– or Trials and Tribulations in Turkey.

I suppose it was my fault, really. I had just hit sixty and felt time was running out. Then, when I asked myself, what had I achieved and what had I done, the sad answer to both questions was, ‘not much.’ What I needed was an adventure; I needed to get out of my comfort zone; I needed to explore this wonderful world. So, when Jack Donovan, my neighbour, told me he was thinking of buying a boat that presently was moored in Southern Turkey but that the price was just a bit too rich for him, I found myself saying that I too was interested in just such a venture and why didn’t we go halves. We very quickly came to an arrangement.

Jack is a few years older than me and had owned a boat previously. I, on the other hand had never owned a boat but, strangely, I was a fully qualified Day Skipper having sat and passed the Royal Yachting Association examinations ten years earlier when the bug to own a boat first bit me. Jack and I complemented each other rather well; he had the practical skills needed to sail and maintain a boat and I had the theory of navigating one as well as having a superficial knowledge of the laws of the sea and an understanding of the effects of wind and tide. We decided to go halves on the purchase price, the maintenance, the mooring costs and anything else that came along.

The current owner of the boat, which was a 30 foot 2/3 berth yacht, was a man called Bill Nevis. He was the friend of a friend of Jack’s and lived in the same town, which was how Jack had come to hear about the boat. Bill was in his mid eighties and could no longer justify the work and expense of owning such a far-flung asset. He was likely to accept any reasonable offer, Jack assured me.

The plan was to fly out to Antalya Airport in Turkey with Bill when, hopefully, over the course of a week, a bargain might be struck. When she heard about the planned trip, Jack’s partner, a Dutch lady called Greta, decided she wanted to come as well. If Greta was coming, it would be unfair to leave my lovely wife, Pauline, behind and in the end we decided we would all go, we would stay for two weeks and we would make a holiday of the trip.

Jack and Greta booked the flights, the hotel in Finike and a taxi to take us from the airport to the hotel. Finike is a tiny little town on the Mediterranean, eighty miles south of Antalya airport. All five of us would fly out from Gatwick at the end of August with Thomson, the holiday company, who just happened to have five spare seats on their plane. What could go wrong?

The flight was scheduled to take four hours to reach Antalya and took off on time at 7 pm. Except that no refreshments were served and that the seats were very closely packed together so that leg-room was minimal, all went well until we were two hours into our journey. Suddenly, all the cabin lights went out but before anyone could panic they came on again followed by a message from the pilot telling us that the primary generator had just failed and that we were now running on the back-up generator but had to return to Gatwick when another aircraft would be ready to take us to Turkey. So, after flying for four hours, we arrived back in Gatwick where we waited on an apron another hour for our replacement plane to be made ready.

By this time, Bill was pleading with the cabin staff to be allowed off the plane because, he claimed, he had a heart condition. Whether or not that was true, his reasonable and very understandable pleadings fell on deaf ears. The truth was, by that time we were all desperate to get off that blasted plane. Nor had we been given any refreshments in all that five hours; not even a bottle of water. Thomson should hang their heads in shame. Our treatment was genuinely appalling.

At midnight, once again we took off for Antalya but it was only after we were an hour into the flight that we were given some bottled water but no food, not even a biscuit. This second attempt to fly to Turkey was successful, however, and stiff, haggard and in desperate need of sustenance, at 4 am and five hours late, we reached Antalya airport. After clearing customs and paying a surprise, last minute visa fee, we staggered out into the Arrivals Hall which, understandably at that time of the morning was almost empty and there, patiently waiting for us, was our taxi driver. Ever the optimist, I thought it would be plain sailing from then on.

Mohammed, the taxi driver, took us out to an almost completely deserted car park. I say almost completely deserted car park because there was still one small car sitting in splendid isolation about one hundred metres away towards which Mohammed purposefully strode. Even from a hundred metres away I could see it was utterly inadequate. Frantically, I looked around for another vehicle but that one small car was the only one there. ‘That’s no good. We need a much bigger car,’ I gasped in some panic, subconsciously echoing a similar remark made in a famous seafaring story. After having been cramped in an aeroplane seat for nine hours, the idea of struggling into that tiny car for the eighty miles drive to Finike was quite awful to contemplate. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that it was that tiny car or nothing. Also, after he had waited five hours for us, we could only be pleasant to our driver. It was certainly not his fault he had been given a totally inadequate vehicle.

