After
climbing in Athens we hopped on another overnight ferry and after a little stop off on Rhodes Island we arrived in Turkey (see my
last post for travel details)!
We arrived Geyikbayiri late at night under a full moon, the first thing I noticed was there was rock everywhere! Once at one of the many accommodation options in the valley there is no need for a car, stacks of amazing climbing is a flip-flop'able 5-15min walk away, this made a refreshing change from the daily driving to the crag we did around Athens.
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| Friendly JoSiTo Camping Bar |
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| Geyikbayiri South Facing crags, too hot for these! |
Crawling out of my tent in the morning the next couple of things I noticed was that there where pomegranate and persimmon fruit trees everywhere and that it was hot! Unfortunately it was way to hot to climb on many of the crags overlooking the campsite, which was a bit of a shame. However luckily there was one crag 10min walk away called Trebenna which gets shade all day and it rather good indeed if a little polished.
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| Amazing rock structures in Trebenna |
The rock in Trebenna is often steep and always amazingly featured with lots of tufas on all angles which results in lots of sometimes painfully wide bridging, contorted positions and unexpected rests.
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| More amazing rock in Trebenna |
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| Jon on a super steep 7c+ roof |
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| Lowering off |
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| Wide Bridging! |
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| Sampling some local gozleme, savoury pancake |
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| Turkish Tea (Cay) |
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| Onsighting Ying Yang 7c in Trebenna |
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| Super tasty, BBQ trout at down the road from JoSitoCamp at Geyikbayiri Alabalik. Highly recommended :-) |
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| Petzl Roc Trip arrives into town |
It was cool to meetup with the Petzl Roc Trip in Geyikbayiri, hanging out with other enthusiastic climbers is always motivating. Petzl laid on a bus each day to take us to a rather impressive newly developed crag 40min away called Çitdibi. This crag had lots of super long and super impressive tufa lines with the best looking lines around 8a+. There was also a few easier (6b-7b) long 40m wall climbs which where fantastic. The consensus of the Petzl climbers was that many of the grades of the new routes at Çitdibi in the new guidebook where a bit of the stiff side! There is currently a refuge being built near the bottom of the walk-in to the crag, I think in the future this will become a great place to stay for a couple of weeks of hard climbing.
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| Long 8b tufa at Çitdibi |
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| Octocopter filming at Çitdibi |
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| Octocopter! |
After just under a week in Geyikbayiri we moved on with the Petzl Roc Trip to to Olympos, a couple of hours drive away by the coast. I was looking forward to a change of scene, some warm water sea swimming and some deep water soloing. We had one really good days climbing on a nice vertical wall Cennet which made a welcome chance from steep tufa pulling. Unfortunately on our second day in Olympos Jon and I got taken down by food poisoning. Jon managed to recover after about 24hrs but it's taken me a week and a half to get over it! The remainder of the trip was mainly spent either in bed or on the toilet!
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| Watchout for turtles |
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| Olympos Beach |