Our coasting stops at Ayvalik

Sailing in very gentle winds from Cesme to Eskifoca

Ayvalik harbour front

It's funny how things pan out when you're travelling by boat. The force and/or direction of the wind, which matters next to nothing to a land traveller, will either stop you in your tracks or send you rocketing past a place you'd rather liked to have seen. In our case, add a teensy bit of back pain, and the inconvenience of a weekend, when exiting and entering countries by sea is usually best avoided, and before you know it you've been somewhere a week. Somewhere like Ayvalik where, in another life,  I might have settled down.

Greek church converted to a mosque

We've been tied up at Ayvalik for longer than we ought to have been, given the horrible daily rates charged by Turkish marinas. This is as far up the coast as we're going now (we've abandoned Canakkale and the Gallipoli peninsula). On Monday, all going well, we'll peel off for the Greek island of Lesvos.

We were always going to come in here for a day or two so we could leave the boat and drive to Pergamon, the ancient ruins at Bergama, about 50 km south-east of Ayvalik. More about that in another post. I knew that Ayvalik was famous for its olive oil production (and that excited me), and that it used to a Greek town before the population exchange of 1922. It's a fishing town, obviously, its harbour sheltered behind the islands of the archipelago.

But what I didn't know was how mellow life is here,  nor how much the Turks love the place. There's are few foreign tourists (compared to the south) but lots of Turks enjoying the place. They've built ugly holiday "villages", as they call their tree-less coastal developments, around the harbour, but from inside Ayvalik's narrow streets you don't see or sense these changes. It's a place for stopping a while.

A backstreet Ayvalik olive oil shop

It almost goes without saying that there's a Thursday market which flows around the cobbled streets like water seeking out channels, and that I found great treasures there. This week, gooseberries in their fragile cases, and fresh and dried cherries. I am already steeling myself for the relative scarcity of fresh produce on Greek islands.

The top end olive oil shops are very fancy

After half a day of wandering the streets and hills behind Ayvalik, we returned to the boat with several types of olive oil. Alex placed himself horizontal, but I ventured out again with a purpose.

A chance encounter on a Turkish food blog pointed me towards Cop(m)adam, an experimental project in Ayvalik designed to give work to women who hadn't ever had jobs, and to recycle waste material. It pinged something in my famously bleeding heart, so off I went with my Google map. I walked past Cop(m)adam's shopfront probably three times before I saw it. "Everybody gets lost in Ayvalik," Tara Hopkins said, when I walked into her workshop and out of the late afternoon heat.

Cop(m)adam's workshop

Tara sat just inside the door at a table covered with cats. The room was small. Five or six women were packing up their work. It was Friday, but nobody seemed in a hurry to leave. Women were chatting, comparing work, laughing.  Did I want tea? No, I wanted to know. A huge thirst for information overtook me. What's happening here? Tell me quick.

Tara Hopkins and a bottle-top bag

I could have stayed and picked Tara's brain for hours. A lively, politically-alert American who's lived in Turkey since 1989 - a journalistic goldmine! Civility prevailed however, and I took what information I was offered as an interested passer-by and left as tickled as an Alice who has fallen into wonderland.

In brief (and do check the Cop(m)adam link), this project is Tara's attempt to advance the "civil society" theory she's taught for years, most recently at Sabanci University in Istanbul, from another tactical vantage point. She used to train activists, but you do wonder, don't you, about fighting the system, and you do get tired. Why not trying working from the inside? At Cop(m)adam, she employs about 10 women full and part-time, and another 60 who work from home. Cop(m)adam's "garbage ladies" make bags, purses, embroidered work, funky accessories and so on from donated waste material. The goods are sold in boutiques in Istanbul, and on-line.

In behind the workspace is a largish room stuffed to the ceiling with bolts of cloth, plastic, leather, even a pile of donated parquet planking - "we don't know what we're going to do with that yet". She'll figure it out. She measures the growth of her project not just in sales. A condition of the pieceworkers'  employment is that they must come into Cop(m)adam's little workspace one day a  week. Tara's sub-text isn't subtle - get women out of their homes, and they will flourish, grow in confidence. "One of my ladies went out the other day and bought her first lipstick," she tells me. "Some ladies are buying bathing suits for the first time." That's counter-cultural. In Turkey, there's a big push from the top for women to cover themselves up. And they are. We see covered women, young and old, everywhere. From her quiet corner in Ayvalik Tara won't stop the traffic, but the theory is that from little things big things grow.