Six large adults and two weeks’ worth of luggage for five of those adults all had to be squeezed into that old, small, five-door car and with nothing to separate passengers from their luggage, Pauline was very concerned about large suitcases decapitating somebody should the driver do an emergency stop. I reassured her that it was unlikely that the car would even get to twenty miles an hour so laden was it. Greta claimed to suffer from car sickness so she had to sit in the front. Even though there was really only room for two adults on the back seat, three of us had to squeeze into the space available. That only left the front passenger seat for Greta and Jack to share. At six feet two inches, Jack is a big man and Greta is far from being a light-weight, but for the next three or so hours Greta sat on Jack’s knee.

We chugged slowly out of the car park and, as I had predicted, we never managed more than 25 miles an hour. On hills we climbed at barely walking pace. On downhill sections the driver was so concerned that the brakes would not hold us, we descended slowly and with great caution. After a few essential stops to allow us to stretch our cramped limbs, we eventually arrived at our hotel safe it not completely sound. It was about 8 am. The manager, who had expected us to arrive at about two or three in the morning, was waiting for us.

Turning to me, Jack, who was more experienced in these matters said, ‘If you pay the driver, I’ll square up with you later. Meanwhile, I’ll sort out the rooms.’ Innocently, I agreed.

When Pauline and I finally staggered into the hotel under a massive load of luggage, Jack greeted us. There was genuine concern in his voice when he said, ‘I’m afraid only one of the rooms has a balcony with a sea view. Yours faces away from the sea.’

The hotel manager who had listened to this exchange said, ‘It’s a very nice room, sir. Come and see.’

Pauline and I followed him to our room while Jack and Greta went skipping off to their room with its sea view. The room we were shown was quite unexceptional but it was perfectly adequate. We’ve certainly had much worse. We smiled at the manager saying it would be fine and thanked him. Suddenly he said, ‘After freshening up, I suggest you go back down to the dining room and have some breakfast. Don’t unpack yet.

Suspecting nothing we followed his advice and met up with Greta and Jack fifteen minutes later when we enjoyed a splendid breakfast. We were all suffering with sleep deprivation and as we left the dining room to go to our respective rooms the manager sidled up to me and told me he’d had our luggage moved to another room to which he would now take us. Our new room proved to be the best room in the hotel. It was a huge room with a splendid sitting area to one side and a fabulous en-suite bathroom. It also had a huge balcony with a wonderful sea view. We thanked him profusely for his act of kindness. As you might imagine, Greta and Jack were green with envy when they eventually came to sit with us in our sitting room or out on our balcony and even suggested that as our accommodation was so much better than theirs, we should swap over after the first week. I laughed appreciatively at their little joke! It later transpired that their room and balcony was at a different angle to the sea than was ours and they could not use the balcony because of the prevailing wind. Fortunately, our balcony was fine.

We went to see Bill’s boat later that first afternoon after we had caught up on some of our lost sleep. The boat which was called Laurel, had been removed from the water at the end of the previous year and had not yet been returned to it. She was securely held on sturdy supports on the harbour side and Bill was now sleeping in it during his stay in Finike. It did, however, require quite a steep climb to get into her. We all immediately fell in love with the interior. The layout had been carefully thought out and was everything we had hoped it would be. Externally, Laurel also had lovely smooth lines and seemed to be in excellent condition despite now being about forty years old. Naturally, we could not come to a final decision until we had seen her in the sea and had sailed in her and Bill agreed to arrange for her to be put in the sea within the next few days.

As it happened, there were a few other boats in the same marina that were for sale so we spent the next few days examining the alternatives. One, owned by some German sailors, was of particular interest. It was priced a little higher than was Laurel and though older, was better equipped. On the down-side, we weren’t quite as impressed with the layout of the interior.

