Road to Bodrum

With the onset of winter rain, we are enjoying the comforts of the improved road to our village house. When we started building in 1991, our access lane looked like this.  Bumpy in summer and very muddy in winter.  Experience was needed to negotiate the puddles and several friends' cars ended up bogged down half way along. 

Last year the road was widened and gravelled. This is a double-edged sword; boy racers have taken to whizzing past on their drunken way back from village weddings but our VW's chassis will last a few years longer and I don't have to keep my wellies in the car.  

Of all the changes in Turkey over the years, the most obvious is  the amount of road building.  Despite having lived in Bitez for 2 years, I now hesitate to visit friends there as I keep getting lost. 

When we moved to a Bitez mandarin garden in 1983, there was only one road (marked in red) and one river bed that was sometimes a road and other times a raging torrent that tumbled cars from the village down to the beach. 

To really appreciate the changes a born and bred Bodrumite of senior years has seen in the transport infrastructure, the grainy photograph below was taken by Freya Stark in 1950 of the road between Bodrum and Milas. 

This is the access road to Bodrum today. 

"If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road"  Freya Stark,  East is West.