ks off the main road" says I. "So that's 26ks all up. It's nothing.."  (Plus the hour or so to look around, although I didn't bring that up. I'm not that stupid). 

Now, to be fair, I have the advantage of having visited Turkey before, 12 years ago with Jess, and already knew that Turkey is a country with unbelievable ancient sites linking the present day country to many long gone civilizations (e.g. Hittites, Ancient Romans and Greeks....). Mike just thought I was dragging him to a boring bunch of rocks. 

Finally he agreed, turned off the Fethiye-Antalya highway, and tried not to harumph as we drove through green rural scenery gazing at snowy mountains on a bumpy country road. 

And then, at the end of a winding road we spied the impressive remains of what looked like a castle on a steep and rocky hill.

"Holy guacamole!!" shouted Mike as he leapt out of the car.

"Welcome to Turkey"  I said expansively, as if I had created all this for his benefit.

The castle turned out to be The Acropolis, or rulers palace and fortress. But it didn't stop there. The site also contains the remains of a stadium, baths, necropolis, temple and a roman theatre. 

Now, I'm not going to pretend to be an overnight authority, and nothing I write can adequately describe Tlos, so here are the basics - evidence shows that the foundations for Tlos began approximately 4000 years ago, and Tlos, first called Tlawa by the Hittites, became the oldest and largest Lycian city. After several civilisations lived in Tlos, the remains suffered serious earthquake damage in 141 AD, and then again in 240 AD.  

Click here for information about Tlos   

(Apologies to my librarian friends, this is from Wikipedia...)

We first wandered up the hill, taking our time explore the ruins and take in the view. A single Turkish flag fluttered at half mast in the cold wind at the very top of the ruins. It was a very poignant sight. The day was the 7th February 2023, one day after the 2 catastrophic earthquakes in South East Turkey. In fact, while we stood still and considered the fall of this ancient site due to earthquakes, tremors continued to devastate cities and towns elsewhere in Turkey, as they still do. 

PS - there are no photos of the theatre because

a) it was undergoing renovations to repair collapsing walls

b) camera malfunction

c) camera operators malfunctioning, or

d) all of the above.

So after wandering around in awe and contemplating our insignifant place in history, we headed off. Not before Mike had made friends with a local dog, who followed him everywhere and looked completely bereft when he realised Mike was heading for the car. 

I decided to give Mike a break, so I turned off the GPS and told him, when we get back to the main road, just follow the signs to Antalya. He agreed with me, it's one road which we'd already driven, how hard could it be? So I stopped looking at where we were going and paid absolutely no attention to the road, but to the scenery...

After a while I thought, gee that man looks cold, poor guy, as I gazed out the window. Hold up, it's cold because... that's snow outside! What?? There was thin, but definitely white stuff on the ground next to the road. I'd heard that there had been more snow on the mountains near Finike, so we both presumed that it had snowed more than we'd been aware of. 

As it continued we decided, well there was a section 2 days before that had been covered in thick fog, so this must why we didn't recognise any of the landscape. And it was white now.

The snow got thicker and thicker. We got out a couple of times just to revel in the novelty. So exciting - confusing, but fanastic. I was kept busy looking for Mr. Tumnus, after all we had somehow tumbled into Narnia, without a wardrobe. And surely there would be Turkish Delight somewhere too? (You cannot imagine my "delight" when I found out as an adult that this was a real thing).

If you look at the mountains in the distance in this photo, you see a lake we passed and this was the way we were headed...

Eventually it became clear to us that we were also continously, gradually climbing. The wide vistas were not narrowing and descending as we expected. I'd better check our location...

Yup, we were on the wrong road. Heading into The Mountains. We'd forgotten about a small link road between the main highway and the road to Tlos, so we'd turned right to Antalya, as I'd told Mike, instead of left and left again. So, a different road to Antalya. We'd long finished our emergency donuts and it was after 3pm. It would be dark not long after 6pm. Quick, do a U-ey.  

Mike headed up the way we came as I checked the GPS. It said that the way we had already been going was better. Quick, do another U-ey.

So back we went. Admiring the view, but aware that we didn't have chains, and it certainly looked like we were going to cross mountains. The road had recently been graded, but we agreed the moment the road deteriorated, we were turning around again. After about 30 minutes I managed to contact Tarik, the man who had lent us the car.

"Hello Tarik, it's Mandy. We took the wrong road, we're following the GPS route, but we will be back a little later than we thou-.."

"Merhaba - No, No, No.! You must not go that way. I can see you on the GPS tracker, you cannot go over the mountains. You must turn around."

Tarik hadn't even finished speaking and we had that car turned around again pronto. After all, it was still a wide road with, as you can guess, no other vehicles in sight.

Poor Mike, that quick only 26ks (and an hour or so) turned into a marathon effort. The last bit of the road was the winding twisty ocean road, and we'd be doing it in the dark. I'd already got to the jumpy, we're going to die on the next corner stage, so we gave up and stopped off at Kas to rest up. 

Then he had to get me up and on the road by 8am the next morning - another marathon effort - so we could get the car back on time, but we got to enjoy the blue ocean in the morning sun for the first time.