Ephesus

I just poked my head round the door to see if I had upset anyone last night before I went to bed. I don't remember much about the very end of last night, possibly because I had been celebrating the drop in temperature. A hangover in that heat would have been unthinkable.

We once went to Southern Turkey, where it was about 100 in the shade. A friend of mine had been in the same place the week before when it was even hotter. He took an egg from the hotel and went out into the street with it. He cracked it open and poured it onto the pavement. It fried.

I spent the whole two weeks drinking pints of hot water during the day, and in the evening I drank a maximum of one small bottle of weak beer, washed down with pints of - this time - cold water.

Our fellow Brits began drinking alcohol before breakfast and wandered around town shouting, swearing and generally causing acute embarrassment to us until about 3.00am the following morning. They turned a lobster red in the sun.

In our hotel, a few days before we arrived, a British husband and wife were celebrating their honeymoon. The marriage ended even sooner than they had expected, because he tried to drown his new bride in the swimming pool. The Turkish waiters had to drag her out of the water before he succeeded. She went back home to her mother and he was in prison awaiting his sentence by the time we got there.

The travel agent was a young friend of ours and she tried to warn us what sort of a place Bodrum was by saying, "A lot of young people go there", but the warning was too obscure for us. I think her commission was worth more to her than our holiday was to us.

All we wanted to see was Ephesus.