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Our October Viewing Trip - Part One
I am not sure where to put this so I’ll put it here and Merlin (grovel) can move it if he needs to.
I have a tendency to run off at the keyboard so you have been warned. I also try to write to entertain but hopefully there is some actual information amongst the purple prose.
So here is part one of our trip report from our last house hunting trip by way of payback for the information this site freely gives. Please be aware that we are not typical tourists and we don’t often do touristy things and this trip was to find us a property in Turkey so if you want to know where to get the cheapest Efes in Marmaris you won’t find it here – sorry! Also, everything is flavoured by our own particular likes and dislikes, you have to take that into account.
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There is a little silver fiat streaked with red dust sitting outside Bodrum airport. In the last two weeks, with great bravery, it has carried my husband Phil and me 3000 km around the Aegean coast of Turkey on a whirlwind tour to find the perfect property for us. Through mountain passes with dizzying drops and along coast roads with distracting vistas and down into a multitude of villages and resorts each with their own appeal and individual style. It has been a helluva trip! It has been enormous fun and very tiring and we laughed more and were amazed and delighted more than on any other trip before (and we’ve been to some pretty amazing places!).
We are, without a doubt, difficult customers. We have a very specific idea of what we want to buy and the kind of professional we want to work with. We want peace, quiet, views, room to move and above all privacy. We don’t want to be on a complex and we don’t mind building if we have to.
We want to buy but we won’t buy until we find what we really want. As a result of that I seem to spend my entire time in Turkey waiting to fall in love. I adore the countryside and the diversity of the landscape and the food and the people are all charming and the sense of walking through the myths I read as a child is powerfully strong and I so wish I could find that one special place to love. Each day that dawns sees me desperate to fall in love – I feel like Bridget Jones with my biological clock tick tocking away, but in this case it’s my bank balance whining “Fall in love and spend me! You’ll just waste me if you don’t”.
This was our second trip to Turkey, a follow up from a brief recce trip in September that told us this was where we wanted to have our next adventure. This time we hired a car for the whole two weeks and we had a tough itinerary and a willingness to travel if we didn’t find what we were looking for.
We arrived in Milas airport on a cool Monday morning, a very very early Monday morning, 4 hours before dawn and with scattered rain showers pitting the dust of the airport carpark. We collected our car from a sleepy and smiling representative and on an empty fuel tank headed carefully out of the airport looking for the road to Bodrum and the nearest gas station.
We took up our familiar working partnership roles, Phil drives, I map read and on the occasions when we go off route I try and remember the way back because he is focusing on the road. Fortunately I’m pretty good at maps and keeping a sense of direction and space and he is a really good driver and nothing phases him and he has driven a lot on the “wrong side of the road”. Turkey however, is not so good on road signs and every couple of miles it presents you with some wildly distracting view that has us oohing and aahing and wandering precariously close to road edges with no safety barrier.
But I digress….fortunately it was dark and so we weren’t distracted by the views and I remembered the way and within 40 minutes we were in Yalikavak having turned off before Bodrum and taken the coast road through Torba and Gundogan and then down into Yali.
Yalikavak was our base for the next week (apart from a night away in Altinkum) and from here we explored all of the Bodrum peninsula and down the Bay of Gokova as far as Mazi.
We had a flexible schedule of meetings organised but left free days to explore on our own and make new contacts. Every day we started at 9.30 and we viewed houses until late in the afternoon when the quick coming autumn nights drained the light and made it hard to see places.
We looked at houses and building plots, but because of our criteria it was mainly plots that seemed to meet our needs.
In the hillside village of Geris we found beautiful plots of land, steep and wooded and offering amazing views. We saw grey and red squirrels whisking off the road and hopping up the stone walls as the doughty hire car grunted up the gradients and deposited us at plots amongst the pines. At one plot Phil became thoroughly overexcited when he found a tortoise. ”Quick, come here and look before it runs off” he yelled at me! The tortoise gave him a very old fashioned look and didn’t move for ten minutes as Phil described in horrible detail the methods used in his home town to stop tortoises from straying.
At sunset we would drive up to the pass from Yalikavak to Bodrum and sit at the viewing area up there and watch the Greek islands fade to shades of grey and the lights come on along the coast. I would witter on about the beauty of the “the wine dark sea” and Phil would cheerfully call me a very sad geek.
