A late spring holiday, 1999
I'll tell you how much I loved Turkey, and loved it from first sight. Practically from the moment I got to Lycia, on the south coast, opposite Rhodes, early last summer, I forgot the horror of travelling in a plane a couple of seats away from a drunken youth. He sang "It's a perfect day, and I want to spend it with you" at the top of his voice, in only very rough sync with the stereo which he had wound up so high that it dulled the sound of the jets' roar for me as well as for him.
But that grumpiness was forgotten when the loveliness, comedy and romance of Turkey kicked in. I had chosen a place advertised as being near "the best beach in the world" (according to a poll of travel agents, so it must be right). Frankly, I was as interested in the lovely tumbledown Greek and Roman sites the brochures and the Blue Guide talked about.

We stayed at Kalkan, a one-time, small-time port which has long since given up being workmanlike in favour of catering to flotillas of charter yachts, and to a mushrooming business of villas and hotels. It's a weird, attractive place. The Club Med crowd would be bored by its lack of discos, though the odd bar does its unobtrusive best to keep pumping into the small hours. And, come to think of it, there's only a minute pebbly cove to swim from. It does have other, rather Anglicised, charms. It's kind of like St Ives (steep, cobbled streets, hubbub around the quay), but there's more than a hint of Camden market (herbs, vaguely ethnic bits and bobs). There's even a dash of one of those tiny French Riviera ports (but before the beautiful people made them uncomfortably elegant). Shirley Valentine could get a living here, but she'd think it had become a bit touristy.

We self-catered in a fisherman's cottage which had several advantages. One was that it is in a street so thick with bougainvillia that you'd think it was garden. Also, it was next door to the village's only charity shop, run from her cottage by a cheerful and (unobtrusively) bibulous lady. Another was that one could escape the zillions of friendly, pretty, candlelit, restaurants serving dull Euro-normal food to fellow-Brits. I mean: you couldn't get a shish - let alone a doner - kebab in the whole place. But there were stores which sold thick honey in tins, and it smelled resinous, as though it had been soaked in pine bark. And there was yoghurt which was as solid as clotted cream. There was even a barber's shop with no electricity and a cracked mirror. And there was one grotty cafe which cooked a decent mess of stew in the immemorial peasant way and served it under unpromising neon tubes.

So all in all, a perfect spot, especially as a base. We did the obligatory day trip on a "gulet" (a motor-sailing schooner affair), out of Kas and headed for famous ruins, embalmed in gin-clear water. We made up the kind of party which made me think that a longer cruise on one of these things would be a pain: nice enough people, but no escaping them (nor they us, of course.) Remarkable, really, also, how all the wrong people bare their breasts with enthusiasm and on a small boat that can matter. On land, we had supper at a farm in the hills, where house martins nested in the ceiling of the living room where we ate.

Renting a car is cheap, and necessary. In ours, we wound up and over a mountainous forest road and down past huge greenhouses growing tomatoes, and on - via an improbably tatty road - to Patara. It's a dull town and then, further on, an 18-odd kilometres of blistering sand, with gorse and shrubs and dunes on the landward side. At the car park end of the beach, there's a very good unsmart restaurant. There's also a man who is unhappy and has a camel whose mood is hard to discern: this pair offer rides to those who pay up for the dubious treat, and the owner mutters imprecations at the majority, who won't. I took a charming picture of the beast and was chased half way down the beach for payment by its humpy boss. Only when I fell into the habit of driving the camel-keeper home to Kalkan at the end of his day did we elicit anything like a smile.

The thing about Patara beach is that it is generously wild: really so big that it mops up visitors and then still has miles to spare. In truth, it's so wild it's almost sinister, and all the better for it.

Best of all, the beach is neighbour to a ruined Greek city-port - amphitheatre, arches, an early Christian church site - which is simply and uncomplainingly being swallowed by dunes which are wind-swept smooth and virgin every day. In the sunken port, there was a constant undertone of frogs' discussions. Azure dragonflies flirted. Everywhere, wild flowers danced and bobbed and birds burst their lungs with song. The limestone of the ruins gleamed brightly, as we alternately climbed or just sat and stared.

Patara was a classical site amongst a half dozen within easy driving distance, and it had to a greater degree than any of them that feeling, common in some degree to them all, that vigorous human life - deals and arguments, especially - have only just ceased and are still echoing round. We had Patara's ruins mostly to ourselves, except one day, a wrinkled Mancunian in shorts strode through, careless in his open-toed sandals of the vicious little grasses at his feet. And one day, a blonde girl who claimed to be a model asked me whether I had something called a release and a contract form when I called out to her if she minded strolling into shot, just for scale, when I took a picture. I fancy she was the sister of the yob on the plane out.

A great place, but not if you seek the fashionable, or the hep. A place for lovers and friends, but not perhaps for young families.

Fact box:
We got a wonderful bargain (£288 per person per week, flight, transfer and self catering villa) by approaching the Turkish owned and run Alternative Turkey (0171 923 3230), who sell their own holidays but also can sometimes offer heavily discounted holidays by Savile (0171 625 3001), the upmarket operator (similarly well-connected locally). We flew Britannia, Gatwick to Dalaman, and then were bussed a couple of hours to Kalkan where car rental, coach tours and eating are all easy).