Weekending: Bodrum/Greece

by Meg Nesterov on


As an expat in Istanbul, I am very fortunate to have awesome opportunities for short trips around Europe and the Middle East. My previous weekend jaunt was to Beirut, Lebanon. Though the current 90+ degree weather is ruling out a lot of domestic travel for now, for my next getaway, I made like the locals and headed south to the beach.

The place: Bodrum, Turkey

The Bodrum peninsula fancies itself the Turkish Riviera, though the town proper feels a bit more like the Jersey Shore, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Bodrum coast (like the Jersey Shore) has great beaches and fun nightlife, though it lacks the sophistication of other European beach towns and the coastline is getting more developed each season. Still, there’s charm left in Bodrum town, beautiful castle and harbor views, and easy boat access to more secluded spots in Turkey and even Greece. Big and boutique resorts with private beaches (many of them jetties) line the sea though you may have to rent a car or rely on taxis and dolmuses (minibuses) to get around. As we wanted to stay in a walkable area with restaurants nearby, we chose the Su Hotel in town, on a quiet street close to the harbor, with a good-sized pool and friendly service.
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  • Water is the big draw to Bodrum, though the town itself has only a few small strips of beach, with most of the beach clubs and resorts in neighboring towns like Bitez and Gümbet. The few town beaches are small but serviceable, as well as convenient and most often free, though you may be obliged to buy a drink from one of the adjoining cafes. If you’re after the wide, sandy beach experience, you’re better off in a resort outside of town or taking day trips.
  • Hop on a boat and be in Greece in an hour. From the ferry, you can walk to a beach where 5 euro will get you two chairs, some bottled water, and an umbrella. Pleasant Kos Town doesn’t have a wealth of tourist attractions, but does remind you how NOT European Turkey is, if only for the good wine, availability of pork, and sensible city planning. Alternatively, boat trips are offered all over town to nearby islands and coves in Turkey.

Downgrades

  • While sometimes it’s pleasant to visit a foreigner-friendly city where English is widely spoken and familiar foods are available, after seeing the third cafe in a row serving a full English breakfast, Bodrum’s popularity with Brits and Australians becomes overwhelming and almost demoralizing. I happened to be in town during the England-Germany World Cup match, and the English loss could be heard up and down the streets. On the plus side, a nice book market on Cumhuriyet Caddesi towards the east end sells English books for as little as 5 TL.
  • You don’t come to Bodrum for sightseeing, but the main attractions can still be a little disappointing. The Castle of St. Peter holds the Museum of Underwater Archaeology (admittedly, I hoped it would actually BE underwater) and while the views from the castle are spectacular and several of the exhibits are interesting, the highlights (the cool-sounding Glass Shipwreck and remains of a Carian princess) are only open Tuesday – Friday. Imagine if New York’s Met Museum closed the Temple of Dendur on weekends or the Louvre limited days to see the Mona Lisa?! Likewise, the Mausoleum might have once been one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but not much of it remains.

Getting there

Bodrum is an hour flight from Istanbul, with sporadic direct flights from continental Europe in season. The airport is 60 kilometers from town and a pricey 90 TL taxi ride, but a shuttle bus connects with domestic flights for 17 TL. If you have early or late flights, be sure to factor in the round-trip taxi fare to the cost of your travel. Ferries depart for Kos (also Rhodes) in the morning and return late afternoon for around 55 TL.

Make it a week

Get your bearings in Bodrum town and then sail a gulet yacht for a cruise along the Aegean. Booking a cabin will cost from 400 euro per person including meals (but not alcohol), crew, fuel, and taxes for a week, chartering the whole yacht can run thousands of euro but can work for a group of friends or family. Do your homework and shop around; Turkey Travel Planner is a good primer.

Greek tanker truck strike strands thousands of tourists

by Scott Carmichael on

As if Greece didn’t already have enough worries, its 30,000 licensed truck drivers have decided that the middle of the tourist season would be the best time to go on strike, effectively shutting down many parts of the economy.

Without truck drivers, there are no tanker trucks on the roads, which means gas stations are almost all out of gas. And without gas, tourists can’t go anywhere.

