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.

Autumn pleasures

No need to kick - so much salt in the water

We're floating indolently towards the finish line, an unexpected run of impossibly beautiful autumn weather keeping us tethered to a mooring buoy in Fathom Cove, at the southern end of Gocek bay.

We had considered leaving for Marmaris today, tugged back to town and marina by the need to apply for permanent residency before our tourist visas expire. But as the day revealed its loveliness, we hesitated. Tomorrow, we said. We'll leave early, hope for a bit more wind than is forecast (from the southwest please), and deal with the visa first thing on Wednesday.

So today we stayed still, listening to the hollow knocking of goat bells, the lapping of water against my kayak trailing from Enki's stern, the sweet chatter of birds in the pines and olive trees which coat the steep hills. In the cracks of the rocks, there are autumn crocuses. Irresistible. Standing on top of the high cliff behind our anchorage, we picked out the distinctive shape of a Lycian sarcophugus amongst what at first glance was just rubble. An unmarked tomb. These things don't happen to you  in marinas.

For the past few evenings, a couple of fishermen have set their nets un-nervingly close to Fathom Cove's deep water moorings under the cliffs, perhaps reclaiming their traditional grounds, willing we stragglers to move on. Who knows.

But we'll all be gone soon. There are some last-minute charterers but fewer and fewer. Today the bay seemed to empty out. By the second half of October many longer-term American and European cruisers are calling it quits and going back to their other lives - or at least to solid ground - for the cold months. Our Nordhaven friends, Suzanne and Brian, hauled out in Gocek last week and headed for an apartment in Nice (they had dinner aboard Enki but wouldn't you know it, we all forgot about the backgammon board). Also in Gocek we finally caught up with Sea Cloud, another HR48 owned by a couple of affable Aussies who we've been in email contact with since last year.  Ian Cook is a medical specialist back home in Sydney, and his wife Cathy manages his practice. We gather they're pruning the practice back to give them more time to cruise, but last week they put Sea Cloud up on the hard until next spring. In many ways I envy them going home (I don't need to say how much we miss our kids - or do I?), but perhaps the reverse is true too. With luck we'll see more of the Cooks and Sea Cloud on the water in 2013. I hope so. 

First light in Fathom Cove

"Serious" cruising yachts (i.e. the ones with structures supporting wind generators and solar panels) have been all but invisible over summer, obscured by the armadas of gulets and charter fleets, but now they're more conspicuous. Like us they're sucking back on the last of the season. Will we meet some of these people in port over the winter? I'm curious to know other people who live aboard their boats. But we have wondered if perhaps there are fewer of us around...

Enki likes her space

People say it's been a quieter year in Turkey. Has the effective closure of the Red Sea route (because of Somalian piracy) combined with the aftershocks of the GFC and the chronic sickness of the eurozone taken the shine off the Mediterranean cruising dream? Then there's the unknown of Syria...What triggers a regional war is always more obvious after the event, but it's difficult to see what Turkey stands to gain from getting embroiled in Syria's civil war. But as you can tell, we're not exactly in the middle of things - thankfully (the Syrian border is about 600 km from here).

In these last sweet days, we have been walking a bit (we overtook the tortoise on the way down the hill from the tomb), admiring the olive crop, watching the sky, loving the gentleness of the temperature and committing to memory the colour and silkiness of the water.

Baths at Ruin Bay - Cleopatra's, they say

Looking north over Gocek bay (Skopea Limani)

The nightly thunderstorms which made us so twitchy all last week seem to have drawn back into the interior. The relief. It seems hardly believable that a month ago we were enthusing about "our first clouds". There are clouds in the sky every day now, and we're back in familiar territory, trying to read their intentions.

Full circle to Fethiye

We had to come back to Fethiye. It was where we would have started our cruising this year had we decided not to buy Enki, but rather opted for Lazy Jacques, a very attractively priced Contest 48 which was in exceptionally good nick. We flew from London into Fethiye's baking heat in June last year and spent a couple of days checking her out from top to tail (photo below).  We almost talked ourselves into her creature comforts - huge cockpit chart-plotter, copious air-conditioning, hyraulic passarelle, gorgeous cocktail cabinet  - and then we backed off. We wanted Enki's hardtop very badly. 

Just the other day, as we were sitting in Fathom Cove, watching thundery-looking clouds rolling off the mountains behind Fethiye, we were talking of that boat, and wondering if anyone had yet bought her (it's still a tough market for sellers) and if so, who. 

Our first "real" rain in four months

Now we know. In Gocek, Alex picked up the October issue of Yachting Monthly and there on p4 under the headline Chay Blyth Becomes a Cruiser! was a photo of his new sailing boat,  the very same Lazy Jacques.  Blyth, for those of you not familiar with the name, is famous as a rip, shit and bust non-stop circumnavigator, a boy racer type. He once rowed across the Atlantic with another paratrooper mate of his. A leisurely cruise around the world with his wife, one reads between the lines, is a concession to his advanced age -  he is 72.  They'll be sailing Lazy Jacques (being renamed Willy Waught) from Turkey to the Canaries next summer. They've signed up for the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) in 2013, and are then carrying on across the Pacific with the World ARC, the crowd we tried so hard to avoid in Vanuatu in 2010. Sound like a familiar route? Wonder if we'll try to avoid Sir Chay and Lady Felicity should we cross the ARC's path again,  or if we won't be able to resist the 'hey, we almost bought your boat' pick-up line.

We've also come back to Fethiye to close the Lycian circle. Fethiye is where I first heard the word Lycian. Please don't go away. I'll keep it brief. When we visited last year, we were dazzled by the small local museum's collection of archeological treasures, many of which had been recently excavated from places which we'd never heard of but which we learned were quite near to Fethiye. I remember being astonished to see Lycian coins which were minted in the 5th century BC. There was an amazing block of stone, from somewhere called Letoon, with a proclamation etched on three sides in three different languages - Greek, Persian and Lycian (photo on left). Who were these people? Since then we've made up for lost time in the ruins department, and today we revisited the museum, much wiser about things Lycian, and about why their buried cities are revealing such treasure to teams of Turkish archeologists now that they got the bit between their teeth.

Statue of a Roman emperor, excavated from Tlos in 2011

Fethiye has rock tombs too, but we took little notice of them last time. They're magnficent. Today we climbed up to the biggest of them, built in the 4th century BC by a Lycian king called Amyntas. We think the Fethiye tombs are as, or even more extraordinary than the much more popular tombs in Myra.

But don't you just love the sarcophagae scattered around the town, like this one which is a kind of traffic island?

Then there are the people, who live their lives around these tombs, and all the other paraphernalia in this town which has had more lives that its plenteous cats.

We like the open-mindedness that we've encountered in Turkey, the co-existence of Efes beer and minarets, of high heels and headscarves, of new money and old ways. There's a resilience, and an elasticity we've found here that perhaps shouldn't surprise us. Things change, but they stay the same - Fethiye is the town that was ancient Telmessos, and also Megri at one time, but was renamed after independence for Turkey's first "aviation martyr", who crashed his plane near Damascus in 1914 trying to fly from Istanbul to Cairo.  A big earthquake flattened the town in 1957, but the status symbol tomb which Amyntas built for his bodily remains in the cliffs hasn't moved, and he's still got the best view in town (the one that opens this post).