We recently took a bike trip to Belarus for Ligo, which caused a break in the Turkey reports. But now I'm more or less back in action, so I'll continue.
Since we couldn't find a campsite on the very first day, we started looking for a hotel in the area near the airport. We didn't succeed immediately, even though the navigator suddenly discovered that his GPS showed “points of interest”, i.e. hotels and such. The moral of the story is – seek out the settings, and ye shall find!
The first hotel we found via GPS had no vacancies. Maybe that was for the best – the hotel looked fancy, even had an aquarium in the lobby. People in suits were scurrying about inside – looks like they were Turks after all. We conveyed our thoughts to the receptionist basically through two guests – one translated from English to German, and the other from German to Turkish. That is if my memory serves me right, which it very well might not.
In the end, we left that place, and found our second shelter called “Ufuk Otel” partly with the help of passers-by on the street. They advised us in English and even Russian – as for me, the help of a very young Turk would have been enough, but my colleagues experience quite understandable xenophobia and a desire to fact-check, so they lingered to listen to the dude speaking Russian. Who, by the way, said the exact same thing – go down and to the right.
