Background: Because of my research work,
in May and June 1997, I went to Antalya, Turkey, for
a two-week NATO summer school
and to Tel Aviv, Israel, for a conference.
I took the opportunity to travel around in Turkey, Israel, and Jordan,
and here is a travelog of the trip.
(The trip wouldn't have been possible without
NATO's and my academic advisors' financial support
during the summer school and the conference.)
My German roommate Olaf and I hailed a taxi from the hotel to the highway, where we caught a bus to Antalya. The bus didn't go all the way to Kaleiçi, or the old town of Antalya, and it took us a while to find our way. The locals we met, though nice and helpful, did not understand English. We finally stumbled across someone who spoke German and told Olaf the direction. Because of the omnipresent German tourists, German was the preferred foreign language in Antalya, unlike most other places in Turkey.
It didn't take long before we started to experience the famous Turkish hospitality: A carpet-shop owner in the old town invited us to his shop to have Turkish tea and chatted with us for a while. He wasn't pushy about selling carpets at all. I had been reading travelogs and travel guides about the country so I knew what to expect, but still, the locals' warm hospitality continued to surprise me throughout the trip.
In the old harbor is
the symbol of the city, Yivli Minare,
a tower next to Mehmet Pasa Camii.
Unfortunately, the camii (mosque) was closed for renovation.
We strolled around the bazaar and the harbor and bought
some postcards, before
we took a dolmus (minibus) to
the Archaeology Museum nearby.
Many fellow students from our summer school also went to the excellent
museum, and it appeared to be the main attraction in the city.
We walked our way back to the old harbor and stopped by an Internet café. The Turkish keyboard was exceedingly hard to type, and I spent some twenty minutes to compose only a few short email messages, the only ones I sent during my three weeks in the country. We followed the café owner's suggestion and went to have dinner in a greenish-yellow restaurant a few blocks away.
Olaf planned to join other people to a cruise trip the next day (Sunday),
so he went back to the hotel in Belek after dinner.
I wasn't very interested in the cruise trip, and
knowing that I would be imprisoned in the hotel throughout the next week,
I decided to stay in Antalya that night.
There wasn't much nightlife in Antalya though,
and the most unforgettable experience was to be annoyed
by the continual prayer that seemed to last forever.
(But I was becoming accustomed to it.)
I did take some nice pictures of the town next morning before sunrise.
My first destination on the next day was Perge,
a nearby ruins site where
a lot of the exhibits in the Archaeology Museum were from.
I took a dolmus to Antalya's main bus station (otogar),
which looked more like an airport terminal.
Once stepping into the bus station,
I found myself besieged by a crowd.
I told them I was going to Perge and was immediately pushed to a
counter to pay for the ticket.
They were touts, as I later learnt, and
from then on I would avoid them at all costs and
inquire at the counters instead.
They wouldn't make you pay more (since the bus fare was standardized),
but they'd only lead you to whatever companies they happened to work
for, which might not have the best schedules or routes.
No busses went directly to Perge, so I was dropped at a junction on the highway, from where it was a short walk to the ruins. The site was impressive, and its history spanned the Greek, early Roman, and Byzantine periods. Among the ruins were several marbled pools, used by the Romans for baths. They reminded me of the emperors' bath pools in Xian, China, I had visited just two months earlier. Bathing was important to all ancient cultures, I suppose. Bring a hat if you go to Perge: It's a vast site without shade.
Compared with Perge, another nearby site Aspendos
was much better preserved.
In fact, it's so preserved that it didn't look like ruins.
At night, the grand theater was occasionally the venue of some
concerts of western classical music.
My time was up so I went back to the
Adora Golf Resort Hotel
where our
NATO summer school
took place.
The five-star hotel is in Belek, a town 40 km east of Antalya
on the Mediterranean Coast.
The hotel will be a great resort if
the endless cycles of eating and swimming
sounds like a perfect holiday to you.
I guess it can be a good place to spend a few days,
but two weeks there was a little long to me.
The town is full of similar hotels.
And if you tell the locals in Antalya that you stay in Belek,
their eyes would shine as if you were saying "Please rip me off."
It'd have been less frustrating if there had been some form of the cheap public transportation from Belek to Antalya (that is, apart from the overcharging taxis). There were a couple of daily busses from the hotel, but they departed in the mid morning and returned in the afternoon, which means that you'd need to skip a whole day's classes, and that you couldn't really see much. That's why I didn't get to know anything about Turkey during the first week, and why I was so eager to go to Antalya on Saturday. The only time away from the hotel during the first week was during a tax-free shopping trip arranged by the summer school's official travel agency. The trip was a joke. About forty of us were settled in a large room, and were offered some fine Turkish drinks and a hilarious carpet show: The host explained to us the origins and materials of the carpets while his assistants literally threw the expensive carpets all over the places. They looked like a circus.
Incidentally, I couldn't make my AT&T calling card work in the hotel, although it would work without a problem in other parts of Turkey. I ended up using the phone in the hotel room and receiving a hefty bill.
After one more week, the summer school would be over.
The first destination of my lone voyage into the country
was Egirdir.
You may go back to my travel page, or
for others photos I took, check out
my photo portfolio.