Category Archives: Beaches

Straddling the narrow border between Europe ans Asia, Istanbul is where everything collides, Christianity and Islam and the cultural chasm between east and west.

Istanbul has been on the wish list for several years but we have never quite managed to get there.  Until this year.  So before departure I did my usual preparation and research.

Istanbul is a very big city, ranked  by population within city limits it is the largest in Europe and with a population of almost sixteen million it is the seventeenth largest city in the World.

After a short delay leaving Manchester  airport due to some air traffic control issue because of a dispute in Italy we arrived at Istanbul airport at about midday and the size statistics just kept on coming.  It is the seventh largest airport in the World by passenger numbers and the second busiest in Europe after London Heathrow and narrowly nudging out Paris who cheat anyway  by combining statistics from three airports.

It is so big that it took the Easyjet plane fifteen minutes to taxi from the runway to the terminal building and then fifteen minutes or so walking through the terminal to the arrivals desk where there was a queue of another fifteen minutes.  Then another fifteen minutes walking to the metro station.  All of these fifteen minutes were adding up but at least we were getting our steps in.

Turkey  is placed fifty-first in the Human Development Index which means that it is the bottom half of most highly developed countries.  The Index ranks countries by level of ‘human development’ and the statistic is composed from data on life expectancy, education and per-capita gross national income. Turkey does well because of a good education system and a well developed health and welfare record.

It is rated ninety-fourth in the World Happiness Index, which may not sound very impressive but is three places above the United Kingdom.  Finland, Denmark and Iceland are all walking on sunshine, having placed first, second and third respectively in the happiness index. 

Turkey has twenty UNESCO World Heritage Sites which is an average sort of number bearing in mind the ancient history of the country.  Maybe there is more waiting to be discovered.  Who knows?

Being in the Mediterranean the country has always participated in the Blue Flag Beach scheme. 

The Blue Flag beach award was originally conceived in France in 1985 where the first coastal municipalities were awarded the Blue Flag on the basis of criteria covering standards relating to sewage treatment and bathing water quality.

Two years later, 1987 was the ‘European Year of the Environment’ and the concept of the Blue Flag was developed as a European initiative by the Foundation for Environmental Education in Europe to include other areas of environmental management such as waste disposal and coastal planning and protection and in that first year two hundred and forty four beaches from ten countries were awarded the new Blue Flag status.

Turkey has five hundred and sixty seven Blue Flag beaches in almost six thousand miles of coastline, it is third behind Spain and then Greece.

My next measure is always the Eurovision Song Contest and Turkey has participated in the annual contest thirty-four times since its debut in the 1975.  It hasn’t performed especially well it has to besaid but did win the competition just once in 2003 (UK came last that year ( Gemini – cry Baby)) but then about  ten years later fell out with the organising committee over something trivial  and has not competed since.  Well, that is their loss.

Here is the 2003 winning entry…

After negotiating the cavernous airport our next test was getting onto the metro.  It was well signposted and we made it to barriers where the next task was buying a ticket.  There were automatic ticket machines with an English language option but the problem was that the English language option was written in Chinese. 

We missed the first train whilst we tried to work it out and then we bought way too much credit than we really needed, not just for this journey but for the rest of the week.

The metro journey was relatively straightforward even including a change of lines and I thought that I had got the hang of things when we emerged blinking into the sunlight in where I mistakenly thought was close to our accommodation.

How wrong was I.  We had no city map and without internet no Google Maps so we wandered about helplessly for a while and asked directions.  People seemed to be trying to be genuinely helpful but their directions made no sense to me so after  a short while of city arrival confusion we broke a golden rule and took a taxi.  And as usual I got a mad taxi driver who drove as though he was in a formula one race and shouted all the time on his mobile phone.

Upon arrival our first reaction was one of disappointment with our accommodation, very basic and rather like a hostel than an apartment but it was clean and the owner was friendly and gave us a beer and there was a big sunny terrace so we approved it and settled in and that was about it for the day, we were tired so we just did nothing except go to a nearby supermarket for some wine.

But the supermarket had no wine, what is the point of having your own supermarket that has no wine?

Anyway, all was not lost, there was a little corner shop opposite the apartment and he had wine  so we made our purchase went back to the terrace and let the rest of the afternoon slip carelessly through our fingers.