One of Tara's ladies - she's 73, devout, and proudly uncovered

Ready for more ruins? They come next.

Keeping Greek waters to the left

From the top of Cesme castle you can see across to Chios

We are well up the Aegean coast of Turkey now. If we wanted, we could be in Europe - or what's called Europe - in less than an hour. The Greek island of Chios is 8 km across the water from Cesme (pronounced Cheshmay). This morning I re-assured my mother that yes, we were keeping well clear of the "dangerous part of Turkey". From New Zealand, you might imagine that anywhere in Turkey is far too close to the Syrian border, but if she could see Cesme she'd understand. It's a tidy town, with zero tolerance for trouble-makers, I'd guess. The marina is expensive, and reeks of Izmir money.

Enki (centre, front, with yellow kayak) at Cesme marina

What's this?  Cold and wet - Samos on the horizon

We should have been out of here this morning, running before a fresh southerly up to Ayvalik, 70 miles further north. But the forecast for fresh winds firmed overnight into a near-gale force warning - and we're done with thunderstorms having ridden out one which slipped beneath our on-board forecaster's radar a few days ago - so we stepped ashore to visit Cesme's castle instead. We are parked right beneath it, in fact.

Old school harbour protection

It's a good-looking castle. The Genoese built it in the 14th century as a fortress. What were the Genoese doing over this way, I ask myself? Genoa was a city-state with a powerful navy, says Alex...Ah. Plus the Genoese were Christians, and the Christian emperors in Constantinople were only just holding out in the 14th century. Not for much longer though. In 1508, the son of Mehmet the Conqueror (he who attacked Constantinople and finished off the Byzantines) re-built and strengthened Cesme kale (castle). Apparently the Venetians (another city-state with a rampaging navy) destroyed it in the 17th century, but the Ottomans rebuilt it. In 1770 the Ottoman navy was blown out of the water in Cesme harbour by the Russian navy (Catherine the Great's lot). That sea battle was Cesme castle's finest hour, defeat notwithstanding. The Russians are back in Cesme, buying villas along the coast. A museum guide told us that the billionaire Roman Abramovich owns a beach over the hill, back towards Kusadasi - he and Alex were talking about football at the time. The international language.

Grazing inside the keep

We came up from Kusadasi yesterday. We stopped there a couple of days, mostly so we could visit Ephesus again.

The Ephesus Library facade - totally fabulous

From the top of Curetes Way you see the library

Domestic floor covering, Ephesus style - featuring Artemis, the town idol

The wealthy lived well in Ephesus - apartment restoration

I'm not sure if there's anything new can be said about Ephesus, but I'll remember sitting  with Alex in the famous theatre of the Ephesians and hearing a voice rising over the clappity-clap of tourist guides. The singer, who belonged to a tourist group milling about down below, continued for a minute or so with snatches of opera, by which time all talking on the terraces had stopped. She was obviously a professional, and the applause for her was loud. It was quite something, that little performance. It helped me imagine more easily how Paul's voice might have risen to the back of the theatre which in its days held 25,000 people.

The road led from the harbour to the theatre

Speaking of large spaces, I'm going to roll out a few photos from ancient Didyma's Temple of Apollo. We had no expectations of this place. It is enfolded by one of the ugliest coastal towns we know of, Altinkum and we were only there because, there being no anchorages on that desolate, silted-up coastline, and we hopped into the D-Marin marina at Didim. It is barren too, so we caught a dolmus to the temple in the 'burbs.

Get the scale of those columns?

