from the head chef!

2012 season at Poppy has begun!  We have a few rooms of guests in – all very nice.  It always takes a little time to get back into routines after the long winter break.  I am up early even in winter, but once the boys have gone off to school I can do things slowly.  Now I have to get all my home chores done and be at the hotel by 8.  Not so bad really, and with a 3 minute journey to work by bicycle (with Holly the dog in tow – or more often towing me) I can’t complain!

As I am going to be doing the cooking this year I have spent some time getting the kitchen how I want it.  Now I have everything in place and it is – I think – easy to use.  The down-side is I now get really cross with anybody who moves things, puts things back in the wrong place, or generally disturbs my order.  I would like to ban everyone from the kitchen but that would mean I would have to cater to the ‘staff’ all the time.  I do cook for everybody once a day – good filling Turkish meals like dry beans and rice, aubergine with mince (a sort of Turkish version of  moussaka which goes by the charming name of ‘belly slit open’ – that is the aubergine’s belly, hopefully not the eater’s!)

caretta caretta turtle at the beach

The local wildlife has been putting in an appearance recently with several people saying they have seen turtles in the shallow water just off the beach (I think it is mating time) and someone telling me he sees dolphins nearly every day in the late afternoon.  Our boat is in the boatyard at the moment – wooden boats have to be taken out and inspected every year and there were quite a few changes we wanted to make to it – but hopefully when we are able to go out again we will get to see dolphins.  We are planning to do private trips for the hotel guests – up to about 15 people for a tour of quiet bays and islands and maybe some ‘sunset’ trips.  There is nothing more relaxing than pulling into a small bay as the sun goes down and lying back to enjoy some food and drink and the gentle rocking of the boat!

I was sent a feature from the Daily Telegraph which focuses on investment in Turkey but inevitably talks quite a lot about tourism.  Here are some interesting facts:

·         76% of Brits polled who had visited Turkey said their holidays were ‘better than expected’ and 70% ranked their trip as 1 or 2 on a scale of 1-5 where 1 is the best

·         The top reasons for choosing Turkey were climate, history and culture, fair price, Turkish hospitality, family-friendly environment and accommodation facilities

·         Turkey comes 2^nd globally in terms of number of hotel beds and ranks 7^th on the world’s most-visited destination list (according to World Tourism Organization)

another nice picture from Dalyan

 Another reason to visit Çalış is the carnival which will be held this year for the 5^th time from 27th May to 2^nd June.  The programme this year includes a craft fair, oil wrestling competition (a traditional Turkish sport which has to be seen to be appreciated!), a beach football tournament and entertainment from various musicians and bands.  Carnival day will include the grand parade along the sea front and a big concert in the evening.  I hope the weather is kinder than it was last year but I am sure whatever happens that a good time will be had by all and lots of money raised.

our winning 'army' at the carnival 2009

Boats, bikes and Bond

There has been a lot going on in Çalış and at Poppy but I have not been good at keeping the blog updated.  Now, as we start the 2012 holiday season – first guests due this week – I am going to do my best to get blogging again.  (I sort of thought nobody would notice but have been given a telling-off by a few people!)

First, the end of the story of the wreck for diving – which is actually just the beginning really.  The boat was eventually towed all the way from Samsun, on the Black Sea coast, along the Black Sea itself, through the Bosphoros straits at İstanbul into the Marmara Sea, through the Dardanelles straits into the Aegean Sea and down to Fethiye.  It took several weeks – including two weeks or so of bad weather when the boat didn’t move from İstanbul.

When it arrived in Fethiye, our friends who were organizing the sinking had lots of work to do cleaning it out, stripping it of any parts that might come lose and be a danger, then weighting the hull with concrete and cutting extra ‘windows’ for the water to go in.  The day of the sinking was quite an event.  I didn’t go but Cem went out with Suntrap and there were a number of boats spectating, including one with dignitaries and the town band and a Coast Guard boat there to ‘see off’ their retired boat.

It sank with great style – taking water slowly but surely until the hull sunk suddenly and the whole thing (all 42m of it) stood upright in the water, then settling slowly down – to the strains of the band playing – to sit upright in about 26m of water.  It will be a great attraction for experienced divers, more so as it becomes home to all sorts of sea life.

