Hi Fiona
Just to say a quick thank you regarding our holiday, the villa Meltems, the area, the people were all fantastic.

We took in a couple of boat trips one from dalyan and another from Gocek both were great value for money especially when there were 19 of us.

Every body in the town were very friendly from the bars to the shops especially the bars when they see 19 people coming I think they thought that they had won the lottery.

Anyway thanks again would like to go back some other time maybe not bang in the middle of July, as it was very hot

Hello Fiona
Just thought I would give you a bit of feedback on our week at Don & Mary's Villa from 18-25 July.

Firstly, thanks very much for arranging this at such short notice, as the whole family had a really great week and, of course, wished we had booked it for two weeks! (Impractical though as the two-week flights were horrendously expensive)

The villa, then: we loved it and wished it was ours: contrary to our previous experience in Turkey it was spotlessly clean and (more or less) everything worked - thank heavens for the dishwasher! And although it has a built in BBQ chimney, this is effectively unusable as there is no grill or anything like that to hold the food.

Something was leaking from the downstairs toilet (nothing horrible, water I think!) and by the time we left there was quite a pool of water on the floor in there. And the shower cubicle upstairs is badly designed so that however you close it, water escapes and collects on the floor - we stuffed beach towels down beside the toilet to soak it up as much as possible, but again by the time we left there was a damp patch appearing on the living room ceiling. By the way, we did tell Ahmet about these things before we left, so I'm sure he'll have it in hand!

The arrival transfer was not as smooth as we would have liked: when we emerged from Dalaman arrivals into the scrum outside, there was no-one to meet us, and we had to wait about 20 minutes until a guy from Ertan showed up, and even then we had to seek him out rather than vice versa - then there was a further delay as he 'wasn't expecting 4 people' with modest luggage, so had come with a car that was too small, and so we had to wait another 20 minutes while he phoned for a minibus! Meanwhile all the other passengers on our plane had disappeared into the heat haze! Not the best first impression.

Ahmet was at the villa to welcome us when we arrived, and I have to say he was really helpful the whole holiday - not intrusive but extremely ready to help when asked.

We liked Dalyan very much, although apart from the two different ends of the beach we didn't do any of the trips; far too hot to do much except chill out around the (really fabulous) pool. We were a bit shocked at how big and developed it was, and how many of the bars and restaurants are geared up to the needs of the English tourist (whereas we would probably have liked a bit more Turkish atmosphere) We felt that too many restaurants were bastardising Turkish cooking to appeal to the English (Fillet steak anyone??!!), which is a pity as their cooking is great in its own right; but then we're 'foodies' and can get very boring about this kind of thing. In the end we wondered if we had arrived in Dalyan about 5 years too late?

Never the less, we would like to go back there - maybe out of peak season to 'do the trips' and maybe a bit of walking, or maybe despite it all for a couple of weeks next July, as it's a pretty fabulous place for relaxing! 

Finally we picked up a lot of details about buying property out there, so if you have any advice about that I'd be very interested, as there would be a lot of worse places and we're seriously looking!

Sorry for the length of this message, and thanks once again for making it so easy for me to arrange this holiday.

Kind regard