"Each step forward has a sacred meaning of its own"   Sri Chinmoy

Kursunlu Waterfalls - Jan 2024 - Antalya, Turkey

With our Sri Chinmoy Centre Christmas Trip scheduled to start on Jan 6th (Christmas lasts a few weeks it seems!) we arrived on a Saturday evening in Antalya with a day and a half to occupy before we joined up with our group. We hired a car and opted for a drive down to the ancient ruins at Side (see-day) which included a stroll around the incredible remnants of the Temples of Apollo and Artemis on a spur of land overlooking the sea. It was very developed for tourism, probably overdeveloped, and we wanted something closer to nature for the afternoon. I decided to finish our trip with a light hike around the Kursunlu Falls just outside Antalya city - certainly somewhere well on the tourist trail but as popular with the locals as the visitors.

This was a hike of a distance and effort-level that Kokila and I could do together which was a nice change from all my solo rides and runs. First came a turnoff from the highway on to a narrow road into the hills. From the parking lot we crossed the road, paid a very small tourist tax at a booth for a ticket to the Nature Park and then found ourselves immediately in a peaceful and charming forest of well-spaced pines with the sun glinting through. There were plenty of visitors but no sense of crowding, everyone ambling quietly through the trees and the handful of stalls that were there to get to the downhill path. This trail, laid with a kind of pebbled concrete so it was free of mud (but still quite slippery for me, in hard-rubber-soled hiking shoes) wound down through a rocky hillside to the river, here a broad pool under around 5 narrow but lively waterfalls, with small bridges and moss-covered rocks.

Our route took us in a loop, past the falls then over a small bridge to the far bank, down the left bank of the river on a trail called the Plant Tunnel. It was paved for most of the way, cut into steps in places, always firm underfoot. There were ducks that swam up to beg for food and songbirds in the trees - all in all a really lovely place for an easy loop on the riverbanks. After 1 km or so we came to a cafe, decided not to bother with a coffee (it was a modern place rather than a tea shack) and instead took the big wooden footbridge back to the right bank for the undulating walk back to our starting point.

This was a very meditative walk, great for bridging that gap between our work-lives and the forthcoming Christmas Trip with its daily program of meditations, music, humour and inspiration. I was glad the flights to get us here on Arrivals Day hadn't worked out and had given us an excuse to arrive early and explore! By the time we arrived back in the pinewood at the top of the gorge I was very relaxed and feeling absorbed into the gentle winter season and Turkish landscape I was going to be immersed in for the next couple of weeks.

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