Kemer → Chimaera Flames Transfer

Kemer to Chimaera Flames private transfer

Most of Kemer is lit up after dark: the marina bars, the hotel terraces, the music drifting along the beach. The reason for this leg is a hillside with no electric light at all. Above Çıralı, gas seeps out of cracks in the rock on the slope the Turks call Yanartaş, identified with the Mount Chimaera of ancient Lycia, and as it meets the air it catches and burns in small, steady flames that writers were already describing in antiquity. By day they are pale and hard to pick out against the stone. After nightfall they glow orange among the pines, which makes this an evening outing from Kemer: you set off as the light goes and get back late, once the hotel has gone quiet.

The leg is 31 km and takes about 35 minutes. From Kemer the D400 runs south between the mountains and the sea, past the turnings for Phaselis and Tekirova, and then leaves the coast to climb through pine forest. At the Çıralı junction the car comes off the highway and drops in tight bends to the valley floor, a stretch a driver takes gently in the dark. In Çıralı the Yanartaş signs lead a few kilometres along the hillside and up into a side valley, where the road ends at a car park. From there it is on foot: a stepped path climbs through the trees for twenty minutes or more, passing the low remains of a temple to Hephaestus, the smith god, just below the first flames.

• A head torch beats a phone light on the rock steps, because both hands stay free, above all on the way down, which feels the steeper half.
• In midsummer it is not properly dark until late, so set the pickup time in Kemer by the sunset rather than by the hotel's dinner hour.
• The car park is quiet at night and you cannot count on finding a car there late, so arrange the waiting time and the run back to Kemer when you book the outward leg.
• Wear closed shoes with some grip: the upper part of the path is bare, uneven rock, and the descent is usually made in the dark.