Turkey, the perfect place to escape the apocalypse

By Vicki Woods

8:36PM BST 09 Sep 2011

Since I have to cross the Atlantic several times a year for my other job, I try not to step on an aeroplane unless someone’s paying me to travel. We staycate, mostly. On canal boats or in villas close enough to drive to (Brittany, Lot-et-Garonne).

Since the dread day of infamy that is commemorated tomorrow, all the soaring excitement one used to feel when pulling into Heathrow has totally gone. Can’t be just me who resents the pouring away of liquids: there’s always one stupidly expensive unguent I’ve forgotten to decant.

But this year, I badly wanted to get outta here. Out of the eurozone, out of the Anglosphere. Especially now. The post-apocalyptic public discourse is a) draining and b) inaccessible to the fiscally illiterate. Was Gordon Brown right all along? Search me. Should Alistair Darling now be Chancellor? Lord knows. Are European banks more perilously “extended” than American banks? Dunno. I just know I’ve had it with Merkel and Sarkozy.

I saw a picture of the Blue Mosque and my heart leapt. Istanbul is one of those place names, like Acapulco or Montego Bay or Casablanca, that resonate magically. I’d never been (astonishing at my age). Why? I kept asking myself, as I leaned out from the hotel terrace in Sultanahmet, looking at blue-black plums growing thickly below and hearing a trickling fountain in the garden. We were between Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, both of which I’d only ever seen in books.

We booked it in euros: 230 euros a night, bed and breakfast, with 10 per cent off for cash. They would arrange airport pick-up for 25 euros, also 10 per cent off for cash. I find very few monetary transactions more satisfactory than when somebody says: “That’ll be a hundred, then – ooh – you’ve got notes? Call it 90.” We didn’t pay in euros, though. We paid in Turkish lira, because they’re a better deal. While Greece is in the eurozone, Turkey is not. I’m not saying Turkey should be in the eurozone, because I have no idea about whether or not it meets anybody’s Five Tests. I’m just saying that Istanbul is a fabulous city that works brilliantly in many ways that Athens does not.

What I liked was being somewhere that works of itself and for itself. The little café garden in an old medresi near the Grand Bazaar is packed with old Turkish gentlemen smoking nargile in a country that has banned smoking inside all public areas. (The old chaps are “outside”.) I liked the young woman inside the Blue Mosque handing a shawl to someone and telling her to cover her arms. (Not her head.)

I liked seeing whacking great ships at anchor in the Sea of Marmara, all along the road from the airport, and I really liked chugging up the Bosphorus in a tourist ferry, passing Russian oil tankers close enough to spit plum stones at. It’s thrilling to be somewhere that connects the Mediterranean with the Black Sea. Out of 150 million tons of cargo passing through the straits each year, 100 million tons are oil.

“They want to move the port, though, the government,” said an Istanbul native at my hotel. She said there were plans to cut a ship canal east of the city to replace the Bosphorus as the main route from the Black Sea. “They would close down the port at Eminönü so you wouldn’t have the big boats anchored there any more. It would free up a lot of land.”

She put on an expression that invited the question, so I asked it: free up a lot of land for what, exactly? “Houses,” she said, “for very rich people, who like big gardens and wonderful views. And moorings for their yachts.”

via Turkey, the perfect place to escape the apocalypse – Telegraph.