Sally Mair - Loving life

By Sallymair

Babadag

It had rained again overnight and so this morning for the first time, I think, this trip that we had breakfast indoors rather than on the terrace (she drops that one in quietly just so readers can note and inwardly digest).
By lunchtime things were better though and so after lunch we set off to walk to a restaurant someone had mentioned to us. It was in a part of Olu Deniz we'd not been to before, on a small farm on the outskirts. It took us about 20 minutes to walk there in hot sun. The restaurant is set in a small orchard. The trees I recognised were apple, peach, cherry, mulberry, and orange, the latter being the only one producing at the moment. There were grape vines too and beds of beautiful flowers. We spent a very pleasant half hour out of the sun enjoying the shade of the grape vine sipping cold drinks.
We walked a different way back to the top of Hissaronu and decided as the weather was good, to catch the Dolmus to the Babadag chairlift. Only the lower section is open at the moment, with a station at 1200m.
I got off the Dolmus very carefully when we got to the start, as that was where I came to grief last year. We noted that the slope where the bus stops is really quite steep and with the loose gravel on top it really was quite treacherous. All was accomplished safely this year though and I managed to remain intact - in other words, I successfully got off the bus!
The chairlift really is spectacular, the blipped view is looking back from just below the top. Olu Deniz is to the left and Fethiye to the right in the far distance.
We enjoyed some home made lemonade and watched an eagle soaring from the restaurant at the chairlift's upper station.
On the way down, we were very taken by the sight of a goat herd and his flock just below the top. The extra is of their shelter under the edge of a shear cliff - you can just see, to the left of the picture a flash of blue which is the roof of the shepherd's hut. All of this up almost vertical tracks and at around 1000m! We were still taking about him and wondering how often he went down the mountain when a couple of hundred metres lower down we came across a women and her flock of sheep. Just below her were a huge number of beehives. This is such a productive area of the world and it's so interesting to see that even on inhospitable rocky slopes the land is put to use!

Comments
Sign in or get an account to comment.