My partner and I had travelled from western Turkey along the coast to Simena and Kekova Island and now headed back to Kas on the southern coast. We'd stayed in a small village, Ucagiz, which in those days was very undeveloped and a beautiful spot on the Kekova coastline.
In Kas, we immediately ran into a Turkish rug salesman, Mustapha, whom we'd met the previous week. Then, he told us he dated foreign girls but disliked Australians. "They're too tough" he'd complained. "Unfeminine. They swear. They're ball-breakers." Now he was sitting at a bar with a pretty blonde Australian and wearing a T-shirt that said AUS. TRA. LIA. He welcomed us like old friends and introduced his girl without batting an eyelid. The café owner came dashing over and offered us tea. When we tried to pay he declined, saying it was 'a present'.
We spent a few lovely days in Kas, at the Pansiyon Yali, paying around 14 dollars for bed and breakfast. It had a beautiful balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, with masses of flowering oleanders, blazing red. We explored the shore and the ancient amphitheatre. It must have been quite something to sit on those stone seats 1000 years ago, watching a show with a backdrop of olive trees, rocky shore and turquoise sea.
The dirt tracks by the shore were filled with flowering shrubs, lazy dogs lying in the sun, skinny cats nipping about the dry stone walls, hens and tiny chicks, and local women in veils or headscarves hanging out their washing.
We ate meze each evening including aubergines and peppers, yoghurt with chili, finely chopped vegetables steeped in olive oil and herbs. We had swordfish kebabs served with lots of smiles and cold Turkish white wine.
Each morning in Turkey, apart from in Ucagiz, we were woken before dawn by the Muslim call to prayer. Once the call started, everyone seemed to join in - cockerels crowing, dogs barking, car and motor boat engines starting up. When we left Kas to head off to Fethiye, and then the airport at Dalyan, we rose around dawn with everyone else.
Along the highway we stopped at a tiny settlement. My partner wanted a shave and a haircut and he'd seen a barber's shop. Inside, a young boy was sterilizing scissors and a razor and dashed off to fetch the barber. The barber was a young man who spoke some English. Before sitting David down he asked what nationality he was. "Scottish" he said. "Good" came the reply. He sent the boy to get tea and, for some reason, tobacco leaves from a nearby field. He swapped Turkish cigarettes for David's Marlboroughs. Then he began the haircut, expertly wielding comb and sharp scissors. As he worked, he explained that he hated the English. (I'm English and kept very quiet.)
"I worked for English people at Fethiye" he said brokenly. "They did me something very bad. I am very angry person." He made stabbing motions with the scissors, just beside David's face, and then explained he'd stabbed his English boss, Roy. He crossed his wrists to indicate he'd been handcuffed.
"I was jailed two months" he said, shrugging his shoulders. Then he picked up his razor to shave David's chin.
Afterwards, he performed a face, back, shoulders and head massage and ended by delicately sprinkling talc and rose water on David's skin. He charged less than a dollar for over an hour's work. As we left he slapped David on the back and said "Scotland good. Not English."
In Fethiye for a couple of days we ran into Ruhi, a young man working in his family's hotel whom we'd met before, on the journey east. He was keen to practice his English and I bought him a good English dictionary as we strolled around town. There was going to be a wedding at his hotel he told us - one of his relatives - and he would like to invite us. We declined, having decided to press on to Dalyan for our flight to Glasgow a day later.
I have no idea what Dalyan is like these days but back then, in 1997, it was a dump. Tourism seemed to have hit it like a bomb, exploding in the centre and scattering the Turkish community to the outskirts. What was left in the middle was a paved, sterile compound of tourist shops and restaurants with waiters calling impatiently and persistently to passers by. Shopkeepers harangued you to look at their rugs, their silver, their tourist tat. It was hassly, ill-tempered and unpleasant.
We checked into a hotel with a round swimming pool from which sparkling water flowed into a river behind. A rather horrible palm-fringed bar was framed by large placards advertising Bacardi. But behind them, across the river and built into a high hillside were some of the best-preserved Lycian tombs you could hope to see. Great temple-like structures built into the solid rock, dominating the view. How they were ever built is hard to imagine, never mind hauling the dead up there for a funeral and eternal rest.
A member of staff beetled over to tell us that, at the nearby beach, we could see loggerhead turtles breeding. It was necessary, he said, not to disturb the creatures and not to step on their eggs. We decided the turtles could probably do without our turning up to ruin their day and their reproduction and went back into the centre of Dalyan to eat. The food was awful - fatty fish and limp salad - and it turned out we were the most edible things in town. Swarms of mosquitoes attacked us as we bolted down our meal before fleeing back to the hotel.
On the last day of the trip, we picnicked on the way to Dalyan airport. The Turkish countryside can be very beautiful and we lay among flowering shrubs watching a young black goat who had climbed a tree to tug at its leaves. Brilliantly-coloured dragon flies flitted by and a large prehistoric-looking tortoise ambled along the line of a dry stone wall. In the baking heat under a perfect blue sky, it was countryside bliss.
In the airport, we took tea in a tearoom decked out with Turkish rugs and cushions on low seats. A middle-aged English woman was berating a staff member. "Put more milk in it" she commanded. "More! For heaven's sake, I thought you'd understood." I chafed at her arrogance but suspected it was, even then, an unstoppable trend - tourists who find it annoying that Turks speak Turkish in Turkey or that French people speak French in France. It's not so hard to learn a few phrases when you go abroad, not difficult to show willing by learning some vocabulary.
But the airport, like all airports, was the interface between home and abroad - and we were going home. Turkey had given us a wonderful holiday and we'd met Turks everywhere who were friendly and wanted to chat - and not purely to get dollars from the tourists. We'd seen something of the tensions between the old rural way of life and the newer commerce developing. We'd noticed that Turkish men spent a lot of time taking tea while Turkish women engaged in some heavy manual tasks in the fields. And we'd discussed the awkward relationship between Turkey - sat there between east and west, between Christianity and Islam - and Europe. I wondered then whether Turkey would ever become part of the European Union. Strange to think that Europeans and Turks ponder exactly the same question nearly 15 years later.
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