Day Cruise from Koycegiz

---

---

We woke up early so we could get to our next destination, Koycegiz, early since we had a day cruise booked to a beach island. It was only about an hour and a half drive to there, so we all were excited not to spend too much time on the bus for once!
We got to the hotel, hopped out of the bus, and walked over to the boat and hopped on. The boat was a nice size with lots of seats and tables, and there weren’t too many people on the boat which was nice! We set sail immediately after boarding and all of us settled in. As we were driving along the views of the mountains were just incredible and the water was so blue! Fatih sat down next to me and started reading one of the labels from someone’s drink. He said he needed to get his pronunciation better, so I pulled out my Jodi Picoult book and he started reading to me and I would correct him when he pronounced something wrong. He knows a lot of English but he has learned it all from school and University as he has never visited or lived in an English speaking country, his main problems are v’s and w’s and he switches them up. So instead of “visiting this next site” its “wisitng this next site” the funniest is when he was talking about the last tour group and he singled out one American guy and he said what sounded like “he was a eunuch person” we all started laughing and we all told him that what he really meant to say was “unique.” So now we tease him about it, but he is a really good sport and teases us back as well.
After our pronunciation lesson (Fatih pointed out several times how difficult our language is with words like except and accept, etc.). He got a pen and paper and gave me a Turkish lesson! I can now kind of hold my own in a small talk conversation! I had never seen these words I had been learning spelled out, so it was really interesting to see how my English speaking brain spelled them vs the real Turkish spelling. Fatih laughed when I described some of their letters as “the s with the tail, the c with the tail, and the g with the hat” but hey, it got the point across. We also learned that there isn’t a song for the Turkish alphabet! But Hassan and Fatih both knew the English alphabet song and it was cute to hear them sing it.
The boat stopped in the middle of nowhere on very calm beautiful blue waters and it was time for swimming! We anchored and then we all jumped off the back of the boat! It reminded me of the Blue Cruise my family took when I was 5 when we were in Turkey, it was such a good time jumping off the boat and swimming that I still have great memoires of it.
We all swam around for a bit then it was back on the boat to reach our next destination, the mud baths! We docked and walked into the outdoor mud pit and it reeked! Everyone looked so silly as they were all walking around covered in mud. We made our way over to the pool and try our best to gather up some mud, we aren’t very experienced in this sort of thing and we reckon we got all the bad mud with rocks in it as we were having trouble covering ourselves. But we managed to do an alright job. Once we were covered we went back to Fatih and he took our pictures since there wasn’t any way we could touch anything of any importance to us without getting it covered in mud.
The protocol was to let the mud dry before washing it off, but it was really starting to itch (are you sure we used the right mud? . . .) and we had to get back to the boat, so we went to wash off before we were totally dry.
The wash off area was a giant outdoor shower that had pvc pipes running in rows and had holes poked every so often in them, and one main nozzle to shut them on and off for each row. So we all picked a stream of water and got to work getting the stuff off, (FYL it’s not easy to get mud out from the crevices of your bikini in front of everyone, but we all managed to get it done without flashing anybody . . . too much)
Then it was back on the boat for lunch (yum! Which they barbequed right on the boat for us) and then drive to the beach. On the way to the beach we stopped and saw two wild sea turtles playing in the water! It was one of the coolest things to see up close! The staff said we were lucky because they don’t see them that often.
The beach was nice, with soft black sand, but other than that nothing to write home about. One of the cooler things we saw on the way was stone tomb carvings in the side of the mountain. I don’t know how the people get up there and carve it all out, but they looked amazing!
We drove back to the mainland and checked into the hotel, and to my surprise the shower didn’t have any walls or ledges or anything! It just sprayed directly onto the toilet and had a drain in the corner of the bathroom; it was an interesting shower experience, only in Turkey!
We then all just lounged around Turkish style on the cushions on this raised platform with a short table in the middle; those of us with netbooks brought them out and we all had fun looking up YouTube videos of thing we had seen in our travels. Bex was talking about a festival in England where you chase after a wheel of cheese down a really steep slope. We brought it up on YouTube and it was crazy! Alas we were all really tired and were in bed by 9:30, but luckily we could sleep a little as we didn’t have an early start the next morning.
B

---

Photos

I am helping Fatih with his pronounciation with some reading time
Good old Jodi Picoult, I tried to trip him up with having him read the word "psyche" :)