HOLIDAY. That's what I said to myself several months ago amongst a flurry of self-help remedies to cure my ongoing therapy-requiring levels of apathy. And my chums, ever the delights that they are, heeded my existential cry for help and offered me a week's vacation in sunny, sunny Turkey! Marmaris, to be precise. The gateway to the 9th Circle of Hell itself to be too precise.
Being Scottish, I react to the sun in the same way that Don Quixote reacts to renewable energy sources. I see the sun, and if I'm in it's presence for more than 30 minutes, I turn to the Dark Side and declare a blood-thirsty vengeance on all that is good with the world. I break into feverish sweats, screaming incomprehensible strings of consonants and flinging poo at citizens who are understandably caught off guard. I just can't deal with it. I'm 4/16ths Inuit, and thus perform better in cold situations where the snow blasts into my face sideways. I, however, was not aware of this trait when I accepted the offer of Turkey. And now that I have returned, I offer to you an account of my seven days in the sun. Cue Feeder.
Arrival
It was, of course, a package holiday, and therefore I had many, many reservations
in my mind. Package holidays just conjure up images of cheapness and poor maintenance. Y'know, the sort of stuff you would see on
Holidays From Hell. And so the entire holiday, before it had even began, had a damper placed on it. A 600ft wide damper made of JML Magic Erasers and Garnier Ambre Solair.
I'm not sure if you can count this as "a day" as such, as we arrived at 9:45pm, so the eight of us were greeted with the splendorous sight of fuck all bathing in 26°C. Yes, twenty six cocking degrees Celcius at quarter to ten at night. I looked back to make sure the aeroplane hadn't turned around and was now blasting it's white-hot engines through the airport terminal roasting the denizens of Dalaman like little Turkish peanuts. It were a Thompson holiday, it were, so we were greeted outside by numerous Englishmen and women, all tanned and all possessing camp qualities and/or a smoker's vernacular. Two and a half hour bus journey (where upon the holiday rep welcomed us into Turkey by reminding us all that the country is military-controlled and near to a current war zone. Comforting buggers), check into the surprisingly good quality Club Candan and put to rest our weary heads for the night.
Only to be woken up again four hours later by Allah.
Well, a mosque to be more precise. I really don't mean to cause offence, but when I am woken at five in the morning by EXTREMELY LOUD foreign yellings amidst double-figure temperatures, relatively near a current war zone, and coming from a dome that appeared out of bloody nowhere (it was dark when we arrived, mind), my survival instinct kick-started itself after years of remission and I bolted upright, preparing myself to grab the ration book and duck under the Anderson shelter. I injected some mental Valium when I looked outside and saw the preposterously large blue tower, mocking me in the morning sun with it's glinting conical eye.
I told it to fuck off and went back to sleep.
Day One
And so the glory of Marmaris was unveiled to us in all it's British-endorsed splendour. The whole view from the balcony (yes, a balcony. I have never known such luxury. What a contemporary fag I am) was akin to a slightly drunken belly-dancer: wonderful, tingling and perhaps even graceful, but disappointingly bland and there's a incessant worry that she might fall over if you cough too hard in her direction.
I glanced downwards to a sorry sight indeed. Amongst all the noise and commotion of the swimming pool was more inked skin than a biker's carnival. It's hard to tell retrospectively, but I swear that at least 80% of the women down by the pool had those God-awful tramp stamp tattoos. You know the ones I mean. Those tribal patterns that are sprawled across the lower back, sometimes with the majority of the design hidden under the bikini like a tiny, slutty iceberg. In the XY department, things weren't much better. One particularly swarthy northern punter had "ETHAN" pretentiously scrawled across shoulder blades in tall, Gothic lettering. Well done, Ethan. I have seen you for literally one second and I'm fairly certain I know everything about you. Day consisted of arsing about on the balcony trying to ignore the topless women for the sake of keeping my libido at bay.
Day Two
More sun. More money spent on water and carbonated beverages. More arsing about ignoring all the boobs. One delightful young lady had obviously poured a lot of money into two, rather large investments perched on her chest like a pair of scarred footballs and was fully intent on showing her new found courage to the world. In front of children and strangers with holes in their pockets.
Night time, and the eight of us went out for a surprisingly enjoyable meal! One of the benefits of tourism being the numero uno source of income for this part of Turkey is that waiters are forced to be extra friendly so as not to scare us away back to our setts. This, however, got slightly out of hand when one of my friends started dancing to Turkish electronica with two of the waiters who were on shift that night. And strobe lights, too, turning everything into a sort of 1920's surrealist post-modern silent film starring a time-traveller and his quest to sample new and futuristic cultures.
Day Three
This is where I really began to notice the heat. I know I previously mentioned that I take to sun like an Alka-Selzter takes to lemonade. But I was genuinely enjoying the heat! It was a lovely change to the fuck-your-toes attitude of Scottish weather that I'm oh-so-very used to. But on the third day, I began to believe I was being punished. I speculated that, as a child, I once performed some extremely explicit and lewd acts in front of the weather, who was justifiably repulsed by my sexy endeavours. And now the weather has seen it fit to punish me by placing me outside of my comfort zone for as long as it can manage. The bastard. What a massive bastard he is.
