I realized I forgot one funny tradition from my last section. As we were approaching the city of Pumakkale, our tour guide told us to look at all the house chimney`s as we drove through one town. “What do you see”, he asked? I said that I see a lot of coke bottles and asked him why? He said the families put up a coke bottle to signify the daughter is ready to marry and then men can start to court the daughter. We noticed there was a size difference in the bottles, and he explained that the bigger the bottle, the more of an emergency it is for the daughter to marry faster. If the daughter is really old (meaning over 20 years old), then she needs to marry fast and the family puts up a large coke bottle. I also noticed some of the bottles were upside down, which he explained meant the daughter is not a virgin and this would be a 2nd marriage. Interesting as this one town is the only place in Turkey that he knows that still uses this traditional to advertise marriage. I asked what this meant if the daughter was older, say 32 like me. He said she would be staying with her family forever. So if this was true for me, I guess I`d be moving back in with dad after my trip! Is my room ready???
So now onto the 4 day Mediterranean cruise called “Blue Cruise”. Our goal was a nice relaxing time sailing between towns and being able to hop off the boat a lot to swim. Overall, I`m glad we did the cruise and there good parts to it, but we had quite the adventure and some bad luck along the way…
We should have known bad times were ahead when the travel agent that booked this for us in Istanbul sent in the wrong date to the yatching company. They had us leaving a day later than we planned which wasn`t really ok since we had flights booked already based on the day we should have finished. All in all, after 2 hours of discussion with the travel agent and him then talking with the boat company, Milena and I were able to sail as planned on August 5th. We found out as we were getting ready to shower and pack up our room and the boat company came in and said they got us a spot on the boat…come now! So we hurried and get in the van but then had to sit in the yatchings office for 3 hours since our boat wasn`t there yet (or was broken…we don`t know which.)
So once on the boat, we met a fun group of passengers including 6 Australians (Lisa, Luke, Erin, Jared, Katie and Craig) that had met earlier on another tour in Turkey, 2 sets of Koreans (siblings Ser Jin & Kim and friends Min & Jin), 1 English girl (Helaine) and then Milena and me. Nice and fun people. So off we sailed stopping for lunch and our first swim which really meant – jump off the boat and hang out in the water as it was so salty it was easy to float. Now I`m not one to get sea sick, but the rough waters we had after lunch made our entire boat feel awful, and I didn`t feel too good. I had a lot of sea sick pills, just in case, and passed them out to a few people in need. No one got sick, which was good, but Helaine was the closest but she made it through.
That fist night we parked in a cove and were able to swim more. That was the night we kicked off “The Great Noodle Races”. We had these foam noodles that help you float, and decided to create rules to how you must use and hold the noodles and then swim in a race. It was quite a fun time, and other boats were looking at us and laughing. That is a time you wish you had a video camera. I took second place in the first noodle competition, but that was as high as I placed. It was a very competitive and strong swimming group (mostly the Australians that were all great swimmers). After the races, we all swam more, and a great surprise was a giant sea turtle cruising by underwater, so I grabbed a snorkel mask and swam along with him for a while. It was really amazing as I saw him grab for a fish against a rock and then watched as he swallowed the whole thing and it went down his throat. Very cool!
As we were parked in the cove, the locals were coming up in little motor boats trying to sell everything from crepes (that were made right there on their boat), an ice-cream boat came up (made me think of the old ice cream trucks that went up and down our streets as kids), and even a guy on a jet ski asking if we wanted to take a ride.
On our boat, we all had a cabin and bathroom to use, but it really was just where we stored our stuff and changed, as we slept on the top of the boat under the stars each night which was nice. Well until the sun came up at 6 in the morning and then the heat came at 7am and we were so hot it was time to get up and go for a swim. But we knew we could nap later on if we were tired.
The 2nd day we sailed for a long time and eventually got to a port town of Kas. Now we thought we would stop here for an hour or two to visit the town, we didn`t realize we would be staying all day (and then return the next day for more). We were a little bummed as we couldn`t really jump out and swim as the water was dirty but we did a little shopping in town and used the Internet so made the most of it. Two people on our boat elected to go paragliding so we got to watch them land right by our boat. If you were to ask me, not the safest place to land as there wasn`t much of a landing and the space was surrounded by boats and a wall. We were told we would leave at 5pm, but we didn`t and at 6pm we were trying to leave, but the boat wasn`t really working. It finally took an hour and many people from other boats to get us out of the port, but we were off at 7pm and were sailing to our next cove for the night (and more noodles races). At this point, we realized there was something wrong with our boat and a man from town came out to try to fix it. We didn`t know what it was then, but later found out it was the motor to raise the anchor. So this man tried to fix the boat until 2am, but guess he didn`t as we had to be towed back to Kas the next day, and this is after all the guys on our boat had to lift the anchor up. I think it was a total of 10 men that were needed to pull it up. They wouldn`t let the women help that were on board. Milena and I were off swimming so we couldn`t help. As we were swimming, we noticed the boat was moving away from us so we started to swim back and the boat kept moving. They knew we were out so they wouldn`t leave, but we knew we had to keep swimming to catch up to the boat. It was a long way back, but we made it.
