Gumbet or bust.
I’d only visited Turkey once before when I’d popped over to see a mate who was working in Istanbul. Istanbul is amazing: the Hagia Sophia is awesome, the Blue Mosque tries to keep up, the Grand Bazaar is just like walking through an Aladdin film (the one where he does a lot of shopping) and the Sunken Palace is a must for James Bond fans. After a day spent sightseeing you can relax with a cup of apple tea and a few puffs on a sheesha. If you’re still feeling tense pop down to the local Hamman, where a huge hairy bloke will beat several types of sh*t out of you under the flimsy guise of a massage. Istanbul is the kind of place where east meets west, where north stays over for the weekend and south pops in for a cup of coffee most mornings.
Alas, we were holidaying not in Istanbul, but in Gumbet. Gumbet proved to be as fascinating and sophisticated as it sounds. Not that it wasn’t a nice place. If your definition of the perfect holiday is guaranteed sunshine, sandy beaches, cheap beer and English food, then go to Gumbet. 
I just don’t like places that have sold their soul to rampant tourism. In Gumbet tradition has been consumed and replaced with the likes of “The Braveheart Supermarket”, an emporium catering to Celtics desperate for cheap fags and budget priced woad. The pubs have traditional Turkish names such as O’Neils, Murphy’s, Mary O’Hara’s and the Outback. The restaurants are no better; the Beavis & Butthead, for example, does both beef burgers AND chips. If you have a real taste for the exotic they can even put a dollop of mayo on the plate.
In short, Gumbet is like Blackpool with the Central heating turned right up and the donkeys making way for camels. It’s the kind of place where, when East meets West, guys from Tower Hamlets have just bumped into girls from Hounslow.
As we walked down the main drag on our first day we were greeted by the traditional Turkish calls of “Wanna look in me shop mate?”, “Wotcher Geezer” and the ancient Ottoman battle cry of “Lovely Jubbly”. Thank the Lord I’d brought my Berlitz guide… to Peckham.
Booking Gumbet was probably a mistake, but we mitigated this by making several more. Firstly we changed all our money into Turkish Lira at the airport, only to discover that 90% of shops will take sterling and at a much better exchange rate. Then, having changed ALL our money to Lira, we discovered that the Turks wont let you in without a Visa paid for in Sterling. So we had to change Lira back to Sterling again, at an appropriately extortionate exchange rate.
Our second school boy error occurred on day one when my wife bought a bottle of expensive perfume believing that she was getting a bargain. On route to the perfume shop we walked past 30 odd retail outlets flogging Prada, Nike, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, and Fendi. Much of this quality merchandise was going for as little as £3.99, with offers such as “buy one, get 9 free”. My wife wandered past, oblivious. Many of the shops sported signs saying “Get your genuine imitation here”, they passed by unnoticed.
When I mentioned that the perfume might be fake she was adamant that you can’t fake perfume.
“Ok, the perfumes real, it’s just the box that’s fake.” I replied.
She opened and closed her mouth a few times and finally noticed the rack of £9.99 Rolex watches…. “It’s fake isn’t it?”
Fortunately, she got over her disappointment with a 3 quid pair of Prada shoes, and a Gucci handbag thrown in for free.
Our third error was typical dipstick tourist stuff. I’d opened a map of Turkey and noticed that the Pools of Pamukkale where close to our tiny corner of Turkey, no more than an inch away. How far can an inch be, eh? So we gaily jumped in to the car, with a light heart and a full tank of petrol…. 8 hours and 400 mile’s later we slumped back into the hotel, hot, sweaty and exhausted. Turkey is a big place. A Bloody big place!
The final error was mine alone. I can get sunburn from a 60w light bulb, so I was being very careful with the Mediterranean sun. After a day spent lying on the beach and swimming in the sea I had a cool shower and then covered myself in what I believed to be “Après Sol” moisturising cream.
It was only when I was putting on my flip-flops the next morning that I noticed that my knees seemed unnaturally yellow. As did my elbows. And my palms. It soon became apparent that, from my head to my toes, I was now a bright, cheerful, nicotine yellow. I looked as if I’d been dipped in a vat of tobacco juice.
I found the moisturising cream and this time I read the label. Yup, it was tanning lotion. This is dodgy stuff at the best of times, but when you’ve lathered it on in a slap-dash fashion, the result is quite spectacular.
I spent the next hour under the shower and managed to wash off much of the dye, but I still looked as if I’d contracted Yellow fever. There was not much more I could really do, so I just headed down to the beach shouting “Cheap as Chips”, in the hope that everyone would assume I was David Dickinson.
Fortunately, wet sand proved very good at removing the remaining dye. My palms still tended to glow a little in the dark but that was damn handy when it came to hailing a taxi back to the hotel.
Our hotel wasn’t too bad. The fact that it had been awarded two stars just went to show that the Turkish tourism board has a rare sense of humour. However, the room, whilst distinctly Spartan, was clean and…
Well, clean was as much as you could say for it really. Mind you, the pool was ok and the hotel bar was friendly.
The room actually had Air-Conditioning, a prerequisite in a country where the average Summer temperature hovers around the 40°C mark, but if you wanted to use it you had to pay an additional £25 a week. Upon parting with your money they handed over the remote control for the unit.
We were staying in a room that was nothing more than a white painted box with a bed stuck in the corner. A room who’s only redeeming feature was the shiny new A/C unit fastened to the wall. And they wanted me to pay more money just to use it? Were they mad?
Whilst my wife had a shower I studied the A/C unit. It took about half an hour, but by carefully prodding the electrical innards with a rubber toothbrush I managed to bring the A/C to life and cool air descended into the room. £25 quid a week for cool air? When I’ve got a rubber toothbrush of my very own? My a*se!
