Marmaris

After visiting Olu Deniz in Turkey last September Sue and I liked it so much that we have just returned from a 10 day stay in Marmaris. It is a lovely location, the weather was good and hot, reaching 40 degrees centigrade on 3 days. The Grand Azur hotel food and facilities were excellent even if the room wasn’t in the quietest of locations. With an exchange rate or around 2.75 TL to the GBP prices were reasonable (especially if one haggled) so a little retail therapy was undertaken. From the hotel we could walk east into Marmaris town centre and harbour area or west to Icmeler which has a large and lively open air market on Wednesdays. If we didn’t feel like walking both ways then we would catch a Dolmus for 2 TL per person into Marmaris or 2.5 TL to Icmeler. Why we British don’t adopt a similar transport system I’ll never know – it works is probably the answer.

This is my first ever “lounge in the sun” holiday. Yes, we’ve holidayed in the sun before but I usually leave Sue on the sun bed an go exploring. This time I just chilled out on a sun bed beside her. I didn’t take enough reading material, everything read from cover to cover by the end of the 5th day. There were plenty of bars to choose from prices were cheaper in the bars that were not attached to a hotel chain (as one would expect). The harbour area and Icmeler were both very pretty and picturesque but walking in the heat of the day is not recommended. Marmaris also has a lovely quaint bizarre but we got fed up with being plagued to “visit my shop”, “be my friend” and “cheaper than ASDA/Primark” – they just won’t let you browse the way we do in the UK.

What a contrast though – 10 dry days in the sun and temperatures constantly above 30 degrees centigrade returning in the early hours of Friday morning to driving rain and 9 degrees, to be told it had rained daily while we were away.