When Christmas holidays were getting closer and closer, we were torturing our mind by looking for a perfect climbing destination… Our expectations were high: Nothing less than ALL inclusive should it be this time… Anti-rain, Long routes and Limestone!
Literally all, at least in case of the weather was expecting us… trying to escape from the grey and cold winter weather at home, turkey was welcoming us with heavy snow. The decision to move on from Geyikbayiri to the close to the cost located and therefore little warmer area of Datca was made fast… Much faster than it took us to go there… 7h for about 300km… Hard to believe that we would overbid it on the way back…
Finally arrived in Datca, it turned out to be the perfect location. Superb climbing on spectacular, up to 70m long routes on tufas and perfect limestone à la Siurana! When we first arrived to the impressive Can Baba cave, the main sector of Datca, so many lines were catching our eyes that we decided to try all of them instead of focusing on a single hard project.
The highlight of this trip are the numerous 8a´s we´ve been trying together. Nina´s flashes of Vendeta (8a) and Mediteranean dream (8a) has to be pointed out as well as the many many other 8graded routes she sended mostly on her second try and the numerous flashes and onsights up to 7c+! For Marvin the highlight
was doing „Turkuish moon“ (8c) the Kingline “A muerte bicho” (8b+) following all the way (55m!) up on tufa structures and the numerous routes up to 8a he did onsight.
It has been an amazing trip to Datca and we were leaving from there in the mood of melancholy.
The desaster started on the way to the airport. Leaving the cost and driving upcountry the heavy rain turned into snowfall. We made it on the skin of our teeth to the airport by not beeing able to drive faster than 30km/h for most of the way… Barely we couldn´t made it at all, slideing with spinning wheels through the next hill… Super exhausted we arrived on the airport at 7 am just in time for Nina´s flight… On the airport in Antalya the heavy snowfall in Istanbul wreaked the total chaos… Thousands of people waiting for hours before the counters with completely overloaded staff, in order to just get refered to the next one and back to the same one again… Nina´s flight was canceled but finally she managed to get a flight to Istanbul where she had to stay two more nights to finally get a flight back home via Vienna. Due to a delay she needed to stay there one more night and when she arrived back home her luggage was lost… What a torture! Luckily it arrived on the next day… Happy end!
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