The Viking Pirates Take Turkey

You have to feel a little sorry for the hostess at Bistro Floyd, stationed here nightly at the ugly underbelly of international tourism. 

"What language do you speak?" the hostess asks us in English as we stand at the entrance of the Dutch restaurant.

"I’m Swedish," Ola tells her, "but I also speak English, Dutch, some German ..."

"Yes, I speak English, too," I say, chiming in, "but also a little Turkish, some French, not a lot but I can get by ..."

The hostess holds up her hands to stop us.  I think she might next ask for our favorite color, or a description of what we would do if she were an ice cream cone.  But no, apparently we are not on The Dating Game, and she's not looking for a recitation of our Curriculum Vitae.

"I just need to know what menu to give you," she says. "We have Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, German and English."

Notably, Turkish is not mentioned as a menu option.
 
"You want English?"

Sure, let’s go with English.  What country are we in again?

*     *     *

Welcome to Alanya, quite possibly the most un-Turkish place in all of Turkey.

Although purporting to be a Turkish city of some 100,000 on the Mediterranean coast, in August at least, Alanya is something else entirely.  Currently this is a city populated almost exclusively by Danes, Swedes, Norwegians and Finns:  mostly tall, blond, blue-eyed and under 25, all with their Scandinavian skin toasting to a rosy red.    

Outside of the shop owners, good luck finding any Turks to talk to in Alanya.  You have a much better chance of sitting at a table next to Bjorn Borg, or one of the original members of A-ha.

Don't get me wrong:  I love Scandinavia.  I just never expected to find it located on the southern coast of Turkey.

*      *     *

I know Ola from a year spent long ago at a university in Brussels, Belgium.  I was there faking my way through a program in "International and Comparative Law," information that ever since has been gathering dust in the back-room filing cabinets of my brain.

Ola and I actually had gone to the Bistro Floyd our second night in Alanya with the twisted, nostalgic hope that a Dutch restaurant on the coast of Turkey might possibly be serving Belgian beer. 

They were, in fact.  Let's all drink to the Free Movement of Goods and Alcohol.

Ola now lives back in his home country of Sweden, in the southern town of Malmö. In recent years he’s become quite the scuba diver, periodically posting envy-inducing underwater photos on Facebook from places like Malta and the Egyptian Red Sea.

While I haven’t seen Ola in more than a decade plus, several weeks ago he wrote and told me he was planning a scuba-diving trip to Alanya, on the southern coast of Turkey. He knew I was in Istanbul, which he realized was not exactly close by. But he invited me to join him anyway because both places are in Turkey (technically), and, as he put it, "you seem to get around."

I seem to get around.  Say what you will about me, Spandau Ballet, but I know this much is true.

Scuba diving in Alanya?  I'm not exactly sure where Alanya is, but what the hell, Ola.

Wake me up before you go go.


*    *    *

As long as I am shamelessly throwing out 1980s song-lyric allusions, you may ask yourself (last one, I promise):  do I even know how to scuba dive?

Don't be ridiculous.  Of course I know how to scuba dive.

That is to say, I used to know how to scuba dive, much in the same way that I used to know how to solve an algebraic equation.  You know, back in the ninth grade.

With one exception, all of my previous scuba diving experience pre-dates the current century.  I figure it's all like riding a bicycle, which is basically correct. Except that the design of the bicycle has changed a bit during the past few decades.  

Ola looks at me with disbelief on the dive boat, for example, as I search for a place to manually inflate my buoyancy vest.
  
Yeah, we hook that up to the air tank now, Grandpa.

And yes, I am only marginally humiliated when the Turkish female dive guide, Aşkım -- literally in Turkish, "My Love" -- informs me that I am putting my wet suit on backwards.

Damn kids and their crazy new wet suit fashions. When did they start putting the zipper in the backs of these things?  Apparently sometime just shortly after the cancellation of "Sea Hunt," but never mind.

So I'm Old School.  Or perhaps I'm just old.  No matter.  I don't care what My Love says, I still look damn good in a backward wet suit.
  
*     *     *

No one can really give us a good answer as to exactly how or when the Scandinavians took over Alanya.  The driver from the airport tells me it used to be Germans, but they've now mostly moved on to other places.

