On the trip
Phaselis
Optional Monday 12 October from Çıralı. The car is not currently booked.
On our trip
- The $120 Phaselis car has dropped off Elvira’s transfer list. If we still want the ruins, we re-request it. Split four ways that is $30 each, and it stays out of the main cash total.
- The site ticket is separate from the driver: about €10, card or cash at the window. Not in the bring-cash totals.
- The day itself is easy hours at Odile and the protected Çıralı beach. Susan Stevenson’s car from the airport is 13:00, $80, hers alone.
- All four walkers are together for this second night. Tuesday’s pickup at Odile is 09:00.
Phaselis is a maybe. It is not on the booked transfer list anymore. Monday is the day Susan Stevenson arrives, the four of us are finally in the same place, and the written plan is the beach and the hotel unless we ask Elvira to put the car back.
If we do go, this is what it is. Phaselis sits on a pine point between three small harbors — north, central, and south — with a Roman main street running from the middle harbor up through the city. The aqueduct comes in from the hills. The theatre is modest. The appeal is the combination: you can see the street, the harbor moles in the water, and swim off the south beach in the same hour. It is a coastal Roman town that stayed small, not an Ephesus. Alexander took the city on his way down this coast; the ruins you walk are mostly the Roman town built centuries later on the same harbors.
It is close to Çıralı, which is why it was ever on the list. A car out and back is the $120, if we re-request it. The ticket is extra, about €10, and you pay that at the gate yourself. Our notes do not give hours. Ask Elvira or the hotel before we commit the afternoon, and do not invent a timetable.
If we do not go, Monday is still a real day: Susan’s landing at 12:30, the car at 13:00, and a protected beach. Çıralı is the nesting beach for loggerhead turtles. The point of a rest day before Demre is to start the walk with four people and uncooked legs, not to collect another site. Phaselis can lose without the trip losing anything we have already paid for.