FtLet me tell you about a few Adrasan people.
Sera I met last year, the cheerful lady who, with husband Ali runs the Kaptan Ali Bungalow hotel* (*it's like a hotel except you have a garden and bungalows instead of floors/corridors and rooms; every bungalow has an en suite shower/wc).
Ali is local. His father was the lighthouse keeper and he grew up living in the lighthouse. His mother was a nomad. No kidding. She spent the Summer on high pastures grazing sheep and goats. Any free time he had from school would find Ali helping either his father at the lighthouse or fishing at sea, or his mother and grandfather tending to animals, herding them on the wild hillsides unsuited to cultivation. He is proud of the knowledge he gained of the sea, of plants and animals, but after High School, he says, laughing, he couldn't wait to get a way from home and joined the navy.
Sera is from Istanbul. She is very sociable (unlike Ali who would happily spend all his spare time fishing) and enjoys the Summer when Adrasan is thronging with visitors, but finds the winter months long and tedious. She misses the noise and excitment of the city she says. And probably the shops.
They have two sons; the elder is at High School in Antalya learning Hospitality and Tourism; the younger, Djem is still at Primary. He is lively and inquisitive, has excellent manners and is naturally considerate - when he had found the dozen chocolate eggs that the Easter Rabbit (me) had left in the garden he made sure that everyone else had been offered one before eating any himself. He keeps himself occupied with his own constructive or exploratory projects and skips rather than runs the length of the garden path, or anywhere actually.
The household also includes Grandma (Sera's ma) who has her own room perched on top of the main house, and Beda the housekeeper. These two are always asking me questions and making remarks to me in Turkish. Perhaps my default of smiling and nodding has given them the impression that I understand the language, or am a simpleton. Either way they are very good natured and make sure that I'm lack for nothing, especially in the çay department.
All the women seem to spend nearly all their time in the Dining Room (Beda perhaps a little less - she is very diligent about in her duties). This is a large room (it has to accommodate all the guests during Summer) with a wood burning stove in the middle, a bar at one end (the kitchen is behind this) and a huge flat screen TV in one corner. The TV is always on. It is usually tuned to a channel that shows non-stop soap dramas, usually featuring immaculately dressed city type folk. The "good husbands" are nearly always tubby with thick black moustaches. The sly philanderers are clean-shaven and slim.
Just a hundred yards along from AKBH, towards the end of the beach is Chill House Lounge. It is the hip place to be in Adrasan. It would not look out of place in Ibiza.. or Santa Barbara. The decor is eclectic, a little bit hippy, full of colour and fun.
Mustafa is the laid back but efficient boss of the place and his sophisticated playlist of music, that ranges from contemporary to classic jazz and blues, infuses the bar and cafeteria with a rich velvet calm. I never saw Mustafa greet anyone without a smile. Mustafa's wife Elme seems to have the same inner bliss that shines from Mustafa - they are a delightful couple. Meeting again after a year both greeted me warmly but casually as if it had been only yesterday. Perhaps it's because I arrived early in the year that I am remembered - I am not one of a huge mass that arrives all at once - but I am touched that I am.
I asked Mustafa about the forest fire that I had read about earlier this year. I had already noticed that the hill behind the properties on Adrasan beach were bare of trees and the red soil glowed warmly the evening sun. It had occurred in July of last year when the wood was tinder dry. Nobody knows how it started but it seems that it spread from a source about 2 km back and was fanned into a raging blaze by winds from the south, towards the properties on the beach front road. All those properties were evacuated, one entire hotel of timber construction was razed to the ground and other had varying amounts of fire damage. No inhabited properties suffered but the income stream from tourism was immediately shut off, seasonal workers were sent home, visitor bookings cancelled. Mustafa said there was some compensation from the government but little from insurers. "Around here" Mustafa said " not everyone runs their business strictly by the book " so there were large losses among those operating within a black economy.
There were also floods but that's another story.
