Alexandria Troas, the Pink Heart Lake (Dalyan) and Apollon Smintheus

Connecting Ancient Troy, the Geyikli ferry to Bozcaada and Assos along the western Aegean edge of the Biga Peninsula (known in antiquity as the Troad) is a quiet coastal road through valonia-oak forests that holds three extraordinary stops with zero tour buses.

1. Alexandria Troas (At Dalyan Village, 15 minutes south of Geyikli Pier)

Founded in 306 BC by Alexander the Great's general Antigonus I Monophthalmus and renamed in honour of Alexander by Lysimachus in 301 BC, Alexandria Troas grew under the Roman Empire into a huge port metropolis of 100,000 people covering 400 hectares (so important that Julius Caesar and later Emperor Constantine the Great both seriously considered moving the capital of the Roman Empire here before Constantine chose Constantinople). St Paul sailed from its ancient harbour to Europe on his Second Missionary Journey and raised young Eutychus from the dead here in Acts 20:

• The Baths of Herodes Atticus (Herodes Atticus Hamamı): standing amid ancient oak trees right beside the country road, the colossal stone arches and cyclopean piers of this 135 AD Roman gymnasium and bath complex, funded by the wealthy Athenian senator Herodes Atticus, are among the largest Roman vaulted ruins in Anatolia, paired nearby with the newly excavated Roman Odeon, Forum and Maldelik (Nymphaeum).

2. The Pink Heart-Shaped Lake of Dalyan (Kalpli Pembe Göl)

Walk ten minutes west from Alexandria Troas down to the sea at Dalyan Village, where the Ancient Inner Harbour of Alexandria Troas sits separated from the Aegean by a narrow sandbar. Shaped from above like a heart, this shallow, hyper-saline lagoon turns a surreal bubblegum pink and magenta between June and September when warm sun and high salinity trigger a bloom of beta-carotene-producing Dunaliella salina microalgae and halobacteria, flanked on the beach by giant ancient granite columns lying in the sand that were quarried at nearby Koçali Roman Granite Quarry (where seven 12-metre, 110-tonne monolith columns still lie abandoned side by side in the rock).

3. The Sanctuary of Apollon Smintheus (In Gülpınar, 25 km west of Assos)

Approaching the westernmost tip of Asia at Babakale (crowned by the last Ottoman fortress built in 1723 and famous for handmade Babakale knives), stop in Gülpınar to visit the 2nd-century BC Hellenistic Ionic Temple of Apollon Smintheus ("Apollo, Lord of Mice", mentioned in the opening pages of Homer's Iliad), whose onsite museum displays exquisite marble friezes of the Trojan War.