The other great excitement in Fethiye recently has been the filming of the new James Bond film.  Apparently about 10 minutes of the finished film will be from Turkey, including scenes shot in İstanbul ( a very exciting motorbike chase on the ROOVES of the Covered Market), Adana and Fethiye and Çalış.  Several of my students have been involved as extras – one even got pushed out of the way by Daniel Craig(intentionally, he wasn’t hogging the camera!)  It will be very interesting to see whether the scenes are recognizable as Çalış as they built a whole beach bar and market (while paying the real beach bar to stay shut and the street traders to stay away!) and Fethiye harbour has been reinvented as a Chinese port!  Still, it has given us plenty to talk about.

Unfortunately this year we didn’t get the publicity from the President’s Cup cycle race, the Fethiye leg of which was featured last year on Eurosport.  They still came in to Fethiye, stayed the night and left the next day, but with very little fanfare.  I heard that they asked for money from the council in return for the publicity they were creating and the council declined.  If this is true, I think it is very mean as the council are also ‘hosting’ them and having to close roads, provide security etc.

Cem and Grant at Faralya in March

So…to Poppy.  We have been busy all this month with bits of painting and repairs – general preparations for the season.  The pool was regrouted yesterday and will be ready to fill tomorrow and with a few weeks of sun on it it might even be warm enough to get into!  Kenny, who is already in Marmaris, is due down here on Friday as are the first agency guests.  The weather is lovely – such a relief after the misery of winter – and the only thing missing seems to be my swallows who for the first time in 14 years have not come to occupy the nests.  Hope it’s not an omen!

The lizards -like me - have come out of hibernation!

Dreaming of summer

This is my twentieth winter in Fethiye and it is the worst one I have seen.  It isn’t so cold any more, but it has rained so much that the ground hardly gets a chance to dry out before it is bucketing down again – and believe me it can chuck it down.  Here is the canal that runs next to our house (the railing is the bridge!) – a local journalist who came out at night to report on the flood fell up to her neck in one of the side channels and, as the council policeman who was here said ‘almost became the news’; luckily the only casualties were her camera and video recorder.

In Ankara last week the weather was extremely cold – minus five or six in the day, minus twenty and below at night!  The snow had been there for a few days when we arrived and they are good at keeping the main roads open – one of the important routes built on a slope even has underground heating.  However it isn’t possible for the snow ploughs to get round all the side roads and there are a lot of hills in Ankara, so there was a lot of skidding of cars and people.

Tonight in Fethiye there is a storm warning.  The thunder and lightning don’t bother me but the high winds do as you never quite know what is going to come crashing down.  Last week, two solar panels (large and heavy glass panels) blew off one friend’s roof.  A doctor friend of ours once told me that A and E at the hospital is busiest after storms like this with people who have been hit by flying objects or – somewhat stupidly – been blown off roofs while trying to fix them.  One man even tried to fix his greenhouse during a storm by climbing up on the top and holding out the nylon sheeting that had come loose; he ended up several fields away!  Still, I hope if it is bad tonight it will at least be like this tomorrow – this is Çalış beach after a storm a couple of weeks ago – washed clean.

With all this bad weather, I am beginning to feel like the guests who send mails in the winter saying ‘can’t wait for the summer’!  We have to sort out plenty of things before we get going for another season – not least finding all new staff.  But we are starting to get bookings through – from Hotels4u too now we finally have a contract with them.

The weather has also been very frustrating to some friends of ours who as chairman (lady actually) and deputy of the Fethiye diving federation have been heading a project to sink a boat in one of the bays.  This will provide exciting new diving opportunities, as well becoming a habitat for marine life (yes, surprising as it seems, all sorts of sunken vehicles and junk can enrich the natural environment).  They were given a decommissioned boat – all 43m of it – by the coast guard but the boat was in Samsun on the Black Sea Coast.  Bringing it here required a tug to pull it (it has no engine) over a journey along the Black Sea, out through the Bosforos Straits at İstanbul, into the Marmara Sea, out through the straits at Çanakkale to the Aegean Sea and all the way down to Fethiye.  This is of course an expensive operation – 110,000 lira expensive (about £40,000). They worked hard to get contributions from all the diving companies in town, and support from the council and the chamber of commerce to raise this money.  Then they were told that because of the size of the ‘load’ (measured as the total length of the tug plus rope plus boat) they would have to pay extra to be ‘navigated’ through both straits.  This they also managed to sort out with the help of contacts (knowing the right people always helps in Turkey!)

