The LWAT Chaos machine has been on the road again and this time, it all went reasonably well. Our trip to Mallorca last year involved power cuts, thunderstorms, all-night delays and literally hundreds of mosquito bites. Our quick jaunt to Copenhagen darn near ended in a riot after three hours of delays and two flights trying to use the same gate…there was no actual riot but we did end up with Covid. So when the worst that Turkey could throw at us was a small delay and a change of room, I call that a success.
We were flying from Gatwick again, which isn’t the most convenient London airport for us…in fact, it’s probably the least convenient. I think the drive home last year took an incredible four hours. But this time the drive went smoothly, parking was swift and we arrived at the terminal with a full four hours before the flight. Having said that, we did dodge an almighty bullet after I initially booked some very ropey-looking airport parking through a website called Best Parking Deals. The website itself was legitimate enough but it was just a price comparison site and what was billed as “Gatwick Park and Ride” turned out to be “Park and Ride for you” – the proud owner of 48 1*reviews on Google Maps. I only found out the actual name after I’d paid and booked and the confirmation e-mail, which told me I needed to pay an extra £5 “car park entry fee” and that set alarm bells ringing. I found the reviews, cancelled the booking and then went after the price comparison site for their £20 “admin fee”. You’ll be glad to hear that I got the money and spent it on the official parking, which was a little pricier but at least the car would still be there when we got back.
So, given we weren’t stranded in rusty minibus in rural Sussex, we had plenty of time to kill before our flight. We were travelling with an airline I hadn’t heard of before – Corendon Airlines – and their hand luggage allowance is pretty generous, compared to Airs Ryan and Wizz. We worked out that for 5 nights we could pretty much cram it into 4 cabin-size suitcases and take no hold luggage at all. That meant we skipped out the hour-long check in queue we had last time. It took a bit of measuring and masking tape on the floor to reassure ourselves that the suitcases were the right size but yes, sure enough we boarded a plane with one of these each plus a smaller “personal bag” at no extra cost. Go Corendon!
The extra time meant we could get some Turkish Lira, which I hadn’t had time to organise in the frantic packing-and-working week prior to departure. Eva spotted a Pret, which meant I could get us some free coffee and dried mango, and then we had a meal at WonderTree, which is where we ate last time as well. I’m not sure what meal it was, given that it was 3PM and we’d had brunch before leaving. I like to call it “linner” but I’m not convinced that’s a word. Anyway, WonderTree has some good vegetarian options for Eva and some good meat/waffles/syrup options for Roo and even some healthyish options for people like me who don’t like to eat too heavily before flying (I had the Hawaiian beef bowl and it was yummmm…..last year, I had the hummus plate and also yum).
Although we liked the relaxed attitude that Corendon had around baggage allowances, we weren’t so keen on the relaxed attitudes toward departure times. Early on, a note had appeared on the screens saying we’d get gate info at 16:40….for a 17:00 flight. If that seems like a bad sign to you, let me assure you that it was. We were still sitting around at the gate at takeoff time and then once we were all seated and had had the safety demo, we were told that we’d missed out takeoff slot and had to wait another 30 mins. This wasn’t great for Eva, who gets very anxious before a flight and the sitting around with nothing to distract her wasn’t helping. Eventually I decided to just get my phone back out – having put it into flight mode and packed it away under the seat in front – and that gave her something to do. By that point, people were back out of their seats chatting to friends and queuing for the loo so a phone is not as contraband as you might think.
Anyway, she’s always fine once we’re in the air and we finally got into the air around 19:20. And were rewarded with some lovely sunset views:
All of this landed us in Turkey very late at night though. With the time difference, it was 2AM by the time we were hanging around a smoky part of Antalya airport waiting for our taxi. Roo fell asleep as soon as we got into the taxi and I was dozing, only to be woken when we made a “rest stop” halfway to the hotel at a neon-lit shopping centre. Our driver told us to go and get food but also told us – via Google Translate – that the shopkeepers were likely to try and overcharge us. I was far too tired to even process any of this and my stomach was far too tired and confused to process any snacks. So I used the free loos and came back to the taxi only to find a small white cat had taken up residence around the handbrake.
At this point, I really did think I was hallucinating but apparently everyone else saw it too….and this would become something of a theme throughout the week.
Our hotel was a full two hours’ drive from the airport, including the rest stop. Along the way, we did see some interesting things but were moving too fast to get any decent photos. Eva – who did not sleep at all during the drive – was fascinated by the Turkish moon, which hung super low in the sky at 3AM and was crescenty, just like the Turkish flag. It was pretty special but I definitely did not manage to capture its majesty.
