I understand this bit won’t tell you, well anything really about what I’ve been up to but sometimes subtlety can be a winning strategy. Lady Gaga taught me that. A few nights ago I was a bit cheesed off, had a drink or two and got to scribbling in a self-righteous funk. Posting rants is probably a bad idea, but I stand by it still in terms of how the resort of Alanya is, though after a few days, travelling through other seaside places, a short rant has turned into a bit of a waffle.
Firstly, a rant...
I don’t hate you for it Alanya. Some are born to luxury and privilege, history and culture. Some have to pimp it without remorse to pay the bills. Not everyone can be a booming Istanbul, a classy Paris or even a stony faced Lakeland town. But sweetie, that skirt really is too short.
You know it’s not you though, it’s me. Effort and reward, it’s about the grind before long slow burning payoff; snowboarding, climbing mountains, long days in the saddle to for a Goreme reward. The journey gives an end its meaning (who skips to the last 5 minutes of Shawshank?) You’re too instant and easy, all inclusive. Sit, eat, sit, eat, sit, club, sex, sleep, repeat until September. There’s no local, no context no meaning to you, where did you come from, what do you stand for? You’re Turkish but the Muezzin’s don’t call.
Life’s easy and I understand the need to escape, I really do, but easy language, easy food, easy excursions, easy splish splashing, easy women, cheesier easier men, easy jet, easy peasy lemon squeasy, there has to be more than this.
Did you see the last few James Bond films? There’s no travel, only fleeting establishing shots of some late po-mo nonplace, geography with neither social landmark nor personality. Try Bourne, adventure rooted in place, oozing reference, context and hereness. I just wish you were someone, something, anything.
Maybe I’m just a masochist, or maybe a bit drunk (hey, it’s included). Either way, I’m off to my room to take a snooze. I’ll be taking the stairs. Obviously.
To explain.
Package holidays, since the jet-setting sun breaks pioneered in the 50’s are a wonderful, brilliant idea enabling almost everyone to get a relaxing break from work. Surely one of the greatest liberating and life improving concepts of the 20th century.
My problem isn’t at all with the people enjoying a break, but with the affect the resorts have on the place they attach themselves to, carbuncle like.
Take for example, a tale of 3 towns. Alanya, Finike and Marmaris. All sunny Mediterranean coast towns, all with seafront tourist hotels propping up or wholly supporting the local economy.
Alanya’s all inclusive resorts are walled enclaves to keep reality out, huge steel gates, 6 foot high border walls and security posts at the entrances. I can understand in hindsight the desire to keep non-guests sticky fingers of the free sarnies, but really, it’s more than that. Not only does it keep the fact that they’re running a two-track economy – the price of rooms and everything is artificially high compared to normal hotels, but hey don’t think about that, the disco’s starting in 10 mins so go get changed.
Imagine if you would a chain of factories stretching miles down the road, all producing the exact same product in some Communist like parody. There’s no need to be different, to innovate, just keep the end user blind to the sameness of it all, keep their world tightly wrapped around them with no word of events outside and it’ll all be fine. Outside those walls there be dragons so stick with us.
The reality outside is amazing, Turks are warm, friendly, interested and interesting people. Of course the problem is, the world outside is largely free, or at least I mean to say, not a product. Keeping the wall up does keep scruffy bikers and poor people out, but also means any ventures outside happen through the resort’s contracted excursion provider for a set fee.
Trying to find a place to stay is an effort in futility, where there are rooms free or not, you can just see the whole place is let under contract to Thompson, Sun Tours or whoever for the season and anyone else can go sing for it. After talking for a few automaton managers and front desk people I was dying to speak to the bin men in a passing lorry just to talk with an actual human being.
It’s a sad place, closed off to Turkey, just a Western property development rammed onto a chunk of seafront real-estate. There’s no place, its physically in Alanya, but could be Spain, Portugal, Greece or anywhere, it doesn’t matter. That’s sad, sad for the town and for the people who’re sat behind a wall of, well I’d say deceit, but you could say ‘experience management’ and accountants determining what unit price your enjoyment will be. You know this advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcTrCXVrsPk it’s eerily close to the mark.
