scrapheapstuart3

I’ve been to Turkey 3 times before but this was my first trip to Turkiye. ( Ha Ha!) The Turks have recently changed the name of their country, maybe because they were fed up with being associated in the West with the festive season’s sacrificial bird. My first visit was to Istanbul, on my own, way back in 1974. I stayed in the same hotel as Agatha Christie and James Bond,( the Belle Epoque: Pera Palas, up the hill from the Bosphorus). I visited the monumental church of Hagia Sophia, saw a dancing bear outside the beautiful Blue Mosque ( very cruel), tried to walk to Asia but didn’t make it, found out I didn’t like Turkish coffee ( a bit of brown sludge in the bottom of an egg cup), and visited the fabulous Sultan’s palace with its glittering crown jewels. ( the Topkapi Sereglio).

Two decades later, in the early 90s, a girlfriend and I found ourselves in Kalkan in Lycia on the Turquoise Coast of South West Turkey. It was a wonderful holiday, alternating sunbathing and swimming with visits to ancient sites. About 10 years ago I was in Lycia again, this time with my wife Chris. We were on an escorted tour west from Antalya which eventually took in the fantastic Roman cities of Ephesus and Aspendos. Finally just recently, we got lured by a bargain price, on to another escorted tour in the holiday low season, this time linking Antalya, on the south coast with the weird but wonderful landscapes of Cappadocia on the central Anatolian plateau. It was to prove a hectic, eventful but memorable trip with a few lows but many amazing highs.

A friend of mine who had been on a Mediterranean cruise described it as a series of fascinating snapshots, whetting the appetite for a longer visit at some future date. I think an escorted tour follows much the same format. You see a collection of interesting places for just a short amount of time each, before quickly moving on. There is little time to linger. The downside is that someone else is deciding what you see and how long you will see it for. Someone else even decides when you get up and have your breakfast. Relaxation is not a word one would associate with an escorted tour. Sometimes it can be frustrating as outstanding places are experienced in a rush. But the alternative would be to travel round an unfamiliar country, which speaks a strange, incomprehensible language, on one’s own. At our age, the thought of doing that is pretty scary. Our carefree, backpacking days are now well and truly over. So Chris and I sacrificed some of our freedom to play it safe and have a lot of the worry taken out of our heads. We travelled on a package tour with 32 British people, 2 British based Turks, a German lady from Blackburn, a Canadian lady now living in Derby and 2 Taiwanese Chinese ladies currently residing in London. It was an excellent bunch of people — interesting and varied. Everyone was friendly, open and supportive. Our Turkish guide and driver were Abdullah and Ahmed. They looked after us very well although inevitably there were a few little niggles on the way. However as the Muslims say, nothing and nobody is perfect except Allah.

The adventure started in Manchester where we caught a budget airline flight to Antalya on the Turkish south coast. It was a near 4.5 hour flight reminding us that we were not only travelling to another country but also to another continent. Turkiye straddles both Europe and Asia. One early highlight of the trip was seeing the dark mountain peaks of the Balkans rising up above a blanket of white cloud which had settled in the valleys below like snow. Once we landed at Antalya we could stop thinking for ourselves as the guide and driver then took charge. Like schoolchildren with our teachers, we were now being chaperoned. We drove through dark and busy streets lit up in lurid neon, to our hotel complex. After a late buffet dinner, we settled down in our room to catch up on sleep. We had pushed our clocks 3 hours forward, and our bodies needed time to adjust.

It would have been good to rest up the next day. The hotel complex was very nice, with a pool, tropical trees and plants, a bar and lots of slim, graceful cats slinking around. We saw cats all over Turkiye. Presumably they are there to keep the mice and rats down. Yes, it would have been nice to relax but we had paid to visit a mosque and go on a river trip, so off we went.

The coast west of Antalya is ugly and heavily developed. It is a popular tourist area, a narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the dramatic Taurus Mountains, just inland. A four lane highway runs right behind the beaches. This now hosts almost permanent traffic congestion and the situation has been made worse by the addition of a tramline, built for an Expo in 2016 which few people use. Alongside the beach is a continuous line of huge luxury hotels and holiday villages. Some of these are really showy and over the top — something we saw a lot of in the tourist areas of Turkiye. Some people would call it “kitsch.” Tourism has brought a lot of revenue to the area but has also made property incredibly expensive, driving the local people out. The largest group of tourists are the Germans, followed by rich Russians and then us Brits. Many people are attracted to the idea of relaxing, sunbathing, swimming, sipping cocktails and living in luxury for a week or two. Some don’t even leave their tourist complexes for the whole of their stay. They are sometimes cynically referred to as “fly and floppers.” In the past this was a peaceful area of Greek villages known as Pamphylia but now it is a crowded concrete jungle. It seems that in chasing the tourist dollar, Turkiye has failed to learn from the “mistakes” of the Spanish in the 1960s and 70s who covered their attractive coastlines in a sea of concrete and tower blocks and more or less invented mass tourism. Apparently, about two thirds of Turkiye’s holidaymakers are “sun tourists”, while the remaining third are attracted by the rich array of sights and culture. We fitted into the latter category.

Amidst the ugly, urban sprawl that spread like an ink stain along the coast, Abdullah pointed out an ancient Roman bridge across a river and the remains of a Roman aqueduct which had once brought water to the city from the mountains. The ruined aqueduct was a sad sight. Most of its stones had been pilfered for other building works over the centuries. The idea that the past should be preserved to be part of a country’s heritage is a relatively recent one. Hadrian’s Wall in England for instance is now a World Heritage Site but in the past, local farmers stole its stones to build their houses, barns and sheep pens.

