Turkeys

I became intrigued by Rize when researching a book on the world’s best road trips. I spent weeks cruising the globe’s highways, country lanes and mountain passes via Google Street View. When I reached Turkey, I noticed a long green belt running along its northern coastline and discovered a land of dense tea plantations, cliff-hugging roads, roaring rivers and wooden villages.

Curious to find out more, I convinced a friend to come on a road trip to the Fırtına valley, home to some of the region’s most spectacular scenery (as well as being its most accessible area – large swathes are serious wilderness and should only be visited with a guide).

Rize is the name of both the province and its capital city, an unassuming coastal hub. We decide to prioritise our time in deep nature, so head straight for the mountains in our hire car rather than lingering in town. As we head east towards the Fırtına valley, our route is lined by the shimmering turquoise waters of the Black Sea on one side and rolling tea plantations on the other, where the steep hillsides are dotted with workers gathering leaves into wicker baskets strapped to their backs. Rize has been Turkey’s leading tea-producing region since the 1940s. It is the country’s wettest region, but rain tends to dissipate quickly during the summer months, leaving thin wisps of mist trailing across the hilltops.

After about 20 minutes, we reach the mouth of the Fırtına River. The name translates as “stormy” and its waters crash along the rocky riverbed. The further along it we drive, the more ferocious it becomes; the valley sides loom over us, their steep slopes blanketed in dense forests (apparently home to a growing population of brown bears).

After half an hour, we reach Çamlıhemşin. The town skirts the riverbanks precipitously, cradled by towering, mossy cliffs. We wander along its main street as the sun sets, passing a few tea houses, bakeries and shops selling honey and local cheese.

Dinner is at the Çamlıhemşin cafe-restaurant on the river, where we feast on chargrilled chicken skewers, white bean stew in a rich tomato sauce, and hunks of bread. With the help of Google Translate, our waiter proudly tells us that the loaf is homemade.

After dinner, a staggering series of hairpin bends leads to our accommodation: Dudi Konağı, a towering stone mansion that clings to the valleyside. Once one of the grandest private homes in the region, it was built in the early 1900s by the Tarakçıoğlu family, who made their fortunes in Russia. Today it’s a 24-room guesthouse with restored timber panelling, carved stone fireplaces and rustic wooden furnishings. We’re ushered up to our room on the third floor, where we fall asleep to the sound of a nearby stream and the soft croaking of frogs.

The next day, we head off deeper into the valley, towards the lofty, snow-capped peaks of the Kaçkar mountains. We trace the course of the river, passing thundering waterfalls hidden within corridors of beech and chestnut trees, and stone bridges that date back to the early years of the Ottoman empire.

Our first stop is Zil castle, a 14th-century fortress that rises above the thick forest canopy. Historians believe it was constructed by the empire of Trebizond, an offshoot of the Byzantine empire that thrived along the Silk Road. For centuries, Zil castle guarded a critical mountain pass that connected inland routes with ports on the Black Sea, watching over caravans carrying spices and silks between Europe and Asia. Today, it’s a miraculously preserved masterpiece of medieval engineering, with sweeping panoramic views across the valley.

As we press on, we spot a colourful new addition to the landscape: rhododendron bushes. These plants, bursting with bright purple flowers in early summer, are responsible for one of the region’s more unusual delicacies, deli bal (or “mad honey”). The nectar of this native variety of rhododendron contains a neurotoxin that slows the heart rate, is said to pack a hallucinogenic punch and has aphrodisiac properties. The honey is among the world’s most expensive. With the land too steep and rugged for regular agriculture, beekeeping is big business here.

The region is home to the Hemshin people, an ethnic minority who originated in Armenia but have been present in the Black Sea region since the eighth century. This relative isolation has helped keep its distinctive language, culture and traditions alive. One age-old custom is black hive beekeeping, which involves hoisting hives high into the branches of hornbeam trees, so they are out of the reach of greedy bears.

As we edge out of the Fırtına valley, the road turns to a rocky track and snakes upwards into the Kaçkar mountains. We head deeper into the clouds until we’re enveloped by thick mist. Our final stop, Elevit, is a small mountain hamlet, which perches prettily on a high-altitude plateau. People only live here in the summer months to tend their livestock, then descend to the towns when the snow arrives. It’s still quite early in the year and the village is eerily quiet. The mist adds to the mysterious atmosphere: shuttered wooden chalets appear ghost-like through the haze; a technicolour blanket of wildflowers has a thin, dewy sheen.

Behind the fog lie the high peaks of the Kaçkars. An extension of the Caucasus, the range extends 620 miles along Turkey’s Black Sea coast, making them more than twice as long as the Pyrenees. While it’s possible to hike here without a guide, it’s not advisable. The area isn’t properly set up for day hikers; paths through the rugged terrain aren’t marked clearly. Had we more time, we would sign ourselves up for a guided trek – offered by the likes of Montis and Two Ararat – to explore the untamed wilderness of lofty peaks, glacial lakes and mountain pastures. But with our road trip set to continue over the border into Georgia, our exploration into the Kaçkars ends in Elevit.

We drive back to Çamlıhemşin with dusk casting an amber glow over the valley, the river below glinting like a ribbon of steel between the darkening trees. We end our day playing backgammon (or tavla) in a dimly lit, wood-panelled tea house that feels like a working men’s club. The clientele sip tea from tulip-shaped glasses as their wooden counters clack speedily across the board.

The proprietor asks us what we make of his region. “Güzel,” (beautiful) we tell him. He gives us a wide grin and nods. It’s easy to understand why this place inspires such fierce pride in those who call it home. Rize is not packaged for mass tourism, and that’s precisely what makes it worth exploring – a place that still feels wild, where ancient cultures live on, and the tea is always hot.

