Is this the world's sexiest hotel

There is no idea on Earth so bad that it cannot be made significantly worse by the injection of very large sums of money.

Half an hour's drive from Antalya airport in southern Turkey, living proof exists in the record-breaking hulk of the Adam and Eve Hotel on the Belek coastline. The records it boasts of breaking include 'the world's longest bar', 'the world's longest swimming pool' and 'the world's sexiest hotel': two out of three ain't, I suppose, bad.

But it was always going to be doomed, this idea of calling anything 'the world's sexiest', in roughly the same way that any woman will (or should) run a mile from any man who informs them that he's 'well sexy', and men will flee a woman who boasts of being 'dead funny but a bit mad, me!' It would be like trying to go out with Liverpool.

And so, even on the way there - the longish flight to Istanbul and the fabulously frustrating crossover there to the second flight to Antalya, and then the bus, and then the lengthy wait at check-in before we could go to our rooms and find someone else's bags waiting - even then I was thinking fairly bad things about it all. Could it really have sold itself in that way? The 'world's sexiest hotel'? And, if so, wouldn't it end up being some terrible Ferrero Rocher/Austin Powers hybrid?

Yes. Goodness but it's unappealing. It was full, on the weekend I went, of rich Russian types, and their minders, and a number of lady friends who had been flown in the night before and all seemed to share youth and long legs and exuberant good looks and a rather mystifying lack of previous acquaintance with their 'friends'; so perhaps I wasn't seeing it at its true romantic best - but it is, in truth, hard to imagine exactly what that would be.

Yes, the 88m bar is the longest in the world; but if we're going to go for superlatives, how about a few more that don't appear in the badly spelt brochures: the world's slowest and most stupid barstaff (all men), who will manage in an almost magical way to avoid your eye unless you are accompanied by a tall woman, who knows you are accompanied by a thick wallet; the world's most stupid badly signed lift system, but also no stairs, anywhere, so you have to wait for the stupid lift; the world's most annoying traipse back, through almost half a mile of darkened purple terrible Seventies gay porn movie corridors, into whose walls you will stumble about 12 times on your way to get your book just to have something to do while you attempt to eat a horrid international breakfast.


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