At last we turned off the busy coast road into the town of Manavgat, about 50 to 60 kms east of Antalya. I was hoping to be able to have a wander round the town centre and perhaps witness a slice of everyday Turkish life. But no— we were on a tight schedule and were there to visit a mosque. Even though it was the low season, tour buses were constantly coming and going and groups of tourists were being shepherded in and out.

To be fair, it is a beautiful modern mosque, based on the famous Blue Mosque of Istanbul but smaller. It had been built in 2004 and paid for entirely by the Government. It seems that the current Turkish government led by Recep Erdogan is trying to turn Turkiye into a more religious Islamic nation, moving away from the ideas of Ataturk, who created modern Turkey in the 1920s out of the ruins of the collapsed Ottoman Empire. Ataturk wanted to establish a secular nation to avoid the religious strife that had plagued so many countries over the centuries. Like Modi in India and Netanyahu in Israel, Mr Erdogan seems to be reversing this policy and is using religion to shore up his support. He seems to have largely succeeded, as around 90% of the Turkish population are now muslims, although most don’t speak or read Arabic, the language of the Koran.

As I said, the mosque at Manavgat is ravishingly beautiful. It was worth getting out of bed early for. We had already been half woken by the early morning call to prayer from the local minaret which reminded us that we were no longer in the UK. Now, after removing our shoes and the ladies covering their heads, we were standing in a Muslim place of worship and it felt a real privilege to be there. We got an interesting talk about the main features from our guide, then a demonstration of the call to prayer from the Iman or priest. We then had time to explore the building, admiring its ravishing turquoise tilework, beautiful calligraphy, stained glass windows, patterned carpet, niches and graceful arches. It was all laid out beneath a spectacular, decorated dome. As in a church the rule is that there should be no visual representation of God or Allah. This explains the emphasis on complex geometric patterns and lovely stylised calligraphy. All too soon we had to leave. I suspect the next tour group was waiting to come in.

The itinerary now dictated that we leave the town and drive to a nearby river where we were scheduled to go on a boat trip. I imagined picturesque scenery, and a relaxing cruise to an interesting destination. Little did I know that we were being led blind into a tourist trap. Our meal on board the tourist boat was paid for but straight away, the crew were circulating trying to sell us drinks. For some reason, drinks always cost extra. They then took our pictures and of course framed versions of them were waiting to tempt us at the end of the trip. Mine was framed inside a plate! The scenery was scruffy with quite a bit of litter on the river banks. Just inland were the impressive mountains but we were sailing away from them. All along the riverbanks were mock galleons decorated with pirates, dinosaurs or dragons. It was a fake world created for gullible tourists. I shuddered to imagine what the river would have been like at the height of the tourist season. The river flowed gently to the Mediterranean Sea. Our boat then moored up and we were given 1.5 hours of free time to “enjoy” a short stretch of sandy beach that lay between the river and the sea.

I had hoped we might stop at a quiet, pretty spot where we could relax and contemplate the sea in one direction and the mountains in the other. But that was just wishful thinking. The reality was a tacky tourist trap, with cafes, bars, ice cream stalls, jet ski sessions and camel rides. Yes, some tourists were grinning nervously as they perched precariously on top of a camel plodding across the sand. My pedantic teacher side kicked in when I noticed that the camels were dromedaries which belong to Africa not Asia. Asian camels are 2 humped bactrians and apparently they are an endangered species. Chris and I made the best of it by taking our shoes off and enjoying the warm sand trickle between our toes as we took a slow walk up the beach.

Eventually we were back on the tourist boat which then sailed slowly back to the start. There we met Abdullah who had enjoyed 3 hours rest, having got rid of us on the boat trip. Finally we drove back through congested traffic to our hotel for dinner and then a much needed sleep. I felt frustrated because I thought much of this first full day had been wasted. The mosque had been very good but the boat trip was tacky, touristy fayre. I thought we’d signed up for a cultural, sightseeing excursion. As I retired for the night, I felt a bit low. Had we wasted our time and money coming all this way to do gimmicky tourist stuff? I consoled myself by thinking I had witnessed mass tourism in action. Following a pre-arranged itinerary, the tourists were collected into groups and then placed on a conveyor belt of packaged experiences. It was very disappointing . I cheered myself up though by thinking that the journey through the Taurus Mountains would be spectacular and once we had left the over-commercialised coastal strip, we might actually witness some genuine Turkish life and culture.

Even before the early morning call to prayer, we were rudely awakened from our slumbers by a tremendous thunder storm. It began around 3am and lasted for over an hour. Constant flashes of lightning lit up our room and then our ears were assaulted by deafening claps of thunder. The rain was torrential. As I waiting for the storm to die down, a new worry entered my mind. What if our route through the mountains was being flooded? Would the road be passable? Might there even be landslides up in the highlands? I had seen a landslide on a previous trip to Turkiye when the bus I was on between Kas and Demre had to slow right down to allow diggers to clear the way ahead. I gradually drifted off into a restless sleep. Might the trip be called off before it even began? Despite the fixed itinerary, thanks to the extreme weather, this tour could end up becoming a journey into the disappointing unknown.

To be continued… Watch this space…