The strike is taking place because of an argument about truck licenses. For forty years, Greek drivers were unable to get new permits, so the existing permits sold for about $390,000 on the open market.

As part of the massive bailout from the European Union, the Greek government was told that this system has to come to an end, which means anyone with the correct experience can get a truck license.

Crete, Corfu and Rhodos all say they are most likely going to go bankrupt in weeks unless the federal government puts an end to the strike. Thousands of tourists have already canceled their trip, and on Crete, 100’s of rental cars have simply been abandoned with empty gas tanks. Yesterday, the Greek government ordered the truck drivers to return to work, but they have refused, and made it clear they will not deliver anything until the licensing changes are rolled back.

[Photo credit: LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/Getty Images]

Weekend travel media top five: July 17-18, 2010

by Alex Robertson Textor on

This weekend’s most interesting travel stories include a take on apartment rental listings services, an overview of the delightfully uncrowded White Mountains of Crete, an exploration of boutique caravan rentals in Cornwall, a search for pies in southern Alberta, and a list of NYC hotel rooftop bars.

1. In the New York Times, Benji Lanyado explores new developments in the orbit of inexpensive apartment rentals. Lanyado’s article got a lot of attention this past weekend, all of it deserved. His is essential ammunition for the budget-friendly fight against gratuitously expensive hotels.

2. In the Financial Times, Henry Shukman walks all over Crete’s White Mountains. The article ends with a quick guide to four additional European island hideaways.

3. In the Guardian, Gemma Bowes explores the new wave of boutique caravans (or trailers, as we know them stateside.)

4. In the Globe and Mail, Cinda Chavich embarks on a road trip across southern Alberta’s Cowboy Trail, sampling pie in towns with names like Black Diamond, Twin Butte, and Okotoks.

5. In the Los Angeles Times, Sherri Eisenberg provides a primer to Manhattan’s hotel rooftop bars.

(Image of Crete’s White Mountains: Flickr/bazylek100).

Tour operator Goldtrail goes bankrupt, strands 16,000

by Sean McLachlan on

UK company Goldtrail Travel Ltd announced it had gone bankrupt at 4pm yesterday. The revelation, made just an hour before the end of the work week, has left the travel plans of thousands of customers in doubt. About 16,000 customers are already abroad on Goldtrail flights and package tours, mostly in Turkey and Greece.

Goldtrail operates under the names Goldtrail Holidays, Goldtrail Travel, and Sunmar.

While flights returning this weekend and Monday will operate as normal, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority is left to pick up the slack for the remaining passengers. All outbound Goldtrail flights have been canceled. You can read the CAA’s statement about the failure, and advice to those affected, here.

The number for the CAA helpline in the UK is 0844 856 2585. Customers outside the UK should call 0044 203 441 0846.

Travel Q&A with author & cook Tamara Reynolds

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Tamara Reynolds is a the co-founder (with Zora O’Neill) of The Sunday Night Dinner, an Astoria, Queens-based supper club. The Sunday Night Dinner, which continues to thrive, was well ahead of what has become a supper club trend. Out of the Sunday Night Dinner came a fabulous cookbook, Forking Fantastic, which Reynolds co-authored with O’Neill. Travel is key to Reynolds’ imagination as a cook. She shops for food in the international food markets of Astoria and travels to countries with great food traditions.

Q: Sum up your professions in a few snappy words.

A: Cookbook author, cook for hire, cooking teacher, television show shopper, and Hostess with the Mostess of The Sunday Night Dinner.

Q: How did the Sunday night dinners come to happen? And how did Forking Fantastic emerge from the supper club?

A: SND began when Zora O’Neill and I met in 2002. We worked at Prune together and discovered we were neighbors and both loved to cook. We began cooking on Sundays for friends, and the next thing we knew, we were consistently feeding 15-20 people every Sunday. We began asking for donations so we could afford to keep doing it, and the next thing we knew, we were running an underground supper club.

