Turkey

It’s our annual holiday.  Nizwa is smouldering in 46 degrees and we were all glad to get out of it. The children passed the year with extremely good marks considering they missed a whole month in the beginning.   This year we have decided to visit Fethiye in Turkey.  The holiday was initiated by extremely kind and generous friends who have a peaceful spacious haven amidst the bustling tourist hive.

We flew Turkish airlines from Muscat via Bahrain, Istanbul and finally Dalaman.   We then caught a taxi to Fethiye which is roughly 30 minutes away.   By the time we arrived in Fethiye it was dark and we were all tired.

The apartment is my kind of place.  The living room is lined with well-read books; the conservatory has an extra kid’s corner with a PS2. The apartment has everything we could wish for.  A huge bath, a shower, even aircons for the hot days and heaters for the cold ones.

Fethiye is mainly a tourist resort and an unforgettable experience. The people are friendly and very welcoming.  In the evenings, they sit outside enjoying the last of the sun, playing board games with their neighbours and chatting away in Turkish. To my astonishment, every so often I hear an Afrikaans-sounding word between sentences. 

There is a waterpark here that has slides of every description: There are tunnels, open ones, steep ones, curvy ones and gradual slides all running down to a deep splash-pool - a kid’s paradise.  We were there until poor Nicholas couldn’t walk up the stairs anymore.  He had told us that he had never encountered a slide before (he was too small to remember the slide in Salalah) and Matthew was running up and sliding down at the speed of light.  It was a lot of fun.

The drive to the cool waters of Saklikent Gorge took us through some Turkish countryside where there were acres of olive trees and tiny little restaurants that seemed to pop up everywhere.  It seems Turkey is a nation of gardeners.  The water runs freely here and the soil is fertile.  Everywhere one looks there are flowers, plants and fruit trees.  What is remarkable for me is that the roses smell of rose, the fruit smells of fruit and even the bougainvilla smells like flowers.  These fruit and vegetables are sold twice weekly at the local market where you can buy almost anything else as well.

The Mediterranean Sea is clear, cool and the boats bob up and down in the quiet water.  There are numerous stony beaches dotted along the shore.  There are boats which seem to be on every beach. One can hire one in order to go to most of the islands dotted around the coast.  One can even take a trip down to Rhodes Island which is Greek territory to see how the other half live. It is very beautiful here. I am looking forward to visiting the famous Oludeniz beach very soon.  It is said to be the 5^th most beautiful beach in the world.   

The sign says ‘You can’t leave Fethiye without watching a sunset on Calas Beach’ and so last night, as we dined on the water’s edge, eating everything Turkish -  lamb, ice cream and coffee, the sun went down behind the mountains displaying a crimson glow over the water. Even the Turkish music playing in the background seemed to lull us into a Mediterranean haze.

Well, we have eighteen more days to go.  I will write more, but for now I need to pack that picnic basket to head off on another adventure. Wish you were all here.