Advertisement
Published: August 9th 2008
Edit Blog Post
So then we got on the gulet, which is apparently the name of the type of boat in the picture. It has two masts, but nowadays it is pretty much exclusively sailed under diesel power. We slept on the gulet for three nights. On the first night we slept on the highest deck and had a really good view of the Milky Way. The next night the captain said we'd be going over open sea from 5 to 9 in the morning, and it would be reasonably calm. Luckily we intuited that the crew's idea of reasonably calm and ours might differ, and we chose to sleep on one of the lowest open deck (its way to hot to sleep in the actual cabins). Reasonably calm did in fact involve a great deal of pitching, but I found that by closing my eyes and visualizing the oval or parabolic trajectory that my stomach was following, I didn't get seasick and actually slept pretty well.
We sailed for a few hours each day, to get from bay to bay. In between there was a lot of swimming and some occasional going in to town. One town, called Kas, we bought raw
almonds and Jershon got a nice leather-bound joural (however, it was so hot that we were glad to get back on board and jump in the water. At another stop, Jershon and I climbed up to the top of St. Nicholas Island (yes, that St. Nick), which has alot of Mediterranean scrub vegetation, no fresh water, and the ruins of 3 small churches. Unfortunately my camera battery decided to give out just as we reached the top. It would have been a pretty top-of-the-hill hiking picture.
(Right now we're in Istanbul, and I'm sitting on a rooftop terrace at our hostel. The last prayer call for the day has just started. We can hear it first from the huge Sultan Ahmet mosque up the hill, then about 20 seconds later the small neighborhood mosque down the street starts, and we hear that much more clearly. If I could bring 2 things back from Turkey, it would be rooftop terraces and prayer calls.)
The best thing about the gulet was that there were 11 of us tourists plus 18 vacationing Turks, so we got to know people. Silmarien especially made the rounds and made a lot of friends, in
particular a young woman named Pinar who has a degree for teaching English and is managing a clothing shop in Istanbul. She taught Silmarien a children's song (about a bird who flies in the window in winter to warm up) and helped me with Turkish and braided Silmarien's hair. I told her she needs to quit her job and get a teaching job -- she was very good at it! Also Jershon played volleyball with a bunch of the men, and 8 games of backgammon with one of the Turks. (Backgammon is very popular here -- maybe its a Turkish game?)
The worst thing about the gulet was being on it for 3.5 days. I don't think we're cruise people. Silmarien loved the swimming, but the rest of us got a little bored, and when we got off the gulet it was too hot (over 100 degrees) to do anything but wish we were back in teh water. I read 2 books -- one trashy novel by Danielle Steele about some poor woman who was a world-class photojournalist but scared to offend her husband by working after she had kids (yeah, it didn't make a lot of sense), and
one sort of interesting book about a year in the life of an Egyptian peasant. They were both in English, from the ship's library. Art read some short-story murder mysteries. Jershon read his sci-fi short story collection. Silmarien finished off 2 Boxcar children books.
Oh yeah, and I have to explain the pancakes (gozleme). During the day, small boats come to sell you food -- mainly ice cream, but once this couple came selling pancakes. The woman rolled out the dough until it was almost paper thin (probably 1/16th inch). She does it by rolling the dough around the stick, then unrolling it and giving it a bit of a turn, and rolling again. Then the man spreads on toppings, folds it in half, and pushes the edges shut. He puts it on a big flat grill for about 20 seconds, flips it, and folds it over a couple of times, and its done. We had sugar, but you can also get chocolate, or cheese and olives, or about 10 other flavors. I asked if I could take a picture, and the man stood up
Karen.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.167s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 49; dbt: 0.1312s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb