Just one day earlier snow had fallen, briefly icing the Aktepe plateau before melting away again with the midday sun, but out in the valleys the apricot trees are in blossom and there is a palpable sense that the hardships of winter are finally behind us.That’s just as well because this year’s tourism season has got off to a cracking start, with most of the hotels full for Easter, full again for Children’s Day and looking forward to being full once again in the weeks following ANZAC Day. This is a great relief after a 2006 season blighted first by bird flu, then by the fallout from the Danish cartoons furor, and overall by relentless bad news from Iraq and then Lebanon. This year, in contrast, hoteliers seem quietly confident that, save some unforeseen development in Iran, spring will segue into summer with all their beds comfortably full.
After eight years in Göreme I have seen first hand what a risky business tourism can be. In another life I used to teach British students about the travel industry. As part of the course we studied the impact on tourism of all sorts of external factors ranging from exchange rates and prices in competitor countries to terrorism and war. I knew all about the theory. However, it wasn’t until I came to live in Cappadocia that I saw at first hand what happened when theory morphed into cold, hard fact.
Of course 1999 was rock bottom -- the year when the arrest of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist leader Abdullah Öcalan and then the twin earthquakes that hit northeast Turkey effectively wrote off the summer season. With 90 percent of its residents dependent on tourism for their income, Göreme was worst hit, but no part of Cappadocia could have ridden out that year unscathed. I can still see the white, frightened face of a friend in Avanos as the cancellations rolled off his fax machine. “What will we do? We have 40 families depending on us!” he wailed.
“Terrorism tourists,” my friend Ali dubbed some of the people who passed through that year and haggled for cheaper prices, shamelessly asking how hoteliers intended to support their families without their “help.” But since then lessons have been learnt. These days most hoteliers prefer to court the less penny-pinching segments of the market. They are also much keener on Turkish customers, knowing that when times are hard, it’s the domestic travelers who will keep coming.
Outside my window a pretty little black redstart is calling to his mate. Like the swifts, he spent the winter elsewhere and has come back to build his nest amidst the fairy chimneys. In his carefree call, I hope I hear an omen for the season, an omen of peace and prosperity for all.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
