black hotels

We spend three nights in Alanya. This allows us to soak up some much-needed sunshine and explore the old walled city and fortress on the large hill on a promontory jutting out into the sea.  It is a naturally defensive position and down below in the shelter of the promontory there was a shipyard for the first Ottoman emperors.  There are still a few old homes built on the steep slopes and within the walls, but the city has now grown all around the foot of the hill and along the beach.  We're happy to rest up and get some proper sleep after three fitful nights in the tent.  The weather forecast is not so great, and as Gayle is still feeling rough we decide to delay departing.  It's a flattish ride up to Antalya from here so it shouldn't be too strenuous.
   

looking down on the harbour

Departing the city leads us along a bizarre stretch of coast littered, I use the word precisely, with large hotels.  As on the approach to Alanya, the sea is on one side of the highway whilst the majority of hotels are on the other. They are lined up side by side on what would have been rather lovely farmland once upon a time.  There is nothing else around apart from these hotels, no villages or towns.  They are quite isolated.   A lot of the hotels look forlorn and abandoned.  Some look brand new.  All look rather large and ugly.  There are pedestrian underpasses to reach the beach - a thin strip of sand.  The underpasses are clogged with sand and debris.  None of it looks used.  It's only later, whilst reading a not-so-thrilling thriller about Russian money-laundering that I come across a description of 'black hotels'.  Big fancy hotels built with 'dirty' money and the hotels are then 'fully-booked' for the next five or six years.  The hotel takings add up in the hotel bank account and are thus laundered.  The Turkish government has been pushing construction because it employs a lot of people.  Recently it lowered the financial qualifications to allow foreigners to gain residency because foreigners are driving construction.  Thus Turkey is despoiling its natural beauty, concreting and building structures that then stand abandoned and disused.

After finally escaping this horror we meet an old friend.  The black rain clouds we could see ahead are finally upon us.  Stopping at a petrol station for a picnic lunch under a shelter (and availing ourselves of the obligatory free tea which the establishment offers to passing, ahem, motorists followed by use of the facilities as demanded by the intake of said tea), we meet a Basque couple and their dog, on bikes.  Well, their dog has a trailer but prefers to run.  They have cycled (and run) across to Tajikistan and back.  We huddle up out of the rain to chat and eat before setting off again.  The couple were asking to camp behind petrol stations and were often then invited into spare rooms to sleep.  It's something we haven't tried yet.  We pass them after their dog stops for a swim in a flooded ditch and we don't see them again.  This is because we're heading to Side, a minor detour.

Sorry I can't remeber your names - but you seemed to have an indomitable spirit