One of my concerns when I read about the fire was how it might affect the ecology of the area. The area affected by the fire, though of a fair extent, was less than I'm had imagined. The mature pine forests in the valley and hills to the South were unaffected. It was also clear that the fire had not spread beyond a back road. I guessed that firefighting operations had used this road as their front line, but also the more dense forest stopped there - the land this side of it being cleared and cultivated. last year I had seen and photographed one or two beautiful tiny tulips, not yet opened and a deep red colour. I was thinking about these, not knowing whether my sighting of so few indicated rarity, or whether their bulbs would survive a fire. I need not have worried. Or at least my worries should have been on other accounts.
Though I have effectively completed the Lycian Way (Hooray! - more about that in my next and final posting) I decided to take a walk into the valley South of Adrasan, giving myself 2 hours out - 2 hours back walking time. It is the beginning of the path that leads one down the East side of the Gelidonia Peninsula, the path by which I had arrived last year. I had barely left the level fields of Adrasan and begun to climb before I saw my first tulips, many fully open and brighter shades of red. Any fears of fires contributing to their extinction evaporated. They seemed on the contrary prolific and indomitable.
Also pushing through in abundance were many stems of the extraordinary purple orchids In had seem last year, sadly not yet in bloom. Another smaller but even more unusual orchid was, however - one with almost insignificant flowers and with chlorophyll masked by reddish colour in its stems, but certainly an orchid and typically evolved to attract a specific pollinator.
I also saw ghostly mauve stems and flowers of broomrape, a parasitic plant that does not require chlorophyll as it feeds on the sap of others. It seemed to me that some of these tended to grow in an arc and wondered if like mushrooms that form "fairy rings" this was because they had successively exhausted the nutrients in the roots beneath them or if in fact the fairies had planted them like that.
I saw another example of a fritillary, with a mostly green flower on a tall stem. Much of the green is from an outer trio of sepals rather than petals, but the inner petals too were largely green with just a freckling of dark purple brown on their everted edges. This is the second species of fritillary I have seen this visit and one I have never seen before.
I returned from my forest foray with a plan tom walk to Adrasan's own small lighthouse, " only an hour walking" Ali had said. But arriving back at AKBH Ali asked if would like çay and we proceeded to chat. He told me about a boat that he had converted and was renovating for use in the coming season. Hearing that my father had been a naval architect and that I had worked in a boatyard he was keen that in should come and see it. I did not have to be dragged there by force.
Ali's boat is a seven-and-a-half metre lifeboat. It has a fairly upright stem and a rounded projecting rim to the gunnel all round. Ali says that it came form Ramsgate (Lifeboat Station)! It looks built for buoyancy in heavy seas but I doubt that it will ever put out in such conditions with passengers aboard. It has nice strip and caulked iroko decking and iroko bench seats at either side of the aft deck. Much of the other woodwork is pine, which is a little disappointing, as it will move much more with changing humidity. Indeed one door and one locker panel were jammed, the latter due to accumulated (rain)water that has infiltrated during the winter. Still I'm sure he'll get it all ship-shape in a month or so and persuade some visitors to take trips around the bays and islands of the Antalya coast.
Returning to AKBH it was Ali's turn to cook, he being the provider of the catch. In had chosen the smaller of two white grouper. It was cooked in a pan with vegetables in the box of the wood-burning stove and when presented looked enough for at least two people. Mysteriously though, I managed to eat the lot.
Before the end of the evening two women visit, both with head-scarves, baggy shalwar pants and babies bound to their backs in shawls. One of them carries a huge blue plastic tub from which she produces a carrier bag full of some kind of fry-bread with a hole in the middle, like flattened dough-nuts. They are offered around and all take one, me included. They are not sweet, moist with oil and slightly eggy-tasting. There is a lot of friendly chat, the babies are kissed and they go on their way. They are friends and neighbours Sera tells me, "..a little bit nomad. She lost her son exactly two years ago, we do this to remember them". The bread? "It has another name" Sera says "Here we call it pishke"
