If you’re looking for a last blast of summer, these sunny resorts offer quiet beaches but enough life to stave off the end-of-season blues

A Kalkan sunset is always a beautiful thing – the horseshoe-shaped bay deepening to azure blue against an apricot-rose sky – but, in October, when the light is low and the sun drops early, it’s almost transcendentally lovely. In some Turkish resorts, you’d be sitting watching it surrounded by quiet streets, half-empty bars and that melancholic sense that another season is over. In Kalkan, it still feels like summer; the harbourfront restaurants throng with visitors, the day gulets (wooden boats) still putter in and out of the bay and you don’t have to wait an hour to get a taxi back to your villa.

As Christopher Nolan’s star-studded adaptation is released, Australian archaeologist and cyclist Sam Wood has recreated Odysseus’ journey on two wheels

Backpacking around Europe is a rite of passage for many young Australians but when Sam Wood proposed a trip with his two brothers in 2009, he had something a little more ambitious in mind.

An avid cyclist who studied classical archaeology at the University of Sydney and spent three years working at the British Museum, he suggested retracing the route that the Carthaginian general Hannibal took over the Alps with his war elephants in 218BC.

Thirty years after she first visited, our writer is relieved to discover that the town has managed to swerve the worst excesses of tourist development

My favourite memory of Akyaka? The second evening of our most recent visit: the beach floodlit by the last embers of a flaming sunset, the mountains that stand sentry around the town softening into deep purple hues. Before our eyes, all was transformed: sunloungers stacked away, waiters whisking back and forth with tables, menus and small rechargeable lamps. A little further along, in one of the bar areas on the beach, a trio of Turkish women, their hair in shades of pepper and smoke, sat with their toes in the sand, happily knitting. I recalled other beaches in Turkey, where oligarchs and influencers preen and pose, and thought – yes, this is exactly where I want to be.

Akyaka – a small town, huddled on the eastern end of blue-washed Gökova Bay – is an old friend of mine. Thirty years ago, working as a holiday rep, I visited on a weekly basis, popping in to see the handful of clients who were staying at simple pansiyons (small B&Bs) in the town. Back then … well, actually, back then it wasn’t that different from today, which is something that can’t be said about many of the Turkish villages and small resorts I knew in the mid-1990s.