Turkey part 4: Our temporary break in Patara on the Lycian coast

Some of you may have seen our social media post with our Turkish Short-Term Residence Permit (IKAMET)? It’s true, we are now officially allowed to stay in Turkey until December 21 and have an address in Patara in South Turkey. Therefore, it’s about time to tell you more about our last three months on the Lycian coast and why we’re here in the first place.

Let’s rewind to December: A big yellow taxi brought us and our bicycles to Patara and we looked at different apartments for our winter break in Patara and also in the small town Kaş. The advantage of Kaş would have been, that we could have gone grocery shopping whenever we wanted and everything was around the corner. But we both always lived in cities and therefore we wanted to try to live in the countryside for a change and we spontaneously decided to spend our winter break in Patara and rented a cozy 2-bedroom-apartment with balcony and a shared rooftop terrace in the middle of nature and with views over hills, olive trees and the sea in the distance.

Why are we taking a winter break?

We decided to take a break for different reasons; obviously our accident in Fethiye caused us to take a rest; another reason was the rainy and chilly winter weather and the current curfew restrictions and the closed restaurants and cafés. Additionally, the borders towards the east still remained closed and it didn’t make sense to cycle further and then get stuck in the snow somewhere in eastern Anatolia. After four very intense months of cycling, we also felt like taking a break and when in life arises this opportunity to just spend time in a place so close to nature and to enjoy and to read for several weeks?

You’ve never heard of Patara before? Neither did we. Lisa read about it in a travel book and thought it would be a good place to spend the winter and that’s how we ended up here in this unique place. But we’re not the only ones that like Patara, this location was and is something truly special, but see for yourself:

• Patara offers stunning sand dunes and a laid-back village far away from the crowds.
• Ancient Patara has been populated since 7^th century BC and was one of the highest-ranking cities in ancient Lycia. It was also an important harbor and ships sailing east from Greece and those arriving from Syria sailing west stopped here.
• There’s so much history to explore and you can find grand monuments from the Lycians and the Romans scattered along the wetland and hidden between olive trees.
• Patara is the birthplace of the 4th-century Byzantine bishop of Myra who later passed into legend as Santa Claus / St. Nicholas.
• A Roman lighthouse from 60 BC has been discovered and it’s one of the oldest existing lighthouses in the world.
• During the summer season, Patara beach is a nesting site for the Caretta Caretta, the loggerhead turtle.

And thanks to the turtles and the ancient site the beach is protected and no construction is allowed and so today behind the 18 km long beach you find thick Mediterranean bushes and wetlands and there are just a few dirt paths leading to Turkey’s longest beach. This long uninterrupted beach is often voted as one of European’s finest and we can get there within only 20 minutes from our apartment. Sand is a demanded good and just recently the police detained a gang illegally transporting sand and stupidly promoting properties that were built on ground made of sand from Patara.

Just behind the beach lies ancient Patara (more about the Lycian kingdom in our next post) with a 5000-seat theatre, the ancient parliament (bouleuterion), a colonnaded street with an agora and a necropolis. 3 km from the beach is the location of the actual town Gelemiş, often just called Patara. Here you can find various family-run pensions and restaurants, most closed during our time here. There are small supermarkets with a very limited selection. Everything is very quiet and sleepy. The wonderful nature and the beach were definitely our highlight and we can’t imagine that Patara could get full in summer. By now we got used to living Patara and it feels like home to us.

Everyday life during our winter break

The change from everyday cycling and our nomadic life to an apartment with kitchen, washing machine and all modern amenities came abrupt. Just yesterday we were cycling and now we are buying everything for a longer break and suddenly have a lot of time at our hands. How do you cope with that? At first, we were just exhausted by all the impressions of the past months and needed time, to process everything. A long-distance-cycling trip can be quite tiresome and even though we have a lot of time to think while being on the saddle, it’s hard to really grasp what’s happening and what we experience during the trip.

