After Cappodocia I had no idea where to go next on this trip around Turkey that I didn’t plan to take but somehow ended up taking anyway.

Then I found a flight to Antalya for less than £20 and I thought ‘right, that’ll do me’ and off I went.

Antalya is on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, known as the Turquoise Coast

Art museum

I spent just one day there.  It was quite busy, since it was a Turkish holiday.  Temperatures were around 34 degrees; I felt like a little ball of sweat walking round so I do wonder how these women do it, complete with sleeves and headscarves.

From Antalya my next job was to take a Dolmus (a little minibus) to Kas (pronounced: cash), which is a four hour bus ride away and cost a bargain 12 lira (less than four euros).

The bus was full up when we left the station and then a bit further out we stopped at a bus stop where four young women were waiting, each with a large suitcase. ‘I suppose they’ll have to wait for the next bus’, I thought. Wrong. The driver produced four little collapsable stools out from under his seat and placed them in the aisle. He then sat each woman on one of them, with her bag in front of her. To say the little minibus was crammed to capacity would be an understatement.

Kas is a nice little town. It is about as far south as you can get in mainland Europe, on a similar latitude to Tunis. This means it gets very hot in summer, although by the time I got there mid-September it was starting to get a little more comfortable.

sunset in Kas

Kas was a lot quieter than Antalya. Firstly, the Turkish holiday was coming to an end but also Kas is just that bit too far from any airport, making it a lot less visited than other coastal towns.

Pretty little harbour in Kas

I liked it. It has an idyllic little harbour and also little platforms where you can sunbathe or get down into the water for a swim, for the price of buying an occasional drink or snack from the cafe that own them (although this is not an obligation apparently).

In Kas I joined a short sailing trip, along with nine other people, sailing up the coast in the direction of Fethiye.

My co-travellers were a mixed bunch. There was one other Brit; three minutes of conversation with him taught me that his political viewpoint was somewhere to the right of Hitler, so I spent the rest of the trip avoiding him. Then there was a French man with a mute wife, who complained that everything was boring.  There was a Dutch woman who spoke to me in Dutch every day, presumably assuming that I understood her (the first time it happened I smiled and nodded. Obviously that was an appropriate response because she kept on doing it after that.  It gets to the point where it is too awkward to say ‘I don’t speak Dutch’ and so you have no choice but to carry on).

My favourite co-traveller was a woman, probably on the far side of sixty years young, who on the last night got up and performed Tom Jones’ Sex Bomb for us all (much to the horror of her husband).

Sexbomb sexbomb you’re a sexbomb
You can give it to me when I need to come along
Sexbomb sexbomb you’re my sexbomb
And baby you can turn me on turn me on darlin’

Our captain was a funny man. Rarely seen without a bottle of beer in his hand, he told me he had come to the coast as a ‘young man’ from a small town in Turkey. Well I suppose that is what happens at the coast; people are able to live a different life, free from the constraints placed on them in more conservative Turkey.

There’s nothing quite like stopping in the middle of calm, clean water to go out and swim or snorkel