How I learnt to love the bargain basement break
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How I learnt to love the bargain basement break
Despite constant Europop and wall-to-wall English breakfasts, Gemma Bowes finds that her £99 Turkish break is full of pleasant surprises
'I'll go anywhere, wherever's cheapest,' I told the travel agent on the other end of the phone.
'Oh, you don't want to do that,' came the disbelieving response. 'It's allocation on arrival, you could end up in anything ...'
'Er, no thanks, I absolutely want to go to the cheapest place, whatever it's like.'
After several hard years, the big tour operators have cut capacity to such an extent that dirt-cheap last-minute holidays aren't as easy to come by as they used to be. But if you've got no preferences or standards, and a sense of adventure, they're still out there, ripe for the picking.
I just missed out on an incredible fortnight in Turkey for £59. Then there was a £79 week in Cyprus, but that was departing within the hour. So finally I settled on a lastminute.com offer of a £99 self-catering package to Marmaris, on Turkey's south coast.
It took me and my friend Anna to Manchester airport at a painful 5am one Friday earlier this month. The guidebook description held out little promise to ease the journey: 'Marmaris is brash and downmarket, full of bland eateries with an omnipresent thump of Europop and very little to see.'
Maybe it was not exactly on my list of 'do before you die' destinations, but it was somewhere hot, with possibilities for exploration and, if necessary, escape. Then there was the price - back home in London, the average rent is £102 per week, £3 more than our flights and place in the sun combined.
It didn't start well. The first endurance test was the coach transfer, when, squished in among loud families with tattooed fathers, we listened to our nannyish rep Jean give us tips such as 'wear suntan lotion'. At our 'comfort stop' at a small cafe, a skinhead dad knocked over a stand of glass keyrings, smashing dozens, but refused to pay for them or even help the owner retrieve them from the floor. All the while we were imagining what a decrepit cockroach pit our hotel might be: leaky toilets, bunk beds, an adjacent building site and a lack of ventilation?
We were wrong. Our apartment was not too shabby. Basic, yes; our kitchenette had just two electric rings, a kettle and a fridge, but there was an airy lounge with bookshelves leading onto a balcony that thankfully overlooked a patch of garden and a derelict yard rather than the noisy pool. We had a large bedroom with ample cupboard space and a sparkling bathroom. Considering what we'd paid, it was wonderful.
Not that we wanted to spend much time there. Almost all guests were families with young children, but this didn't stop the staff DJs pumping out cerebrum-melting techno throughout the day, or turning their favourite tunes up to speaker-blowing levels that drowned out the whoops of watersliding children. Coupled with the potential health risk of toddlers in nappies playing in the pool, and most sun loungers being claimed by Man U or Chelsea towels, the best option was to head elsewhere.
At least our hotel was outside the raucous town centre, which became increasingly tack-riddled as we got closer to the coast. Every road was lined with English fun pubs. Shops stocked tracksuits, football shirts and Union Jack towels. Handmade Turkish rugs, hookah pipes or local crafts were nowhere to be seen.
We inquired after a Turkish breakfast and the waiter said he was more than happy to oblige. 'We have Turkish bacon with Turkish eggs, Turkish sausage and Turkish baked beans,' he said with a flourish. Even the prices were in sterling, not lira.
Young males shouted, whistled, begged and flattered to try and get us to enter their shops - 'Hey lady, come here please! Can I talk to you? We have English tea! Where you from? What's your name? You want boat trip?'.
All we wanted was to relax and start enjoying our holiday, but the beach proved to be a disappointing strip of murky brown, with sunloungers so tightly packed they were like armour against the dirty sand.
What can you expect from Britain's cheapest holiday? It was never going to be Mauritius. We needed to stop complaining and get creative, because in a cheapo resort you have to work harder to have a good time.