The inner courtyard of the temple of Apollo

Temple maiden

What's left, from the front steps

Can you believe this place? Apparently it missed out by only five columns on being one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (it was the second largest temple, and there are no prizes for second now or then). We strolled, and basked, and people-watched, and marvelled at the fantasies that drive human beings to keep raising stone columns to the heavens. Most of the good statues were carted away long ago for "safe-keeping" in the British Museum,  but there's enough left at Didim to satisfy a thirst for ruins in the late afternoon sun.

Mega Medusa 

Clouds in the south, lit from the west, at Didim marina

Biding our time in Okluk

While we are still in Turkey, I am reading Alexander's Path, by the late Freya Stark, whose travel writing I have a crush on.

Her hero, Alexander the Great

The nomadic Miss Stark 

Miss Stark was a superb traveller, known as a kind of Freya of Arabia. She was also an impressive classical scholar. She came to Turkey in 1954, at the age of 61, to try to figure out exactly which route Alexander and his army marched when they left Halicarnassus (now Bodrum) to meet up with his commanders in  Phaeslis (south of Antalya) during an early military campaign.
She had a pretty hard time of it. Roads certainly weren't what they are now, nor was transport much improved since Alexander's time. She travelled by jeep where one was available, and by taxi (ditto), but often by packhorse or donkey - she rode well, and often much further than her guides wished to go. It goes without saying that a woman with an itinerary of her own making was not usual in Turkey at the time, and she was regularly thwarted by male intransigence. But she was philosophical, and an Englishwoman. "One of the chief blessings of travel," she wrote, "is that sameness is not its attraction; the pleasant and the unpleasant days are almost equally agreeable to remember, once they are over." If only I had more of Miss Stark's personal fortitude.

Enki at anchor in Okluk

The neighbourhood, looking south-west

Freya Stark has kept me company these past six days, and I do like company. Alex hasn't been up to it.  When he put his back out on Sunday morning, he hunkered down with his old familiar, mind-twisting pain, and it's only today, now that he no longer looks like a bent fork, that we're able to contemplate moving on from this anchorage.

It's been a fine place to be holed up, honestly, though you'd have to call Okluk a backwater. Miss Stark put it in the proper perspective for me: "A good traveller does not, I think, much mind the uninteresting places. He is there to be inside them, as a thread is inside the necklace it strings. The world, with unknown and unexpected variety, is part of his own Leisure; and this living participation is, I think, what separates the traveller and the tourist, who remains separate, as if he were at a theatre, and not himself a part of whatever the show may be."

The pier attached to Turgut's restaurant in Okluk

Speaking Turkish is a prerequisite for understanding the show in Okluk, or anywhere else. I don't have enough Turkish, but I do have a kayak which is a social ice-breaker. I met a Yorkshireman called John, who has spent three winters here on his boat Simone - he suffers from back pain too, and when he found out that Alex was crook, he came across with a bag of books. He gave us the rundown of Okluk's characters, who he'd invite on his boat, and who he'd close the door on. Small places are like that.
We asked him about the bay one around from here which is marked off-limits on the chart. Oh, he said, that's reserved for the use of the Turkish prime minister. It's got a permanent police guard. But the current PM doesn't use it much because his wife and daughters prefer the high life at Bodrum.
Thunder is banging around in the hills, and we'll be heading out soon to eat at Turgut's outdoor restaurant on the other side of the inlet. It's where the show goes on each evening in Okluk, and tonight we get to watch and learn.

The place to eat

One last word from Freya Stark though before I put her to bed. In 1952, she cruised with the British consul in Smyrna (now Izmir) and his wife along the Lycian coast in a small boat called Elfin. "No part of the world can be more beautiful than the western and southern coasts of Turkey", she declares in the opening sentence of Alexander's Path, so you know where she stands on the matter. But how well can you know a country when you travel by boat? I've often wondered, and she obviously did too. "A country looked at from the sea is like the sleeping Princess, the unknown," she writes. "From the land it is no longer enchanted, but varied and human, a foundation for friendship and living..." I tend to agree with her. We need to get ashore more this year.

Gearing up in Gokova Gulf

The hardest thing about leaving is letting go the lines, seasoned cruisers tell us. There's always one more job to be done.

