Today we really took our time and didn’t leave the hotel until 1100hrs which was unusual. This was partly because I knew that the next stop for lunch was to be Side, a recommended village to be visited and not too far on our way to the east of Antalya. I even took my time driving there not knowing what to expect.

After taking the turning off to Side we had to drive in towards “Sehir Merkezi”, that’s town centre by the way not a town’s name as I thought when I first saw the sign. There were too many such sign it had to dawn on me, that it meant something other than a name of a town. Without any warning we came across the ruins of Side, the “Pomegranate Paradise” as it is locally known.

We first walked down to the marina and it was just another touristy town we thought, Half of the rows of shops were selling Turkish made jewelry, although some were closed because of the “Byram” holidays related to Eidil Adha. The other half were restaurants inviting people in with all kind of ruse one could think of, even cutting the menu price down by 30%.

As we were contemplating on leaving, Adrian confronted who I thought was an old man, (as it turned out he was only 55), a Mr Sevchef and got into conversation with him. He told us that we could have a better view of the ruins and we followed hi through the overgrown path and true enough we had a fantastic view. Sevchef was puffing and panting away climbing up the sand dunes and I thought he was in a much worse shape than I was. Sevchef explained to us that the theatre was different from others in that it was not built against a hill background but on pillars resembling elephant’s hoofs. Thereafter he just led us to wherever it fancied him and showed us the motif designs on some of the pillars which were based on “ivy” and another plant locally found,

We had to have a drink and that was when Adrian discovered he had lost some of the toy snakes I bought him earlier. He cried and cried even after being pacified by the owner of the cafe giving him a Spiderman toy, that I had to get up and marched him back to the ruins in search of the snakes. We did manage to find two out of the three he had dropped and he was quite happy to go back to the café then.

Our final stop was the temple of Apollo and Athena, part of which was standing proudly. By this time everyone was knackered and as Alison had told me that Sevchef had asked for some money while I was away hunting for Adrain’s snakes, we parted company giving him a 20 Euros, more out of pity than anything as I could have insisted on 10 Euros.

The “otopark” was a rip off but then all touristy towns are. The attendant didn’t give a receipt which we could have insisted on, but then again it’s no use arguing and probably depriving him of a side income.

Alison suggested that we stopped somewhere along the way if we found a hotel but most of them were closed and the one we stopped at had a full house and it was 5 stars anyway. We drove into Alanya and stopped at the first hotel we saw, Cleopatra Paradise and after some bargaining agreed on 80 YTL with breakfast. Just to make sure we were not conned we made a survey before checking in and most of the hotels had a half-board package which we didn’t want.

After checking in we went in search for dinner as we didn’t have lunch and ended up at Laponia hotel restaurant. Obviously someone had seen us when we drove in as right after dinner a lot of questions were thrown at us regarding our expedition by a couple Huseyin and Meral with Mahmut acting as interpreter. We were glad we chose the right place to have dinner as they gave us a complimentary dish of fruits as well for desert and found the true hospitality of Turkey.