Lake Salda is in the Turkish Lake Region in Western Anatolia, a three hour drive from Kalkan. It is a crater lake at 1300m. The minerals in the water have created a “beach”, which gives (at times, according to the tourist agency) the appearance of being in the Maldives. At the time of our visit, some imagination was needed to picture this scene !

Not far from Lake Salda is the begining of the “Lavanta Yolu”, the lavender route, which passes through lavender fields close to Lake Burdur, leading to the village of Kuyucak. Production can be traced back to a local farmer visiting Provence in 1975.

The region has a small tourist trade in the summer as well as the winter, with some ski slopes in the area. The visitors are almost entirely Turkish. This gave us a need/opportunity to use our relatively basisc Turkish; mostly with the desired results, although we did once or twice require the help of google translate and found some words that we frequenty use in Kalkan pronounced differently. We found the prices to be a fraction of the prices on the Turkish coast.