It was 4AM Turkish time when we stumbled into the hotel to be met with some plumber-like intakes of breath from the man on Reception. This did not seem like good news. As it happens, it could have been worse but we’d been assigned one room for the four of us instead of the two we’d paid for. It would be a tomorrow problem though, as sleep was becoming an urgent priority.
Of course, a few hours later Reuben’s urgent priority was breakfast. We hadn’t had much to eat since linner the day before so he had something of a point. Nathan was not on board with the whole waking up thing but the rest of us managed to drag ourselves downstairs for around 8:30 and that was it, we had started our day and our holiday.
So let me tell you a bit about our holiday setup – a little late into the post, granted, but I’m sure all that stuff about dodgy airport parking will come in useful to someone. I should point out that, even though this blog is still called London With a Toddler, we no longer own any actual children of the toddling variety. I’m working on stealing one but he isn’t responding as well to the trail of breadsticks as I’d hoped. No, ours are that much older now and so the kind of holiday we can attempt is a bit different. Do not in any way read this post and think it’s OK to leave your toddler unsupervised on a waterslide or drinking unlimited amounts of Coca-cola. Or if you do, just don’t sue me.
We were staying at Club Wasa Holiday Village, an all-inclusive resort which was right on the beach. It was far from luxury but, as I may have mentioned before, we’re not exactly high-class people so that’s OK. What I do look for in a holiday is the chance to swim all day and eat whenever we’re not swimming. And this provided both. Plus the aforementioned unlimited Coca-cola, which both kids took full advantage of and beer, which Nathan took full advantage of. I did try the wine once but just the once…enough said.
I’ve called this post “Touristy Turkey” cause I can’t pretend that we even scraped the surface of the culture Turkey has to offer. When Nathan and I visited in 2008, we took a boat trip and had a mud bath and saw rock tombs and all kinds of things but that was all before kids. Nowadays, holidays tend to be slower paced and involve a lot of relaxing and playing card games. Plus, August in Turkey is genuinely too hot to do much. Our previous trip had been in April and temperatures were around the mid 20s – this trip was 30C plus every day. I’m justifying myself a little too much here but I did have a conversation with a slightly pushy sales rep on that first morning – when I’d been up all night and slept for a few hours in a room that wasn’t what we booked. I’m not sure I was my *best self*. But no one really is when trying to explain that his excursions looked lovely but we were only there for 4 days and spending £200 on a 9-hour day out might be somewhat of a disaster if the kids aren’t in the mood for it. And chances are they wouldn’t be, not in that heat and with sensitivities to noise and crowds.
We did venture out to Alanya for one morning though. Normally on holiday we just potter around on foot but there was nothing in the vicinity of the hotel except for more hotels and a dual carriageway. So we ordered a taxi and for €15 he took us to Kızıl Kule – the Red Tower. Now, I’m not saying this wasn’t still a touristy thing to do but it was the only time when we all got dressed in actual clothes instead of swimwear so it counts as culture.
And what a lovely spot it was! Right by the harbour with a tiny beach and a great view of these pirate-type ships we’d been spotting on the horizon all week. It only cost 30 Lira each to go up the tower, which is around £1.20 so a very economical trip out. The observant among you will notice that I quoted the taxi fare in Euros and the entry fee in Lira and if you’re confused, you’re in good company. Although the official currency is Lira, it seems like Euros were accepted everywhere and even desired. When we asked prices in shops, we were always quoted in Euros which led to some confusion (10 Lira for a pair of sunglasses would be very cheap indeed) We were barely organised enough to get one set of currency, let alone two, but I had a look in my wallet and found €25 in notes and change that had been hanging around since last year. We ended up getting more Euros from an ATM in a situation that got a bit confusing but I’ll explain that later.
First off, the Red Tower! It’s a bit of a slog up to the top and the steps are massive, especially the first flight up. I’m still feeling that stretch in my thigh muscle two days on. But along the way, there are shady enclaves to sit and feel the breeze through the arrow slits.
