Faralya and Kabak Articles
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FOUND: THE BEST LITTLE BEACH IN TURKEY
Sunday Times, 16th February 2014
At Turkey’s Kabak Valley, with its pristine beach and frond-topped timber cabins, I might have been in Shangri-La. Except that pony-tailed Mark didn’t see it that way.
‘The place is OK if you like en suite toilets,’ he declared. ‘And menus.’
Kabak, tucked away at the foot of the Fethiye region’s 2,000-metre Babadağı Mountain, may just be the loveliest bay in all Turkey. Begging Mark’s pardon, but could he really be complaining about en suite toilets and menus when the only structures on the gorgeous beach stretching before us were fashioned entirely from driftwood – here a corral raised by conservationist locals to protect the buried sand nests of loggerhead turtles, and there a charming makeshift cabana? When there were no boutiques nor bars – not even a proper building – to mar the natural charms of this legendary hideaway?
The place didn’t even run to tarmac. Forget air-con Mercedes minibuses; getting here meant clinging for dear life to the jolting sides of an open-topped Chrysler Fargo 4WD truck. But Mark, from Oregon, was having none of it.
‘You shoulda been here back when the only way in was by a goat path,’ he insisted. ‘When it was omelette or pasta. And lanterns. And communal showers.’
Secret Kabak lies just a few miles east of the famous lagoon beach at Ölü Deniz, which is where the comparison ends. While ‘Ölü’ slapped on the concrete and turned into one of Turkey’s top holiday resorts, Kabak lay a half-hour hike beyond the end of the road. It became a haven for new agers, flower children and eastern transcendentalists. And hard-core eco-primitivists like Mark.
In recent years, however, the opening to the truck shuttle of the dirt track – among the steepest, mind, that I have ever travelled – has finally brought the valley’s long isolation to an end. The word is out and new camps have been opening – the total is now 23 – to cope with the rising visitor numbers. On the shuttle there were not only the usual Kabak yogis with startling hair but also hikers, on-the-run resort escapees from Ölü and even a couple of well-travelled family groups. As the truck plunged through olive groves and pine forests, however, the hand-painted wooden signs offering pranic healing and poly-energetic therapy at camps with names like Shambala and Shiva, and the stones painted in psychedelic shades on the path leading to Shanti Gardens, suggested that only the yogis would feel at home here. For an alarming moment the rest of us were left thinking that we’d somehow slipped through some karmic portal, a long-haul one marked Goa or Thailand, and fetched up in an ashram.
We need not have worried. At Turan Hill Lounge, the oldest camp in the valley, I found myself in a place as inclusive as it was alluring. From the shaded terrace, with its cushion-strewn decks, I took in the wooded slopes of the soaring massif opposite. A path led down through lemon and mulberry trees, olives and palms, to the camp’s spring-fed swim pool. Pine-clad cabins, some painted white with blue trim and hung with starfish like Nantucket beach huts, others varnished in a plainer sylvan style, were scattered among the grounds. Delightful in their Crusoe simplicity, these over-sized wendy houses were no more than rug-strewn bedrooms with balconies, but they were pin clean and lovingly cared for, with mosquito nets, home-stitched curtains and potted basil plants on the sills.
As for Mark’s grievances, it was certainly true that some cabins at Turan’s now had en suite bathrooms. Three of them had even had air-conditioning recently installed. There was a menu, and the food was excellent. Over a salad served on white china and strewn with intensely scented local mint leaves, I asked on-hand manager Ece about the recent changes.
‘Over the last few years the world’s been finding its way to Kabak,’ she told me. ‘They’re a different lot from the original backpacking crowd, with their own expectations, so we’ve been doing all we can to raise standards without losing the valley’s original charm.’
In the afternoon I followed the waymarked Lycian Way, Turkey’s top long-distance trail, where it zig-zagged up the canyon’s wooded sides high above the sea. I passed pink-flowering oleanders and stands of sandalwood to arrive at a secret waterfall where I swam in a sudden swarm of butterflies. The track traversed the wild valley, winding through pine woodlands where goats and tortoises grazed. Back at the beach, I found Mark combing his pony-tail in the shade of a cabana.
‘See what I mean?’ he asked. I wasn’t sure I did; in my view the overhaul had substantially preserved Kabak. In learning to welcome the world – by going easy on the hippie factor while developing a more mainstream ‘glamping’ ambience – the valley had not so much sold out as grown up.
‘And there’s nothing wrong with that,’ I told Mark who turned to stare at the sea.
At Faralya, just around the headland, the upgrade had taken an even more dramatic turn. Another 4WD swept me down another impossibly steep slope; this time, though, it delivered me to the delightful Hotel Perdue where ten safari-style tents on raised platforms were arranged above a rocky cove. My tent, shaded by a frond-covered roof structure, came with agreeably period-era furnishings including a tallboy, dressing table and full-height mirror. There was a walk-in shower, and the deck even boasted a sunken Jacuzzi.
Except for an old stone store, which now functioned as the hotel’s whitewashed foyer, the Perdue was as free of buildings as the camps at Kabak. Beneath the natural luxury the same meditative mood prevailed. There was twinkly-eye Taner, resident yoga master, who appeared to double as a poker ace judging by a T-shirt which read 5-Card Stud. Avocado orchards, waterside decks, shaded pavilions and a Bali-style massage cabin completed the picture.
Over a dinner of freshly landed bream on the restaurant terrace, an elegant aisle of lamp-hung tables overlooking the sea, owner Hakki Bey told me how the idea for the Perdue had come to him after a stay in a campsite on the Turkish Mediterranean a few years ago.
‘I loved the sound of the sea and the stars at night,’ said Hakki. ‘But the place was dirty, especially the showers, and I won’t even begin to tell you about the food.’ It sounded like a place Mark from Oregon would have left exactly as it was; but later that night, soaking in my deck Jacuzzi beneath the stars, I was glad that Hakki Bey had felt it was time to do his bit in recasting the Turkish camping experience.
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