Accommodation was provided by Dudi Konağı (dudikonagi.com); rooms from €140 a night B&B

Four decades on and having trained as a chef, Canözü has not only built a restaurant and 14 tourist cabins in Kabak, he has married a foreigner too: a former Middle East correspondent from England, who came here to research a novel and ended up falling in love. Now they are raising their family on this wild fringe of Anatolia’s Turquoise Coast, a region that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founding father of the Republic of Turkey, is said to have called the most beautiful in the country.

The Olive Garden takes its name from the 200 to 300 olive trees growing on the terraced hillside above the sea. Canözü’s father dug them up in the mountains and lugged them here on his back, a testament to the years of hard work it took to make this place. Canözü designed the cabins himself, building them in wood and stone to minimise the environmental footprint. Then he installed an infinity pool where his family once threshed grain. When the restaurant opened in 2005, he waited a nerve-racking 45 days for his first customer. Slowly, people came.

My wife and I stay here for four nights, sleeping first in a standard cabin and then in one of two luxury cabins overlooking the sea. The room is airy, glass and pine, but we spend most of our time sitting on the deck outside, continually astonished at the view. On the far side of the forested valley rise immense limestone walls that mark the southern reaches of the Taurus mountain range – the summit nearby is slightly lower than Ben Nevis. On the beach below, a sliver of sand meets startlingly blue water. Kabak beach has long been known for its alternative vibes, a place where groups of hippies sunbathe alongside Muslim families, women in burkinis and dogs dozing on the sand.

This sense of coexistence – something that many see as the heart of modern Turkishness – extends to the marine life: at sunset, half the beach is cleared for nesting loggerhead turtles.

By road, the village of Kabak is literally the end of the line, which, along with the rugged terrain, has helped shield it from the overdevelopment suffered by resorts elsewhere.

On foot, it is a resting place on a longer, slower journey. One of the things that brings travellers here is the 470-mile Lycian Way, established in 1999 by a British-Turkish woman called Kate Clow, who still lives locally. We hike sections of this world-renowned walking trail, first along a rocky path through pine forest and strawberry trees to visit a nearby waterfall. Some beach party stragglers have landed after a long night, so we take our plunge to the thump of techno. A few minutes’ scramble and the trail brings us back to wild silence.

The following day I walk south for two hours while others go ahead by boat; we meet on Cennet Koyu, which translates as Paradise Bay. No road has made its way to this beach, and it fully deserves its name. Swimming here, in water as clear as glass with steep green mountains rising behind, is as close to paradise as can be imagined. Up in the forest is one of the “camps” that were founded before gentrified tourism arrived – vaguely piratical travellers’ outposts that keep things reassuringly scruffy. Dogs, chickens and donkeys wander among the trees.

The boat, steered by a local man with an anchor tattooed behind his ear, takes us around the next headland to the site of a ruined village. Its archway and collapsed stone walls, half swallowed by greenery, are a testament to the darker history of this stretch of coastline. Kalabantia was once inhabited by Greeks, forced to abandon their beautiful home during the brutal “population exchange” that followed the Turkish war of independence in the 1920s. No one came to take their place – it was too remote even for local Turks – so now its stones are sinking back into the land from which they came.

A 45-minute drive away is the much larger settlement of Kayaköy, formerly Levissi, from which over 6,000 Greeks were deported in 1923 to a “homeland” they had never seen. This melancholy ghost town of 500 roofless houses is almost entirely abandoned, but for roaming goats and tourists. There is something particularly tragic in its Orthodox chapels and churches, with their painted stars still pricking the ceilings. Strangely, I realise I’ve been here before: under the fictional name Eskibahçe, this was the setting of Louis de Bernières’ novel Birds Without Wings, which describes how nationalism tore apart multicultural communities that had lived side by side under Ottoman rule for centuries.

The Greek influence is also apparent in Lycia’s most famous ruins: the rock-carved tombs that we saw on our way here from Fethiye. They were made by the ancient Lycians, who blended Hellenic architecture with the Persian technique of hewing structures from the living rock. Smaller tombs, which resemble lidded caskets made of stone, are scattered throughout the mountains and along the Lycian Way, monuments to another of Anatolia’s vanished cultures.

Life has never been settled here. Kabak might still be remote but the road has inevitably brought change, and since the Olive Garden opened, trees have been bulldozed and concrete poured, although the pace of construction has apparently slowed in recent years.

With increasing visitor numbers, the water supply is a big concern, followed closely, in this time of ever-rising temperatures, by the risk of forest fires. But other things stay much the same. Where the road terminates the mountains are still vast and wild, the forests are still full of boar, and the turtles still return to the beaches every year. As in other places where beauty masks a harder existence, there’s a balance to be struck: without tourism – including the hikers slogging along the Lycian Way – many of Kabak’s young people would be forced to move elsewhere instead of working locally, as the Olive Garden’s staff do. At least for now, Kabak feels on the right side of that balance.

On our last night we eat imam bayildi, which translates as “the imam fainted” – presumably because the dish is so good – roasted aubergine stuffed with onions, tomatoes and garlic, drenched in olive oil and smothered with melted cheese. The food has been consistently fresh, local and delicious. The moon shines on the walls of the valley, which glow as bright as bone. We have learned a new word, yakamoz, my favourite in Turkish or any other language: it describes the sparkling of moonlight on dark water. There is poetry in this land. Any culture that has a word for this must be doing something right.

Standard cabins at Olive Garden Kabak (olivegardenkabak.com) from £70, luxury cabins £120 (both sleep two), breakfast included