Day Four
It was time for some proper holidayin'. The Thompson reps, as played by the cast of
Educating Rita, were so kind as to offer us a scuba diving trip in the Mediterranean! "Wow!" I thought, "This shall surely be interesting!". And right I was correct. After a distressing boat ride where a Dutch man told me that he liked me because I was wearing an especially orange t-shirt, we arrived at our first diving spot. And fucking hell, I have never seen water so blue. It was like swimming in an ocean of Powerade.
When the boat was still enough, I could see right down to the bottom of the shore! Fish! Rocks! Plants! Other typical ocean-y things! This was what I had come to Turkey for! After a few brief lessons in how to avoid danger from the deep blue, we were told to fall forward on onto our faces (which didn't sound especially professional), and that's when it kicked in. At that point, everything went wrong. My mask got too tight around my nose, causing pain and making me sound like Janice from
Friends, but paradoxically became too loose around other areas, and salty sea water started trickling in through my mask. I had trouble breathing. I was splashing around underwater. And I had one thought going through my mind: "THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME!". Literally the only thing I could think of was, "I am going to drown in the Mediterranean and I do not care.". I couldn't think of a better place to drown! It's next to all the good countries like Italy and Spain! Perhaps my body will wash up on one of these shores and I'll slowly rot away, my minerals returning to earth, whereupon I will fertilise the vineyards of Italy and make lovely wine. People all over the world will be drinking parts of me!
But no. Some Australian bloke (and I really mean Australian. He looked like an animated illustration of an Australian as drawn by a child: short-ish, whispy blonde hair, streamlined orange-lens sunglasses, wet-suit and pecs that stuck out further than his nose) dragged me back up to the surface before I could start making
vino lewisio and sorted
out everything that was wrong with my scuba gear. He threw me underwater again and everything worked like a charm. I couldn't complain, I suppose.
The second dive was a separate affair. Instead of falling face-first into the water like a Chuckle Brother being hit with a comically over-sized tranquilliser dart, we were expected to step forward off of the boat in a totally underwater professional way like what you see in the movies n' shit. So I complied, jumped off, and the exact same thing started happening! But only in my mind. I had visions of every part of my scuba gear failing. The mouthpiece falling apart; the tank bursting; the mask cracking. EVERYTHING WAS GOING WRONG AND THERE WAS NOTHING I COULD DO ABOUT IT. Except it wasn't. I panicked and flopped back up on deck like a salmon. It was when I was recuperating that I figured out what was wrong: I looked overboard and just saw murky blue. I looked around the boat and just saw the horizon. There were no edges. No bottoms, no tops, no sides. It was a massive open body of water. I had, at that very moment, diagnosed myself. I have agoraphobia, or a fear of open spaces. I can deal with open spaces on land, mind. But when I was in the ocean, the sense of fear I got when I looked down and saw no bottom was so overwhelming that my mind when into overdrive and started to imagine every possibly worst-case scenario. As you can imagine, I decided to sit the second dive out knowing that discovering and curing a phobia on the same day is unprecedented and thus totally not possible! Still, the first trip was well good.
Day Five
Another epiphany day.We had booked a trip to a local water park, dubiously titled 'Aqua Dream Water Park', which sounded like something a 13-year boy would called their creation on
The Sims. This was the day that the whole "package holiday" notion really set in. I had just snaked down one of the slides at pant-wetting speeds, when I flicked my head up from under the water and took a look around. More tramp stamps. More bloody Gothic typographic tattoos. Fat, middle-aged men with vest-shaped tan lines. Bleach-blonde babes with conspicuous chest enlargements. Oh God. I had hit the singularity. My reservations had reached critical mass and all my enjoyment was being sucked out of me at a worrying rate, unhindered by the one massive thought that was flashing inside my head, beaming in neon pink lettering with a fluorescent flamingo under a palm tree.
I was trapped inside a perpetual episode of
Benidorm.
The signs were everywhere, and oh so obvious! But I couldn't see it because I was too inclined to have fun! Oh, what a fool I was! I ordered a Coke and read Russel Brand's autobiography to sooth me. Which didn't help in any way, shape or form.
Day Six
This, again, was another arse about on the balcony day. By midday, the screaming of people down by the pool got to me and I had to retreat inside and watch Scuzz for the rest of the day. I couldn't deal with all those semi-erotic fuckspawns euphemistically rubbing their wet hands down the shafts of their pseudo-sexualised water pistols, jizzing fountains of hot aquatic fun over the faces of their unsuspecting friends as they open their mouths to...to...
Sorry, I got a bit carried away there.
Day Seven
Way-hay! Final day! This largely consisted of me moaning about the heat and dry-humping the sand in order to quell my boredom. Still, the boat trip was nice. I got hear the story of somebody long ago who did something of quite some importance, but I couldn't pay attention for long enough to tell you who or what it is, because our tour guide was the physical manifestation of Microsoft Sam with a megaphone.
-- --
So that's basically Turkey. Obviously, my cynicism leads to this post being a bit skewed towards the negative. I thoroughly recommend it if you're one of those bellends who, upon the arrival of a family member who has been away to a sunny country for a week or two, believes that the most appropriate request is "LET'S SEE YOUR TAN!", as though how brown you are honestly depends on how good your holiday is. Go ahead and book a ticket, you idiot.
