Northern Cyprus: Where's The Beach?

Wednesday night we received a note in our room mentioning an offer at another resort The Korineum Golf and Beach Resort. It said that they were having some promotion for golf resorts and were offering a free night’s stay. After the experience we had been having at the Malpas the idea of another resort sounded fantastic, especially after looking at the brochure.

However, the letter didn’t mention anything about how to take advantage of the offer. So, we went to the receptionist to speak with someone about it, and of course, the guy working knew nothing on the subject and said maybe we should come back later to ask someone. After breakfast on Thursday, we went back, before going to the beach and tried reception again. And at seeing “Blank Face” working, I didn’t have the patience to talk to her, so HK went and asked. At first, we had no luck, but HK persisted and eventually got someone else who was helpful who spoke English. I don’t remember the ladies name, but she would turn out to be the only competent employee at the entire place. She said that she would arrange our transportation to the other location and actually seemed friendly and wanted to help us have a decent trip. Too bad it took until Thursday to find this wonderful person.

Once we got that sorted out, we hopped on the shuttle to the beach. If you go the website of the resort, it uses the word beach when describing what they offered, and the brochure says that this place has a private beach with a shuttle to get people to the beach. So, imagine our surprise when we got off the shuttle and found that they had a dock with a bunch of chairs on it around a little bay to swim in.

After the “beach,” we returned to the room to find the sewer smell even worse than the previous night. We went to the helpful person and told her about it, and she said she would have someone take a look.

As I write this on our last night in the room with the door to the balcony wide open, I can tell you no one looked at it. From what I can tell all the did was come into the room and spray some air freshener in the room to cover the smell. Think of it like trying to sleep in a porta-toilet that has been used heavily and sat in the sun for days.

Update: much later at night the air condition stopped working altogether. So, at midnight, we called the receptionist to let him know it’s not working.

1:30 am a technician arrives but can’t seem to fix it. He leaves and says he is coming back.

I call the front desk again to have them change rooms, but of course, they are fully booked.

“So, you are telling me that this is the most popular hotel in the country and is fully booked?!”

“Yes” he responds, “we are fully booked.”

I slam the phone down, fighting the urge to throw it on the floor and jump on it smashing it into bits. Then walk down to the lobby and punch the guy in the face. But the idea of a few nights in a Turkish jail doesn’t sound appealing, so I managed to control myself.

The technician came back with another guy, and they both take turns turning it off and on. They say it’s fixed, leave, and it turns back off again. One of them gave us his direct number, so I call him, he comes back, switches the circuit breaker off and on this time and leaves. Around 2:30 in the morning after going through this same routine over and over, we give up and decide to sleep with the windows open, and I take a sleeping pill I’m lucky enough to have. It doesn’t work very well, and we are occasionally woken by the sounds of cars racing up the road for the remainder of the night into the morning.