Gerikbayiri – a summary

Gerikbayiri is a fantastic hot rock destination.

Gerikbayiri is a small village only about 25km from Antalya. It’s very quiet and not at all touristy.

We flew to Antalya with flythomascook from Manchester. There isn’t a great deal of choice. In fact, flythomascook is the only company that flies to Antalya from Manchester at this time of year. But this time of year is the best time of year to go, i.e. the week after the Easter holidays are over. It was very quiet, and the spring flowers were all in bloom.

There are a few options for accommodation:

• Right next to the crag
• In the village
• In Antalya

JoSiTo and Climbers Garden are two camp sites right next to the climbing. They both provide camping, cabins, kitchen, bar and restaurant, and are perfect venues to be close to the climbing, with excellent food and are pretty economical so long as you don’t go too mad at the bar. Our friend Helen has stayed at both and said that they can get rowdy, depending on who’s there, but they’re great places to stay.

Many of our friends have stayed in hotels in Antalya, taking advantage of the half board deals, which make for a very easy life, except perhaps for the 40 minute drive up into the hills every day with very expensive fuel (nearly £1.80 a litre).

We stayed at Nancy’s Apartments, which is in Gerikbayiri village itself. Nancy is from Wales but has lived in Turkey for many years now.

We knew we’d need a car for the 5 minute drive down to the climbing every day, and thanks to Steve Scott’s advice, we went with Cizgi who gave us a very reasonable rate of €140 for the week. Koon and Elsie arrived in the very silly early hours of Monday morning, so Nancy arranged a one way transfer for €40 to get them to the apartment.

There are 35 climbing sectors on the rock bands running along the main road just before entering the village and all of the climbing is pretty well much within walking distance of each other.

We went to:

• Left Cave and Heart on Monday, which provided a good introduction to the rock with short routes just opposite JoSiTo
• Kebap on Tuesday, where we met Chris and Mike Simpkins and had wonderful views and a bench perfectly placed for a lazy belay
• Cennet, near Olympos, on Wednesday, which was very steep, and didn’t have very many easy routes
• Alabalik Balkon 1, 2 and 4 on Thursday, which provided some harder routes that we were warmed up to tackle
• Ottoman on Friday which gave us some most excellent longer routes (recommend at least a 70m rope)
• Trebenna West on a cool Saturday which provided shelter from the odd shower
• Right Cave and Turkish Standard on Sunday, perfectly placed to roll down to JoSiTo when it all got a bit too hot

Here are some more climbing pictures.

When we weren’t climbing, we were resting, eating, drinking and sightseeing.

There is only a very small shop in Gerikbayiri so many people visit the market at the weekend. There is a great array of fresh fruit at ridiculously low prices.

There are plenty of sites of historical interest all over the place, but we didn’t get to see too much of that. If the weather hadn’t been so good, perhaps we would have taken more time to visit them.

And as Colin notices, there was a distinct lack of cakes. We did manage to rectify that by going to the Climbers Garden for their most excellent apple pie, but we also had something a little more traditional for Turkey…

Series - Gerikbayiri

1. Turkish Bolt Clipping
2. Kizlar nerede?
3. Gerikbayiri – a summary