Friday 1st November
Our rep called and said that we were on the earlier plane going home… no we are not! She has already checked our tickets and returned them to us. We know CTA overbook their planes but they can find another mug to change planes because we aren’t!!! She then arrived to take our tickets and we wouldn’t give them to her and a full row ensued with us saying that we are not going on the later plane. She left saying we would have to get the earlier plane, and that was that. So, we ended up calling Osman in London who said he would sort it out for us.
Arranged to meet Hakan at the land at 1pm and he said he was bringing the main tapu man who had just retired but he knows every bit of land on the island. Yes, did he (or so we thought). He looked for one of main markers (marked by a stone????? Or some old relic!) He could not find the one on our land, he said it had probably been destroyed by the bulldozer levelling the land. He did find another marker on the land next to ours and then measured from there. He was excellent (or so we thought he was) but every time we saw his tape measure cutting away a bit more of our land where we planned to have the house, I felt more and more miserable (if only we had realised at the time that he’d added a bit of next door’s land). Yes, we were right, the ledge is part of our land and pretty useless at that! We have decided now the land looks more like a boomerang than a boot so will have to change the name from Cesme. Having said that it looks as though we may own a bit of the road as well so I suppose we could always put a tollgate up! Hakan assured us the house would still fit in where we want it but we won’t have quite so much garden. This isn’t so bad as we have had second thoughts about maintaining so much garden. We still have room for a large enough hard stand for cars (oh no we haven’t) and have access (may or may not be ours, if not it is the governments and they have stolen some of ours for the new road, so we see it as quits and were told the Turkish Cypriots see it that way too – unfortunately we found out later that the access belongs to someone). Both of us are totally exhausted.
Back to hotel where we received a phone call from our rep, yes we would be on the later flight (good old Osman… from Travel world that is, a good company.)
Saturday 2nd November
Really hot, and so we sat by the pool. Returned the jeep about 1.00pm and bought Turkish delight to fill our cases. Caught the dolmus back. I love it, all the locals cramming on and anywhere you want to go, just shout and they stop and all for about 40p! Great system.
Spent our last evening talking to Sam.
Sunday 3rd November
Alarm call at 4am. Taken to the temporary airport. Back on the plane. Awful journey. For some reason the plane took 4¾ hours to travel from Turkey to the UK, and that was without the stopover time at Antalya and the flight from Cyprus. We were both knackered and felt we had achieved very little. Better luck hopefully in December.