Toros Traverse

We had originally planned our own "Haute Route" across the Toros, heading in a straight line from Konya through the highest peaks of the Bolkar Toros and dropping down directly into Adana. However, this would have meant a whole week pretty much in the middle of nowhere and the thought of a) the embarrassment as our loved ones back in England tried to mobilize the entire apparatus of the Turkish State to find us when we were quite happily trotting through the mountains and b) carrying an entire week's supply of food on top of our already overloaded bags made us rethink our plans. Instead, we opted for a lower level route, dropping South from Konya, down to Silifke and then up the coast to Adana.

There was nothing mountainous at all about the plain South of Konya. Although we were up at 1,000 metres, the landscape was as flat as a pancake. We could see for miles, all the way across to the various mountain ranges ringing the plain. A particularly bad moment to get caught in a thunderstorm and realise that WE were the highest point for 5 miles in every direction. Forks of lightning streaked across a foreboding black sky as we headed across the plain as fast as we could for a village we could make out on the horizon line. Soon the rain began and then big stinging hail stones whipped across our bare legs. Then as soon as it began, the rain stopped as the storm clouds divided and rolled on down the two ridges of mountains running down either side of the plain, leaving us more or less untouched in the middle.

Although we had escaped the storm, we still had to contend with the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere and had no food for the night. Problem solved by a kind old shepherd, who when we asked if we could have some bread, took us back to his house and fed us a full meal (delicious home grown tomatoes and cucumbers, rice, bread and a steaming hot chicken, bean and tomato casserole).

Rather than take the easy route to Karaman straight across the plain, we decided to detour over the flanks of an extinct volcano to visit Binbirkilise ("A thousand and one churches"), two Byzantine settlements with a large number of churches and cells made from the volcanic rock around. Discovering that the main concentration of churches required an 8km detour uphill, we opted to just look at the churches around the modern Turkish settlement of Madanşehri. This was once a thriving community, which minted its own coins. Arab and Turkish invasions appear to have forced the citizens further up the mountainside to Binbirkilise itself, away from the prying eyes of marauding bands (and exhausted pilgrims). In Madanşehri, successive settlers had incorporated much of the previous settlement into the new village - many of the houses looked like they had just been repaired and re-used and the ruins of one beautiful granite church had been incorporated into the wall around someone's property. One ruined church, which must have been huge in its prime, stood away from the rest of the settlement in the middle of fields. Standing next to the atmospheric old ruins, gazing down to the cloud-mottled plain 300 metres below was a moving experience.

Despite only being 3 days out of Konya, we arrived in Karaman (biscuit capital of Turkey) exhausted. Clearly having two days off in Konya had turned us soft. Must be all that pampering in the Turkish bath. We decided to have half a day off to prepare ourselves for the mountains which began abruptly after Karaman. James took advantage of the morning off to visit the barber and have a full shave and haircut - abandoning the messy beard and long hair of last year in favour of something cooler for the heat of the Eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately, he got the barber's apprentice who apparently had only mastered one hairstyle so far and hadn’t quite got the hang of how to wield a cut-throat razor. He emerged an hour later sporting a 1930's haircut, super-short hair brylcreamed to his scalp with a perfect side parting scraped through it, a red raw neck and blood pouring from a nick in his upper lip.
Tom supportively collapsed in hysterics and took lots of pictures.

We were in Karaman for Turkish National Day, which coincided with the funeral of a judge apparently killed by an Islamic militant for making a judgement against the wearing of headscarves in school and university. We had spoken to our medical school friends in Konya about this, who were very much in favour of lifting the ban. The issue really seems to draw out the fault lines in modern Turkey between the secular state and islamists. Our medical student friends reckoned that something like 40% of the population are strongly Muslim. Most of them would I am sure have condemned the lawyers action and it seems to have had the opposite effect from that which he intended, bringing thousands of people on to the street in defence of the secular state.

Leaving Karaman, the mountains proper began (once we had escaped the main road and its multiple biscuit advertising hoardings). The strenuous climbs were particularly uncomfortable for James as the sweat ran into the raw skin left from his scrape with the apprentices razor. Up here we felt further away from the modern world than we have yet. We passed through a village where several people were still living in caves, the entrances filled in with stone walls and wooden doors. With satellite dishes attached (no getting away from modernity completely). Up in the high valleys, families of shepherds tended to their sheep around their goat hair tents as they must have done for generations.

High up on the mountain side, unsure of where exactly we were, we caught sight of a vulture circling slowly over head. Visions of us, collapsed from exhaustion, slumped against the rocks, bidding each other stoical British farewells ("Well, I suppose this is it old man, toodle-pip and all that") whilst the vulture hopped gleefully from one to the other, selecting which juicy bit to get stuck into first, flashed briefly through our heads before we saw (or rather smelled) it's real object of interest - a dead sheep carcass, rotting and flyblown next to the path