So our 3rd day was spent in the Kas Harbor and it was this time that I discovered I had some major credit card fraud. I tried to purchased a ticket to Kenya and was declined, and I was declined a few days earlier buying a ticket to Tel Aviv, but I figured it had to do with the “verified by Visa” screen which is new and doesn`t always work. After logging into my credit card online, I saw 6 large charges for $6,800, $6,500, $3,300, $2,000 and a couple thousand more. All in all it was over $20,000. I didn`t recognize any of the purchases, but noticed it started on July 31, which was the day after Colin left, the day Milena arrived and I purchased my tour package for the rest of Turkey. Since that tour package was the only place I used my credit card, I wonder if someone in that company did this. Neither Colin or Milena had any problems with their credit cards. Regardless, I was able to call my credit card company, cancel the card, have them remove those charges from my bill, and issue a new credit card to be sent to me in my next city in Turkey. Very frustrating, but so be it. I know what to do and took care of it quickly.
When we were ready to finally leave the port town at 5pm, as the boat was fixed, we heard a loud thud…and then within a minute we heard sirens. Right across the U shaped harbor from us (where our boat was parked the day before), a para glider must have crashed down – really hard. We don`t know if they crashed on the cement landing or into a boat, but it wasn`t a good looking scene and both people were carried away on stretchers. As we looking into the sky, there were 4 more gliders that were about to land, and I can`t imagine what there were thinking if they saw this…not a comforting sight. Makes me glad I don`t have any interest in paragliding or if I did, it would be over a beach or something — not a busy harbor.
So the rest of our cruise was very fast as the crew tried to cram in all the places we should have seen. The coolest was this old pirate cave that we could swim into the last day.
All in all, a fun time but with all the problems we had, it could have been much better. I would definitely suggest others to do this cruise and hope they don`t have as bad of luck as we did. Now our entire boat was upset as we paid a lot of money for this and we were all going to talk to our travel companies to see about some sort of refund. Milena and I called our travel guy the 2nd day we were stuck in Kas so he was aware of it. But when we finally got to the last city of Olympos, where is this an office for the yatching company, we realized we are not in Kansas anymore. Milena and I were shocked at the lack of responsibility the yachting company took and it really was a game of “he said she said”. The boat claims we were only broken for 6 hours, yet it was over 24 and we didn`t get to sail or take the cruise we paid for. They just didn`t want to admit they didn`t uphold the terms and conditions as they listed clearly in the brochures. They should have sent a replacement boat for us, but didn`t. After talking to them, and then talking to the owner of the whole company, the owner Ali was screaming at us on the phone and told me “cars break, planes, break and things happen”. There is no way he understands customer service nor cares. I realized we could talk to our travel agent, and he was reasonable before and if he didn`t help or do anything it was better to just let it go. I didn`t want to waste anymore time on this issue as the yatching company didn`t care and knows it won`t effect their business as we would leave soon. (He said he would refund us 25% himself and see if he could get more from the company after I wrote him an email with all the problems). So we`ll see what happens. Milena is going to go see him when she returns to Istanbul this week.
So after all this, I had two days to enjoy the city of Olympos. Best way I could describe it is a laid back hippy town. There are no ATM`s in town and everyone lives in tree houses. Kinda brings you back to your childhood. So tree house living, great food (as all the places include breakfast and dinner) and the days were spent at the beach. Rough life I know.
The first place we stayed in was Kadirs. This was the original tree house village of Olympos. When we got there, they said sorry, we are out of tree houses (yet we reserved that a week ago). So they upgraded us to a bungalow with our own bathroom which was nice. I had made a reservation for my second night at a different place, as I needed an address to have my credit card sent and I had no address for Kadirs nor a website to find it. So I moved to Saban Pension for my second night and was thrilled there. A nice Australian, Mike, ran the place and was looking for my credit card when it arrived. Too bad my credit card people screwed up and sent it the slower way so it would arrive the day after I left. So I had to deal with that and find a new place to have it sent in Israel. What a pain! But I loved my time at Sabon Pension as it was such a chill place and right in the middle of town. I met tons of fun people (as Milena left me that day to continue her time in Turkey). So I enjoyed relaxing for an extra day on my own.
While in Olympos, when the days were too hot to be at the beach, I came back to our place to chill, have a late lunch and watch the Olympics (in Olympos…hee hee) and finished another book. So it was a nice relaxing end to my time in Turkey.
I finished up my time in Turkey with a 15 hour overnight bus from Olympos to Istanbul, then a quick change to the metro to get to the airport and was off to Tel Aviv. I realized I had been in Turkey for 18 days, which is the longest in one country for this trip.
Now the airport experience in Istanbul was strange. There was one counter for check in for Tel Aviv and when I got to the front, I got 20 questions. Where was I going, who was I going to see, what did I pack and that was before I got to the counter. Then lots of special security tags were put on my bag. Finally when I went through security to board the plane, they spent a lot of time looking at my passport, asking how long I would be in Israel and so one. Don`t know why, but interesting. After an hour delay at the airport, I was off to Israel.