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.

How we remember...

Back home now, it's the tail-end of Anzac Day. The morning will have been filled with patriotism and marchers. By early afternoon the booze will have kicked in. If we were in our house, we'd be hearing a roar surging from the pub crowd watching two-up in the Sackville pub's driveway. And all this because of what happened in Turkey.

I had the oddest experience a couple of days ago. I was walking along a shopping street towards the main square in Marmaris, vaguely heading for the arts and cultural centre which I meant to visit before we leave the marina in a few days. I knew it was a public holiday, Children's Day, whatever that meant. Sounded a bit saccharine to me, like Valentine's Day or Mother's Day. Ahead of me I could see the square. It was packed, and someone was addressing the crowd from a stage rigged up the day before. Better walk around it, I thought. I'd seen children dressed up in their new clothes, with their parents, and flags and balloons....

Then the speech stopped, and music came over the speakers. I had a delayed reaction, my mind elsewhere as usual. Then I heard it. The Last Post. Everyone around me was frozen in place by the lone trumpet, arms hung down by their sides, looking straight ahead, blankly, in respectful silence, like soldiers on parade, except they were citizens scattered on a footpath and standing up from their seats at cafes. Young women, children, men, everyone was still, and attentive. I was still among them. Then what I presume is the Turkish national anthem started up, and they all sang. It was very different from back home. You could feel the pride, but it was as much private as communal.

I decided not to walk around the square but through it, and I stayed a while, watching the children on stage - everyone there had a child, and I felt very conspicuous alone, so obviously a foreigner, photographing the tiny tots. But I stayed anyway.

I've just looked it up. April 23 is the day the first Grand National Congress opened in Ankara in 1920, at the beginning of the War of Independence. Because Ataturk - or Mustafa Kemal as he still was then - dedicated the new Turkish republic to children, Turks celebrate April 23 as Children's Day as well as National Sovereignty Day. Apparently in Ankara children are given the run of parliament for the day. They "govern" the country - a nice thought.

In Marmaris, they were dolled up, some had their faces painted, and in the square, troupes of little stars came onto the stage to perform for the cameras and crowd. A couple of small boys in dark suits and bow ties did the Gangnam Style dance, and the family crowd went wild, clapping and dancing along.

Further down the road, by the water, Ataturk's statue was festooned with flowers like a school Flower Day competition entry. It was very Turkish. And a million miles from the tragedy of Anzac Day.

Turkish works

Sinemaya gitmeyi seviyorum

In Marmaris, where the movie offering this winter has been very pedestrian, I can't imagine a situation where I'd want to say, as above, "I like to go to the cinema". But the excitement of being able to construct a sentence with a noun, a preposition and two verbs is...almost better than being afloat. And being afloat again after five days in the yard is pretty damn good.

View from the back deck

She's got a big belly to cover in anti-foul

New letterhead

Alex and Mehmet - overseers

The best thing about hauling out is re-launching. Nobody likes being on the hard, even if the work done there is done well, as ours has been. Mehmet Guven (above) and his wife Seval turned it around efficiently and pleasantly. See that shine, watch Enki go.

Hussein's polishing rag is a wad of kapok

Shiny boats, like shiny cars, go faster - they say

But back to speaking (or rather, learning) Turkish.
Our friend Agnes, who speaks five languages well, claims you need 50 words to get by. When in Portugal, you pull out your 50 words of Portuguese, when in Greece, your 50 words of Greek etc. If you speak English, you're way ahead because English is not only the language of the sea but it's also the language of the internet (there's also Google Translate to get you out of a serious linguistic hole, as we discovered in Sicily). So why bother with the fiendish twists and turns of Turkish grammar?

I don't know. Because it's fun? Now, when I go to the market, I can mostly make myself understood, give or take the occasional blank look. Bir tane taze sogan lutfen - one bunch of spring onions, please. How's that? It's much harder to understand what's said to me, but I've learned to say tekrar lutfen (please repeat). I get a buzz out of recognising written words and that's happening more and more.

Language reveals itself in stages, but there are breakthrough moments. This morning was one of those. Zehra, who isn't a teacher but one of us, a boater and a Turk (those two are not often one and the same), decided that the time had come to introduce us to verbs. Not just a few useful phrases which include verbs - like "I don't understand Turkish" and "Do you speak English?"-  but a cluster of common verbs in their infinitive forms. You can do so much more in Turkish with an infinitive at hand, it turns out.

Yapin! (please do it - from the verb yakmak, to do)

I'm not saying it's easy, but Turkish has its own logic, and when you get the logic, then the language becomes seductive. The scattergun approach of the tourist phrase book is completely useless to me. I can't hold onto random words.  If you give them to me in their barest form, like roses pruned right back to their root stock, I start to see how words grow and blossom into the extravagant forms that constitute conversational Turkish.

Sogak bira icmeyi seviyorum

"I love to drink cold beer."

That sentence definitely has a future once the unstable weather of April has passed through.

Sicak kuzu ve beyaz pilav yemeyi seviyorum

"I like to eat warm lamb and spiced rice".

I've been playing around in the galley, using a cookbook called Secrets of the Turkish Kitchen, written by an Englishwoman called Angie Mitchell Sunkur who, I believe, is married to a Turk and lives in Bodrum. A couple of nights ago I made her lamb shanks and spring greens recipe (Terbiyeli kuzu kapama). The shanks are cooked on top of the stove (I used the pressure cooker) in a broth and covered with lots of spring onions, lettuce leaves and other spring greens (I used beetroot leaves), garlic and dill.

Alex wasn't convinced by the lamb, but then he has bad childhood memories of boiled mutton. I enjoyed everything - kuzu, pilav ve fava.

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.