I got back from Turkey just in time to avoid quarantine – I couldn't believe the news
The jagged spine of mountains across the Gulf of Antalya sweep up into a purpling sky, the tips of the peaks illuminated by the pale yellow of the sun setting behind them. At the feet of the mountains the ruffled blue-grey sheet of the Mediterranean, suffused with pink at its farthest reaches, glimmers glassily as the light fades.
Lights flicker into life in the cafes, bars and hotels hugging the great arc of four mile-long Konyaalti Beach as dusk swallows up the sand and shingle.
In a city not exactly short of fabulous sea and mountain scapes this panorama, from the cliff-top Kaktus Manzara café-bar, is the best. Especially at sunset. Cold beer in hand. I catch-up on the news with an old Turkish friend, made in the period when Antalya, gateway city and airport to Turkey’s breathtakingly beautiful Turquoise Coast, was my home. Talk soon turns to Covid-19 and the ‘new normal’.
“It’s terrible, Terry” Ahmet says “There’s been a spike of cases here, even our mayor is in hospital with it, in intensive care”.
I find it hard to reconcile this news with what I had experienced in Antalya over the last few days. Although not as busy as in recent years, the bars and restaurants in the old walled quarter of Kaleici seemed to me to be doing a roaring trade with locals and visitors from the UK, Russia, Ukraine and many other countries. But visitor numbers are down dramatically.
“Look” continues Ahmet, checking a flight app on his mobile. “Here are the number of flights coming into Antalya. Just 180 most days this week. It’s nothing when you compare to normal!”.
His words are confirmed the next day by Berry, co-owner of Mithra Travel, a small but long established travel agency in the old town. She tells me that they have done less than 20 per cent, maybe as little as 10 per cent, of the business they did last year.
“But” she says, ever the optimist “they are coming now. We have a Spanish group walking the Lycian Way, a couple of UK visitors from ‘On Foot’ out on the trail now doing a self-guided trip. It’s getting better”. She tells me the majority of people who drop into the office are Brits and Russians, mostly enquiring about daily tours to Antalya’s hinterland, rich in Greek-Roman sites such as Perge from where St Paul set-off on one of his proselytising journeys, and mountain-top Termessos, so spectacularly high and remote even Alexander the Great failed to capture it.
Later on I chat on Facebook messenger with Atil, a friend who runs Middle Earth Travel, an agency specialising in outdoor tourism in the bizarrely beautiful Central Anatolian region of Cappadocia. He said: “We lost 90% of our business. Maybe more,” and he was less than optimistic about the future adding: “there won’t be a next year. I hope for 2022”. I also talk to my friend Erkan Karpuz of Talisman Tours in Istanbul, who works with specialist groups from the UK, Australia, Canada and the USA. He has organised no tours at all in 2020.
My Romany neighbours, who live just across the narrow street from my Antalya house, have a couple of goldfinches in separate cages fixed just below the window of their upstairs living room. The birds chirrup and flit back and forth constantly, stir crazy from their confinement. The locals, especially after Turkey’s initially super-strict lockdown restrictions, know just how they feel. Things are much freer now but the teenagers in the high school close by have yet to return, my neighbour’s primary age daughter has just started but is restricted to two days a week.
In the backstreets few people wear masks, despite it being a requirement, but out on the main streets compliance is high. Though as elsewhere around the globe they are as likely to be worn under the chin, hanging off one ear or round the wrist as across the nose and mouth. Short-sleeves are ubiquitous in the September heat, allowing the terminally hip to loop their’s around the top of the elbow. I saw more than a few foreigners caught out by the requirement for a track and trace code (HES) to enter banks. It’s hard to get the code without a Turkish SIM card (I know, I tried and only with extreme perseverance succeeded!) and is also essential for domestic travel among other things.
My week in Antalya up I take a cab out to the airport. On my arrival the airport had been eerily quiet, the quickest trip from plane to taxi rank ever, but it’s quite busy now. Approaching the check-in desk I fill-in an ‘Online Locator Form’ with some difficulty through the gov.uk website using my mobile. It is, an airline official assures me, essential for entry to the UK. I think no more of it and eventually board the plane and fall fast asleep. I keep my Turkish Sim card in my phone so don’t have internet access until I get to a friend’s house in London around 7pm and swap back to my UK SIM.
My phone ‘pings’ and 3 WhatsApp messages from friends in Turkey tell me there has been an announcement whilst I was airborne that the air corridor between the UK and Turkey will be closed as of Saturday October 3rd. I feel guilty for the sense of relief I feel at getting back in time to avoid quarantine.
The green shoots of recovery of Turkey’s all important tourism industry (12% of GDP) have begun to wither following Grant Shapps' announcement. Turkey has worked hard to contain its losses and welcome visitors in 2020 but in the harsh new normal of Covid it has just been struck another blow. I think of optimistic Berry, hard-grafting Atil and Erkan, who both have young families to support. Of all the hotel and restaurant owners, car-hire companies, coach operators and more who will lose yet more business. Some will go under. Of the waiters and bar-staff, beach attendants, hotel employees and shop workers who may lose their livelihoods with this further turn of the screw.
Turks are tough and resilient, and in this current crisis they will need to be.