One Night In Alanya

For us one of the joys of long term travel is that “time to move on” feeling, when we pack up our backpacks, say goodbye to one place and prepare to explore the next one. As we’ve said before, it’s good to move on while you still love a place; that mixed feeling of wondering if you’re leaving too soon coupled with the excitement of a new destination, is a heady feeling and is one of the real buzzes of travel.

And we’ve missed that feeling during our extended stay in Side. True, we have always wanted to experience a long stay in one place too, but it’s come earlier than we intended and, whilst we’ve enjoyed the experience as much as we had hoped we would, we’ve also missed the buzz of reloading the backpacks and heading off to somewhere new.

Consequently we decide this week to have a quick “holiday” from our airbnb apartment in Side and decamp to Alanya for a couple of days. Whilst it means we’ve paid for two beds on the same night, prices are so reasonable here that it doesn’t really challenge the budget too much.

So we pack light in day bags only, leave the rest of our stuff in Side, and head off in our newly acquired hire car back down the D400. Seems like a great idea until we enter our Alanya room, which is almost exactly nothing like the description on agoda. “Family run” it says, without saying the family are miserable; our “suite” isn’t in the hotel, it’s a ground floor flat in a block of flats down the hill; the “suite” smells like no one’s been in it for months; the bathroom smells of stagnant water; the wifi doesn’t work. Ah well, it’s only for one night, we say, quietly wondering why on Earth we’ve left our lovely apartment in Side an hour down the road.

But of course, it IS only for one night, and the night, it turns out, is great. The first draught beer in, literally, weeks…great little restaurant on the seafront…excellent tasty food…..lots of laughs….including seeing the funny side of exchanging our lovely apartment for this oddball “suite”. We have a really good night out. 

En route to Alanya, we call in at the remarkable location of Alara Han. “Han” is Turkish for “inn”; Alara was a stopover for the caravanserai on the ancient Silk Route, built yet again by the influential Seljuk Turk, Aladdin Keykubad II, and, judging by its size, must have been an absolute hive of activity. Alara Han sits by the river in the shadow of the surrounding mountains, and even now is a huge construction. How must it have felt for those nomadic traders, travelling thousands of miles by camel along the Silk Route, to stop off here to drink, eat and socialise, everyone with a common aim, yet miles from anywhere and certainly miles from home, and from their destination. The convivial spirit must have been amazing.

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Above the Han is Alara Castle, right at the top of a pyramid shaped crag. For a while we defy the “dangerous and forbidden” signs in an attempt to reach the castle, but when confronted by pitch-dark vertical-climb tunnels up through the rock, we concede defeat. 

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In Alanya itself, as well as our boozy night out, we find Dalmartas Cave, with its incredible display of stalactites and stalagmites. The cave is small, but packed with crazy rock formations, and with an atmosphere all of its own: at a constant 23.6 degrees, 98% humidity and oppressive air pressure, it is apparently the perfect antidote for asthma sufferers, some of whom sit for up to 4 hours simply breathing in the air.

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As we saw on our first visit, Alanya is obviously a big holiday party town in a normal season; now, the night clubs and the pirate boats sit silent and idle, the road train gathers dust in its lay by, lonely shopkeepers idly drink chai. It’s not just the end of the season, it’s the end of a disastrous season. We feel for these guys, their living has been taken away from them this year.

We drive back along the D400 as the skies darken and the rain starts to fall. Winter is arriving. Those guys have no chance of saving this lost season now.