It is still the morning after our thirty-hour day of easterly travel, breakfasting with Helen Mirren on the balcony of the Escape after various small swims before the eventual venture [somewhat ill-advised though with an excellent map provided by the management] down to town…

Which started out nicely enough but soon deteriorated [for those afoot] into a rocky descent beside a major motorway to the not exactly scenic outskirts…

All was, however, redeemed by what was arguably one of the best meals of the trip; seafood by the sea side with amazing local mezze -seaweeds and pickled local “grasses”- unlike any subsequently encountered, and many were.  The calimari and shrimps and…well.  We had a look out at the harbor, wondering if our ship had come in [it hadn’t] wandered wanting coffee, and all agreed a taxi was the best way back up to dinner on the loggia…very fine as well.

Saturday was spent mostly idling around the pool and after a lavish little lunch we were eventually picked up by our “transfer” [as it’s called in the trade] to the boat, a 110 foot gulet out of Fetiye called the “Kayan 11”

Once there we settled in to our cabins, met the three other guests already aboard, and awaited the six yet to come, who arrived around dusk, also settled in, and then all joined together with our two guides for an enjoyable dinner of many courses, replete with wine and introductory conversations…the group seemed to be preponderantly from banking and finance, with an architect and pathologist from Australia and some philanthropists mixed in; this doesn’t quite cover the range of interests completely, but along with Heinrich, the archaeologist and Ugur, our Turkish guide and facilitator extraordinaire I will eschew further detail except to say that among us were now several serious boat people, whose presence I, as a novice [or, really, non] sailor found particularly enjoyable in the week ahead.

Night, as is its wont, fell, and we slept at the mooring, surrounded by boats, in the harbor of Gocek.

Sunday morning the diesels fired up before dawn; we motored to a secluded cove nearby for breakfast and, surprising myself, a little recreational swim [this was so easy to get used to that even L. embraced the custom quite early on] waking up long-forgotten muscles in water too buoyant and temperate to resist…

We cruised again, an hour or so east to moor off the extremely tourisitic beach of Ovacik for yet more swimming and, ah, a lunch of many choices before being ferried in to said tourisitic beach…

…to intersect a van which drove us through the town and up an alarmingly precipitous switchback road. We were dropped at the base of a trail allegedly in the town [a town I failed to see] of Faralya, from there to take the rocky steamy path up through woodlands with unfamiliar spiny plants, traverse some ridges [with a refreshing tea stop at a bee keeper’s shanty]…

…and descend, equally radically, to Kabak, another tiny cliff-hanging village, for pomegranate juice overlooking the sea.  Though L. and I walk several hours every day in the mountains of Colorado to call this  a “walk” seemed to partake a bit of that famous British understatement, being, at least in the up and down parts, rather extreme…almost, dare I say, a “hike”? But lovely, though the air and the far views were a bit steamy.

[NOT the site of the pomegranate juice]

In Kabak we rejoined the van for a sunset ride back to the boat…which deserves, to my mind, a post of its own.

M