Maybe it’s just a Northern thing, I’d rather have the truth, whatever shape it takes, over a plastic fantastic lie. In normal places you meet warm, open and friendly people. In resorts that’s supplanted by a locked down cash generating business model. There are no real Turks, no friends, people talk fast and will be your temporary bezzy mate so long as you’re buying drinks, food or whatever’s being hawked.
There’s a massive amount of exclusion here, of course there has to be in this model, and it irks, because as Bender says – this is the worst kind of discrimination: The kind against me. It’s the first time my money’s been no good, and it’s my damn right to whinge about it! One resort for Germans, one for English, one for Spanish and so on, you don’t, you just do not walk in from the street to these places, like the worst schoolyard cliques, if you’re in you’re in, if you’re not, get lost.
And it kills the town, Alanya is a weird mis-mash of enormous walled off plots, wealth inside, those hawking anything for 1 Lira outside to put food on the table that night. Trickledown rarely works, especially when the water’s been damned.
I was going to leave it there but over the last few days I rode through Finike and Marmaris which put all this in context.
Arriving in Finike choosing a random sea front hotel, the manager storms out to grab your hand, big handshakes to welcome you to the town. Bags carried inside, cup of caj rustled up without asking. That’s Turkey.
There’s all the beautiful melancholy of a small working coastal town here. That’s not a bad thing, completely the opposite, it’s just aged a bit because it’s been there a long time and can tell a story. Finike’s a gorgeous place, the boatyards clanking away, fishermen sitting patiently on the harbour walls, the smell of fresh fish hauled in that day, shrimp casserole that might be the tastiest thing I’ve ever eaten.
The point is its real, real life happens around you. There are normal shops, fish comes from the sea, is sold in a market and the world just works, it’s real. There’s still the beach, hotels, sun loungers, bars, clubs and all the rest, but it’s in context, it’s rooted in a place and so much more enjoyable for it. Just being there gets you daydreaming as the sun sets on a sea every shade of light blue, the air deliciously salty. You can sit amongst it all with the other lovers, locals, fishermen and early evening wanderers along the seafront and just think about things.
You couldn’t do that in Alanya, not least because every (really, every) hotel has that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me’ song blasting out at full volume to half empty dance floors. It’s not that though, you’re just not allowed to think. There’s nothing to pique your interest or recall a memory. Because nothing in life looks, sounds, smells or feels like that.
Heading down to Marmaris was kind of an experiment. Since chancing a TV documentary that may well have been Channel 4’s “Man Hunters: Our Turkish Boys”, a garish car crash show following some squawking women around Turkey’s burgeoning female sex-tourism scene, I’d packed away any high hopes for this part of the world. Would it just be Alanya over again? Of course it is, but...
Mile after mile of beach bars, but all open fronted, hawking for your business with every kind of variety you can imagine, Michael Jackson dancers, Turkish dancing, Sky Sports, Club Music, Beatles, there’ll be something for you somewhere. There’s difference – noise, texture, people, skin colours, mixed languages, little stone houses and 10 story hotels shoulder to shoulder all there to be explored. Of course it’s massively over developed and the harbour is full of tourist cruise boats to hire by the day, but the boats are beautiful and it’s a reminder Marmaris grew from a working port, the statues tell you that story as well.
It’s bawdy, boisterous, tacky as hell, Blackpool-on-the-Med, but you can’t help but think, well at least it’s something, that’s a whole heap better than nothing. I’d rather be offended than bored by non-plussed mediocrity.
The hotel people keep calling round just to pat you on the back and say hi. Half the people speak no more English than that, and its fine, it’s the Turkish nature coming through. Offers of cigarettes and chit-chat. Neither person understands, but the friendliness of the gesture is clear.
It is the most pure, saucy postcards and too-small bikinis, bare faced awfulness but for that, you’ve got to love it. Maybe that’s just a reaction to locked down non-places compared to open ones, even if you don’t want to go there, the choice is yours not someone else’s.
I really need to re-word and work on this a bit, but its 38 degrees today, too hot to think, so its a juice by the pool then into town to catch the Leeds game... when in Rome. Back to service as normal soon, oh, I rode what are surely the finest roads I’ll be lucky enough to ride the other day – more on that next time.