One day we drove to Kizil Agac and met an emlak obsessed with Liverpool Football club. Each day he wears a Liverpool top, short sleeved for summer and long sleeved for winter. He was affable and knowledgeable and we talked of politics and socialism and religion and Turkey’s development as we drove to view plots of land marked out in the ochre earth of the olive groves. He explained how the people of Kizil Agac are wary of overdevelopment and there is a report currently being compiled to recommend the way forward. So building in the area is on hold but he thinks it will be all sorted by August 2006.
We spent two days with our Liverpool fan. He guided us along the old and nearly abandoned Izmir road to Mazi. Carrying enormous folders of permits and maps he had comprehensive details of all the plots on his books and he checked every plot thoroughly before taking it on.
One hot and sunny afternoon as he was trying to guide us to a particularly remote plot we became lost. “Not to worry” he cried, “Stop the car I will ask directions”. Clambering out of the car he energetically popped over a low stone wall and headed across a field. Phil and I took the opportunity for a quick fag break and stood looking around at this empty beautiful landscape studded with mighty trees and granite outcrops. The only sound was the distant sighing wave wash of wind in the pines. There wasn’t a house in sight. There was barely a road. “Who is he going to ask?” I wondered kicking idly at the loose gravel of the road and preparing for a significant wait. Phil turned round, “Her!” he said. Liverpool supporter stood chatting happily to an elderly lady and her goat who had suddenly appeared from behind a large bush. Clearly you are never alone in Turkey. From that point on we felt hidden eyes upon us. We developed a rather ridiculous sense of paranoia!
“I know where it is now” shouted Liverpool supporter cheerfully as he jogged back to the car, “You won’t like it! Lets go to Mazi and have lunch at my favourite beach!”
So we headed off to Mazi and he took us to a hidden cove with a gorgeous terrace restaurant overlooking the Bay of Gokova and we dined on bbq octopus and slivers of sweet creamy white flesh picked off a pile of freshly caught and fried fish. “I come here every Sunday” confided Liverpool fan, “I eat, I drink wine, I sleep there.” He pointed to a stubby dock standing sturdy in the sunlit water. “On Monday mornings I roll off the dock into the water and swim, then I go to work.” Not a bad life I thought.
I gazed out across the Bay at the shadowy and hazy coast across the water. “That is Datca,” confided our friend, “My mother lives there, the road is terrible and they have bears but it is very beautiful and they make good rugs!” He became thoughtful, “I like selling houses but in a few years I will become an antique dealer, I love history, it is my passion.” He looked thoughtfully at us “Would you like to buy a genuine antique ox cart? I can get you one to put in the garden of you new house!”
I loved the Emlaks we met outside of the main tourist areas. They were such individuals and they seemed to be putting more thought into the development of their home areas. They seemed to view the rapid development of complexes, co-operatives and sitesi in other areas with horror. None ever offered us an off-plan development and they were universally friendly and full of information about their area.
We met a most wonderful Emlak in Ciftlik just a few km from Bodrum. A charming, urbane and handsome man (think Tom Conti in Shirley Valentine but with out the moustache and with a slight American accent…..yum!). His enthusiasm and love of the area was obvious. Before we ever looked at a piece of land he was taking us down steep rutted tracks to hidden beaches off the main tourist trail.
Whilst he and Phil talked I clambered on the rocks at the water’s edge and perched on slabs of granite over gin clear water and lost myself in the view and the peace and the quiet. Just a few coves away the tourists from the Sea Garden resort were sipping cocktails and contemplating which activity to turn their all-inclusive bands to next but here was silence and sea and the multi-shaded waters of the Blue Voyage coast. I remember my way back to that cove. I’ll go back there one day to eat white cheese and fresh bread and dream an afternoon away.
The lands we saw that afternoon were wonderful. We viewed a large plot (6000 square metres) on a terraced hillside with views across the valley. “You never know exactly what you are getting until the land is mapped.” Our guide said, “When my land was mapped I lost 500 square metres I thought I owned but gained a 1000 in another direction! You can never be sure of anything until you get the mapping engineer out.”
There was an old house on the plot, semi ruined and ripe for renovation. I was thinking thoughts of turning it into a guesthouse whilst we waiting for the rezoning to allow us to build a new house. Phil was dreaming designs of stone and glass houses wrapped around the hillside and following the terraces. It could have been out of this world. I am very very tempted by that land.
Whilst you could get a permit now to renovate the house, new building is still on hold. It will happen though, the local Mayor is waiting to build his own house and he has quarried stone piled up ready to start. Cut stone cannot be used for building once it has been exposed to the elements for very long so the rezoning will happen or the mayor will have dug half a hillside out for nothing!
