Day 4: July 07, 2009 – Tuesday
Woke up feeling much better. After a light breakfast, we set out for the legendary Mazi beach. Mazi is not exactly inside Bodrum. In fact, driving eastbound, it is 50 km away from the center of Bodrum. Yet, for anyone wishing to be left along, and sunbathe and swim on a bare beach, Mazi is the place to go.
The road leading to Mazi is very rough. Unless you are not driving your own car, you may not want to speed no more than 20 km/hour for certain parts of the road. After an hour and a half later, we were finally there.
It was in fact my second time in Mazi. The first time was 5 years ago with my father. There are a few beaches down the village Mazi. With my father, we’d been only to one of them and the sea on that particular day was not at its best. The weather was windy and harsh. This time, we ended up going to the other beaches. The first beach we went to was totally bare, almost abandoned. There were just a handful of people, lying down on their own towels.
As young adults, we decided that we needed more than towels and so we checked out the next beach in line. Here were a couple of hostels and little motels with beach restaurants (still very primitive) and a few beds on the beach. We picked the most secluded little motel.
After swimming and sleeping and reading for about an hour and a half, the staff rang a little bell to announce the start of lunchtime. Lunch was table d’hote: whatever the landlady wished to cook for the day. For that day she had cooked zucchini with olive oil and onions, plain white rice and haricot beans –a Turkish traditional. For desert, she offered pumpkin pie or watermelon. The food was not spectacular, but it was fine homecooking with big service sizes.
After lunch, we swam and slept a little more. Since, we had a long way to go, we left the beach early around 4.30 P.M. to get back home and get ready for dinner.
The hype of the day was the dinner. We went to this little restaurant in Bitez, called the “Bagarasi.” It is ran by a friendly and nice lady, who does the cooking, who takes the orders and who picks you up from the center of Bitez, when you cannot find her little place in the back streets of Bitez. Her little place is a little vineyard. She serves only 8 tables per night –and trust me she had to turn away so many people on one night- so reservation is a must. The food is varied. She takes you first to her glass-bounded fridge and shows you the meals of the day. There is no set menu, it is whatever she has cooked that day, yet it is mostly grass and vegetable dishes cooked with virgin olive oil. We had a grass platter (sea grasses marinated with special sauces), a dish of beans served with yogurt sauce, a special rice dish with vegetables, fried vegetable patty made with eatable grasses, fried dumplings served with minced meat and yogurt, a very special and unique beetroot dish and grilled calamari as usual. As we were overwhelmed by the taste of all those dishes we had ordered, we were taken back by the smell of something we had not ordered: smell of roasted lamb. Noticing our daze at the dish, the right hand of the nice lady (I wish not calling anyone at this place a waiter or a cook or a servant, since they were all like a team and since they were all very friendly to the guests) asked us whether we would want him to “steal” a little portion of the lamb for us to try.
It turned out that apart from the wonderful vegetable and traditional Turkish home dishes, the nice lady specialized in cooking meat and chicken dishes. Yet, you had to tell her that you were interested in eating -let’s say roasted lamb- the day before, so that she could start marinating the lamb for you from a day before.
We left the restaurant satiated, full and happy; yet eager and curious for more…
Bağarası: Pınarlı Cad. No:59, Bitez, Bodrum
0252 363 76 93
You will find on Donuz, everything that is unique to where we have been and where you would want to be. Be it food, be it lodging, be it a special feet massage, a bottle of wine, a person… Be it for 7 days, a day, a week, 36 hours or a single moment. On Donuz, is everything, you will need to make your holidays special. We hope you share with us your experiences.
Mon, Jul 13, 2009
Bodrum