Dropping off the tops and into a beautiful green valley with a bright mountain stream running down the middle, we were shouted over by a bunch of people running a trout farm. They were just preparing a banquet of fresh trout straight out of the water, seasoned with chilli and salt and barbecued out in the open. They invited us along and we gorged on the delicious fresh fish, doused in lemon and wrapped in flat bread, accompanied with finely chopped onion and cucumber. Delicious! We declined their offer of a lift down the valley with great difficulty - they couldn't understand why anyone would want to walk (even on such a glorious sunny afternoon) - and continued on towards the town of Dağpazarı. We reached it the following day and breakfasted in the ruins of another Byzantine church. This one looked as if it were in imminent danger of becoming even more ruinous, with huge gaps between the stones in the apse which the morning sun streamed through. Evidence of old settlements abounded - a marble column holding up the balcony at the back of someone's house, piles of old masonry lying around and what looked like an old caravanserai in the dusty main square. From Dağpazarı, we anticipated a couple of days out in the wilderness, so decided to stock up on supplies. Perhaps in retrospect 5 loaves of bread, half a kilo of pasta, half a kilo of cheese, a foot of sausage, 5 tomatoes and a kilo of chocolate was a little excessive, but at one point as we wandered along the tops at 1780 metres heading in exactly the opposite direction from the one we wanted and with no obvious route out, it looked like we might be needing it all. No vultures this time, just a truck full of unhelpful people giving us impossible to follow directions and, to add to our misery, a rainstorm. Undaunted, (well, maybe slightly daunted), we pushed on and thanks to our navigation skills (or more likely sheer luck), we found our way again, the sun came out and we found a beautiful campsite in a high meadow, flat as a board and with lovely springy grass underfoot. Which was just as well as by now James' thermarest had sprung a leak and all attempts to fix it had failed in a mess of sticky sealant. The springy grass at least meant that he only woke up 3 times in the night having to re-inflate the mattress.

Hitting the road down to Silifke, Tom spotted a beautiful plunge pool underneath a waterfall in a spectacular limestone gorge. Scrambling down the side of the old Roman bridge still carrying the road across the gorge, we stripped off and went for a wash in the icy cold waters of the stream. Tom made a feint to jump in with James, then scampered up the bank to get his camera and revenge for an earlier picture James took of Tom skinny dipping near Istanbul. Modesty was mercifully preserved by a fortunate splash of water.

By now we had crossed the watershed and were heading down the Southern face of the Toros. With it we lost the cooler weather of the Anatolian plain and began to get the searing heat and unbroken sunshine of the Mediterranean coast. Shepherd fountains which further up were still gushing cold sweet water were here already dry for the summer and we had to rely on bottled water. By the time we reached the village of Uzancaburç (the ancient holy city of Olbia , dedicated to Zeus and ruled by a dynasty of priest kings), it was getting on for 30 degrees and we were beginning to suffer in the heat. We still had the energy to wander through the magnificent ruins of the temple of Jupiter, admire the huge tower (part of the old city's defensive works - about 20 metres high) and pose for silly photos in the impressive remains of the ancient theatre. However, after walking for 8 days without a proper break (bar a half day of 24 kilometres) through the mountains, we decided to do something sensible and took a minibus from there to the coast to have a day off in the city of Silifke. On the way down to Silifke, the man next to us (a typical "spy", with a white beard and a little wooly hat) pointed at Tom's shorts, patted him on the leg and rubbed his fingers together in what we took to be the universal symbol for money and nodded knowingly. We were a bit puzzled by this - our various interpretations were A) "Are you too poor to afford proper trousers like these baggy ones I’m wearing?", B) "Are those shorts expensive?" or C) (which we didn't really want to contemplate) that he was making indecent proposals and offering money in return. Luckily, the man behind us, who spoke some English, translated for us:

"He says look at the ancient Roman monuments" and pointed to a series of spectacular mausolea carved into the cliffs and perched on the tops of the hills, all classical pediments and stately columns. How the old man's hand gestures could possibly translate into that, we had no idea.

We arrived in Silifke in the middle of its annual cultural festival. All the surrounding villages set up a tent in the middle of the town to show off their cultural highlights and serve tea and traditional dishes; in the evenings they compete in some kind of traditional dance competition up on a stage in the centre of town. On the plus side, the town was buzzing with people promenading up and down by the river, visiting the tents and enjoying the atmosphere. On the downside, all the hotels in the centre were booked out by traditional dancers and we had to stay miles away out near the bus station. The sudden rush appeared to have caught the local restaurants unprepared. We went for dinner to the restaurant of the Göksu hotel, where we were given a lavishly illustrated menu several pages long listing the culinary delights on offer. Everything we asked for was met with a negative "yok" ("there is not") by our waiter. In frustration, we asked him what there actually was, whereupon it emerged that all they actually had was chicken kebabs and salad, so we settled for that with very bad grace, ate up quickly and then went off to watch the traditional dancers. Unfortunately, as we arrived, they were ushered off stage and replaced by the compère - a dreadful woman looking a bit like the bride of Frankenstein (so much make up and bad plastic surgery) with permed fake blond hair piled on the top of her head which must have required a can of hairspray to keep it in place. She seemed far more intent on self-promotion to the bored looking citizens of Silifke than on providing any entertainment and not even the prospect of seeing her stray too close to the lights and her hair going up in fireball could make staying and listening to her bearable so we headed off to bed to prepare for the heat of the coastal plain.

Comments

[Chocoholic]

I love the article. I am new to your blog and I like what I see. I look forward to your future work. Thanks.

[bob linnell]

James,

This is a fantastic story that you and Tom are living! I am almost envious until I remember my fallen arches. I hope you are sponsored by a good boot company.

Happy trails.

[Mr the porter]

Haven't you got there yet? If you don't hurry up my daughter will catch you up and overtake you on her way to Peru (with her unpunctured thermarest), perhaps you should not keep stopping for chai. Good luck and god speed both of you.