But there’s one thing they can’t organize – and that’s the weather.  First storms in the Black Seas region delayed them.  Now the boat has got as far as İstanbul but the weather has delayed it there and the tug has gone off to do another job in the meantime.  Hopefully for ALL of us, the weather will improve soon and the boat will reach Fethiye and be prepared for its final journey to the sea floor.  I will keep you posted….

FROST in FETHIYE

Well, I have forgotten the storms now as for the last week the weather has been abnormally cold here.  There has been FROST in the mornings and ICE on puddles!  I know that might not sound so awful to those of you who experience it most mornings through winter, but you have to bear in mind that we are not used to it!

Many of the plants in the garden are looking very sad.  Some will recover but some – including the banana trees and possible some larger trees won’t.  The pipes here are generally not insulated and the tanks and solar panels are very exposed on the roofs.  I haven’t seen any this time, but in past cold spells I have often seen pipes and panels that have burst, causing hot water to pour off the roof.

Worst of all – as far as I am concerned – is the difficulty of heating the houses.  Most do not have central heating and with tiled floors, large windows and no cavity walls they are designed for summer heat rather than being cozy in low temperatures.  Many people rely on air conditioning units to heat, but it is such a small heat, blowing high up near the ceiling that it often barely takes the chill off the air.  Everyone who lives here gets used to wearing slippers (yes – even the people who laugh at slippers when they first move here!) and sitting around wrapped in blankets!

The ground floor of our house is made bearable by the wood-burning stove.  I have only just mastered the art of lighting it, and it is a bit messy, but after an hour or so it definitely makes the room pretty warm and seems to warm the walls so that it is still nice when I come down the next morning.  We have even been experimenting with cooking in the oven part – here is Cem with a ‘börek’ (type of pie) we made a couple of weeks ago (learning in the process to be careful not to BURN things in the stove!)

Upstairs, though, is another matter.  My alarm clock is a flashy digital thing that shows the temperature – hence I know it was 10 degrees in my bedroom last night!  Some of you will know that I feel the cold a lot and will even sometimes be cold in the summer months when everyone else is wearing shorts and t-shirts – so you can imagine how many layers I have on at the moment.

Of course it is only on the Mediterranean coast here that we are so unaccustomed to the cold.  Parts of Turkey – including the capital Ankara - are again under snow and further east many villages are cut off by snow.  It’s school holidays next week and if we can get away we want to have a couple of days skiing somewhere.  If you ask me, that is the only good thing about weather this cold!

Kaan is 12!

Yes, it was Kaan’s twelfth birthday this week.  Can’t believe that my ‘baby’ is almost a teenager (there’s something to look forward to – having two stroppy adolescent boys around the house!)  Although his birthday is the 9th January, we didn’t actually take him ‘home’ (he was born in St Thomas’ London) until the end of February as he was 11 weeks premature.  Here is how he was then….

He is now just over 5feet tall and you would never guess that he weighed 3lb 3oz when he was born!  Here he is with his ‘bicycle’ cake…

He hasn’t been able to go to school on his bike this week, as the weather has been absolutely awful.  We have had storm-force winds, thunder and lightning and a lot of rain – so much that we were having problems dealing with it in the hotel.  As we are lower than the surrounding plots, we not only get what rains on us but also a lot coming in from those higher areas.  The system that channels the water round the outside of the pool and into the pool tanks works alright but there is also some seepage into the pool engine room and when it was raining hard the small submersible pump couldn’t get rid of the water fast enough.

Finally on Tuesday Cem bought a petrol-powered pump which can get rid of the water much faster and which will also keep going during a power-cut – the other thing which has caused us problems in the past.  This winter we seem to have had more power cuts than for the last few years, sometimes lasting a couple of hours.  That’s pretty annoying when we pay such a fortune for electricity.  Our last MONTHLY bill at home was 270tl – just about £100 – and the hotel bill, even in the winter months, is never less than about 400tl.

Actually, there has been a bit of a scandal concerning the electricity company which might (not holding my breath) result in us getting some money back.  Due to the remoteness of much of the eastern parts of Turkey and the wiliness of the residents, many people – often whole villages – do not pay for electricity but ‘steal’ it by stringing up illegal lines.  To cover their losses in those areas, the electricity board has been charging us a tax on our bills - maybe only a couple of lira for a normal household but as it is worked as a percentage of the total, it amounts to a lot of money on the huge summer bills at the hotel.  I might just about understand it if the electricity board was still government owned, but it was privatized about 5 years ago and I don’t see why we should be penalized for the fact that they cannot do their job efficiently.  One man finally stood up to them and has taken a case to court so we are hoping that he wins and we will be able to claim back this money.

