This was before everything. Before Italy, before Lisbon, before the plan had a name. We were in Bodrum on a family holiday — all five of us, in the MagicTUI complex, deep in the hills above the bay. The kind of holiday where the most ambitious question is where to have dinner. The kind where you bus into town because the hill down is brutal and the hill back is worse.
But I needed a run. Sometimes it isn’t complicated.
Looking east across the bay from the hillside — the harbour, the castle, and the Aegean beyond.
The hill
Getting out of the complex on foot was an adventure in itself. The roads up here aren’t built for running — they’re barely built for walking, wide enough for a car and optimistic about whether a pavement was necessary. The town is already visible below you from the moment you leave, white buildings in the early morning light, and you can see the marina and the castle and the bay stretching out beyond it, and Greece somewhere past that on the other side of the water.
The descent into town is steep enough to feel like a small negotiation. Going too fast would be reckless. Going slowly felt like a waste. I split the difference.
The bay from the higher slopes — yachts in the marina, the Castle of St. Peter just visible through the trees.
Bodrum’s whitewashed hillside streets. The bus makes more sense in the afternoon.
The theatre
I didn’t plan to go to the amphitheatre. I just followed the road and there it was, sitting against the hillside as though it had never not been there — because it hadn’t, not in any timeframe worth thinking about. The Theatre of Halicarnassus. What the Greeks built here when this city was called Halicarnassus. Third or fourth century BC, some sources say, and from the road you can look through the fence at the stone seats rising up the hill and the column bases and the tumbled marble and wonder what it sounded like when it was full.
I stopped. I walked around the perimeter. There was no one else there.
The Theatre of Halicarnassus. Bodrum, built when the city still went by another name.
The upper tiers from the road. Thousands of years of stone. A chain-link fence. A Tuesday morning.
Inside the theatre perimeter — the stage floor, the seats, the hill behind.
Somewhere on the way back
The route back took me up through neighbourhoods that don’t appear on the Bodrum postcards — the ordinary residential parts, the side streets with parked scooters and grapevines growing over gates and satellite dishes on every rooftop, the bits of town that belong to people who actually live there rather than people passing through. I liked it up there. It felt like the real dimensions of the place.
From the right angle you can see the whole bay again — the harbour below, the hills opposite carrying their own weight of white buildings, the Aegean flat and blue and doing nothing particular.
The view north from the residential streets — another bay, another set of hills.
Looking back toward the complex, mid-climb. The town below.
The last stretch was a long palm-lined road out past the theatre back toward the hills, empty in the morning, which felt right. The kind of road that looks like it should have something at the end of it. What it had was a bus stop and then a very steep climb.
By the time I got back, everyone was having breakfast.
The road east of the theatre, early morning. Eight kilometres gone, and the hills still to go.
The old town road — running into the market quarter, back toward the marina.
The holiday carried on the way holidays do. Beach. Dinner. The same argument about where to have dinner, the same result, everyone content. Bodrum does that well — it has enough of everything without being overwhelming. We didn’t know it at the time, but this kind of trip was already doing something to us. Teaching us that moving through a place on foot changes what you see. That finding a 2,400-year-old theatre on a Tuesday morning is the kind of thing you can do if you just set off early.
We weren’t searching for anything yet. But we were learning how to look.
Bodrum, Muğla · 8.68 miles · 1hr 17m · 624ft · 8:56/mi
