Turkey

Our passage from Ashkelon to Turkey confirmed the nickname for this sea: "Motorterranean" as we had to motor all but 6 hours of a 3-day trip. It was easy but expensive in terms of diesel, which in these parts costs maybe $8/gal and up.

We decided to skip Cyprus for a variety of reasons. Our main problem is lack of time to spend in the Med. We decided time in Turkey would be better spent and we needed some parts and repairs after months spent in the Red Sea. One season in the Med after beating up the Red Sea is a grueling and single minded march to the Atlantic.

Here we see El Tubbo parked in the marina at Antalya. Fuel is not the only thing that's expensive: our 2 day visit here cost about $400(!!), which is way out of our affordability range. Note to selves: avoid marinas in the Med. But, we got checked-in (easy) and phone and Internet SIMs, which worked great.

One thing that surprised us here was that it seemed every boat in the marina had a US flag. We thought, how great to have this pocket of fellow Americans in these distant shores! Wrong. All the yachties spoke Russian or Turkish. The Russians often had kids born in the US (free everything!), but the Turks seemed to be simple tax cheats. All the boats hailed from Wilmington, Delaware - hundreds of them. It seems that the US has become a flag of convenience, like Liberia or Panama. Feel the pride. Your tax dollars at work. The American flagged boat alongside Amante "had a small beezness in California". Too small to talk about.

As you can see, the scenery in this part of Turkey is spectacular, with sheer mountains plunging into the Med.

Even more spectacular is Mt Olympus.

This is the ancient city of Phesalis. No, we hadn't heard of it either.

OK class, what is this? That's right, it's the remnants of a hypocaust, the Roman way to heat a floor & room, usually in a bathhouse.

The old theater, with the admiral for scale.

The ancient harbor, complete with breakwater.

Roman vintage aqueduct.

The admiral can get anyone to perform, as these locals demonstrate their juice-squeezing machismo.

Next up, the gorgeous harbor of Cinavez Limani.

The anchorage is in the shadow of the mighty Musa Dagi (Mount Moses), made famous in the historical novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the story of Armenians bravely and desperately holding out here against a Turkish army dedicated to slaughtering them.

What's this? It's a malevolent cloud that formed in our anchorage at Cavus Limani. Once it started to pour over the mountain ridge it created gale-force gusts that finally forced us back to the shelter of Musa Dagi.

We haven't shared a rise or set in awhile - this is a rise.

This is our anchorage in Gokkaya Limani, a stunning fiord-like series of islands west of Finike. The latter has a marina but for us now it's "A euro saved is a euro earned"! Anyway, this view beats any marina, anytime. There were a plethora of multi million dollar motor and sail yachts plying the anchorages. But as one friend pointed out, no matter what kind of boat you have, when you stick your head out of the cockpit we all have the same view!

On a less idyllic note, we visited the town known as Kaya Koy (stone village in Turkish), a ghostly testament to the ethnic cleansing of Turkey in the early 1920s. The population of this Greek village was swapped for Turks living in Thrace. Apparently, the Turks didn't want to move into this Greek town of 2,000 inhabitants and it became a ghost town. Overhearing the various tour guides it was astonishing to hear the propaganda and cultural Marxism deployed on unsuspecting tourists. There never was any ethnic cleansing and the Greeks voluntarily moved on. Such is the not so subtle change of History. A lesson to be learned today for America as she stands on the brink of deconstruction.

Here's the church seen on the middle of the picture above. Note the mosaics in the foreground.

What's left of the interior. It's hard not to imagine the weddings, funerals and other minutiae of daily Greek life played out in this center of village life, all abandoned in about 1922. All the frescos and saints and icons were removed and demolished.

This is from another church and is slightly better preserved, complete with iconostasis that retains some of its fading icons as well as remnants of the pulpit on the right-hand side.

We anchored in the bay seen at the base of the mountain in order to visit the ancient city of Caunos. We had to take a river boat up to see it because like many ancient cities on this coast, it has become landlocked due to heavy sedimentation by the river/estuary that made it a great harbor.

As you can see, the ancient harbor is now a swamp some miles inland.

The old theater (every city had one).

A Byzantine church.

A temple to Zeus built over the harbor and agora (forum).

More impressive than Caunos itself are the much older Lycian tombs carved into the sides of the cliffs behind the town. Here a telephoto lens was used. we were unable to climb to the top since several tourists had succumbed to various injuries such as broken limbs. The government's rules allowed eager historians to ply the ancient sights from the water. This entailed a modest fee via a packed tourist barge snaking up river.

For those folks who couldn't afford a full-blown temple, there were simple holes cut into the rock.

This is what's left of the ancient city of Knidos, with temples to the left and theater to the right. We pulled into the anchorage and decided there wasn't much there there and didn't even stop. By now we've seen many, many ruins and have become picky. But, it's one of the few on this stretch of the coast that still is waterfront property.

By now we are anxious to get to Greece, but we wanted to see Ephesus. On our way to the town closest to that ancient city, we stopped at Port St Paul, an anchorage used by Paul on his way to Ephesus. This is sunrise.

This Soviet/nazi-style statue is in Kusadasi, the town near Ephesus. You probably wouldn't recognize the guy in the middle unless you'd spent time in Turkey, but it's Mustafa Kemal, aka Ataturk. He might be regarded as similar to George Washington, but it runs much deeper. He is revered like Lenin/Stalin in Soviet days or the King of Thailand. Every shop has his picture. His face is everywhere. We have no idea what the current Islamist regime in Turkey will do with Ataturk-worship. (The sign is a famous Ataturk quote, "Peace at Home, Peace in the World".).

This has been sort of a whirlwind tour of Turkey. We actually spent over a month here but many anchorages were repetitive and the nobody would care to see pictures of the marina in Marmaris. We do have separate pages for Istanbul and Ephesus, so please peruse them. It took at least a week to take the time to adventure in Istanbul. Well worth the detour.

If you still have the stamina (we get tired, too), please join us as we conquer Greece!

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