We're not seasoned yet, and leaving port after our anxiety over fuel had cleared was as simple as stowing a few more cans of Illy coffee and ducking over to West Marine to buy Alex a new pair of sailing shoes (he was all for fixing the old ones, but I draw the line at broken plastic shoes).

After that, we handed over the key to our bike lock to Lee, our ex-US navy submarine commander buddy, wished he and Zehra pleasant riding, and then we were gone.

At anchor at Sehir Adalari

Now it seems as if there never was a winter.  I'm back in the kayak and (children close your ears) back in a bikini. The first time I lowered myself down the ladder to swim a stern line to shore however, I did so in a full-length wetsuit and booties. A couple of Brits on a boat anchored about 100m away stared rather rudely. They were sitting in their cockpit half-naked. Yes, I understood that the sun was hot overhead, but it was early May, and surely the water was still cold...

It isn't actually - even Alex has dunked his body - but until further notice I'll risk derision and stick with the wetsuit for those long swims with the floating rope.

We've not come far as the crow flies.  For the time being - until Alex kicks the hacking cough he brought with him from Marmaris, and reassembles his back - we're at Okluk (the word means "quiver", as in bow and arrows and quiver, in Turkish) which is in behind the mountains at the base of the Marmaris peninsula. There's a dolmus (shared mini-bus) run into town twice a day - about 30 km one way. By boat though it's much further.

Always a good time to revise Turkish vocab

Great drifts of yellow "stuff" we think is pollen sit on the waters of the Gokova gulf

Okluk is towards the head of the Gokova gulf, which extends inland for over 40 miles from Bodrum on the Aegean coast of Turkey. To get to the gulf from Marmaris, you sail west past the Greek island of Simi, head north-west around the tip of the Datca peninsula (where to sit at anchor in the man-made harbour of ancient Knidos is like being centre-stage in a great classical theatre), and then turn east again towards a massive wall of rock which falls steeply into the gulf on the north-side. It's all very wild, and undeveloped once you get past Bodrum, and because the wind reliably blows west to east, you can't expect to hurry up and back in a few days. You have to plan your legs, so to speak.

First stop was Cokertme, just cranking up for the summer trade

The northern shore of Gokova gulf, from Sehir Adalari anchorage

Cleopatra's custom-made beach

It's a great piece of sailing water though, beneath the mountain citadels. And this early in the season, we have it almost to ourselves. The turquoise anchorage at Sehir Adalari, which Rod Heikell says is hellish in summer, was virtually empty - and paddling close to the ruins on-shore at sunset I could see why Anthony and Cleopatra might have chosen this place as a getaway. Legend has it that Cleopatra had sand brought by ship from the Sahara to make herself a perfect little beach there - apparently, in our times, the sand has been geologically tested, and pronounced untypical of the region and of a type with Saharan sand. The island is now a certified museum. You can swim off the beach, under the watch of a guard in a tower. Swimmers are forbidden to wear anything but swimwear onto the beach or to bring a towel near the sand lest heritage Saharan grains be removed, I guess. It's all a bit strange, but you can't blame the Turks for milking the original It girl's appeal.

Behind the beach - the crowds will come

Something much more satisfying about a theatre

Looks like Copenhagen, actually is Okluk Koyu

Okluk is just around the corner from Cleopatra's playground. Sadun Boro, the first Turk to sail around the world in a small sailing boat, keeps his boat at the head of the inlet, beneath the pines and the liquidambers which grow wild in the forest. It's not the boat he circumnavigated in - he gave that to a maritime museum - but a catamaran, with a decal on both its rear quarters of a giant octopus holding a mermaid in one tentacle and a bottle of Yeni Raki in another. A bit rakish, a bit risque. The old celebrity salt is away now, probably in Istanbul making money from speaking, one of the local liveaboards told me. His girl is here though. She sits at the entrance to inlet, looking decorative and marking shallow water off the point.

So this is it. We're cruising again. It took me a few days to realise what I was missing - the muezzin's pre-dawn alarm call to prayer. We wake now with the light, and in Okluk Koyu, backed up against the forest, with birdsong. It's good.

Mezes and Efes - the perfect combination

Skype is best without the camera - talking to Sam