Bridging the GAP – a flavour of South East Turkey
For many of us living on fixed incomes around the Bodrum peninsula we have a regular weekly routine, the visit to the pazar, supermarket shopping, swimming and sunbathing along with all the rest of normal daily life. On the whole most of our needs are met in the area without travelling much further afield and this is our main experience of Turkey. Some of us will have made trips perhaps to Marmaris, Fethiye, Pamukkale or Istanbul. I wonder how many of us have been adventurous enough to go 'off the beaten path' and discover just how enormous and richly varied a country we live in. Probably relatively few, myself included - until last month that is.
When my wife Nükhet asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate my 50th birthday, after only a moment's reflection I said I didn't want a mini-break in Europe like the old days, what I really wanted was to see more of Turkey, the country I love and live in all year round. That's how we came to be in an Istanbul car park at 11pm with a bunch full of strangers waiting for a bus. Not just any bus, but an air-conditioned coach that would whisk us off on a 5,000km magical mystery tour of south east Turkey (the Tigris and Euphrates delta region) over the next 10 days. Sounds a bit hard work for a holiday, doesn't it? But it turned out to be one of the most memorable trips of my life.
We took a package trip with Etstur, one of Turkey's leading tour operators. Though independent travel has always been my thing, as we discovered to have done this would have required a huge amount of planning, as a lot of the places to visit are quite remote or with considerable distances in-between. Having the itinerary organised with all hotels pre-booked makes sense and in my experience now I'd say this is definitely the way to go. We don't have a car, so for us this was a no-brainer. Including 8 nights in mainly 4 or 5 star hotels half board, professional guiding and all entrance fees to sites and museums, the cost was about £400 per person which I think was superb value.
Expecting a taste (literally) of a very different Turkey, our first night's stop was highly unlikely - an open air swim at the Adana Hilton, doctor's orders after a long hot day on the road, followed by an evening beer watching an American jazz quartet on the patio! After that each day was very, very different and that swim fast became a distant memory. The next day took us to The Hatay, a fascinating region originally Arabic and part of Syria until 1938. On to a host of historic places (perhaps better known to some of us for football or food!) Gaziantep (a wealthy city famed for the pistachio); Şanlıurfa (both a religious and kebab capital); Mardin a historic hill town with higgledy-piggledy atmospheric narrow back streets and spectacular views over the plain below; Diyarbakır with its mighty city walls; the huge Atatürk dam, Malatya and its famous apricots and so on. At each place we took the opportunity to try various regional dishes especially at lunch. The landscape is often beautiful with many scenic routes taken and the land is extremely fertile, partly due to irrigation brought by large dams built in the region over the last 20 years.
For me the highlights were the smaller delights, such as the boat trip in Halfeti where we floated above the ruins of a village submerged by a dam, just the minaret of the old mosque peeking above the waterline. Or Harran, with extraordinary pointy tea cosy-like old traditional houses built out of mud. We were privileged to visit Hasan Keyf, an ancient village whose fate we await, since it is almost certainly going to be drowned by the Ilusu Dam project and will disappear. All this and an epic trip up the mountain of Nemrut Dağ with its giant stone heads, and the whole tour capped off in Cappadocia, with its unique volcanic landscape and (if you can afford it) an early-morning hot-air balloon ride through the famous fairy chimneys. We had to be content with getting up at 5.30 am and taking photos – itself a sight never to be forgotten.
The whole trip went like clockwork thanks in no small way to the excellent professional guide Bülent and coach steward Rifat, who is studying to be a guide. The guiding and programme were in Turkish (as were all the other passengers) which sounds off-putting but the guides and several passengers did speak English and they were such a fun-loving bunch the atmosphere was very happy throughout. Where else could you find a dance-off between passengers in the aisles of two minibuses overtaking each other on the way down from a mountain? Both hilarious and crazy. In any case there are many English language tours available, several of which I saw en route, so don't let this put you off from making a trip to the south east, you will not regret it.
Oh, and yes I did get a birthday cake. And a large G&T to go with it. Already lining up a trip to the Black Sea next year…