It was very good for us to write our blogs and rewatching all our videos. We started to learn about video editing, something new for both of us. It was fun to learn this together and we definitely have got a long way ahead of us. Filming at the right moments while cycling sounds easier than it is. Other cyclers manage to edit their videos in the evening in the tent, but we’re always too tired for that. Maybe we get there in the future, who knows. Although, we find it quite convenient to take a longer break to edit our material. Everything takes much longer than anticipated – from creating maps, to the editing itself, to asking the bands if we could use their songs. Even creating English subtitles for the videos alone takes half a day at least. We started to split up the work: Dario is doing the main video editing; while Lisa translated all our blogs from German to English on our website. We also used our address here to order some spare parts for our bicycles and did some much-needed maintenance. Suddenly, time was running really fast and we’re already here for three months, hard to believe.

Where’s the next supermarket?

We really live in the countryside, we mean really. Going grocery shopping therefore is always at least a half-day excursion as the next bigger village is 10 km away. Once, we even hiked for five hours to get to Kalkan. Okay, that was part of the Lycian Way and very beautiful. But still, you get the picture. During the weeks, there are rotating open-air markets around Patara with a great selection of fruits, vegetables, cheese, yoghurt and nuts and we already have our favorite vendors. We are very lucky with our location as it is a great area to grow vegetables and there are many greenhouses and we can get everything fresh and local. Our neighbor trades with tomatoes and kindly supplies us with fresh tomatoes several times a week. We often don’t know what to do with that many tomatoes and saying no would be impolite, so we give them back to him as Pizza or Sugo.

We like to combine our market visits with a little snack and one of our favorites is the vegan Çiğ Köfte. This raw Köfte consists of fine bulgur, spring onions, tomato paste, walnuts, olive oil, spices and fresh parsley. The raw bulgur Köfte, some lettuce and a bit of pomegranate syrup is then wrapped in a Yufka leaf (very thin Turkish flatbread) and ready to eat. It’s absolutely delicious and healthy!

Many places in Patara are closed during the winter, but almost always open is Ayşe’s Pancake House and we can get oranges, walnuts, olive oil and of course the tasteful Gözleme from her.

We clearly miss a rich cultural life and the regular interaction with others in this downtime. Often, we just see each other for days and when we met some other travelers or have a longer conversation with the locals, we are very excited about it. Lisa tries to learn some Turkish every day, but without a language course, it needs a lot of self-discipline. Regardless, communication in Turkey worked out just fine so far and there have been some great encounters. While cycling, a local from Demre stopped us and passed us some oranges and invited us to his home town.

Lately, we met another long-distance cyclist from the Netherlands, who has cycled since 1986 and also stays in Turkey until the borders open. Just like us, many other cyclers are “stuck” in different places around the world and are waiting for a change and to continue their journey. Some are currently cycling through Mexico and Central America as traveling is possible there. For us, this isn’t an option at the moment to change into such a different culture suddenly and we would like to explore more of Turkey.

We learned to appreciate waiting

We fully enjoy our sabbatical from consumer culture here and for us it’s more than just “waiting”. Waiting is something we’re not used to anymore in the western world and it’s often seen as lost time, as we are used to constantly experience and do something, often immediately. But don’t we lose the value of something if we don’t have to wait for it anymore? To suddenly have so much time is a rare thing and we’ve both missed it in the past years. We’ve definitely grown more patient the past weeks and learned to accept that we can’t control the momentary situation. Our patience is also tested when we try to catch a bus, as Patara doesn’t have a regularly served bus station in the winter. To take a bus means to walk or cycle for 3 km, then waiting at the big junction for a bus to pass. And the bus always arrived, sooner or later.

As many others we use this special time to discover our surroundings and the little things around. Spring is definitely here and there are flowers in every color and humming bees everywhere. We couldn’t sit in front of our laptops any longer and needed to get out there. We packed our things in our small backpacks and started to explore the Lycian Way for a week. More about this in our next blog Nr. 20.