Hike to Alara Castle

A week ago I went on a major hike with the students. It was an all day hike in the mountains next to Alanya (the Taurus mountains). Our first loop is the one I'll talk about today, it was up a hill that seemed to be vertical at first look. To get to the top, we had to go through tunnels. Most kids might think: "TUNNELS!! AWESOME!!!" Until you start crawling through them. 

They were stairs, almost stairs, except ten times steeper. When we came out, we were half way up the hill. We were in a castle, it was a long, steep way down. But we kept on climbing. Now it was a little easier, except for a couple thorn bushes. Okay, it wasn't that easy. We climbed up a few boulders and some slippery patches of dirt. To make things worse, my hand and heel were both hurting from scrapes, then again, they weren't nearly as bad as my dad's scrapes.

We slowly kept making our way to the top, and finally when we made it, we were tired, hot, and thirsty. I couldn't even think about the way down. All I did was rest. 

It turned out that for me, the way down was easier. Once I was going the right way, and everybody else thought I was going the wrong way, so then we all ended taking an alternate path to the tunnel entrance. It was really hard, I had to climb my way along a rock, and from there jump down to the ground, about 3 feet down.

Then we went back to the tunnels, this was a hard part. We had to be really careful to not kick loose rocks to other people. Luckily we got out safely and  we had a great time on the first loop of our hike.