Over the next few days we wandered around exploring the area. Bodrum was only a 10 minute walk away so we headed off one morning to see the sights. Apparently “Bodrum” means “Dungeon”, as this was where Ottoman officials were exiled to when they got on the wrong side of the Sultan. The Ottomans were renowned for their luxurious lifestyle and it must be said that, for a dungeon, you could do far worse than Bodrum.
We went to see the ‘Mausoleum’, which in it’s day had been considered one of the 7 wonders of the world. Today, all that remains is a hole with a few old looking blocks of stone scattered in and around it.
To be honest I don’t know why we even went. I have visited a number of these ancient wonders. The Temple of Artemis turned out to be a blue plaque set besides a slight depression in the ground. The Statue of Zeus was a mound of rubble and a little blue plaque. The Colossus of Rhodes was a bay with some old stones scattered around it…. And a blue plaque. The lighthouse at Alexandria was another little plaque and the same went for the hanging gardens of Babylon. Only the Pyramids and the Sphinx can raise a gasp of wonder these days, and they have brown plaques, so probably don’t count anyway.
We all assume that this means that the “Wonders” have been ravaged by time, but what if Antipater just loved blue plaques? After all this list was compiled in 200BC, way before Coronation St. or Oprah Winfrey. Entertainment and wonder were thin on the ground those days, and not only is it a plaque, but it’s BLUE! Wow!
The next day, tired of rubble, we went on a boat trip. It was a lovely relaxing day but the snorkelling wasn’t up to much and the highlight of the trip was the “Amazing Hot Spring”.
Both Greece and Turkey seem to be inundated with these “Amazing Hot Springs” and, as usual, this “hot spring” was about 1°C above the ambient sea temperature.
What the f*ck is “amazing” about hot water in a region where the summer temperature rarely drops below 40°C? If they’d come up with a COLD water spring I would have been impressed. In fact I would have spent most of the day swimming in it. Were there any? Were there hell as like!
Having seen all the local holes in the ground, gasped at some hot water and eaten at a restaurant specialising in “Gordon Blue cuisine”, featuring deep fried “Cally Mary”, we decided to head farther a field.
Hiring a car in Gumbet was remarkably easy. In most countries you have to hand over your passport, let them take an imprint of your Visa card, sign this, counter sign that, give them a retinal print and leave behind a small child as hostage. In Gumbet, you hand over your money and they lead you to the car. Simple as that! What they don’t tell you is how expensive petrol is and how big Turkey is.
Despite the fact that it took 8 hours to get there, the Pools of Pamukkale were impressive. It’s a terraced rank of semi circular limestone pools covering an entire hillside in milky blue water (hot, as usual) and bright white flow stone.
In the 80’s and 90’s every travel agent seemed to have a poster of the pools stuck up on the wall. In fact the real thing didn’t look quite right without a bit of blue-tac in the corners.
Bathing in the stream that created all this is considered a cure for a myriad of ailments - including ‘death’, if you believe the literature. We didn’t fancy full immersion, partly because death didn’t seem to be knocking on the door but mainly because we’d left our swimming costumes at the bottom of the hill. However, we did have a good paddle and are now cured of all major ills from the ankles down, which isn’t a bad thing.
Our next trip was to Ephesus. Apparently, Ephesus was the London of it’s day; a huge, enormously wealthy port attracting people from all over the known world. The locals spent millennia building this entrepôt only for the bay to suddenly fill with silt and leave Ephesus high and dry and 7 miles from the sea. In fact “Ephesus” is an ancient Greek word meaning “Bugger!”
Since the entire city was now useless, the population upped sticks and headed off to Gumbet to buy into KFC franchises and open Irish bars. This left Ephesus deserted and relatively well preserved.
The trip there took a mere two hours. Made more exciting by the variety of wonders on route; just outside Bodrum we passed a Carpet Farm. Imagine that, grow your own carpets!
How come this hasn’t caught on in the UK? Perhaps we don’t have the weather to grow a whole carpet but surely we get enough rain and sunshine to grow your own rugs? Why isn’t Elton John funding further research?
A few miles further on and we passed the “Gazelle Centre”. I really wanted to stop and find out what it was all about, but we didn’t have the time. Did they just sell Gazelles or did they cater for all your general antelope needs? What were the special offers? Buy a deluxe Kudu and get a Dik-dik for free?
Ephesus was very impressive. You will not find a finer array of dilapidated old ruins outside of the House of Lords. The Library was particularly impressive, especially when you consider that it was built over 2000 years ago in a major earth quake zone.
The end of the tour takes you to the Temple of Artemis, one of the 7 wonders of the world and therefore a small depression in the ground with a blue plaque. Nice plaque though, a thing of wonder some might say.
Having filled ourselves with culture we took the long trip back to Gumbet via the Mat Ranch and Impala’s-R-Us.
Sitting on the beach the next day it struck me that whilst travelling around Turkey involved vast distances, travelling from Turkey to Greece could be achieved in under 3 minutes with a half decent pedalo.
From the beach, the Greek island of Kos seemed less than a mile away. In fact you really ought to take your passport with you if you intend swim past the surf line. No wonder the Greeks and Turks don’t get on. It would be like the Isle of Wight being French, or the Channel Isles being British………………Ar!
And so the week ended. We both had decent tans; my wife’s brown, mine pink. We’d managed to find some vaguely traditional food amongst the Lasagne and chips generally on offer. Now all we had to do was prop up the hotel bar, drink cheap beer, and wait for the 2am transfer to the airport whilst laughing at how the loss of a single letter can change a sign. It hung over the hotel pool and read “Please shower before entering Poo.” Most amusing 
