Our Turkish Lullaby

Chris and I have done a lot of travelling together over the years; Australia, Norway, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Hong Kong, Latvia, Germany, Switzerland… but we realised when we started talking about what to do for our summer holiday this year that we have never had a relaxing, warm beach holiday together. The closest we’d gotten to that was taking Chris’ mum to the Gold Coast back in 2002. Not always the most romantic trip when someone’s mum is along for the ride.

So this year we started looking at resort holidays in places like Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Croatia and all the other warm European destinations. There were so many to choose from we just didn’t know where to start. Overall, Turkey seemed to offer the most for our money, so we chose that as a destination almost right away. But there are just SO many resorts and hotels, how does one choose? So we took the scientific approach; we went to the Ving website (a Scandinavian charter tour company), clicked on Turkey and the dates we wanted, and clicked on… well basically the first thing that had a nice looking photo. What did we find? The Barut Hemera Spa and Resort in Side, in the Alanya region. We booked pretty much right then and there.

Oh how little we knew about how lucky we were! I had read a few positive reviews on the Ving site, and we were happy to go ahead and book, but it was only after our booking that I started reading TripAdvisor reviews. “Glowing” doesn’t begin to describe!

People were coming back to Hemera year after year, booking their next holiday there as soon as they returned home! The photos looked amazing, the reviews were outstanding… it all sounded too good to be true. But it wasn’t. Our 2009 trip to the Hemera resort was hands-down the BEST holiday I’ve ever had. Ever.

We were there for two weeks, and every minute was pure luxury. As an all-inclusive resort, we could eat and drink as much as we wanted, all day long, every day. We divided our time fairly evenly between lying by the pool, swimming in the pool, lying by the beach, swimming in the sea and eating and drinking to our hearts’ content. Those of you who think this would get boring after a while, please hear me when I say IT DOESN’T! In fact, it becomes easier to relax every day.

We read books, we walked along the beach, we talked, we played in the water (which was between 25-29°C most of the time, both in the sea and the pool), and I think we only actually left the resort three times. Once to look at the little resort town of Side, once to get some money from the ATM across the street (I’ll explain later why we needed money in an all-inclusive resort) and once to take a tour of the nearby ruins.

The food was really great. Most of the time we ate at the buffet restaurant, but there were three a la carte restaurants you could book into as well; a Turkish restaurant where we had one dinner and one Turkish breakfast, a fish restaurant where I actually ate and (shock!) enjoyed calamari, and an international restaurant. All were fantastic.

Drinks were also included, and no sooner was your wine glass empty than someone whooshed by and refilled it for you. All the waiting staff were ready with smiles and service and remembered most of the guests by name! Amazing, considering there must have been over 500 people staying there at any one time.

We were lucky enough to be there at a time when there were no less than three litters of kittens living on the hotel grounds. They weren’t the sad, diseased strays you tend to think of in such situations, they were cute, feisty and always ready to receive the tidbits we stole from the buffet for them. Our three favourites we named Dodger, Bob and Missy (short for Mrs Gobbelina). They waited for us every morning and evening to bring them various delights from the buffet. They were particularly excited the night we managed to get them roasted turkey. There was lots of growling, swiping and general bad manners, but it was all so cute that we could only laugh.

On our way to dinner one evening, we were sidelined by the hotel photographer, who insisted on taking some photos of us. We discovered that they had a shop on-site where you could go the next day to look at the photos and if you liked them you could purchase them. If not, he’d delete them and it would cost nothing. Quite a few of my family members had been complaining for some time that they didn’t have a nice picture of Chris and me, so we decided to give it a go. We figured it would be a lot cheaper than sitting for a portrait in Oslo, and we were tanned and surrounded by great scenery, so why not. This was one of the resulting pictures:

When we went back the next day, the photographer said he thought the pictures were “just okay” but that perhaps we’d like to do another session in about a week when we had “more colour” and he could take some on the beach at sunset. Once again we thought, why not? So we did. This was one of the photos from the second shoot:

As you can see, the photographer was right. We  did get a lot more colour, and the sunset was just spectacular. In the end we liked so many of the pictures that we bought an album of 45 pictures and with it received five 8x10s, two huge pictures (which we now have no idea what to do with), and a CD with the entire two sessions as well as pages and pages of small proofs. Amazing deal. We paid cash, which is why we had to leave the resort to go to an ATM, as I mentioned above.

I think the only other things we paid for that weren’t included in the package were a tour of the nearby Amphitheater ruins and the Turkish massages we got in the spa centre (five each, meaning a massage almost every second day. Bliss!). Oh, and I also bought a gorgeous leather jacket, which feels more like silk or butter to the touch than leather. Delicious!

The only sour note of the entire trip was that once again my throat started to cause me trouble. It had just been starting to feel better when I woke up one morning to have such a sore, swollen throat that I couldn’t swallow without my eyes watering from the pain. Luckily there was an on-site doctor who immediately prescribed me with some fantastic cold and flu drugs, a throat spray and some pain killers. The drugs made me feel a bit dizzy and queasy at first, but they at least made most of the symptoms go away and by the time we were ready to leave I was feeling almost back to normal.

What we didn’t realise was that this time there was a reason for me getting yet another throat infection. A reason we wouldn’t fully understand until more than a week after we returned home…

Up until about a week before we left, I had been on some very strong antibiotics prescribed after our disastrous London trip. They did their job and I just had a little cough left over by the time we left for Turkey. Little did we realise that the combination of very strong antibiotics, relaxation, sunshine, romance and my lowered immune system would lead to us not returning to Norway alone. Unbeknownst to both of us, a little stowaway was already making its home in my belly, lowering my immune system further and hence allowing yet another throat infection to attack. It also caused the mild dizziness and nausea I innocently mistook for side effects of the Turkish cold and flu medication.

Yes, one week after our return I, feeling like I was being silly and overreacting, took a pregnancy test which gave me news I never thought I would receive in Norwegian:

Yep, “Gravid” means “Pregnant” in Norwegian. But more on that next time…