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Turkish Delight
I spent the first five months or so on the coast near a farming town called Manavgat -the Turkish equivalent of Margate, but without the glamour. Manavgat is not a teeming metropolis, the pastoral calm and beach are the main attraction for the hordes of tourists - mainly German and Russian - that descend annually. Nor is there a plethora of natural features. The most important being a very pretty waterfall, billed by the locals as a bit like Vic Falls, and a sleepy-green river, good for sleepy-green boat tours to the sea.
Like most of the country, the place is well set up to ensnare tourist lucre, so finding suitable diversion is easy. Simply arriving by mini-bus (dolmus - pronounced dolmoosh) at the otogar (bus station) looking foreign is enough to get you accosted by at least five locals offering you a boat trip in as many minutes - quicker if you're a woman on your own. The Manavgat river is bounded for most of it's length by high, luscious vegetation right down to the waterline. All this makes for a quiet, relaxing sail if you can find a boat without the incessant, thumping techno so many regard as standard accompaniment. Upriver at the falls are fish restaurants where you can choose your dinner live before it gets gutted, blackened over hot coals and served with fresh salad and chips.
Southern Anatolia has been settled for thousands of years and has, as you'd expect, the ruins of Roman cities as well as some Ottoman and Seljuk bits 'n pieces. As a friend quipped, 'You can't go anywhere without tripping over a piece of ancient aqueduct.' Having had a passing acquaintance with Roman history, I figured this would be a good chance to see their achievements 'in the stone'.
Side (See-Deh) is on a small peninsula, built on and around one of these ancient sites. Entry into the town is gained via a tar road laid through a hole attractively smashed in the wall of the old city. On the way in you'll find the remains of a villa with mosaic floors still visible through the undergrowth and dog-shit. Preserving antiquity costs money which, in Turkey, seems more readily spent on flashy new uniforms for the riot police.
Today, Side is a tourist-trap. In days of yore it was one of the biggest slave-trading ports on the Mediterranean. There are similarities. Both activities are about selling to the highest bidder - and Turkish shop-keepers wrote the book on 'hard-sell'. In defense of Turkish salesmen, it must be said that they sweeten the pill like no other. If you're prepared to buy something, you get the royal treatment - usually including as many glasses of apple tea you can drink and, if you're female, probably the offer of a date thrown in.
My time in Turkey is over, and instead of sunning on the Med this year I'm bumping about in the tunnels of the London underground. England is very organised, not at all like Turkey. It's a little antiseptic at times; the gardens too well clipped, the streets too squeaky clean, the faces too closed.
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