Turkish coffee cup
The sea and mountains beckon, dream at night and tease in advertising screensavers. Back in January, I started to wool Turkish hotels in search of a decent economy option. This time the choice fell on Kemer. It's simple - the longing for the Crimea has reached peak levels - we haven't seen each other for five years, and then in the office computer I accidentally stumbled upon the director's photo report about the vacation in Tekirov. Pines, oleanders, palm trees, mountains. . . Does it look like the South Coast? Very, there are not enough cypresses.
The main problem is Kemeri pebbles. My fighting mother's legs are loaded with pebbles, it is not at all easy for an elderly person to get out of the water. The pier is not suitable - mother swims exclusively on foot on the bottom, without breaking off from a hard surface. Tekirova did not like the rather large pebbles. Seeing the cobblestones of Beldibi close-up in the photo, I was horrified and was about to replay the trip towards the proven sandy beaches of Side.
The Crimean mirage did not let go, I continued to look for options in the Kemer region. I found a couple of options in Goynuk, but in Kimeros Park there was a vast territory, my mother’s trip to the sea turned into an expedition. I liked the reviews of Kilikia Palace - compact and clean, but I decided to look for more. Google helped - a beach with small pebbles and a hotel with good comments were found very close to Kemer, in Kirish. Once I saw a homemade map of the Antalya coast, which indicated sandy and pebble beaches. It would be great to make a detailed description of all the beaches with photos - from Bodrum to Alanya.
Kirish is a kind of Rybakovka, Lazurnoe or Sergeevka in Turkish format. 1.8 kilometers long, one clean street with shops. Behind the mountains, in front - the sea. Kemer behind the mountain, go to the White Tower by dolmush for about 15 minutes. Hotels on the first line, hotels on the second, orange orchards on the sides, local residents somewhere far away.
I also chose a simple hotel - Sailor`s Beach Clab. 4 stars, the only four on the first line. On the left - pretentious Max Royal with the delivery of tourists by helicopter and luxury villas. On the right are five-star Akka Alinda and Alva Donna. The price for a week in Sailors in January is 23.000 UAH. Alva Donna - 44.000, Max Royal - above 170.000. The beach, in fact, is the same everywhere. Oddly enough, reviews of the fives were full of indignant remarks about the sluggishness of the waiters and insufficiently large shrimp. Reviews about Sailors were mostly excellent, and the ratings were high: people rested without any special complaints and were satisfied with everything.
We took off for the first time from the Nikolaev airport. Bukovina is an amazing airline, it doesn't even have its own website. When I saw an ancient Boeing on the field without any company logos, I was horrified. When they entered the salon, in the eyes of the crew meeting the passengers, one could read “here, then, with whom, if anything... ”. However, we were delivered to Turkey and back on schedule, without excesses and lost luggage. It's gone. The day of rest was traditionally "licked off" by Joyne - we arrived at the hotel after dinner, and returned early in the morning.
I was not mistaken in choosing the hotel. The hotel stretched out in a thin line from the main street to the sea and contained in its underground and ground levels the unsuitable: from the hammam to the slides. I have already published a mini-excursion with Sailors:
Pebbles still hindered my mother's normal swims a little anyway. I was rescued by the pier, under which in the mornings fish were teased by the sparkling sides. The water sparkles in the sun, the bottom can be seen several meters deep. The backdrop for all this abundance is the top of Tahtali, wrapped in clouds. In the evenings, from the balcony, the upper platform of the cable car built by the Swiss is like a bright star on the velvet of the sky. Miracle, how good!
All days of rest, 95% Russian-Ukrainian speech sounded around with slight inclusions of Polish, Serbian and German. From time to time there were light verbal clashes on political grounds, but everyone was too lazy to swear, and the wonderful nature reduced the level of adrenaline. The head animator skillfully juggled the Turkish-German-English-Russian vocabulary and tried to mix the teams without differences in the colors of the flags.
Some tourist was unpleasantly surprised, digging up flowers with roots "as a keepsake" from a flower bed in the dark. It was somehow uncomfortable for me to shame from the third floor at night. In the morning, the growling gardener habitually filled in the gaps. It was embarrassing. Me.
In the reviews, everyone praised the food. There were no king prawns and elite wines served by waiters. There were ice cream, delicious cheeses, olives, pastries, snacks, grilled fish and meat, baked in front of pide and gozleme, and so on, so on, so on... The daily change twice a day of 10 hot traditional Turkish dishes in half-meter ceramic bowls looked touching - spicy, with meat, tomatoes, blue ones, in cream and adjika. Yummy! I will modestly keep silent about the dessert table. On the "Turkish evening" I counted 12 types of baklava. Eat a maximum of 2-3. Horror, how insulting.
In October, Sailors is closed for renovations and plans to enter the 2020 season as a "five". Now the hotel does not claim to be a luxury hotel. The restaurant has plastic tables and chairs, and people walk around in simple shorts and dresses. But the atmosphere is absolutely homely and relaxed. This is rest. I would really like that the main feature of the beach hotel-club, which even has its own anthem song in Russian, is not hidden behind the European-style renovation - the feeling of a family vacation.
The Marine Hotel performed a small miracle. On the fourth day of rest, I asked the animator for a plastic stick for water aerobics and began to teach my mother how to swim. The men on the sun loungers smiled and "liked". And she did swim! The next day, the puffing mother crossed the pool on her own - for the first time in her life. Then she swam into the sea! We did not finish our studies before the pier - the vacation was over.
The minimum starting point for prices in Kirishi is a dollar: for hammam towels, cherries, ice cream and magnets. We went on a dolmushe to Kemer. I, as an "experienced tourist", paid 6 lira for two. The driver of the dolmush shamelessly took a dollar from each newcomer without change. This petty scam does not even offend - the resort after all. In Kirishi, for a tiny chocolate bar with pistachios, a young seller asked me for the notorious dollar. To my indignant exclamation “yes, it costs one and a half lira at the most! ” just laughed and shook his finger: “uuu, you knowJ”
We left the hotel at half past four in the morning. We rode in the front seats, admiring Kemer, elegant one-way tunnels, bright road markings and a brilliant scattering of Antalya lights against the backdrop of the brightening White (“Akdeniz”) sea.
. . . At a mandatory stop for all outgoing tourists at a shopping center with indecent prices, our driver did not have time to drink coffee. With a practiced gesture, I put a full glass with almost boiling liquid into the bottle recess and, as usual, went to the airport. The coffee did not spill - the roads are smooth, only speed bumps are felt. I suddenly remembered with pain the nightmarish holes on the roads to Ochakov, Koblevo and Iron Port. It's a shame, but the prices in our seaside hotels caught up with the Turkish ones, but the service remained at the cave level. It's a pity, but when choosing a vacation, I would rather prefer cozy and friendly Turkey to domestic resorts. At least - until you can't take a glass of hot coffee in a car from Nikolaev to Ochakov without the risk of scalding.
