Off course

On his bike 

This boating blog has gone a bit off course. If Alex were writing it, rather than doing the myraid other useful things he does, you'd get a very different picture of our life here at Netsel marina.  It bothers me that his deep absorption in, say, the pros and cons of monocrystalline, polycrystalline and amorphous solar panels (not to mention the vagaries of their pricing) is quite invisible to you. I do plan to make amends. Very soon you'll be given access to the Boat Jobs for the Winter List - or rather, the Boat Jobs to be Organised over the Winter List.  Here on Enki, we know our limits. No boat job too small to give to someone else. I joke, but...it's something to aim for, isn't it?

I'd like it noted that when a warm wind blew in from the south mid-week, we on Enki, trained from  childhood not to waste a good drying day, washed our salty curtains (the charter fleets hung out their sails en masse, which is much more sailorly). Sounds like a doddle, but in fact it was hell on the fingertips and the nails. I reckon there are close to 500 curtain hooks attaching Hallberg Rassy's silly little granny curtains (dispensed with in newer HR models) to their sliders, top and bottom. I was ready to give up almost before I'd started, but then Alex came up with A Method and I was in the groove. Not a major league boat job, not even one which made the List, but hey, you do what you can do - and freshly laundered curtains give my housewifely heart a lift.

Back on the cultural beat now.

From the time we decided to winter over in Marmaris, people we met along the way began pressing on us the name Gwen Bylund. "You must get on her email list," they said. "She organises everything." Alex and I didn't necessarily want to be organised, but Gwen, it turns out, is unavoidable. She's a Californian girl gone wild, a blowsy blonde with a backstory to turn her mother's hair white. 

Pineapple - open all winter

In her "old" age (I daren't ask, but she says she's getting old), she lives alone on a Nauticat motor sailer ketch which doesn't look like it leaves the dock too often anymore and vents her restlessness on the clueless bunch which washes up each year at the marina.  

When you first "come in", Gwen (or 'KW' as she's known, that being the name of her boat) mails you her FAQ - it runs to 83 pages. Anything you think to ask, she's been asked before, and the answer's in the FAQ. She runs the morning cruisers' net on VHF 69, sorts out winter activities (like the Turkish lessons), takes delivery of a monthly discounted wine order, oils the Tuesday happy hour at the Pineapple, potluck dinners, the hectic December shopping in Izmir schedule etc. 

But Gwen's real claim to fame are her land tours to known and lesser known corners of Turkey. We have met people who've decided to winter over in Marmaris in large part so they can join one or several of Gwen's tours. I find that surprising because the urge to sail your own boat across oceans shouldn't come bundled with a tolerance for coach travel (I think). But she must be doing something right, because cruisers from years past rave about Gwen's tours.

We've not signed up for any of her longer tours but yesterday we piled into a mini-bus with 14 others and headed off on a "mystery" day tour. There were no carpet shops, and no mandatory stops at tea houses. We were told to bring a packed lunch. 

Our guide, Tas ("like Tasmanian devil") was a clever child with a masters degree in political economy, or some such incomprehensible qualification. A quick little devil with more English accents at his disposal than many Englishmen. His mobile face, river of words and the way he had of slicking back his hair reminded me so much of Alex's Mikey that I couldn't keep a silly smile off my face as I listened to him from the back of the bus. 

The mysteries were: a spectacular temple to Zeus (one of very few in Asia Minor) at a place once known as Euromos, a lovely roadside site we'd not have found but for Gwen; a charming traditional Turkish village called Comakdag Kizilagac (don't ask me to say it) which seemed, miraculously, to be empty of tourists except for ourselves; and near the built-over ruins of Heraklia, somewhere north of Bodrum, beneath one of those bare rock ranges that still strike me dumb, a heaven in which to spread our picnic blanket in the shelter of a ruined monastery overlooking a lake of precious beauty....and discover a new (gasp) kind of rock tomb.  

The old ladies in the villages were ready for us with their wares, and their voracious appetite for a sale would have put a Parramatta Road car salesman to shame. They play the game to win, and they won. But I'll leave Alex's photos to tell the rest of the story. There are times, I admit, when I think he's lost sight of anything other than boat systems theory. Then I need to pull out his photos - he sees so much more than I do, and in such tender detail. I'm so grateful for his eye.

