Follow that boat!

We are delighted to be wintering over in Kemer. We mentioned earlier that our first two weeks were pretty much all work, a steady diet of trouble-shooting and repair, but starting the first of November we ran out of urgent tasks and settled into enjoying the good weather and the good company that typify this place.

The marina at Kemer is unique in our experience. It is set up to accommodate about 100 yachts. Winter residents hail mostly from the EC (plus Switzerland). There are seven American boats here, including one from Marion MA, the town next to Mattapoisett (Horizons’s hailing port). There are at least thirty British-Australian-Canadian boats, so, as they say back in the States, Se Habla Ingles.

All that English being spoken creates a severe impediment to our learning a word or two of Turkish, so the marina provides twice-weekly Turkish language classes taught by members of the staff. The focus is on the nuts and bolts of conversation, and we have already made some progress in the area of Bonjour, Merci and so forth. We know some of our numbers, plus right and left.
We can go to the market, and when we ask for carrots, they sell us carrots.

All our linguistic accomplishments are hard-won. The word order in Turkish is subject-object-verb and all sorts of tiny syllables are tacked onto (and squeezed into) the basic word so as to indicate time, person, number, mood, manner and so forth. But the vowel in the tiny syllable probably has to be modified to be harmonious with the verb root—the basic uh needs to become ee or ah or oo, and the strange thing is that we guess right most of the time.

So grammar’s a trial—what about vocabulary? The same: there are very few cognates, since Turkish is not an Indo-European language. The good news is that thanks to Attaturk Turkish uses the Roman alphabet and spelling and pronunciation track perfectly.
The other good news is at least we’re not trying to learn Chinese at the same time.

When we are not learning Turkish, we are exercising. The cruisers take responsibility for the programs at the marina, so there is an aerobics class 2 or 3 times per week, yoga once a week, and best of all, each Sunday one of the boats guides us on a walk in the beautiful countryside.

(The last sentence, taken literally, evokes a truly startling image. “One of the boats” is meant in the figurative sense of “the cruisers who live on one of the boats,” of course. Although I like the idea of a gang of people following 16 tons of ambulatory sailing yacht up hill and down dale in the rock-strewn piney woods of Antalya province. Yeah, right, that’s how we spend our Sundays!)

These hikes are usually around 6-8 km and usually up a mountain to enjoy the view. If the hike is strenuous we only have aerobics two times the following week. (Sometimes we pretend that we have grown accustomed to the metric system.)

Another reason for exercise: the food here in Turkey is very good and we need to do something energetic to allow more calories in the diet. There is a market once a week where it is possible to buy the most beautiful vegetables we have seen, perhaps in our lives. The market is only once a week because the grocery stores want competition from the farmers kept to a minimum.
So Monday is market day, and we stop at the very modern new grocery to buy our meat at the same time. We had been used to eating pork everywhere else in the Med, since the beef was not to our like. Here there is no pork, but the beef is quite good. At least once a week, the Navigator, the restaurant at the marina, puts on a special dinner. Last night’s spit roasted lamb in honor of St. Nicholas’ Night, was outstanding. (St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, was born within a hundred miles of Kemer and spent most of his career on the Dalmatian coast not so far away.)

We have done a bit of touring since arriving in Turkey, including a three day trip to Cappadocia, which we did early in November, before snow closed the mountain passes. Cappadocia is east and north in the Anatolian plain and is a full day’s drive from Antalya.

It is an eerie landscape of hollowed hills and valleys. During the period 400—800 AD, people carved homes and whole villages into the soft native rock. Largely but not completely abandoned, these empty dwellings (and churches) are a fantastic place to visit. Our very inexpensive tour included obligatory stops at a pottery, a stonecutter, and surprise! a carpet producer, but the crafts were very beautiful and authentic. The price for the tour was low because the government partially subsidizes the tours that visit those businesses.

Many of the best sights have been free. A Sunday walk in the Chimera took us past the place where Bellerophon slew the Chimera and the beast fell to earth, where the flames of his breath still come to the surface. (Real flames coming out of real holes in the rock. Mythical beast Chimera of course not real.) That same walk featured Mt. Olympus on one side and the Med on the other before it ended at a trout farm, where we had lunch. A recent walk took us to Termessos, where Alexander the Great decided, upon seeing the city, that it was really too defensible and so didn’t actually need to be conquered.

The long part of that walk was about 14 km down hill through brush. We opted for the gentler 9 km walk through brush. This week we are going to walk to see a waterfall and local village.

Finally, in obvious support of Laurie’s thought that sometimes the gods do smile, last week we prepared for the evil task of finding and fixing the short circuit lurking in the 110V AC side.
(The problem circuit was the one powering the air conditioner, which in winter we count on for heat, using its reverse cycle feature. All summer long we reliably tripped the shore power breakers on the whole dock whenever we turned the a/c on.)

We pulled everything out of the lazarette and then turned on the a/c while Jack sat in the laz to watch. Nothing bad happened.
We could not recreate the fault. The shore power stayed on.
The generator, which also had been acting up, ran smoothly when we switched to that source of power. The boat had healed itself, twice!

So we spent the rest of the day cleaning the laz and now that evil task is done also.

Marina staff in Rome told us that we would not like Turkey—it rains all the time. It turns out that this corner of the Antalyan Gulf has so far been protected from the rain sweeping through Europe. The last two weeks have seen low humidity, bright sunshine and daytime highs in the upper 60’s. Nights are quite cool, but we are comfortable with the little heater on the boat. This may be the perfect place to winter.
Lest you think it is just all exercise, parties and organized fun here, there is a serious side. Once a week we take a bus into Antalya to the symphony. The Antalya State Symphony Orchestra may be the best symphony orchestra in the world for which the tickets for a center front row of seats cost 6 New Turkish Lira each, or about $4.50. The programs are exciting, the soloists and guest conductors outstanding, and the musicians all appear to be under 30 years old. Because the tickets are so cheap, the audience which is primarily not cruisers, is also young.
Maybe symphony in the US is only the province of the old because it is so expensive. Anyway, we enjoy getting some kulchah, and we certainly need it.

We are planning a very quick trip back to the States for Christmas, so it is unlikely that we will see many of you, but as ever, we wish you the very best of the Season and prosperity in the New Year.

(Through the miracles of the internet and Kodak Gallery, if you would like to see a few pictures of our travels in Turkey, just send a reply back and we will invite you to see a few pictures.)