We became convinced that the next step should be to write a cookbook, with encouraging words on entertaining, for real life. Zora and I felt that everyone was so hung up on the Martha Stewart perfection ideal that no one was actually cooking dinner for friends for the fun of it. Plus, we thought that if we wrote a kick ass guide to entertaining, detailing how we taught ourselves to cook and our many many mistakes along the way, maybe we would get invited to dinner more often.
Q: You told me that the fact that you’re based in Astoria has had a lot to do with the fact that the supper club took off.

A: It is funny, when we started our supper club, it was us and Ghetto Gourmet, a traveling club. Now I get a notice about every third day that another one is starting up, usually in Brooklyn. We remain one of the very few in Queens.

Queens is incredibly culturally diverse, but Brooklyn still seems to keep a headlock on “culinary coolness”. That said, I would never be the cook that I am or be able to feed people the way I do if I didn’t live in Astoria. I find the butchers and “old world” feel of Astoria’s food shops completely inspiring and refreshing. There are stores that only import Greek products, Italian products, Eastern European, North African, Middle Eastern, Brazilian, etcetera. Within a seven-minute walk from my house there are three butchers, all with whole lambs, goats and pigs hanging in the windows. These hanging animal carcasses aren’t decorative. People in my neighborhood cook these things on a daily basis. The produce markets burst with really excellent fresh produce, too. The first Long Island tomatoes and flat beans of the season just appeared last Friday and it looked like there was going to be a riot lead by the grandmothers of Astoria!

Q: Your Forking Fantastic co-author Zora O’Neill is also a travel writer. Did her perspectives on travel and food influence your own?

A: Absolutely. I went to grad school to be an opera singer; Zora went to grad school to study Classical Arabic poetry. Along the way we both learned to cook, but when I met her she had lived in Egypt and knew far more about Middle Eastern/North African cuisine than I did. I eagerly lapped up all of the information I could get out of her. She still travels far more than I do. My travel is mainly for pleasure while hers is for work. It is always nice to get a story of a great meal from her. It spurs my imagination.

Q: Where do you like to travel?

A: I feel like I am kind of done with Europe for now. I really want to concentrate on the US states I have not visited, North Africa, and Vietnam. February I am trying to put together a Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos trip. I think it is safe to say that I like to go anywhere where they are doing things differently than I do them at home.

Q: Have you ever traveled somewhere expressly to try a particular food?

A: You know, not exclusively, but I never go anywhere without considering where and what I will be eating, and cannot imagine traveling to a country with bad food. That said, I cannot wait to go back to Turkey to eat some more, and to Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, Sicily, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos just to eat. I view sightseeing as a great way to burn off the last meal and get your body ready to eat the next one. I am also considering driving around the backwaters of Georgia in August to sample some Gullah specialties. I am fascinated the resilience of Gullah traditions.

Q: How do your travels influence your cooking?

A: People cannot cook without markets and grocery stores. Going into either can tell you so much about where you are, who lives there, and what happens in their kitchens. I love to visit grocery stores and markets in every town I am in, one-horse or otherwise. The fact that in other countries you can wander around and see meat sitting out in the open for hours and here we insist on shrink-wrapping everything is fascinating. Sometimes small observations can inform you that your accepted way of doing things at home is definitely not the only way.

Of course, places have particular smells. Every time I exit the airport in Phoenix, my hometown, it smells like home. The smells of cities often tell me what people are eating, and I love to try to recreate particular smells in my home kitchen.

Q: Do you have a favorite destination, secret or otherwise?

A: Secret? Are there any secrets left? Ha. I must say, I loved Ayvalik, a small town in Turkey. People were transporting goods through the cobblestone streets in the town in horse drawn wagons. And there was pickled watermelon rind everywhere. And the eggplant, tomatoes, melons and lamb were amazing. We took a boat from Mytilini, Greece to Ayvalik and stayed a few days on our way to Istanbul. I would love to return.

I also loved the plains of Portugal. I ended up there six years ago purely by accident; my drive down to the Algarve was scuttled by torrential rain, and we didn’t want rainy beach. So we ended up driving up and over from east to west: Evora, Elvas, Beja. So beautiful and so unexpected. We happened into an ancient Roman Meat Market that had at a later point been a Catholic Church and was now a local craft shop/art gallery. So many Roman Ruins and such beauty! For a few years I loved to say, “If you want to see Rome, go to Portugal!”