10 Top Things to do in Southern Turkey
For 2,000 years, Turkey’s Mediterranean coast was the hub of the known world. For the next 1,500, it faded into obscurity, its startlingly beautiful coast inhabited only by goats and fishermen. Today, it is experiencing a huge and rapid revival as one of the great tourist centres of the world, offering a compulsive mix of guaranteed sunshine, warm, turquoise water, hospitality, good food, a wealth of history and spectacular mountainscapes. Out of season, almost the entire coast is a building site, in season, a bazaar. All year round it is enchanting!
The 10 essentials
If you only have a short time to visit, or would like to get a really complete picture of the country, here are the essentials:
1. Drift along past cliffs and caves, stretched out on the wooden deck of a gulet (traditional boat),listening to the lapping of the gentle Mediterranean waves
2. Sit at a harbour-front restaurant eating steaming calamari and sun-drenched tomato salad, washed down with orange juice fresh from the tree
3. Hike through the pine forests and across mountains strewn with flowers; breathing in the scent of wild thyme and oregano, and then collapse with pleasant exhaustion on the walls of a ruined mountain-top city or castle
4. Sip a glass of cay (tea) as jewel-coloured carpets made from wool and silk pile around your feet and you get down to some serious haggling
5. Stand centra stage at Aspendos and proclaim to the ghosts of emperors in a theatre that has been used for over 2,000 years
6. Stretch out on the sand and spend a day working on the ultimate tan
7. Squat on a dusty village track talking to the local women and children and a flock of golden-fleeced sheep through mime and drawings, sharing their borek and your chocolate
8. Lie face-down on a marble slab in a colonnaded steam room and let a vigorous masseur or masseuse release the kinks from your muscles and the grime from your pores in a Turkish bath
9. Gasp at the antiquity of the area as you visit the places where Mark Anthony met cleopatra, where saints Peter, Paul and Barnabas decided to call their new church ‘Christian’, or where the god Apollo was said to spend his winter holiday
10. Party under the stars until the early hours of the morning at waterfront open-air disco, cooled by a brisk sea breeze