Turkey from a chopper: from major to minor.

Flying around in a helicopter is always a pleasure; flying around in a helicopter in the fall – along a shoreline, in clement weather – that pleasure is multiplied several-fold. And that includes down in sunny Turkey…

Oh my glorious!

The small islands you see are also rather stunning viewed from up above:

Multiplied viewing pleasure, like I say. But then…

Then, suddenly, the pretty scenes turn into very ugly – lifeless – ones…

…The result of the Turkish wildfires this summer.

The black you see – that’s forest that’s completely burned up. The brown – trees that have died as a result of the fires.

An eerie, terrible sight to behold…

In these tricky times, it just wouldn’t be right to end a post on a minor note. Therefore, for dessert, some aerial pics of the town of Dalyan and its surroundings – mercifully spared in the wildfires:

Here’s the delta of the Dalyan river:

But the weather was taking a swift turn for the worse: dark clouds, and even thunder and lightning ->

Oh no – minor chords creeping in again. So, I’ll brighten things up, I hope, with a few questions I genuinely would like to learn the answers to!…

In and around the port city of Bodrum – where we spent a few days on various business matters this week – there are practically no long beaches, unlike, say, in Antalya. Hand in hand with that – there are also no large hotels there either (if there were, there’d be daily stampedes of tourists on the tiny beaches). Bodrum only seems to feature boutique hotels, which are always just one to two (sometimes three) stories high, as are the bungalows in villages there. Like I say – small hotels, the thinnest, shortest of beaches:

Our hotel didn’t have a beach – as in, with sand – at all. Just a strip of wooden path or some such. It was also nearly a kilometer to get to! Still, our villa was nice – nothing fancy, but perfectly adequate:

In holiday villas such as these by near the sea, there’s normally a rear garden-cum-yard. It’s walled off, but inside the wall there are no flowerbeds, no lawn, and no yard. Instead there’s a bunch of rocks. And it looks like walking in among them of an evening to wind down after a long hard day at the beach isn’t part of the plan. My question: what are these ‘rock yards’ all about? What’s the story, rocky glory?

Am I missing something? Some feature of Bodrum’s holiday villas that seems to have simply, oddly, passed me by? Come on folks – help me out here!

Ok. That’s all for one day from Turkey. But I’ll be back with more soon – with only major notes: guaranteed!…

The rest of the photos from Turkey are here.