Americans and Brits seem completely non-existent, as do the French, Italians and Spaniards.  The Russians go to nearby Antalya.  The Turks pretty much stay away in the summer all together, opting for Bodrum and Fethiye and other spots along the coast farther west.

That apparently gives the fair-skinned Nordics a clear path to invasion, overwhelming Alanya through continuous waves of direct charter flights from the north.  By mid August the population is so blond that I'm pretty sure Alanya would be able to field an internationally competitive hockey team.

But it's not just any Scandinavian who is coming to Alanya.  Those Scandinavians who are married, child-laden, middle-aged or elderly apparently are stopped at the border, or have found something else to do on holiday.

No, instead Alanya seems specifically designed as giant Scandinavian Club Med for blond-haired, blue-eyed twenty-somethings, looking to spend a couple of weeks in Turkey with their friends getting tan and/or drunk. 

Or laid.  Preferably all three, I'm sure.

The harbor of Alanya is lined with massive, multi-decked party boats -- ships, really -- designed to pack in several hundred young adults, ply them with alcohol, deafen them with disco music and ship them out to sea.

Some of the boats appear to have sailed straight out of Disneyland, designed to look like a Viking knarr, or a pirate ship.  Or sometimes, what the hell, let's just cover all our bases and make it ... like ... a Viking Pirate Ship!

One company, the "Big Baba Boat Tour," advertises a daily "foam party,"  where soap suds bubble out of a pipe above the deck alongside the reflective rotating disco ball, as the dance music thumps away.


The party continues until someone vomits, slips and falls off the boat, or drowns in the rinse cycle.

Remember those great parties you used to have in college, where you'd pour a box of powdered detergent into the Laundromat washing machine and set the dial to "spin?"

Yeah, me neither.

Keep in mind, we are in an overwhelmingly Muslim country, smack in the middle of the holy month of Ramazan.   Two weeks earlier I had been in the slightly more religiously observant city of Bursa, where it was nearly impossible to find someone to sell us a single beer, even after sundown.

In contrast, the first business I see after arriving in Alanya belongs to a 24-hour liquor store located a block from my hotel, with the unambiguous name of "Hello, Alcohol!"

It may be Ramazan, but I assure you, there will be no problem here getting a drink.

In addition to the party boats, the harbor area of Alanya is lined with non-floating discos and tourist restaurants selling the Cuisine of the Young:  pizza, pasta, hamburgers, and -- for reasons I still can't explain -- "Tex-Mex." 

I will admit, the last thing I ever expected to find in Turkey was a table of Norwegian frat boys devouring a tray full of Ultimate Nachos.

Perhaps now I truly have seen everything.

*     *     * 
Back on the dive boat, we've had lunch and are headed back to the cliffs for our afternoon dive.  There are 16 divers on the boat -- mostly Scandinavian, of course -- with a few Germans and assorted other nationalities sprinkled in.      

For the crime of speaking neither Swedish nor German, My Love has teamed me as a "dive buddy" with Pavel, a gap-toothed, slightly pot-bellied, Speedo-clad Eastern European of otherwise undetermined origin.  

Pavel doesn't understand English and I have no idea what he is saying to me, but My Love figures this shouldn't be a significant problem breathing out of a scuba tank 30 feet underwater.

True enough.  But what is a problem is that you are supposed to swim along with your Dive Buddy and keep an eye on them in case a problem develops.  My Dive Buddy, however, has an apparent inability to stabilize his underwater buoyancy.  Pavel spends the majority of the morning dive continuously inflating and then de-flating his buoyancy vest, floating above and sinking below me like an underwater yo-yo. 

Leading the group underwater, My Love keeps pointing to me, then to her eyes, then drawing her two index fingers together.  This is the official scuba diver signal for "Keep your eye on your Dive Buddy!"  I respond with the unofficial yet internationally recognized palms out and shrug of the shoulders.

I'm trying, My Love. Believe me I'm trying.

I keep looking around for Pavel, above me or below me, and then signaling to him with a forward wave of my hand and pat on my hip, like I'm trying to convince a stray dog to follow me home.

