Fethiye, Turkey

In order to continue our fledgling careers as kiteboarders, we picked up shop and moved down the coast to Çalis beach, just outside of Fethiye, a hopping, Bodrum-style beach resort. Çalis itself is a fairly quiet, generic beach town popular with British and Dutch families. We stayed at a cute apartment-hotel run by a sweet Turkish couple who were amused by the novelty of having American guests for a change.

As for the kiteboarding, it's damn hard! After four more days of lessons, both of us mastered standing on the board and riding for a bit before falling on our faces. Kite control is not our strength, and we both spent a fair bit of time re-launching crashed kites or apologizing to the unsuspecting beachgoers whom we nearly decapitated. At the end of everything, we came away with cards that claim that we've achieved level 2, whatever that means. Our instructor says that we still need to be supervised because we are 'dangerous.' No doubt.

Kiteboarding left us pretty exhausted, but one afternoon we manged to sneak away to Kaya Köyü, a village that was abandoned during the Greek-Turkish population exchange of the 1920s. People were classified as 'Greek' or 'Turkish' based solely on religion, so Christian families who didn't speak a word of Greek, for example, were sent to live in a country they had never visited. When the Greek Orthodox families were forced to leave, Kaya village fell into ruin. Today, the remains of approximately 1,000 dwellings are a memorial to this horribly disruptive and painful episode.

7/18/2007 : view on map : permalink : add a comment