While we waited for Larel to be put back into the sea, we tried to thrash out some of the details of the shared ownership. Jack and Greta loved the sun and immediately laid claim to the summer period. As it happened, Pauline and I preferred the cooler spring and autumn periods but when I explained why we were perfectly happy with the cooler periods, Jack immediately said he and Greta would also sometimes like to make use of the cooler periods as well. I was already beginning to have some serious doubts about what I was doing and those discussions did nothing to reassure me.

The next day, our first full day in Finike, started rather strangely and embarrassingly. Jack and Greta were first down for breakfast and when Pauline and I joined them, Greta said that she had told the management that we (Pauline and I) had insisted we had to start our breakfast with cereal which was not on the menu. This was nonsense, of course. Neither Pauline nor I had ever made such a demand. In fact, we had thoroughly enjoyed our breakfast the previous morning but suddenly, we were being painted as hyper fussy guests even after the management had been so generous to us. Still being innocents, and not wanting to appear ungrateful either to Greta or to the management, who had managed, with some difficulty, to get cereal for us, we allowed our friends to get away with the deceit.

Though Finike is small, it has some fascinating areas including some intriguing Roman sites and we decided to visit one of the sites in the afternoon. It was not at all commercialised and was open to anyone to wander over. After we had roamed rather aimlessly over the quite large site, a gang of six local lads approached us and insisted they show us the best bits. The leader, or least-ways the one who spoke reasonably good English, acted as our guide for the next fifteen minutes while the other five trailed along behind. I don’t know how much the lad made up but I suspect he was ‘winging it’ a bit and after a while, we decided we had had enough so I paid our young guide a small amount for his time. ‘You must pay more,’ he insisted. ‘All the others need to be paid as well.’ I began arguing that the others had done nothing to justify being paid when Jack called out, ‘Don’t be mean. Give them more money.’ Only stopping to notice how generous Jack was with my money and that he had made no attempt to make his own contribution, stupidly, I gave them more.

The following day, Laurel was put back into the sea and we all went out for a short test sail. The sea was dead calm so we proceeded under diesel power. As a further test, we put up the jib and mainsail to check them out and everything seemed in excellent order. Nor did the lovely little craft leak. Back in the marina we made our offer which was slightly less than Bill’s asking price but instead of jumping at it, as we thought he would, he dug his heels in. He would accept nothing less than his full asking price and was unwilling to negotiate. By this time, we might have expected nothing less from Bill. After three days in his company we were beginning to realize what a a mean, awkward curmudgeon he was. We’d had numerous meals with him and as well as being a complete misery not once had he put his hand in his pocket to pay for anything. He seemed to think he was our guest and that we should pay for everything.

Nor were negotiations on the future use of our purchase going as well or as simply as I had hoped. Another sticking point came when Jack revealed that as well as the summer period and some of the cooler months, it was also his intention to stay on the boat for a few months either side of Christmas living on our shared asset while Pauline and I only expected to make use of it for a few weeks each year. I caused difficulties when I suggested that instead of sharing the cost of maintenance, each family should pay an agreed sum into a maintenance pot for every week they used the boat. I argued that the more the boat was used the greater would be the wear and tear on it as well as on the engine. Jack countered by saying that there would be less wear and tear if the boat was in constant use as it was lack of use that caused damage. Greta thought my proposal was most unfair in the way it would penalize poor Jack.

After this exchange, I was definitely looking for a way out. It was now absolutely clear to me that shared ownership of a yacht would never be amicable and was bound to end in an almighty bust-up. Fortunately, Bill was proving to be absolutely obdurate. He was unprepared to budge an inch on his price. At the same time, it went against Jack’s principles to pay exactly what Bill wanted. He needed at least some small concession to prove his worth as a negotiator and it looked as if that small concession would never happen. As a result, what had seemed such a good idea a few weeks earlier foundered on the rocks, much to my relief. Before circumstances changed, I made an escape from what probably would have been the worst mistake of my life.

And we were still in only the first week of our holiday!

