We have just returned from two weeks in Olu Deniz 1st-14th October 2008.
The resort is very picturesque with very pleasant mountainous scenery, a very nice blue lagoon, a good beach, and a pleasant tourist-oriented resort centre.
There is plenty of choice of restaurants, shops etc - although very variable in quality. If you want noise, clubs, etc, Olu Deniz may not suit you, but the inland village of Hisonarou may be suited although we found it a bit too commercial.
The weather was in the mid-high 20s every day and we had only a few brief showers on a couple of days - very nice.
The lagoon is part of a national park - you can pay a small fee to enter the park or go around the other side of the lagoon to Sugar Beach etc. The pedallos are not too expensive (20 YTL/hour) and you can look out for turtles (we saw 2 briefly), flying fish and kingfishers. Either way, sunbeds are 5 YTL each per day and umbrellas also 5 YTL.
The whippers-in for the restaurants, tour companies, etc were a bit annoying but rather less of a problem than at Hisonarou where there were nearly as many restaurants as potential ciustomers in October. Restaurants are a little less expensive than UK but not by much - wine seems to be very poor value. The ambience of the restaurants varied from Doner Kebab stalls, through Bar-Cafes to very nice restaurants. Our favourite was the Sultan Ahmet Turkish Restaurant on the main (pedestrian) shopping street not far from the sea-front. Their food and service was excellent and their location and ambience were ideal. The staff were professional, and very friendly without being over-familiar. We gave them 10 out of 10.
The dolmus's (shared taxi/mini-buses) work really well and are very good value for getting to nearby towns like Hisonarou and Fethiye.
The resort is a major paragliding centre, and this was quite fascinating to watch. Beware of paragliders landing on the beach and promenade - sometimes quite dangerously to sunbathers and passers-by. There are plenty of tandem paraglider firms where they will take you up the mountain and an experienced "pilot" with fly you down, taking about 45 minutes. We ddint do it, but I can see why its popular - the views and "buzz" must be amazing. But beware that your holiday insurance wont cover you, and there have been a number of deaths of solo enthusiast paragliders - 10 last year and 2 while we were there. The tandem operators will tell you they have a good safety record (which may be reasonably true) but that wont stop a solo flyer from causing an accident to a tandem flyer.
All-in-all a very nice resort and holiday marred only by our hotel - I'm about to review them next, and they won't be getting 10 out of ten!
Colin & Chris
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