The world according to me....

My favourite beach is Çirali, near Antalya in Turkey. I went in 1997 at the behest of the Turkish NGO DKHD, to help set up a monitoring program for sea turtle activities at Belek beach. Actually, they originally invited Clare Whitmore, but she had too much going on, so she kindly recommended me. Anyway, the objective was to assess the impact of tourists and tourist development in Belek on loggerhead sea turtle reproduction. Belek beach traditionally been used as a summer holiday area for local Turkish families who generally camp out in wagon-style cabanas, but since the early 1990s, Belek has seen increased development of hotel complexes aimed at Northern European visitors. There was concern that increased pressures from tourism development on Belek (artificial lighting at night, more people on the beach, etc.) might adversely affect the nesting activities of sea turtles. One obstacle for this monitoring project was that since much development had already occurred, it was difficult to have pre-development baseline with which to compare current observations. The solution was to use as a baseline the loggerhead nesting behaviour on a nearby but under-developed beach. This turned out to be Çirali, a small beautiful beach in the shadow of several mountains, including Olympos. The data collected in 1997 suggested that the presence of hotels on Belek was impacting sea turtles, mainly the artificial lights at night were keeping females from nesting on all parts of the beach, and affecting the seafinding of emergent hatchlings. Note that since the late 1990s, a sea turtle research group from a nearby Turkish university is now regularly monitoring Belek each nesting season.

When I was there in 1997, I never saw a nesting turtle, but saw many tracks and hatchlings from recently emerged nests. The turtle aspect of the trip was all well and good, but it was the non-turtle part that really made an impact on me.

The food (olives for breakfast, a restaurant sitting IN a river, Turkish coffee, etc.), the warmth of the local Turkish people, the natural beauty, and related things all made me fall in love with the place. But the place that really stole my heart and soul was Chimera, a rocky shield on the side of a mountain where fires spontaneously spring to life from natural gas jets. Feza Toker, a local biologist, led me there and insisted that we sit for a while and drink chamomile tea with a man selling bottled water to visitors. I watched the flames dance from the rocks and felt I must have been in the place where Prometheus had first brought the fire that he had stolen from Mt. Olympos. I have no idea how long I was transfixed by Chimera, but when Feza told me it was time to go back, the sun was getting low on the horizon; we must have passed several hours there, but it only seemed like minutes.

Chimera is as close to the gods I have ever been.