Perking the Pansies, Jack and Liam move to Turkey

Chapter 3 - Back to the Future

"Fancy a kebab?"

We'd just had breakfast. "Don't be an idiot, Liam."

We had slipped the shackles of the waged and journeyed to Turkey in search of the perfect idyll to rest our work-weary bones. Bodrum itself was quickly ruled out: too hot, too busy and too damn expensive. We were sold on the idea of space to breathe and a room with a view; the frenetic town had neither within our price range. We spent a sticky week exploring the surrounding towns by dolmuş, the cute mini-buses that traversed the peninsula. We dubbed them 'dollies'. Nowhere hit the right spot and time was running out. We placed our final bet on the small town of Yalıkavak, twenty kilometres northwest of Bodrum.

It was high noon at Bodrum's busy otogar (bus station) and the dollies scurried about the cracked tarmac like random ants. As usual, the modern day kervanseray was bursting with life: purveyors of rapid kebabs and sweet-baked simits, lemon- scenting cut-throat barbers, pantaloon'd grannies on the make, weary country boys looking for work, sallow sightseers melting in the heat and tea-sipping cabbies dropping off in the midday sun. The place was a magnificent, chaotic and typically Turkish entrepôt. Liam had already begun his transformation into a bone fide plastic Turk. He stubbornly refused to let anything pass his lips unless it was authentic local fare and insisted on thanking every single waiter in dreadful pidgin Turkish. His waking moments were spent muttering in Turklish, pointing at random things in his line of sight, flicking through a dictionary and shouting out the Turkish equivalent like an excitable child on his first field trip.

"Coffee, Kah-ve. Bus, Dol-mush. Bus station, Ot-o-gar."

"Marvellous, Liam. Now, give it a rest."

"Tam-am."  Liam  grinned.  Tamam  –  'okay' –  was  his definitive response  to  absolutely  everything.  He  loved  the otogar and would have stayed there all day, drinking Black Sea tea, talking to the trees and watching the madding crowd. We beat a path through the raucous melée to an empty dolly with an acrylic Yalıkavak sign hanging from the windscreen. We sat at the back and waited for the bus to fill. The inside was sweltering and relieved only by a begrudging breeze slipping through the sliding windows. An old lady weighed down by capacious  plastic  bags  bursting  with  mandarins,  tomatoes and aubergines, laboured aboard. The old dear's haggard face was  criss-crossed  with  deep-trenched  furrows,  bronzed  by the sun and fringed by a red and yellow floral headscarf. A crocheted cardigan enveloped her tiny body, stretching like fishing net across her arched torso. Apart from us, the bus was empty and she had her pick of the seats. The choice seemed to overwhelm her. She scanned the dolly, gesticulated at the driver and shouted something indecipherable in our direction. Liam smiled apologetically and frantically thumbed through his useless dictionary.

"What's she saying?" I whispered. "'Does my bum look big in these?'"

"Just keep on smiling, maybe she'll go away."

One by one, an eclectic mix of characters scrambled onto the bus, each adding an extra layer of colour: pink-skinned day trippers in hats and strappy tops; local likely lads in cheap jeans and gravity-defying hair held aloft by vats of gel, and beefy hillbillies in need of a bath. It was a heady blend that left us in no doubt that Europe was a long way off. Colin was right. It wasn't Spain.

The  dolly  scurried  out  of  town  and  joined  the  main arterial highway, an uninspiring road lined with commercial developments reminiscent of a sun-drenched London North Circular. Feeling like the Sunday roast slowly cooking in a fan assisted oven, we rushed past a hotchpotch of flashy ultra-modern furniture showrooms, out-of-town hypermarkets, ramshackle builder's yards and an endless number of shanty lokantalar serving soup, kebabs and pide, the delicious Turkish take on a pizza. Ten kilometres into our sweaty trek, we left the dual carriageway and ascended a gently winding road into brittle tinder-dry shrubby hills burned brown by the staunch summer sun. This was more like it. The over-laden bus struggled up the hill and joined a long convoy of slow moving heavy vehicles toiling towards a high col framed by tumble-down windmills. As we breached the brow of the hill, we caught our first picture postcard glimpse of Yalıkavak shimmering at the end of a lush valley below like randomly scattered sugar cubes on an overgrown lawn.