We’d had a little paddle in the sea before the climb and I definitely wouldn’t recommend stone steps in wet flip-flops..but we made it almost to the top with no accidents. Nathan and Reuben went to the very top but Eva and I wussed out and hung around this level, which felt firmer underfoot. It meant that I missed out on the view from the very top but Nathan got a good shot:
There were also exhibits to look at along the way, including this catapult:
And, of course a sleeping cat:
After the climb we went for another paddle but that’s when I noticed just how much broken glass there was on the beach. It wasn’t smoothed-off seaglass but the proper jaggedy type which, again, I wouldn’t recommend with flip-flops. It’s a pity cause it’s a lovely sheltered enclave with a good view of the castle walls which run right along the cliff.
On Google Maps it had looked like the castle and the Red Tower were close together but seeing it in real life made me realise why it had suggested a 36-minute walk. It’s all built on quite the gradient.
So we didn’t make it to the castle but we did get cans of ice tea from the shop by the harbour and used the loos by a pretty waterfall (that’s not a euphemism) which charged us €1 each. Again, with the confusing currency. We then walked up the hill to the shops as Eva wanted a new swimsuit and along the way, I got some more Euros out of an ATM to pay for a taxi home. It only let me take a €50 note out tho, which meant we needed to make some change. Eva’s swimsuit was charged in Lira so we needed to buy something else to make change. I considered a new swim top for myself as my shoulders were quite badly burnt by this point but the cheapest was 700 Lira. So instead, I bought a €4 fake Nike t shirt to wear in the pool and felt only slightly guilty that the old man running the shop had to go to a different shop next door to get the change. The swim t-shirt worked a treat tho – no more sunburn after that.
This is where it all gets confusing though and I probably should have thought things through a bit more. We found a taxi driver to take us back to the hotel and he nodded when I said “Club Wasa” and quoted us 150 Lira. It sounded cheap but I didn’t think too much of it. A few minutes later, we pulled up to Kleopatra Beach which is meant to be a lovely beach but not where we’d asked to go. After some confusion and handing over my phone with Google Maps directions on it, he said he’d have to set the meter to get us back. Which was fine but we’d deliberately run down our Lira while shopping because everyone seemed to prefer Euros. And the meter was in Lira. As I watched it tick up past what we had left in our hand – 280 Lira – I devised a plan. The outbound taxi had been €15 so it seemed fair to expect to pay the same on the way back. I used Google to convert €15 to Lira – 441 Lira – and when we pulled up offered this in Euros to cover the fare, which had been 360 Lira in the end. I felt cheeky offering a currency that was not his own but he seemed happy enough, especially as it was more than we should have paid. I was just relieved to have got back home.
Today’s post appears to be sponsored by Google but it is not. And it is definitely not sponsored by my mobile network, who were charging me a fortune to do all this googling. It’s also worth saying that I let myself down by not studying a bit of Turkish before we left as I do usually like to swot up. I’ve had a lot of my mind though, and this holiday kinda crept up on me (hence the currency exchanging at the airport). I never want to assume that everyone will speak English everywhere we go but I’m still out of practice at foreign travel post-Covid. We have been on a few trips in the last few years but everyone in Copenhagen spoke better English than we did (including to each other, not just to the tourists) and while I didn’t master Catalan for our Mallorca trip, my very basic Spanish did the job. Next time I will do better.
And yes, I would have been right to assume that English wasn’t widely spoken in Turkey. It was tricky when trying to negotiate a change of rooms to the two we’d booked as we had to wait for the English-speaking manager to be on shift, which didn’t happen till our second day. We did eventually get sorted though, so don’t fret too much about us. If I’d thought about it, I would have tried my luck with German as there were a few German visitors at the hotel and that might have been a bit more widely spoken. Most of the guests were Russian though and my Russian vocab really only extends to “yes”, “no”, “please”, “thank you”, “milk”, “happy”, “sad”, “woman” and “mouse”. None of which would have really helped in the whole room-swapping situation.
Generally, we coped well though with a bit of sign language, my two words of Turkish – “hello” and “thank you” can get you a long way if you combine them with an insane amount of smiling. At the hotel there was a woman on the beach making fresh gözleme and she seemed very charmed by my stumbling attempts to thank her in Turkish. Every day she piled more and more gözleme onto my plate and it was probably the best thing I ate while we were out there. It was so good. The rest of the food was kinda bland but there was fresh melon every dinner time, which was also lovely, and a kind of Turkish chilli sauce which pepped up the meat-in-sauce that was served every meal.
