From Ankara to Adana, you take the Cukurova Express, which leaves Ankara daily at 8.10pm and arrives in Adana anytime after 9am the following morning. Tickets cost pounds 4.WHERE TO STAYMost visitors to Istanbul stay in the Sultanahmet area where there is a wide selection or hotels, pensions and dormitories. If you have plenty of cash, Yesil Ev, an Ottoman house, exquisitely restored with sumptuous period furniture, rents rooms from pounds 75 (single) to pounds 110 (double) (tel: 00 90 212 517 6785). If you are on a tighter budget, the Interyouth hostel, behind St Sophia, rents out bunk beds in a dormitory for pounds 5 a night (tel: 00 90 212 513 6150). The Pera Palas Hotel in Beyoglu, over the Golden Horn, was the first of Istanbul’s grand hotels and guests have included Agatha Christie and Kemal Ataturk Rooms from pounds 100 (tel: 00 90 212 251 4560).
In Ankara, there are lots of cheap hotels around Ulus, below the citadel hill, including Hotel Kale (tel: 00 90 312 311 3393). In the heart of the modern city, Kizilay, Hotel Old Ertan is on Selanik Caddesi (tel: 00 90 312 418 4084).. ONCE THE exclusive domain of the rich and famous – the only holiday destination to justify scheduled Concorde flights – the island of Barbados is broadening its appeal. All-inclusive hotels and bargain packages from as low as pounds 359 for two weeks are making some of the finest beaches in the Caribbean highly affordable. Charter planes now regularly line up on the tarmac alongside Concorde, and British arrivals are up by around 40 per cent this year.
Down one back street, I stumbled across a vaulted cellar full of Arab horses and little donkeys chewing hay in the gloom The owner of the stable offered to make me a glass of tea. But I headed off to climb up to the citadel to wave to the children playing on the roofs of their houses and to admire the spectacular view over the city in the bowl of the barren hills smoothing out into the steppes which disappear in the distance down to Syria and further over into Iraq I was off to Syria by bike. I admired the fluffy sheepskin rugs until I practically fell over the carcasses lying in pools of blood, hanging up to air or being chopped up and shaved.”Hello, do you speak English,” shouted a little boy who grinned with delight when I said yes. They pelted after me, a hooting, yelling, laughing throng on bicycles and motor bikes. I pretended to ignore them (difficult) and took refuge in the Guven Hotel, opposite the tourist- class Hotel Harran.
For around pounds 3 I had a double room of my own with a clean shower and endless hot water.Just down the street from the hotels are Urfa’s bazaars, a world of alleyways, chambers and ancient khans, doorways, cool secret courtyards, blinding pools of light and deep shadows. You can buy Aladdin carpets and bulging sacks of white cotton and wool, tins, plastic bowls and enormous balls of rope and string, sacks of green henna and rich red Urfa pepper, copper and gold, fur-lined jackets, lentils, peas and tea. But the views at the crack of dawn as the train crossed over the Tauros mountains were worth it: grey jagged peaks, plunging sheersided valleys, rivers like slivers of mirror at the bottom, red poppies, wild hollyhocks and yellow gorse.I reached the city of Sanliurfa after catching a bus from Adana, the bicycle travelling upright in the snug luggage compartment Urfa is the gateway to the south east of Turkey. The city is built in a hot dusty bowl on the edge of the steppes of Mesopotamia. Legend has it that Abraham, a revered prophet for Muslims, was born here and in the middle of the city is a graceful complex of mosques and Islamic schools built in a series of green parks around sacred carp pools.As I cycled around Urfa hunting for hotels, the male youths of the city couldn’t contain themselves. But I took the train (which takes double that) because I wanted to take a bicycle. In the event there was no guards’ van so I attached the bike to the back door of the last carriage and the ever-accommodating Turks accepted the arrangement with a shrug and a smile.The pipes under the seats, which pulled down as beds, belched out hot air all night and it was like sleeping in a Turkish hamam.