And it’s not only electricity that is expensive here…I’ve just seen in National Geographic a comparison of petrol prices from last year – dollars per gallon.  Turkey is the leader IN THE WORLD, at 10.02, UK second at 8.39, while in America they pay 4 dollars a gallon.  Since in Turkey most things are delivered by road (there is not much of a rail network), this adds to the cost of all goods.  Our meat, chicken and cheese all cost more than in the UK and USA.  Electrical goods have always been much more expensive here and cars – well don’t even get me started on the cost of cars!

So how come we are still seen as a ‘cheap’ holiday destination…..?!!

New Year's resolutions

I have been very poor at blogging recently, so here is a photo summary of Christmas and New Year in the Cakir household.:

Gingerbread house…our construction skills are improving every year and this year we added trees to the garden.  Now, the boys are busy deconstructing it, which keeps them away from the Christmas cake!

                                            

Boys with the tree.  Kaan was the first to put a present under it (mine) and then counted every day to see how many more presents had been added.  Emre is REALLY hard to buy things for now and as even he couldn’t think what he wanted for his main present, it has been delayed!  Kaan had a new bicycle – his first full-size one an the first one that has come to him brand new (the down-side of being the youngest!)  He is so taken with it that he has started cycling to school this week.  I went with him on Monday morning and it was actually lovely cycling along the sea front at 7.30am, calm water, pink skies and few people around.  Let’s see how long his enthusiasm lasts though!

Cem and Murat trying to put together one of Kaan’s presents – a bird that flies.  The moral is don’t buy anything that needs constructing (unless you are good at engineering) and especially don’t buy anything with instructions in Chinese!

Two fairies for the Christmas tree….Cem’s cousin’s very cute daughters who celebrated Christmas and New Year with us.

Dinner on New Year – a true ‘fusion’ (for which read muddle) of Turkish and English with quiche, roast potatoes and cauliflower cheese (me) and chicken, liver and various starters from Cem’s mum.

My New Year’s resolution is to post a bit more often again.  In the meantime, I hope you all enjoyed a fantastic holiday season and wish everyone a healthy, happy 2012!

When is a contract not a contract?...

It’s been a while since I posted a blog. Been busy tidying up the hotel for the winter and even doing some gardening. The weather has been fantastic – chilly at night but beautifully bright and sunny in the day. I wish it could last all winter but people are starting to talk of water shortages and the farmers are starting to complain and I think we are forecast some rain this week.


Now I’d like to update you on our relationship with THE AGENCY. We have a contract with two British holiday companies. We signed a contract with one of them in July, since when they have been slowly but steadily sending bookings through. That’s not the one I want to tell you about!

The other company, as I have reported in this blog, first sent a very young guy who wasn’t authorised to make any major changes and went scuttling off when I gave him the prices for next year. We then had several wasted journeys to their office in Fethiye for ‘appointments’ that they had made and then forgotten (or couldn’t be bothered to stick around for).

Finally, a more senior guy came to the hotel. I gave him the rates I had agreed with the other company, he adjusted the details slightly – pushing low season prices down significantly but keeping the peak season price the same and we signed a contract. Finally, I thought!

But two weeks later I got an e-mail saying this contract could not be activated because their sales price was higher than the other company. When I looked at the two prices for a week’s stay at Poppy at different times through the season it became obvious why – their mark-up is consistently higher and sometimes double that of the other company.

They say they want ‘parity’ – for which read LOWER rates but firstly, I don’t see why we should treat them differently and secondly, we discussed all this already. Currently, after several more e-mails, we haven’t managed to make a new contract. To be honest, as we start the annual winter battle for payment, I am losing the will to sign. So far we have been paid for just over half this summer’s guests. And I doubt that we will manage to get much more until next spring.

And this, by the way, is a company that just had to ask lenders to come up with a rescue package.


Çalış Christmas Fair

Yesterday was the Christmas fair in Çalış. Unlike last year, the weather was glorious and it was packed with both stalls and customers. It has become a great institution here where the Christmas celebrations are few and far between, all thanks to a hard-working group of people who put it together.



mulled wine - yummy!