Ah! The joys of travel! What a crazy few days of packing, re-packing driving, checking in, checking out, flying and generally taking ourselves to another far flung corner of the world. It's been exhausting, fun, challenging, exciting, nerve-wracking and eye-opening all in equal measures! By Tuesday evening, we'd got ourselves established at Manchester Airport, ready for an early flight on Wednesday morning.
Despite the news headlines of airport chaos, we moved through without incident, avoiding the biggest queue, which was formed outside of Starbucks. We flew with an unknown Turkish Airline, and the plane was conspicuous in the fact that it was completely unbranded in any way - as if it had just been borrowed for the flight!
We passed some great view of the Danube, where we'd cycled on a previous expedition.
And a few Greek Islands...
Before reaching the forested hills around Dalaman, Turkey.
The airport was largely deserted. It turned out that our phones are not licenced to work in Turkey - something that we'd got used to normal working on our travels! This caused a slight concern, but thankfully, as arranged, a guy was waiting for us outside the airport entrance, with a sign with my name on.
He spoke barely any English and somewhat on faith, we climbed into an unmarked car with him and drove to a nearby garage. Luckily, we didn't get kidnapped. Instead, we signed a hire agreement on the bonnet, shook hands and agreed to meet in a hotel car park in a few weeks!
The heat was a whopping 28 degrees and the fuel tank empty. When the petrol pump guy asked us how much diesel we wanted, we realised that we didn't know the exchange rate was! Sign language got us 400 Turkish Lira worth, which was enough for the days journey to continue!
Part of the magic of travelling somewhere foreign is the sights, sounds and smells that you just don't get at home. Getting behind the wheel of our new car (which only has 130,000 miles on the clock!), soon woke me up from the slumbers of the plane. Every conceivable form of transport was allowed on the duel carriageway that led towards the western peninsular that we were heading for.
Swerving around slow moving traffic on the inside land had to be anticipated early, but luckily, the roads were not too busy and on the whole the road surface was excellent.
As we reached the start of the peninsular, we commented on how the road actually looked brand new. Soon after, it was so new, that the white lines had not been painted on yet. Then, almost inevitably, it was so new, that they hadn't actually finished making it!!
This was a concern, as we still had 50km to go. Passing traffic was kicking up huge plumes of dust as we bumped along, often causing us to not be able to see where in the road we were at all. It was such a contrast from the 'cones and high vis' of the UK. At one point, we rounded a corner to find the workforce and diggers all in our lane! We had to swerve towards the oncoming dust storm of cars and hang on as we bumped through the uneven surface. The old tarmac reappeared after 10km or so and we wound our way down to the coast, reaching out destination - Datca, in the last of the dusty light.
Worryingly, with our phones not working, we'd not heard from our AirBnB host, but thankfully, we found the place and someone was there to let us in. We could have just slept there and then, but a short walk around the corner, on our way to find a shop, we discovered an open air restaurant. We took a gamble and went in, ordering blindly off the Turkish menu! An absolute feast turned up shortly after, with kebabs, salads, flat bread, beers and Turkish tea to finish. The bill came in at just under nine pounds! Happy days! We went to bed exhausted, but well fed and excited to somewhere very different.
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