As we drove around the area our new friend waved and called greetings to everyone he saw. We gave a lift to an elderly gentleman out collecting walnuts and drove him home. It’s the thing to do when you see someone walking around here. “Everyone is getting ready for winter.” Our friend said, “Everyone is entitled to go into the forest and collect as much dead wood as one donkey can carry.” His love of the area and his connection to the people was apparent and like him we felt protective of them and their way of living.
“They are all millionaires you know” he said, as we dropped off our elderly passenger with his bag of walnuts and walking stick, “I play backgammon with them every Wednesday night and they are all land rich. And now they know it!” He laughed, “Come on, let’s go and have a drink at my house.”
Sunset found us at our new friend’s house, an elegant and timeless stone house built amongst an olive grove overlooking the valley of Ciftlik. Floored with warm orange bricks and mellow pine the house was beautiful. The downstairs was open plan and a gallery on the first floor looked down on the living area and kitchen. We sat on the balcony and ate almonds from his trees and talked about olive oil and property development and building houses and life. He and Phil sipped wine and I drank the best cup of coffee I have had in Turkey. He was easy company and it was fun and we could have stayed all night. But it isn’t fair to stretch a man’s hospitality so we said our goodbyes and he gave me a bar of olive oil soap made from his own olives and we headed back to Yalikavak.
I think we will be going back to Yaliciftlik. It has a wonderful feel about it. It is convenient for Bodrum and the airport and although most land there doesn’t have sea views the mountain views are stunning. Once the rezoning is on its way I’ll be going back there. I still think about that old house we saw, I still think we could do something pretty amazing with it.
The next morning saw us eating an early breakfast on the seafront in Yalikavak. We reviewed our progress so far. I haven’t bored you with the details of all the unsuitable houses we had seen or the maybe houses we had seen, or the few Emlaks I had wanted to throttle, but we had seen a lot and we were 8 days into our trip. The land we had liked in Geris had gone up £20K as soon as we viewed it (go figure) and some days had been a total washout as we were taken long distances to view totally unsuitable properties. Whilst Yalikavak was beautiful it seemed that the kind of place we wanted couldn’t be bought here for our budget. Choices are, raise the budget, change the criteria or move on elsewhere.
I thoughtfully watched a fisherman on the dock smack an octopus the required 40 times on the concrete to tenderise it “Apart from the Ciftlik land there is nothing so far that I want to buy.” I said to Phil.
He agreed, “And anything there is on hold for at least 10 months whilst the rezoning is sorted out.”
We agreed that we couldn’t change the criteria, it is one we have worked with in several countries for several years and we are familiar and comfortable with it. The budget is the budget and we don’t break budgets or there was no point in setting it in the first place.
Time to move on.
I dug the map out of my bag, checked my internet notes and we planned a trip to Dalaman. Half an hour on the web to refresh my tired brain, a couple of emails and we checked out of our hotel and hit the road to Dalaman.
Part Two covers our trip to Dalaman and the area around it.
To Summarise so far:-
Yalikavak – Charming and upmarket and peaceful with a beautiful marina, pleasant small covered bazaar and good restaurants. It is a very easy drive 20 minute drive to Bodrum for all you home shopping needs. The emlaks we met were for the most part patient and tried to help although they tended to want to push you towards off plan complex developments. Choices for properties off the complexes are limited and very pricey. By late October Yalikavak was definitely heading into winter hibernation mode and many hotels were already shut. If I was going to buy in this area it would be in Geris or Gokcebel, amazing views and nice ambience, prices are very high though.
Altinkum/Didim/Akbuk – not our kind of place, roads were appalling, Altinkim itself seemed to consist of only English bars and Emlaks. If pushed I would opt for the areas around Akbuk for scenery but really this isn’t for us and the drive from the airport is too far for what we plan. Good points, there are lots of choice in Emlaks so work the system hard for discount and it really is a buyers market.
Ciftlik/KizilAgac/Yaliciftlik – An amazingly scenic area just a few kilometres from Bodrum. There are several new 5* hotels in the area which bodes well for up market development. Currently the area is being rezoned and building is on hold and already built houses are few and far between. But once the building ban is lifted this place could be a great investment for luxury villas on large plots. Local opinion suggests the rezoning will be completed by end of August next year. Local opinion also suggests that development will be strictly controlled – no big complexes. We were guided to some really beautiful out of the way coves with crystal waters and great views of the islands. I would definitely watch this area.
Thanks for reading
Karyn
Last edited by Karyn UK : 2nd November 2005 at 18:31.
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Ohh i enjoyed that karen!!
, learning all the time. Great read, thanks, Eamonn
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