Red tape

We're legal. Turkish residents for a year. How about that?

We picked up our little blue books from the port police with four days to spare on our tourist visas. For one as pathologically law-abiding as myself, my relief can't be under-estimated. I was skipping. Top marks to the Turks for efficiency too. Our applications were processed in two weeks,  exactly as promised, notwithstanding a major public holiday (it felt like Easter to me) falling smack in the middle of that period.

And we're mobile too. There are no photos yet, but the unthinkable has happened - Alex riding a bicycle. As evidence, I give you not one, but two bikes parked at Enki's stern. He's talking picnics. I'm doubtful, but I like his direction. At the very least, having bikes brings our outlying pontoon that much closer to town and its amenities. Yesterday, spotting ominous clouds, I sped into the chicken shop and was back before the rain quickened, dodging huddles of tourists doomed to be drenched on their way back to the cruise ship dock.

There won't be many, if any, more monster liners into Marmaris this year. We're definitely in the off-season now. Race week ends tomorrow. It's been fun, in a crazy way. Plastic sandals and sailing paraphernalia cluttering the pontoon. The new Russian middle-class wearing spanking new boat shoes and matching sponsored polo shirts. Morale-boosting Russian march music - think Smirnov vodka ads - blaring as competitors hasten out of the marina towards the start line each day. The Dutch alongside us counter by turning up the Internationale. I heard boats belting out Highland pipes and rap this morning, but the Russians definitely have the musical advantage. "We are the champions...." I can hear from further down the pontoon. They'll give it a nudge tonight.

The guys next door (and below) 

And when they're gone, we'll be left with the hard-core cruisers. We're meeting a few of them now, and liking what we find. While we were away last weekend, another Hallberg Rassy (our kind of boat) tied up three along from us. Whisper HR, she's called, and she's from Melbourne, via Asia. May and Kevin shipped her to Turkey in April. They know Dave and Melinda, who spent the first two months of the season on Enki, and they knew Russ, who bought our old HR42 Andiamo and sadly died while cruising her in Malaysia. The neighbourhood suddenly feels a lot more like home.

Please I want to know...

Merhaba. Nasilsiniz? Bir kilo limone lutfen.

I'm never going to speak Turkish. Not properly. But the novelty of pointing and miming wears off - scratches away at your dignity too - so I'm committed to covering a few basics. Counting is good, up to 10 for sure, and on the way to 100. The niceties are coming along too - hello (merhaba), how are you (nasilsiniz?), I'm fine, and you? (iyiyim, ya siz?), very sorry (cok afedersin),  please (lutfen). If that sounds a bit pathetic after nearly three months in the country, try saying thank you a few times in a row - tesekkur ederim (pronounced teshuhkewr edereem). I still can't make it run off the tongue, and it's one of my oldest words. I learned an easier word for thanks this morning at my first Turkish class - sagol (pronounced sowel, like towel). I'll wait to see how it goes down the first time I say it. Sometimes people seem confused when I bring out a new word - goodbye- hosca kal (pronounced hoshcha kal), for example, still occasionally draws startled looks though I know I'm pronouncing it ok. Perhaps its literal meaning is something like 'go well with Allah', or 'I'm missing you already'. Turkish can be like that, I believe. Very flowery.

Speaking of flowers, aren't these tiny wild cyclamens beautiful? They've pushed their way through cracks in the stone seating of Pinara's theatre (seen below through the pines).

We spent the best part of yesterday at Pinara, pretty much on our own. Pinara is the last and most haunting of our ruined Lycian cities.  Perhaps I should leave it at that. I'm not much good at descriptive writing. But it's probably useful to know that while Pinara was once of the Big Six in the Lycian league, there's hardly anything left there besides the theatre - and graves.  I've always loved cemeteries, but Pinara is in a class of its own.