The next day we decided to go site-seeing in the nearby town of Kumluca. After we arrived, having travelled in one of the tiny local taxi buses, Greta and Jack went off saying they wanted to buy a few things in the local shops so Pauline and I agreed to meet up with them for lunch a little later. Spotting a park, we decided to take a stroll through it. It was a beautiful day and the park was relatively empty. We were enjoying the flowers and the fountains when I noticed four late-teenagers taking a close interest in us. They were walking on a parallel path to us but I suddenly felt uneasy. ‘I think it’s time we got out of here,’ I said.

Casually we turned to go back and immediately the four teenagers also turned. While we strolled nonchalantly back, they ran off and soon disappeared. The relief I felt was short-lived because suddenly we spotted two of the teenagers coming towards us and they were now on our path.

‘I don’t like the look of those two,’ I muttered to Pauline. ‘Try to ignore them and keep walking.’

As the boys approached, they seem to be arguing and when they were twenty feet away they started pushing and hitting each other. They were still mauling at each other when we finally met up with them. They appeared to ignore us but as they fought, they crashed into me. I would have gone flying if two older gentlemen who were also walking in the park had not stopped to help me. I yelled at the boys and they ran off. I thanked the two older men who had come to my assistance and they too walked off in a different direction.

‘Did those boys steal anything from you?’ Pauline asked anxiously.

‘No, I don’t see how they could have,’ I replied.

Then, patting my pocket where I kept my wallet, I froze. It had disappeared. I had been robbed. Without wasting a second, and much to Pauline’s consternation, I immediately chased after the two respectable gentlemen who had come to my assistance, yelling at them to give me back my wallet. They increased their pace but were surprised when they realized that the white-haired old codger they had just robbed was rapidly catching them up. Suddenly, one of them threw my wallet to the floor and the pair made their escape while I stopped to pick the wallet up and check its contents. Nothing had been taken. Indeed, I had reacted so quickly, they had had no time to check it out. I really impressed Pauline that day. That was a day when, for once, I was not such an innocent abroad.

Later that day, when we were on the little bus back to our hotel in Finike, yet another incident occurred. One of the passengers, a handsome young man, struck up a conversation with us. He was an English teacher from the local school in Kumluca he told us. Greta was much taken with him. One thing led to another and before we knew it, we had promised to return to Kumluca the next day to speak to his senior students. They rarely had an opportunity to hear English spoken by English speakers so we would be doing him a huge favour. Although she had lived in Britain for almost fifty years, Greta still has the trace of a Dutch accent but we were confident the students would be unable to detect it.

After lunch the following day we went to the school where Tomas, our English teacher, taught and he took us for coffee in the staff canteen where he told us what he wanted from us. Then, for the next two hours we gave off-the-cuff talks about life in Britain and answered the questions of enthusiastic groups of fifth and sixth formers. It was a stimulating afternoon for all and was very well received. As compensation for the time we had given up to talk to his students, Tomas offered to show us one of the special natural sights the area was famous for, but about which we had never heard. It seemed the locally named Mount Olympus spontaneously caught fire in the night time and Tomas was determined to show it to us. Several of the students also expressed an interest in visiting the display but they had to go home first to get permission from their parents. We were left hanging around for the best part of three hours while arrangements were made, including a picnic meal for twenty. It also transpired that a coach was required to conduct us all to and from Mount Olympus. That was when Jack, Greta, Pauline and I discovered we were expected to pay for the entire outing. Strangely, Greta and Jack seemed highly flattered by the opportunity and appeared not to notice how much Tomas was taking advantage of us. He, of course, reassured us that the delay would only make the spectacle that much better because we would be seeing it in the dark.

When we reached Mount Olympus, which fortunately proved to be more of a hill than a true mountain, Tomas and his students went racing off – with the picnic – leaving us four inadequately shod pensioners to navigate streams, rocks and steep slopes, all in the dark and as best we could. Fortunately for us, the coach driver, who came with us, had a small pocket torch and he stayed behind to help us. That simple act of kindness probably saved at least one of us falling over and possibly breaking something. It didn’t save our shoes. As we started climbing Mount Olympus, in the gloom I could see a little man with a lighter causing the “spontaneous” ignition of the methane gas that emanated from the ground on various parts of the slope. When we reached the summit we once again met up with Tomas and his students. The picnic had already been eaten and he was enjoying the attentions of the female students with lots of touching and feeling going on. He seemed oblivious to the danger in which he had placed us or even of the professional danger he was in. Fortunately for us, we weren’t abandoned on the mountain and eventually we made it back to our coach.

