Fethiye

Breakfast was served on the terrace. There was a good view of the harbour. I decided that I must take an evening photo from there.


Down at the jetty, there was lots of competition but only a few boats were leaving. I went with a group of Turks, and one German. He turned out to be a retired engineer from the former East Germany, possibly put out of work when Germany was reunified. He spent all his holidays in Turkey. It was his 7th time. Turkey was cheap for him for one thing. And who wouldn't want to escape central European weather. His wife didn't want to accompany him. One of the Turkish girls was of slight build and I initially took her to be a schoolgirl because of her shiny teeth braces, but she was older. She spoke German; she was working in Austria.

As you can see the area of the jetty is not very built-up. It was slightly out of the centre of Fethiye, but it's not a very big town anyway. Wouldn't you like to have a holiday home here?

The passengers are sunbathing on the deck in this shot. The sea and sky were really that colour. This isn't called the Turquoise Coast for no reason. Most of the Turkish passengers were schoolkids, the holidays had started.

This trip is called the 12 Islands Cruise. I didn't count them to check, I just marvelled at the saturated colours of the scenery we were cruising through.

Finally we reached a little cove where we were told we would pause for swimming. The Turks obviously knew the drill, they immediately dived into the amazingly clear water from the boat.

In this picture and the previous one you see a gulet. You can take multi-day cruises along the Turkish Riviera on such boats. Despite the masts, they are diesel powered, the masts are just vestiges of the ancestry of this type of schooner.

Our boat was the flat-topped variety you see in this picture.

We stopped at an island with a sand spit where the crew let passengers go ashore to climb the hill to have a view of the whole bay.

I chatted there with an English lady. Her son worked in Sydney for James Hardie.

The crew were very friendly and put on games for the passengers for the return journey. A fellow passenger and I solved the two person rope trick from what I remembered of a book on topological tricks I had read as a kid, and we were awarded a bottle of coke each.

All good things must come to an end and we put back into harbour. The cruise cost me 7.5M TL, about 30 AUD. Well worth it.

I found an incredibly cheap dinner at the Lezzet Lokantası (Tasty Restaurant) on a side street about 100m from the PTT and town centre. I paid about 0.75M TL for pilav, meat balls, potatoes, bread and ayran. There were lots of outdoor diners in the pedestrian streets. For some reason there were also many gold shops.


I returned to the hotel and watched the TV a bit before turning in. The programs were very parochial. They also repeated the same news many times: the extradition of Ağca to Turkey, the death of Assad, and the recent earthquake.