Like Arykanda, this city was built on a series of terraces below a soaring cliff face. Pinara's cliff faces north east up the Xanthos valley. You approach it from below. The road is rough and winding, and we met goats and an old couple herding them,  dressed as if Ataturk's modernisation of Turkey had never happened.  At first you see only mass, a lump of solid red rock soaring into the eagle layer. And then you see the holes pecked in the cliff. Tombs,  hundreds of them, pigeonholes for the dead, scattered over the rock face. Empty, of course. How did they make them? Why did they put them way up there? I don't know. There's scant information at the site. Pinara is a place which doesn't supply answers. It forces questions,  the same ones the Lycians were asking two thousand or more years ago. What comes next, and how should we get ready for it?

At Pinara, where there are fewer remnants of its citizens' temporal life than elsewhere in ancient Lycia, you think constantly of the effort and time that the Lycians spent preparing for life after death. That they hoped the afterlife would be comfortable, I have no doubt. I love the domestic detail on lintel of this tomb. A man sits at a table, his child stands near.

The previous day we were a little further up the Xanthos valley at Tlos, another Lycian city which attracts comparatively few visitors. It's very difficult to convey the scale of these places. The top photo (below) is taken from the agora (marketplace) looking towards the Tlos citadel; the second is taken on top of the citadel; the third from the citadel, and looks beyond the the remains of the agora and towards the theatre in the distance. The lower photo is taken from below the citadel looking down the Xanthos valley.

To wander in such a place with no limit on our time except that which we have imposed on ourselves, to feed our curiosity and to be delighted and awed by what we come across, to accumulate a smidgeon more understanding of the mysterious human condition is, I think, the essence of travel as we want to experience it. We won't, and can't see everything - neither of us are very interested in ticking the boxes. But this summer and autumn in Turkey we've had the joy of meeting a genius civilisation. What's left of it is as beguiling in fragments as it is in more magnificent, complete structures - almost always theatres, as Alex pointed out to me, because they were built in a semi-circle and withstood the upheaval of the earth better than rectangular buildings.

Tlos and Pinara are two or three hours south of Marmaris, so we booked a couple of nights at a Villa Rhapsody, a small hotel/pension in Kayakoy, a strange place just out of Fethiye. Kayakoy is a place tourists come to gawp. I don't know what they see behind the sad eyes and faded blue paint around long gone doors. I overheard the word "eery" a few times. Yes, it's eery, but more than that, Kayakoy (as the Turks called it) is a monument to political stupidity. It's an embarrassment, surely.

Kayakoy used to be called Levissi, and before that, Karmylassos. In other words, it was Greek. In 1923,  after the Turkish War of Independence, the Turks hung up their shingle - This is Turkey, keep out or suffer the consequences - coincidentally, today is Turkey's national flag-waving day, and things are no longer as black and white. But back in 1923, the Turks wanted to be Turkish, not multicultural (i.e. so yesterday, so Ottoman) and the Greeks, even though they'd been building towns and cities along  the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts forever (ask the Lycians) were considered the ugliest thorn in Turkish flesh and vice versa.

Young Turks on the chapel roof  - tone deaf? 

So one of the first things that happened in modern Turkey was the expulsion of all Christians - and to keep things even, the Greeks agreed to do the same to their Muslims. The little people didn't get a say in any of this.  It didn't matter who called what home. If you were a Christian and lived inside the borders of what was now agreed to be Turkey, you were told to go "home" to Greece. And vice versa. From Levissi, supposedly 2000 people were extradited "home" to Greece (that's what was on the flyer we were given at the entrance). But someone is fudging the numbers. There are at least 4000 abandoned and pillaged dwellings (a lot of them two or three-storey houses) plus two very large churches left in this town - and a lot has been carted away. The streets were paved. There was running water. This was not a village. It was a big town with decent services. I'd say 20,000 people is more like it. Gone. Packed their bags and told to bugger off to where they came from. Sound familiar?

Turkey is so full of other people. The living and the dead. Right now, the Russians and the Germans, participants in Marmaris International Race Week, jammed against our hull, their cockpit level with ours. We have to rub along with them for the next few days. We have no choice. People in this part of the world accept that - until they don't.

I leave you with a picture of the happy couple. We haven't practised much with the self-timer, so get out your zoom feature if you need more detail - but I assure you we are disintegrating nicely.