Kalkan

Approaching Kalkan

We needed to buy some food and we had seen in a guidebook that Kalkan is a picturesque small town worth exploring, so we left Yeşilköy Koyu after breakfast on Friday 3^rd October to motor (no wind again!) the couple of miles to the town. En route we saw 3 or 4 turtles but so fleetingly that I only managed to get a picture of one of them.

Kalkan has a small, narrow harbour and yachts and gulets are moored on either side, and at the end, with their anchors towards the centre of the harbour and lines from their bow or stern to the shore. As at Sími, it’s a recipe for some impressive mooring tackle tangles. Whilst the yachtie spectator sport can be fun, particularly if your boat is not involved, it does make us wonder why harbours like these don’t have lazylines permanently rigged. Presumably the authorities would be able to recoup the cost with a small increase in the mooring fees and it would save a lot of hassle for the local gulet skippers.

Enough said

We took a wander around the town and decided that the pictures that Nicky had seen in a guidebook in the marina office at Finike had been taken with an eye to enhancing the town’s charms. It’s by no means an unpleasant place, and there are a few lovely bouganvillia draped alleys, but it is primarily geared towards tourism and the majority of the shops and cafes are definitely in that vein.

For some reason we weren’t tempted by the Omega and Rolex watches on sale.

The town beach, however, is very pleasant and the harbourside cafés and restaurants looked most attractive as they lit up for the evening.

Kalkan, Turkey