Arrival in Antalya

As I turned and left the terminal building, the wet, musty summer’s air clung to my skin. My feet struck stones on the burnt tarmac, as I brushed off the cacophony of drivers and touts clamouring to make my business theirs.

I had decided to begin my jaunt across Turkey from Antalya for various reasons. The city had promised, through various guidebooks, at once an echo of the crusades, with its mix of Christian and Islamic architecture, the beauty of the lone minaret rising against the lustrous turquoise sea, with lush, green mountains echoing in the background.

But this seemed different. Somehow, more modern than I had expected. Foreign, certainly. Of course, beautiful, but, in the flesh, altogether without that veneer of other-worldliness that guide book photographers make us think that all foreign lands possess, as if, by virtue of the distance a camera creates, smoothing over the rough edges and contrasts that can hold the most beauty for the visitor.

Finally, the bus pulled away from the terminal building, and into the shimmering evening air beyond. The man next to me flicked through his I-pod to the next song, and an attractive, dark curly-haired girl sighed and fidgeted a little in her seat in front of me.

I slowly acclimatised to the foreignness of it all. The main boulevard stretched out in front of us, filled with battered old saloon cars. The outline of modern shopping malls mixed with the tall minarets on the horizon. Fields of maize stood behind rickety fences, and tumbledown houses, with old, abandoned cars, in weedy yards.

A middle aged man, just outside, pulled a cart laden with scrap metal, as the bus honked shrilly, at him to get out of the way. My attention turned to my fellow passengers: The men, mostly young, their hair cut fashionably into mullet-like cock’s-combs teased with wax, sporting tight fitting t-shirts and sun glasses, the women, young, modern and fashionably dressed, mostly, with a smattering of headscarves on a couple of middle-aged ladies at the back.

Rounding a corner, between park and mosque, and surrounded by taxis hovering like bees around a flower, a lone clock tower stood proudly, atop a crumbling vestige of Seljuk masonry, as if a guardian of the city’s long and illustrious heritage. Narrow, cobblestone lanes wound down towards an aquamarine harbour, far below us, flanked by ancient wood and plaster Ottoman mansions.

The smell of beautifully cooked kebabs, mixed with just a hint of sumac, filled my nostrils as we turned just past the Doner seller’s market.

My eyes were drawn to a crowd of men drinking tea on a veranda, in the shadow of Antalya’s lone minaret. Time seemed to stand still, as I drank in the heady atmosphere in the sunny twilight. The sun went down, and the call to prayer made its ghostly, yet uplifting echo, off cobblestones and the closing doors of tradesmen’s shops, as I exited the bus, my first, atmospheric evening in a city hitherto unknown.