KUSADASI: TRAVELLER HINTS AND TIPS
Getting There
Fly to Adnan Menderes Airport in Izmir direct from Manchester or via Istanbul from Stansted. Pegasus and Easyjet do cheap flights. From the airport, get a taxi through dense, choking urban sprawl to Izmir bus station. From there, Pamukkale run a regular and reliable coach service to Kusadasi which only costs 10 TL and includes free tea, coffee, fruit juice, cake and ice cream served by young men wearing bow ties. You also whizz past the magnificent ancient ruins of Ephesus en route, which saves going back later.
Where to Stay
This is not difficult. There are hotels everywhere. You can almost walk right out of the bus station and straight into a hotel. They all have pools and bars and beds and balconies. Apart from that, does it really matter where you stay?
Cuisine
Kusadasi has a lot of established restaurants and cafes that serve authentic ethnic cuisine, such as the All Day English Breakfast and the All Day Irish Breakfast. Famed joints like the Oasis Café of Ladies Beach or the Star Beach Café of Long Beach are justly proud of their carefully sourced ingredients – including Heinz baked beans, Lyons tea and Flora margarine.
I can recommend an evening meal at Toros, Kusadasi’s oldest restaurant (est. 1894) attractively located on the harbor front overlooking fishing boats and water. I ordered a great big chicken schnitzel that had an intense radioactive orange glow and was delicious with four bottles of Efes lager. My companion ordered a Hawaiian pizza that had a base as thick as a cushion and was studded with pineapple chunks that looked like gem stones. You can also order spaghetti Bolognese, lasagna, and various different types of burger, all served with chips or rice, gherkins and meaty tomatoes. There was a poetic atmosphere here, as the warm late-summer breeze drifted in from the sea and stray harbor cats surrounded our table and stared at us with haunting, hollow, hungry eyes.
Booze
Everybody in Kusadasi drinks Efes lager (apart from Turkish people, who drink tea all day instead of working). It is like a watered-down, metallic-tasting Peroni and after a couple of days you can drink it without wincing. It is safer than water and FAR safer than the toxic Turkish wine which is even worse than its Bulgarian neighbor. Guinness is widely available on Bar Street which is, yes, a street lined with raucous Irish bars. However, nobody actually drinks Guinness on Bar Street because it is too expensive. Instead, the hordes arrive at 11pm, already hammered and ready to pole dance, pogo, fight and vomit. This is the time you should leave.
Tourists
Cruise ships arrive daily and deposit their cargo in the Scala Nuova shopping centre where cruisers go to buy clothes and drink coffee in clean, air-conditioned shops and cafes for a few hours before fucking off to Egypt or Italy. But there are loyal visitors who return to the resort for long periods every year, such as the German septuagenarians who perform Strength through Joy exercises along Ladies Beach or the splendid young Baltic girls pioneering the perfect natural all-over body tan. However, the main tribes belong to Essex and Ireland, an annual joint invasion force of tattooed, chain-smoking, sun-stroked, Ephesus-avoiding Karaoke reptiles with Efes lager running through their veins and bodies built out of All Day Breakfasts. They are penned into Bar Street between the hours of 11pm-4am; outside of these times you will find them stranded on plastic recliners or buying fake football shirts from street stalls.
Smooching
British girls have an easy time in Kusadasi, particularly along Ladies Beach which is packed with young Turkish studs lining up for the Turkey Shoot. For chaps it is more complex – not because the Turkish girls are more modest than their western counterparts, but because they aren’t, which confuses the issue. Treat kissing as a matter of marriage or death, or choose a different nationality. This leaves you with German women who are no longer the nubile MILFS of their younger years, and the splendid Baltic babes who cannot be prized from their militant tanning regimes and never come out at night.
Sites of Interest
Ephesus looked magnificent from the window of the coach but you can also get taxis and buses there from the resort and go and stand beneath the large ruined exterior of the library. This had an underground tunnel that led to a brothel, which was quite an innovation. Pigeon Island is an abandoned military fort with no pigeons on it, but splendid views across the Aegean. Various mosques are good for soothing hangovers. You can take a boat trip to the Greek island of Samos which is the large rock formation visible from Ladies Beach, although it is worth remembering that the Turks and Greeks are still tetchy about various bits of contested rubble along the Aegean coastline. Turkey seems to be having quarrels of varying importance and intensity along all of its borders and this is entirely the fault of the abutting nations rather than any Ottomans or Ataturk according to every Turk you speak to.
There are no sharks in the Aegean and no tidal range – consequently, no exciting shark dives or seaweed to cook or shells to collect. There are dusty house sparrows and pigeons of various shades. I heard tales of bears and vultures at a local nature reserve but then I also heard tales of Kurdish gorillas and Syrian vipers and saw none of these things. The only exciting wildlife I glimpsed was the Irish on Bar Street.
Conclusion
Go somewhere else – maybe Aleppo.