Grand Central Station

We’re now (as of July 31) at our rental house in Dalyan. It’s a villa just outside of the village amongst other rental villas, small hotels and apartments, and local residents. Some maps show Dalyan on the Aegean and others show it on the Mediterranean – it’s right about where the two meet, at the southeast corner of Turkey. Dalyan is on the Dalyan River, which winds its way a few kilometers from the sea to Koyceğiz Lake. The town itself is small and now tourism is its main business so there are many restaurants, villa sales and rental offices, tour operators and boats for hire. While this may not sound very appealing, the village is actually very pretty, clean and charming, with a street right along the river lined with restaurants and boats for hire.

Everywhere in Turkey the people have been extremely friendly, and Dalyan is no exception. In fact, on Saturday, our first full day at the villa, we had no fewer than 7 visitors! Each time we’d settle in for a quiet nap after the stressful work of shopping, cooking, eating and swimming, someone else would stroll up the walk.

Early in the morning, before most of us were up, the pool guy came to start up the filter. He was relatively unobtrusive, and most of us didn’t even know he’d come by. After that the cleaning women came to collect the towels they had left on the line the afternoon before, and to pick up the trash.

Later in the morning a guy from the rental company came by, presumably to give us information about Turkey, the villa, and the region. This was his opening to a sales pitch for the tours that the company offers. We listened politely and sent him on his way.

Next was Charlie’s friend Salim. Charles Bentley own the villa – he’s from England, as are many of the tourists and villa owners in the resort areas of Turkey. Salim told us he was like Charlie’s Turkish brother, and that he owned a restaurant in town should we want to go out for dinner. He first started chatting up Nick, who did a good job of chatting him up right back – he told him, “Sure, if we go out we’ll come by.”

The day before we arrived in Dalyan one of the renters of our villa was involved in a scooter accident. It was pretty serious, and she spent 2 days in the hospital. We had heard various versions of the accident story from the rental office and Charlie. Late in the afternoon a woman strolled up the path – none other than the “Accident Victim” herself. Apparently they left in a hurry, with her husband packing up the house for her and their family while she was in the hospital, and he had left a few things behind. “AV” was out of the hospital now and doing well, but she did have a big bandage on her neck. Her injury was pretty serious – she hit the accelerator instead of the brake and rammed into the back of a truck. Good ‘ole Charlie had helped them find a place to stay for a few days since they couldn’t leave when scheduled. Hearing about her accident cured us of any plans we might have had about renting scooters to get around.

Some time before dinner, the pool guy snuck in again, this time to turn off the filter.

We were laughing over dinner about all the social activity of our quiet day when the most unusual visitor of the day turned up. Dining ‘al fresco’, with some music playing and lots of chatter (we are a group of 15, so we tend to make a lot of noise), we were surprised when a thin, older man strolled up the walk. He spoke virtually no English, but managed to say that he was looking for “the party of his friend.” We explained that this wasn’t a party, but he seemed to want to hang around for a while. When we asked for his friend’s name, he said he didn’t know – at least that was his answer to the question, which we can only assume he didn’t understand. He finally left and we laughed for a very long time about his search for the party for his nameless friend.