Day 147: Tuesday 12 August – Beldibi to Alanya, by Ken

Neither of us could face using the camping ground’s showers, both preferring to use the clean and very effective shower in Mabel. We were on the road shortly after 9:00, very pleased to be leaving the awful Orkinos camping ground behind.

Jane had lost her driving mojo after driving through Antalya three times yesterday. The unpredictability of Turkish drivers had got to her! I agreed to drive the first leg to get us through Antalya. In Antalya drivers were behaving much the same as yesterday, the use of indicators was a rarity, lane markings might as well not been there and the shoulder was obviously intended as an overtaking lane. One of the best performances we saw was by a driver in the middle lane veering to the left suddenly without any warning or indication into a filling station cutting across, and narrowly missing, a car in the slow lane. In Turkey it’s very much the following driver’s responsibility to take avoiding action when a driver in front does something silly. While Jane didn't have the stress of driving, she sat in the co-pilots seat gripping the armrests very tightly staring fixedly ahead. She reminded me of looking rather like someone strapped into an electric chair waiting for the switch to be thrown.

Why Use One Lane When You Can Use Two? (This driver drove a long way like this)

This is a frequent sight in Turkey. Men watering plants from a bowser. Most like this one had a line of cones tied together which the bowser pulls along as it moves. Usually, there was a man waving a red flag, or his arms, to deflect traffic. Why a poor country like Turkey spends money on plants and their maintenance is a mystery. There is also the safety implications for the workers and motorists of this work. But then safety doesn't seem to be important in Turkey

Turkey Is Good At Mosques

Our route took us inland for a while before returning to the Turkish Riviera coast about 60km from Alanya. Here there were hotels on both sides of the road crammed in cheek by jowl. Many of those on the landward side of the road had swimming pools and water slides while those on the seaward side had beaches. 

Hotels Stretched For Kilometres Along The Coast

Holiday Apartments

Just before we reach Alanya we passed a beach off which were moored a half dozen replica pirate ships. The reason for the ships wasn’t clear to us, while the area was used by pirates in the 2^nd century BC, their ships would surely not have looked like those we passed - they wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Pirates of the Caribbean set.

Pirate Ships

We stopped to change drivers at about the halfway point. When we reach busy Alanya the driving is on a par with that in Antalya. Jane pulls over after just a few kilometres and hands back driving duties to me.

It was another extremely hot day. By 9:30 Mabel’s temperature gauge read 37° climbing to 40.5° by 11:00. That’s hotter than we experienced in the Sahara desert in 2012 where the dry heat was much more bearable than the high humidity of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Not that the humidity was bothering us in the comfort of Mabel’s air-conditioned cab. 

Perle Camping, situated to the east of Alanya, was delightful. There was just one other motorhome there and that appeared unoccupied. We were given a grass pitch immediately at the back of the beach adjacent to the restaurant. Unfortunately there seemed to be something wrong with the camp’s wiring as Mabel’s panel showed reversed polarity whichever way I connected our plug. I gave up knowing that the solar panel would be more than good enough to keep the leisure battery topped up. A cooling sea breeze meant the temperature was in the high 30s. That, together with the high humidity, still felt too much for Jane.

After lunch of egg in a bowl we took a trip in Smarty into Alanya to visit the Kipa supermarket we had seen on our way through. While stopped at traffic lights a man with a young lad on a scooter asked if we would swap Smarty for his scooter. I agreed and got a laugh from the man. Jane thought it a dangerous thing to do as I might have been taken seriously.

While drinking our G and Ts under Mabel’s awning a man on his way back from the beach stopped to talk. He was Koray, a Turk with good English and owned the only other motorhome in the camping ground, although he wasn't living there at the time. He was a mine of information on camping grounds in Turkey and having found out we were Kiwis, he told us about Sue and Dave Clayton who had also stayed at Perle Camping. They were Kiwis, had bought a motorhome in the UK and shipped it back to New Zealand after doing a trip round Europe. Later we were joined briefly by Veronika. We found Sue and Dave’s blog and started reading it. The similarities were uncanny, they had also bought an Auto Trail Frontier, but not a Mohawk. We could see from its plates that, like us, they had purchased it under the UK’s personal export scheme. We wondered if they had the same hassles as us with DVLA in getting a registration number?

We ate dinner in the camping ground’s restaurant partly because it was far too hot to cook in Mabel with the inside temperature nudging 40°, but also because we wanted to check out whether it would be a good place for a birthday dinner tomorrow. 

Mabel As Seen From Our Table In The Restaurant

Jane Keeping Cool Waiting For Dinner To Arrive

The meal was the best we have had in Turkey, a large plate of meze was accompanied by flat breads, mine was cheese and mince, Jane had cheese. The food came with a green vegetable I didn’t recognize, chillis that were very hot and small bell peppers that weren’t quite as hot. We ordered a bottle of wine which was good and at 45 lira was very good value.

Dinner

The Sun Set As We Ate

Seen In The Restaurant

After dinner we strolled down to the beach and sat on the loungers for a while with glasses of raki. Then we settled down for the night on our camp stretchers under Mabel’s awning.

Today's Trip (178km)