"Come on, Pavel!  Come on, boy!  Up here, Pavel!  Look, look!  Let's go, Pavel!  There's a treat back at the boat! Come on!"

Despite the compatibility issues, in the afternoon Pavel and I are back together again, re-uniting for one more dive.  We're like Hall & Oates, or Prince and Apollonia.  Slightly less talent, yes, but with approximately the same number of Speedos.

The dive boat anchors in a secluded cove for an afternoon of cavern diving.  Both the water and sky are beautifully clear and blue.  As we climb back into our wet suits (zipper in back; hey, I remember) and strap on our tanks, the only sound are the waves lapping against the boat and the rocks of the nearby cliff.

 It's all quite idyllic and amazing.  I would swear I was in a Jacques Cousteau film, if only Pavel wore a stocking cap and spoke a little French.

Just then I notice something off in the distance, at first not so much a sound as a ... sensation. A throbbing sensation. Like the throbbing of the vein in your forehead, at the beginning of a particularly memorable migraine headache.  

The throbbing sensation slowly becomes audible.  Then I see the source of the throbs, rounding the cliffs and sailing into our cove.  

One of the party boats  -- not of the Viking/pirate ship variety but a party boat all the same -- cruises around the bend and puts down anchor less than 50 yards away from the dive boat.  Music of course is blaring from the giant, IMAX-quality loud speakers housed somewhere on board.   

Even though it’s scarcely past noon, bikini-clad Scandinavian twenty-somethings are already dancing on the deck, plastic beer cups held high. Several revelers immediately leap -- or perhaps stumble -- off the ship's deck into the water below, squealing all the way.

Just like that, the idyllic dive cove becomes Paradise Lost, as if someone has towed in a fully-operational disco into your back yard on a Sunday afternoon while you were napping in the hammock.

The speakers on the boat thump out a continuous stream of ... okay, let’s call them "songs," all with the same throbbing, non-stop techno beat, and just a slight variation of the following lyrics:

"I’VE GOT TO PARTY, PARTY!!
I’M GONNA TO PARTY, PARTY!!
SHE WANTS TO PARTY, PARTY!!
THEY NEED TO PARTY, PARTY!!
WE HAVE TO PARTY, PARTY!! ..." 

The subtleties may be lost on you, but I think you get the general idea.  An apparent drunken attempt to conjugate the verb, "to party."

Okay, now everyone together:  the future conditional!
"WE MIGHT JUST PARTY, PARTY!! ..."

Pavel and I both stare dumbfounded at the party boat for a few moments, then strap on our fins and step off into the water.  There is nothing really to say.  As far as I know, there is no official scuba diver signal for "Let's go before they start doing Jell-O shots."


The party boat is still there when we surface 45 minutes later.
But things have progressed, as they are now playing "The Chicken Dance," (or as we say in Swedish, "Fågeldansen"),  the international signal that everyone at the wedding reception is drunk enough to dance around tables flapping their arms like a chicken.

Say what you will about these people, but even with polka music, they know how to party, party.

I have a feeling suds from the overflowing washing machine can't be far behind.

*    *    *
Around dusk that evening we take a taxi to the cliffs above the city, up to the walls of a castle that have towered over the Alanya's bay since some time in the 12th Century.

Ola clicks a photo of the harbor below us, the neon lights of the discos just now blinking into visibility.

"You know, this type of tourism kind of depresses me," Ola says.  "Because the thing is, this is a very beautiful place."  

He's right: Alanya still is a beautiful place, despite all attempts to scrub it of its Turkishness and turn it into some kind of hedonistic amusement park.

Up here on the cliffs above the city, you can almost forget that somewhere below there is a miniature golf course with a hole that requires you to putt your ball through the nostrils of a Norse god.

In the harbor I can see a line of tourists disembarking from a large black bus, walking across the concrete quay straight up the gangplank of a waiting party ship.  They haven't cranked up the speakers on the boat yet, at least not to the level where I can hear it on the cliffs 2,000 feet above.

But hey, the night is still young.

"It is something, though,"  Ola says as he snaps another photo.

Again, I agree with Ola. It is something, that's for sure.

But whatever it is, I'm not sure it's Turkey.