Salty hawkers were undercutting each other like crazy, so desperate for our business that day-long boat trips to prettier coves and islands, including lunch, sold for £4. There were jeep safaris into the pine covered hills for the adventurous, and Turkish baths to relax in afterwards. The natural mud baths in Dalyan proved a fun and unusual, if smelly, day out. Smearing ourselves with the sulphuric slime of the river bed was hilarious, and left us soft but stinking of eggs.
More simple pleasures could be found in the smallest diversions; we strolled through a few lush garden centres and took water taxis, rather than cars, whenever we could. Even though we often had to wait half an hour for them to depart so they could fill up with passengers, we could lie back on the low cushions and rugs, take pictures of the other boats or amuse ourselves by inventing new ways to fight off the gentle advances of the rope boys.
One such 10-minute ride led us down the coast to Ichmeler, with its cleaner, prettier, emptier beach that was well worth making the small amount of effort to reach for lazy sunbathing days. Although the town itself fell foul of the same over-development we saw in Marmaris, the beach front had much finer sand, and lilac, wicker sun umbrellas that gave a stylish appearance and a touch of the tropics.
Wheedling out somewhere inoffensive to spend the evening proved trickier. The hotel was a definite no go, with pop quizzes, karaoke or discos each night, though it was good for happy hour cocktails. Turkish restaurants seemed almost extinct; kebabs and kofta appeared alongside burgers and chips, if the menu featured local cuisine at all. No one had heard of our guidebook's list of recommended eateries.
It was startling to see how many tourists loved the resort and all its tatty Britishness. One day we met Brian, a lorry driver from east London who had been returning to the resort every summer for the past 11 years. Even though the only Turkish word he'd learnt in that time meant 'Hurry, hurry!', he'd befriended many of the waiters, loved the weather (it was 40C) and always had fun there.
We tried to become more like Brian but had resigned ourselves to the miserable fact there was nowhere attractive in Marmaris town when, two nights in, we discovered the old town and were forced to withdraw our assumptions. At last, some traditional stores selling decent pashminas and jewellery; authentic looking Turkish bars with all the tassles, lanterns and floor cushions you'd expect and even a proper Turkish restaurant. So it had a silly touristy name - Ali Baba - and novelty hats for wearing in holiday snaps, but at least we could eat lamb baked in yogurt instead of pizzas - hurrah!
We spent one fantastic evening in Sila Turku Bar, where, despite being near the main drag, we were the only tourists simply because it had a live Turkish band and was full of locals. We were brought plates of cake to help celebrate the female singer's birthday, and a towering dish of fresh fruit to nibble on while watching the men do impromptu performances of Turkish dancing, twirling their hankies in the air. It was wonderful to see blokes unafraid of strutting moves together in pairs, bending and rising opposite each other, laughing and hugging. Up the road, the drunk British boys would only stand and wobble alone.
Marmaris attracts more families than swollen groups of beer-swilling lads or Lambrini girls, but any youngsters headed for the creatively named Bar Street, so narrow, busy and fluorescent it was like being trapped with hundreds of drunk moths inside a neon light. It was easy to be snobbish about the hammered girls falling off podiums into the arms of slimy waiters in the dozens of 'free for ladies' outdoor clubs, or dancing to the Crazy Frog on the 'free cocktail for the best pole dancer' stage, but in the end there was nothing for it but to neck a few overpriced pina coladas and join in.
We ventured into six different clubs, all of which seemed to resemble the Tardis, with vast open-air dance floors and podiums which were well-hidden from the narrow street. We almost dismissed them, which would have been a shame because it turned out to be a good laugh. We'd found the resort itself did have something to offer, but we were also becoming increasingly good at finding the lesser visited delights nearby.
On our last day we took a dolmus (minibus) ride over the steep hills to Turunc. Local people rather than tourists filled our bus, a good omen that it might be an undiscovered spot. As we curved and rattled up through the rocks, I looked back to aggravating Marmaris, pleased to see it had become nothing but a distant smear on the coast.
