This was Turkey though, and we weren’t married yet, so it was best that we travel in a group with some friends. We had started to meet some people from Istanbul’s expat community and there were two in particular we enjoyed spending time with, Holger from Germany and Maarten from Holland. They were both new to Turkey too, and they jumped at the idea of hitting the road for a few days of sightseeing along the Aegean coastline.
The four of us piled into Holger’s car and left Istanbul on a very crowded, holiday-packed ferry crossing the Marmara Sea. Two hours after sailing from Istanbul we deboarded in the port town of Bandirma and drove a short distance to Susurluk for lunch.
Susurluk is a wide spot in the road that made a name for itself in the 1990s as the site of a scandalous, single-car but multiple-fatality accident involving the deputy chief of the Istanbul police, a high-ranking member of Parliament, a contract killer wanted by Interpol, and a former beauty queen turned mob girlfriend. In the trunk of their smashed car were found drugs, guns, fake passports, and a large amount of cash. Everyone in the car was killed except for the parliamentarian, who was later cleared of any wrongdoing.
Turks love a conspiracy theory, and the car crash in Susurluk made for a juicy one. It pulled back the curtains on the “Deep State,” the notion that Turkey’s elected government hides a seedy underbelly that holds the real reins of power in the country. Today Turkey’s conspiracy theory itch is scratched by the Ergenekon scandal, but in the 1990s it was scratched by the car crash in Susurluk. In fact, to this day Susurluk is more an event than a town in the minds of many Turks, much like Watergate is more a scandal than a hotel in the minds of many Americans.
After lunch in Susurluk we drove west towards the Aegean coast, and within a couple hours we were driving south along the sea towards a town called Ayvalik, where we would stop for the night. It was winter and the days were short, so darkness had fallen early and we drove along the coast but couldn’t see the sea.
In Ayvalik we stayed right on the beach at a hotel called Otel Temizel (meaning “Hotel Clean Hands”). Ayvalik is a nice but second-tier resort town and we were there in the off-season, so the hotel was almost completely empty and entire wings had been mothballed for the winter.
Nevertheless, we had read that this hotel had a jacuzzi, and for the last few hours of our drive we had been looking forward to washing off the road grime with a warm soak. We were already irritable from a day on the road, and when we found out the jacuzzi had been drained for the winter, Holger, Maarten, and I became unreasonable.
The three of us summoned the hotel manager and insisted he turn on the jacuzzi the hotel had bragged about. The manager explained that the jacuzzi was only available in the summer. We pressed him further, quite literally, the three of us surrounding him and backing him up against the front desk, insisting that he accommodate our request.
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[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Scandals, Romans, and jacuzzis” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]