Kekova Bay Articles
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LESSONS FOR LOTHARIO ABOARD THE LOVE BOAT
Daily Telegraph, 3rd March 1996
Having missed the bus, Jeremy Seal aids a rake’s progress in order to reach ancient Lycia.
‘Highs, highs, you have beautiful highs,’ said Ali Ihsan as his boat slid into the lee between Kekova Island and the mainland, where the Mediterrannean was a slumbrous oil in the late afternoon.
‘Eyes,’ I corrected him, and not for the first time. It struck me that if Turkey’s tourism boom had had anything like as much hassle as me getting to the villages of Ucagiz and Kale – hiring my very own ferry and giving an English for Casanovas lesson in return for a discount – then perhaps it had given up trying, and I was in for a treat.
I had found Ali Ihsan at the harbour near Demre, where St Nicholas, our original Father Christmas, is incongruously claimed to have been born, but a town that was more accurately characterised by acres of hothouse cramming every last inch of the surrounding coastal plain, freakish geology on a coast that seemed to prefer skydiving sheer into the sea from a great height. Once I established that I’d missed the day’s only dolmush (minibus) to Ucagiz by hours, and a lift on one of the few tour boats by a similar margin, Ali Ihsan was my only option. For his part, he wondered why was I was bothering. ‘What is there in Ucagiz?’ he asked. ‘No girls, no bars, no discos. A quiet place. You want Finike, Kas or Kalkan.’
In fact I didn’t. Ali Ihsan could keep those former villages stripped of atmosphere and clad in unrelenting concrete. What instead attracted me to Kekova – the protuding area of mainland takes the name of the uninhabited island opposite – was the fact that the main road abandons its coast-hugging here, being forced inland by some fierce mountain bluffs, just long enough to put Ucagiz and Kale beyond its compass. Indeed, it was not until the 70s that a road of any sort entered the region when a rough 14-mile track was cut through the pine trees to Ucagiz.
Muttering over the lists of vocabulary in English, German, French, Italian and Israeli, a multilingual lexicon of love taped to his boat’s battered console, Ali Ihsan drew up against one of Ucagiz’ jetties that rise and fall like mini-rollercoasters, as if shaped by the swell of the sea, long enough for me to disembark. A score of terracotta-tiled houses were picturesquely assembled around the faded green minaret of the mosque. Along the shoreline, old men were working on the upturned hulls of their fishing boats. There were chickens in the main street. On a wooden balcony, an old couple were mending a fishing net. It was rare perfection; there was nothing here for Ali Ihsan whatsoever.
I found the owners of the Ekin Pansiyon seated beneath a trellis of bougainvillea, attending to a nargilye, or water-pipe. Ali and Yusuf were brothers, and in their thirties. The brothers told me that the road to Ucagiz had not been tarmacked until the early 1990s. ‘Now, the first few tour parties are finding their way here, but most visitors come by boat and leave by boat,’ said Ali. As for the villagers, not too many of them have yet learned to drive that well. They’ve always got around by boat, you see.’
In the winter months, the brothers co-wrote novels on Mediterrannean life under the name Ali Yusuf. Generally, they explained, they did without a surname, much as their forebears had done until surnames were forcibly introduced in the 1930s. ‘Nobody needs surnames in a village this size,’ said Ali. In summer, they were kept busy running the pansiyon. ‘Well, you could hardly call it busy,’ admitted Yusuf, beginning another game of backgammon and taking a massive, langorous pull on his nargilye.
At the nearest restaurant, the Kekova, a waiter steered me down the jetty where tables had been laid and brought me a raki, the aniseed drink that clouds with water which the Turks know as lion’s milk. I watched crews from the few yachts moored in the bay rowing ashore for dinner across a strewn landscape of rocks and water that had turned purple in the evening – but raised my glass to those fiercely rearing bluffs at my back.
When I asked for the menu, the waiter knelt beside me and pulled at a tangle of lines tied to the jetty, revealing a selection of live fish hooked to the ends of them. The first to be rejected was a huge grouper that looked unpalatable, if not downright dangerous. Later, only the thought of that fish hauling me and half the jetty out to sea just as a (marginally) larger one had once done in Jaws disturbed my pine-scented, rigging-clanking evening. The next morning, when I swam in June water that still hid layers of lingering spring chill within its depths, I did so from a different jetty.
After breakfast, I cadged a lift to Kale with the waterboat. (Even the water comes to roadless Kale by water). On the shore, a shawled woman stood in a great bed of oregano that had been left to dry in the sun, and pitchforked it into a bright blue caique. Sarcophagae lay sprawled everywhere; one even stood island-proud above the water. These distinctive stone coffins, like upturned antique hulls, were a reminder that here was the heart of ancient Lycia.
I explored Kale in my own time; ancient olive trees, a jumble of old stone homes, and baked earth paths leading to a handsome, castellated castle perched above the village. Only an old woman detained me, with the offer of fresh herbs and delicate items of lacework, but even she seemed unconvinced that I could possibly be interested. Certainly, I noticed how she proved herself far more interested in the boxed food processors, electric irons and hair driers that a boat – a kind of portable Currys – unloaded on the jetty later that morning. Kale looked unspoilt, but was clearly not immune to change.
At one of the cafes that fringe the shore, the owner brought me a glass of tea and lingered in the indolent morning. Kale had stunned me by its beauty, I told him. I wondered how it had managed it. Of course, I knew that Kekova was a conservation area, but I also knew that lucrative development opportunities had got round that designation often enough elsewhere in Turkey. The owner smiled and pointed to a big house high, high on the hill, complete with helipad. ‘Home of Rahmi Koc, Istanbul industrialist,’ he whispered. Mr Koc likes a quiet time; it is said that he looks after the financial needs of any villager who might be otherwise be tempted to sell to developers. We raised our tea glasses to Mr Koc.
Without Koc funds to support me, I persuaded a Dutch couple to share the cost of hiring a boat for the day. Sabahattin, who came with the boat, steered south for the sunken city off Kekova island. Swimming is illegal over these ruins, so instead of making do with what remained – the relative crush gawping at the carved stairs and walls above the waterline – we set out for the little-visited ruins at Aperlae. To reach them, we crossed an isthmus on foot where camels were grazing among carobs and straggly vines, and passed shepherds’ cottages where geraniums bloomed bright in old catering cans of olive oil. A woman with hennaed hair, holding a sickly young goat in her arms, watched us from a doorway.
Broken walls, sarcophagae and ceilings that had succumbed to fig trees announced what remained of Aperlae. In the shallows, however, the first course of bricks, almost crimson, had survived in excellent condition. Snorkelling here made us feel like architects poring over the ancient floor plans of storerooms and boathouses encrusted with the necks and handles of amphorae, and shards of weed-snagged pottery, before the sea fell away beyond the harbour wall and the old slipway.
On the day of my departure, Yusuf took my arm, walked me down to the waterfront and flagged down a lift. It was a passing tour boat headed for Demre. As the boat approached the jetty, I could make out a gaggle of bronzed girls laughing at the familiar figure in their midst. It was Ali Ihsan; he had put a young man at the helm while he got on with putting those English lessons to good use.
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