The Turkish coastline gets more interesting (and less touristy) as you go east.

The road can’t always follow the coast due to the sheerness of the cliffs in places……

But that doesn’t make it any less attractive. We even drove past Mount Olympus and got a chance to see the top peaking through a very timely gap in the clouds (although we did find out later that Turkey & Greece seem to disagree about who actually has THE Mount Olympus).

Mind you, you need to keep your eyes on the road as much as possible. They’re liable to just collapse! You can still see the white lines on the ‘old road’ in the bottom of this picture. Not sure even the Land Rover would deal with that sort of off-roading very well.

Due to it’s position as a crossroad between East and West, Turkey has seen itself as a pivotal point in most empires since the Romans. As a result it’s had to do a fair amount of defending itself from both invaders and pirates. There are castles or forts in many towns, and some of the old towns themselves are basically walled-in villages.

The castle below was actually on the turtle beach in the Dragon campsite we stayed at in Alanya. It’s seen better days. Built in the 15th Century it was ruined in a siege by local warlords fighting over who would control this stretch of coastline.

Many of the castles are owned by the Turkish Government and still used for semi-military purposes (mostly administration, rather than as garrisons) and unfortunately not all are able to be visited. A lot still fly the Turkish flag – in fact, it’s not till you see a huge flag flying on some of them that you get a sense of how large they actually are.