We had a few days reserved for another place up the coast before reaching Selçuk (our final stop in Turkey). Onur recommended the Datça peninsula to us, a beach destination for Turkish opposed to tourists, we jumped at this suggestion.
The peninsula is divided into two prongs, we went to the southerly one first and found ourselves on undulating small coastal roads, up and down mountains with sweet spring floral in the air. Spring is certainly the best to travel. We were very happy.
Spring may be the perfect weather and heat for us, but for the Turkish it is not, it is cold. Turns out we had jumped at a beach destination a bit prematurely. Our first stop on the peninsula, Selime, was a flurry of construction activity as they got ready for the season, which was to start in 2 weeks time. This also meant that very few guesthouses, restaurants, bars, shops were open – poo.
However, fortuitous as ever, we met Jenny and she opened up one of her rooms, we were her only guests so had the place to ourselves and paid half the price, not bad!
Jenny is a wonderful English woman, who fell in love with Selime after she went on a gulet (Turkish boat) trip in the 90s with some girlfriends. She has been running Jenny’s House for a couple of decades now and she provided us with a good, solid dose of familiar hospitality and care – aka afternoon tea and homemade cake, ideal.
We spent two nights here and basically beached it – it was blissful and peaceful (no one was there!)
After two horrendously quiet seasons for Jenny, especially for international guests, she saw our early arrival as auspicious – we hope we were.
Setting off for the Northern prong of the peninsula for another two nights, we followed the advice of Jenny and went to we went to Palamutbükü. This place was even more quiet than Selime, just us and one Russian hippy were there – it was too quiet, there was no life and felt a bit odd at night. So we upped and drove just 30mins the next day and found ourselves in the charming Eski Datça- a place so far from our experience of Turkey that we felt that we might have got to Greece early.
We left the glamorous town to get a slightly less glamorous bus/es to Selçuk. When we dropped off our hire car, we had a short yet very impactful chat with this man, the man with the Ataturk tattoo. A simple of question of ‘how do you like Turkey?’ from him to us, led to the reciprocal one back and then followed a diatribe against his country’s government. He said troubles were coming and Erdoğan was at the forefront carving up the nation. He then whipped off his top to reveal his arm touting the well known silhouette of The Father of Turkey – Ataturk.
None of this was new to us, we’d heard both these sides on our travels but never so distilled and condensed as in this 5 minute transit. Pretty much all Turks that we fell into lengthy conversations with at some point mentioned Ataturk or if they didn’t it wouldn’t be long before you were confronted with a statue of him, or his image emblazoned on a flag, a lighter or a t-shirt. He created modern day Turkey in 1923, stopping the countries of Europe dividing up the land for their own fodder after WW1. Overnight he declared a common language, alphabet and set about uniting the Turks. This was not without contention but on the whole, the younger generations of Turkey revere him and see Erdogan as the antithesis. There is certainly unease in this young country and the faults are getting bigger the richer and more gentrified it gets.
