Agylen

Here’s a list of the hotels we stayed at during our recent trip to Turkey, together with some recommendations.

• Faros Hotel, Istanbul. Conveniently located in the center of old Istanbul, a short walk from all major tourist attractions. Small and cozy, with newly renovated and elegant rooms. Can be a bit noisy, being situated on a very popular street, Divan Yolu Caddesi, so you need to keep windows closed if you like a quiet environment. We were initially not very happy with the quality of breakfast, but learned later that finding a good breakfast at a Turkish hotel is harder than we imagined. Recommended.
• Uçhisar Kaya Hotel, Uçhisar. Location is simply incredible, sitting atop Cappadocia’s Pigeon Valley. All rooms have a valley view. It’s got a nice pool and a spa with sauna and turkish bath. Rooms are adequate for two people but become cramped from families who need a third bed for a child, like us. Having recently been bought by a Japanese company, it tends to be full of throngs of Japanese tourists, which is not a bad thing in itself, but is probably the reason why they only offer half boarding and not B&B. Given the mediocre quality of the buffet restaurant, if you can convince them to give you B&B accomodation, you’ll be able to find better and more varied food in one of the many restaurants in the area.
• Ali’s Pension, Egirdir. We didn’t have many expectations about the hotel, but Egirdir looked like a nice place and it was just in the right place, allowing us to split a long transfer into two stages. It also had a good review on our Routard guide and was the only establishment who apparently offered a way to contact them via email, so we settled for it. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a big mistake as things started to turn sour upon our arrival, when the manager told us the pension was full and she had moved us to his brother’s pension (named “Choo Choo Pension”). Since Ali’s Pension is not exactly the Ritz, we only had a night to spend in Egirdir, and the other pension looked rather similar to Ali’s, we didn’t complain too much. The next surprise came when they told us they only had 4 rooms, instead of the 5 they had confirmed in writing, with a total of 14 beds instead of the 15 required. After some negotiations, they found a double room at Ali’s, so everything seemed to be more or less satisfactory for us, until we discovered that there was no running water in the bathrooms, but by then it was already after dinner and too late to scout the town, looking for accomodation. To add insult to injury, when we checked out the morning after, they asked us to pay for the fifth room, even though they had agreed in writing to the number of rooms and the total price. Unbelievable! They obviously knew there was no water at Choo Choo’s, as it had been missing for many hours already, so I suspect they moved people from there to our reserved rooms at Ali’s (which had running water) and then, instead of apologizing, they wanted us to pay more for the privilege! I’ve never experienced such a behavior, so I want to state it very clearly and loudly here, hoping that people looking for lodging in Egirdir via Google will take note: The owners of Ali’s Pension in Egirdir, Turkey are a bunch of dishonest, lying scumbags. Avoid Ali’s and Choo Choo pensions at all costs! You’ve been warned.
• Venus Hotel, Pamukkale. After our bad experience in Egirdir, we were a bit suspicious about the Venus, but I must say that our fears were totally unfounded. To put it simply, what we found there was the best hospitality we had in all of Turkey. Katryn and Ibrahim, the owners, geve us a very warm welcome and were very friendly and kindly responded to all our requests. Katryn is Australian and is very cheerful and open, whereas Ibrahim, a Turkish guy with a burly face and mustache, can seem a bit shady at times, but it’s just a façade that hides a very friendly person. The hotel is pretty, rooms have recently been renovated, it’s got a pool and dinner is nice. On top of it, it cost us just 198€ for seven rooms (dinner aside), which is incredibly cheap. I would give it five stars, were it not for the fact that bathroom furniture in our room badly needed renewing, as it compared unfavorably to the rest of the room. Overall, I highly recommend Venus Hotel to anyone wanting to visit Pamukkale.
• Kale Han Hotel, Selçuk. Conveniently located along Selçuk’s main road, it is a hotel which tries to have some kind of “country” style but ends just looking a bit dilapidated. Not despicable overall, with a garden and a swimming pool, but avoid its restaurant and have dinner at the Istanbul Pide Salonu just 100m farther down the road (recommended by Enrico).
• Pirat Hotel, Kalkan. Shiny on the outside, rotten inside. Well, maybe not rotten but certainly disappointing. To start with, the location is splendid, right atop the marina of Kalkan, possibly the nicest seaside town in all of Turkey’s Lycian coast. It’s architecture is pretty, being made of an agglomerate of smallish, two-storey blocks all of which front the seaside (this refers to the so called “Pirat 2″, whereas the “Pirat 1″, just across the street, is an anonymous building). Unfortunately the room furniture is very cheap and there are no shades on the windows, just white cloths, which can be a problem in the morning, considering all the rooms face east. The pool is OK, aside from being infested, when we were there, by a group of British families with teen-age kids, who obviously thought that spending the day pool-side instead of going to one of the many splendid beaches along the coast was the right thing to do, and in any case it closes at 7PM because the restaurant has tables around it and it opens at that time. Speaking of the restaurant, breakfast was the worst we had and if you want fresh orange juice or an omelette, you have to shell out 3.5 YTL (about 2€). We didn’t try having dinner there, which seemed silly, as the town is full of restaurants, many of them quite good. I especially recommend the Aubergine Patlican: Absolutely excellent food at a decent price (just remember that portions are so large that you can feed two people on a single main course), though they should start presenting a real wine list.
• Marina Residence, Antalya. Not much to say, as we came in late and checked out early in the morning. It’s got a lot of charme, and the breakfast is the best we had, so I can definitely recommend it, even though the A/C in our room was broken and they agreed to move us to another room only after I insisted a bit.

Sunset in the desert

Originally uploaded by Ugo Cei.

We just got back home from Morocco, where we had a wonderful time and saw some truly incredible places. The eyes are still brimming with the colors of a magic country (you can see some of them here).

I also managed to survive driving through the traffic of Marrakesh, which is quite a feat in itself.

Firing up my email reader yesterday night I was greeted by a slew of work-related news, about which I’ll probably write later, but not now.