We arrived in a small, hazy resort where shady, vine-roofed tavernas backed a long, clean beach humming with a waves-crickets-gurgling children soundtrack. No pop, and no one tried to sell us anything. We lazed for hours.
I was nodding off when suddenly, 'Heeeey, heey baby, ooh, ah, I wanna knooooow, will you be my girl?' To prove we couldn't entirely escape the trappings of a downmarket, low-cost break, a disco boat pulled into the bay, passengers' hands clapping above their heads in unison. An unwelcome intruder, but after a couple of laps it was gone.
I reflected on whether the holiday, with all its tackiness and depressing lack of culture was worth £100. Despite the bars beaming in football matches to widescreen TVs, the barrel-bellied families who never left the pool and the pervy men, as I floated, face to the sky, out to sea, with the humps of seaweed-covered rocks visible beneath me, cliffs all around, I felt as content and relaxed as I would anywhere in the world. Of course it was.
The miser's guide to travel
Bargain holidays are still out there, but with big tour operators scaling back on capacity, finding them can prove difficult. More than ever it pays to follow a few money-saving tips:
Timing
With package holiday places reduced, the old industry propaganda - book early to save money - is actually becoming true. Keep an eye out for the arrival of new brochures: they often feature a limited number of introductory offers such as free child places. January and February, peak sales season, see fierce competition and the chance of further incentives.
Fly business
Amazingly, in peak holiday season and at Christmas, it can work out cheaper than economy because business fares are less seasonal. A return from London to New York leaving on 1 August costs £861 in British Airways economy class, but Trailfinders (www.trailfinders.com offers a return in Kuwait Airways business class for £844.
Fly cheap
Instead of searching for flights on particular dates, the website www.moneysavingexpert.com/flightchecker allows you to search every flight for months on end to find the very cheapest.
Haggle
With late packages, ring an agent for a quote. Reduce the figure by £30, then ring another agent and see if they will drop their margin to match it. Repeat until none will go lower.
Save on insurance
If you take more than two trips per year, or are going to America, an annual policy will probably be cheaper.
Save on mobile calls
Receiving calls or calling voicemail abroad can be ruinous. Talk2Text avoids this by converting voice messages to texts. See www.carphonewarehouse.com/talk2text.
Meet the bargain hunters
Daniel Holloway and his wife Ann, both university administrators, have taken holidaying on the cheap to new levels. In the last 18 months they have made around 20 trips abroad and stop at nothing to ensure they pay the minimum for flights, accommodation, food, drink and local travel.
Cheapest to date was a three-day trip in Riga, Latvia, which cost £45 each. Flights cost 90p each way plus taxes, because it was a special offer promoting a new Ryanair route, while the hotel, found on the internet, cost £12 a night.
'Once we were there, we travelled everywhere by bus which costs 20p a ticket,' said Dan. 'We learnt some Latvian before we went, enough to buy the correct bus ticket, order pelmeni (Russian dumplings) at 50p a half pound, doughnuts for 3p and balsam, the local drink.'
The couple have signed up to all the budget airlines email lists, so they are told of new routes with special offer fares.
'You get a lot of junk, but you also get told about some very good prices on them.
'Another tip is that cheap flights work differently on Easyjet from the way they do on Ryanair. On Easyjet, as soon as flights are released the price is at its cheapest, and goes steadily up. On Ryanair, they start at a relatively high price, then come down after a while, and then go back up.'
Next stop on the Holloways' budget odyssey: Weeze (Düsseldorf), Normandy, Tampere (Finland), Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Bratislava, Gdansk, Bilbao, Tallinn, Palermo, Hamburg and Bulgaria.
Factfile
Gemma Bowes's trip to the Excelsior Apartments in Marmaris, Turkey, was booked through lastminute.com. Prices fluctuate, but start as low as £99 per person per week in August. Visit www.lastminute.com or call 0870 443 9002 for more information.
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