When we reached Kumluca, we discovered we were so late we had missed the last bus back to Finike, where Tomas also lived. He asked us to make an additional payment to the coach driver to persuade him to drive us back to Finike. Our ambassadorial duties had cost us a pretty packet but at least we had seen a mountain “spontaneously” catch fire. Before leaving us in Finike, Tomas asked us what we were proposing to do the next day. Personally, I had seen quite enough of Tomas by that time and would have fobbed him off with anything but our true intentions which were to take a swim and to have a lazy day on the little beach. Greta, however, who was flattered by the handsome young man’s intermittent attention, appeared oblivious to how she and we were being used by this chancer and she told him where we would be. So it was no surprise when, the next day, just before lunch, Tomas turned up accompanied by one of his pretty school girls. They were still chatting to us when we decided it was time for lunch. It seemed Tomas, too, was hungry so he invited himself and his young companion to take lunch with us. Tomas did not stint himself but his young companion was much more reserved and declined all but a small drink. Naturally, when it was time to pay, Tomas was more than happy to have his lunch bought for him. Before finally leaving us, he asked for our emails because it was his intention to come to Britain and he would then be able to look us up. Greta fell over herself in her eagerness to give him her email while Pauline and I pretended ignorance of anything to do with emails. As far as I know, Tomas has so far not come to Britain, or if he has, he hasn’t contacted Greta.

The final incident of this incident-filled holiday involved a waiter from one of the local restaurants. In the major cities in Turkey like Istanbul, tourists have to run the gauntlet of carpet salesmen during the day and of customer grabbers, for want of a better term, at each and every restaurant they pass at lunch time and dinner time. Their task is almost self defeating because no one dares stop to peruse the menu outside a possible restaurant because a customer grabber will immediately pounce on you to try to persuade you that his restaurant is best. Finike is a tiny, rather sleepy town without the overwhelming competition of the big cities so it was usually possible to make a reasonably civilized progress down the various streets. There was one restaurant, however, where the customer grabber would even rush across the road to intercept potential customers before they could escape both him and his pitch. One day, in a moment of weakness, we agreed to return to his restaurant to partake of the magnificent fish their chef had purchased that very morning. At that time we were unaware that his personal agenda was somewhat wider. During conversation with him over the meal it transpired that he and his wife were hoping to provide accommodation for the predicted upsurge in tourists to the town. He had a property with rooms to let at the other end of town that he hoped we might take a look at because we might be interested in renting his room the next time we came to Finike. If not, we could at least give him the benefit of our experience by telling him and his wife how to make his rooms as attractive as possible for other tourists. Having failed to buy a yacht but having done magnificent work to further friendly relations between Britain and Turkey, what could we say? We agreed to meet him at his property the next day.

The approach to Abdul’s property was along an unmade street covered in litter of all shapes and sizes, including a discarded sofa. He and his wife would be offering bed and breakfast they told us as they showed us two rather plain little rooms before asking us how they might improve their offering. When Greta mentioned the rubbish littering the street outside and couldn’t that be removed, Abdul could not understand her question. He could see no relevance between the state of the street outside and what he was offering. The two were not related as far as he was concerned. It was also pretty clear that the rooms were minimalistic but when Pauline asked how they had found the rooms when they had tried sleeping and living in them to test them out, again, neither Abdul nor his wife could understand why they would want to do such a thing. ‘We have our own rooms,’ they said. ‘We have no need to sleep in these. These are for guests.’ We dutifully wrote down their contact details in case we ever visited Finike again and took our leave.

We used the same taxi firm we had used on our arrival but this time, they provided a large, air conditioned people carrier. Bill had left for the UK a few days earlier so we were able to stretch out. The return journey was uneventful and we arrived back in Gatwick sadder but wiser.

Pauline and I have been on some remarkable holidays since and have visited many wonderful places and have spoken with many memorable people but our holiday to Finike will long live in my memory as will the lessons it taught two innocents abroad.

B Gallivan
September 2018