One night I had three different types of cabbage, two of them pickled. You have to feel sorry for Nathan sharing a bed with me that night. The bright pink one was goood though. On the food front, you’ll have to forgive me while I become That Blogger for a moment and say that the vegetarian options were a bit limited. Eva was more than happy to live off chips for the week – with more chips from the snack bar in between meals – but there certainly weren’t the kinds of vegan burgers and sausages she has at home. Not that I would expect there to be! She had some plain pasta a few times and would have had the rice but one day there was bits of chicken in it and I think that made her mistrustful. The desserts nearly all had a wobbly kinda texture so we assumed they all had gelatine in and so were also not for her. She found a chocolate brownie type cake that she was very happy with though, so between that and the fresh melon she was absolutely fine.
After all our taxi shenanigans on the third day, we decided to have one last lazy day on the fourth and did nothing but eat and swim. Except that Eva decided she needed to become a wildlife photographer and disappeared off with my phone for a bit to try and film all the tiny feral cats that hung around the holiday village. It was the hottest part of the day so the cats were nowhere to be found but usually they were everywhere. I’m not a cat person but these bebbehs were kinda cute, with their tiny faces and their tiny mews. They kept Eva amused any way.
I mentioned waterslides briefly earlier and that was another source of amusement for both kids. It was just one slide – we chose to ignore the fact that the neighbouring hotel had much bigger and better slides – but Reuben especially was zipping up and down it all day. He occasionally got frustrated with the lack of queueing etiquette from the other kids but I told him it wasn’t his job to police them and, sure enough, on the last afternoon of the last day, a lifeguard appeared and blew a whistle every so often which I think was meant to deter these kids from pushing in or climbing back up the slide when it was closed and things like that. I feel like it really needed a person at the top of the slide all the time though. It would have made things much easier.
There were a few niggles like that, as there often are on package holidays. Ice cream was free but only served once a day which caused more frustration and more violations of queueing etiquette. Tables for lunch and dinner were hard to come by and we had to eat on a bench one day until we learnt to get there before the doors opened.
There was at least one stand up fight over the lack of tables and I saw a British woman saying to a German “You’re not in Deutschland now”, to which the German shrugged and remarked to her dining companions that the British woman shouldn’t have been “zu spät”. It was a bit ugly on both sides and it was stuff like that which made some meal times feel edgy when they should have been relaxing. And also could have been solved by having enough tables for the number of people staying. Still, lovely dinnertime views though:
Sun loungers were also hard to come by – weirdly less so on the beach than by the pool – and we often just left our stuff in a slightly soggy pile while we swam but this is again pretty standard for this kind of holiday.
There are a few things worth mentioning about the return trip, in case anyone else is planning to do similar. Yes, we did have another 15-minute “rest stop” which was a bit nail-biting when it was two hours before the flight and we were still 40 miles away. It was a good opportunity to get snacks though, as an early start meant we hadn’t had breakfast – apart from some cake that Eva had stashed away the previous day and then presented to us in cups like a tiny Mrs Doyle:
It’s always good to try something new in a different country but it was quite amusing that the biscuit selection at the rest stop was the exact same ones that we have in the Turkish supermarket on our road. So we bought some of our favourites plus some pretzel sticks and more ice tea for not-quite-breakfast snacks. We later had some hugely overpriced chips at the airport food court but let’s not dwell on that.
On the airport side though, it’s worth noting that effectively you have to go through Security twice. As soon as you enter Antalya airport, there are scanners for your bags but this is before check in and you don’t need to dispose of any liquids at this point. There are also no bins nearby, so we ended up sending an empty ice tea can through the scanner in a tray. The stern looking lady insisted. After that, there’s check-in which we skipped because we had already checked in online and had no hold luggage. That might have been a mistake because at the gate, our passenger numbers were written on a short handwritten list that made me think we’d done something wrong. Also, everyone else at the gate had cardboard tickets. Whoops!
After check in, we had our boarding passes (on Nathan’s phone) checked, along with our passports before going through passport control and another round of security, this time with no liquids allowed other then 100ml containers. After that, we were free to eat the overpriced fries before going to the gate for two more rounds of passport and boarding pass checking. Thorough, confusing and slightly rushed but at least we took off on time. And we celebrated with a lunch at Greggs as soon as we cleared Customs the other side. We got the car back with no drama, ever thankful that we’d rebooked the parking, and let’s not talk about Dartford. We got home, that’s all you need to know.
A few blips aside, it was a pretty relaxing holiday and just what we needed after the rain-soaked July we’ve had in the UK. For a bargain-ish price it was a pretty good break and being able to travel with just hand luggage made life easier. Now to just get through another two weeks of rain before school starts….!
