MARMARIS / FEYTHEY, TURKEY

by Dan Winters (posted by his more techy savvy daughter)

 There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud. -- Carl Sandburg

 I.  TURKEY APPETIZER

We are finishing up our weeks abroad with 10 days in Turkey. It's the finale, so we don't want to blow it. We decided to prepare: a fellow traveler suggested "some musts" at the border.

“Try Turkish Amphetamine” – So we drank Turkish Coffee, you know the blackish sludge in the dainty looking tiny china cups, the kind your grandmother had, the ones you hold between the thumb and first finger. Well, that is all show. The Turks are all just mainlining massive toxic amounts of caffeine and sugar. The first energy drink.

Evidence of loss of comb-over

“Try Turkish Water-boarding” – I decide to get the famous Turkish Haircut. There were no warnings. First the barber Edward Scissorhanded my comb-over to oblivion. Then he slapped me around a bit. Then he got serious. The Guantanamo part began when he crammed spoonfuls of white hot wax into my ears. I know the ladies are saying, "You should try a bikini wax, girlie man." Ok, I get it, but it was agony and he charged me for it. Then he jammed more up my nose. That was just pure sadism. He finished off by slapping my head for a few more minutes and then for sport, rubbed some burning antiseptic smelling something so I could remember the pain for another two hours. The good news is that now I have nostrils and earlobes as smooth as a baby's behind, which makes me kind of a catch. P.S. Later, I got a Turkish Shave. It was much less painful, but there was a lot more blood.

saying goodbye to my money

“Exchange Real Money for the Turkish Lira” – This is no statement about the Turkish economy. It is just that no one seems to want lira. All prices are quoted in euros, British pounds, then maybe in lira. Of course, each has its own exchange rate. Three lira to the dollar, but euro and pound, who knows? When you buy something, it's a multiply choice quiz. Carol doesn't believe that math is a part of shopping, so she says screw it and just turns her wallet over to the shopkeeper. That's one way.

“Choke Down Turkish Wine” –  It has a bad rep, but it's damn good, or at least a lot better and cheaper than the BevMo ½ price swill we normally drink.

II. TURKEY SOUP

Blogger in action

We started our Turkey emersion by cruising for three days on a gulet boat between Marmaris and Feythey. There were fourteen passengers and four crew members. The boats are two-masted schooners of polished dark wood. Magnificent from afar, pretty beat up on closer look. We asked the 23 year old Turk Captain (his dad was the cook, his uncle was the navigator) if we would sail much as opposed to motoring. He said, "No, we had three sails but two broke." That will happen. The passengers were German, Swiss, Turk, Irish, Scot and Illini. There were two teens and a twelve year old.  Interestingly, the teenagers got to share cigarettes with their parents. I am not sure this is what the Pope and his crusade to solidify

the family unit have in mind. Our shipmates were all charming, funny and energetic. We ate together at a long deck table. The food was prepared in a half ass 1940's galley by a cook who looked like a hitman for the Greek mafia.  It was five stars: stuffed peppers and eggplant, string beans in fresh tomato sauce, spicy kabobs, grilled fish… amazing. The scenery was equal in quality—rugged yellow cliffs, shiny green vegetation, famous blue Aegean waters. The highlight was a side-trip we took with Tish of Cork, Ireland and Ross of Aberdeen, Scotland. We were picked up from our sailboat by a vessel that looked and sounded like Bogey's African Queen scow. First stop was a mile long sand beach famous as a nesting ground for

sea turtles. We were post hatching, the turtles safely in elementary school in the Aegean. Then the Queen sputtered though the snaky, narrow waterways of a five mile long marsh made up of supersize, clearly on steroids, mega-reeds. Ultimately, we came to the upscale resort village of Dalyan. The spanking new resorts were sprawled beneath the Lycian Rock Tombs. These ancient tombs were

sledgehammered into a cliff hundreds of feet up. There were a lot of them, maybe 20 feet high by 20 feet wide by 4 feet deep. They were like thin slices of some falling down thing you would see at the Acropolis. Behind this veneer was a hole just big enough for a casket and perhaps a few of the harem, or a wife or two? Not sure what they were into in those days. I think you ought to be able to picture these tombs exactly from that description. All four of us had the same response, "I bet Trump has one of those on order." These tombs were the ultimate wacked death selfies.    

If that wasn't enough, the trip ended at the Dalyan community mud baths. For two bucks you got to climb into a dark pond of mirky luke warm dirt soup with thirty or so strangers, grope up handfuls of slimy grey mud and smear it on a loved one. It was a second grader's dream. No it's everybody's dream—a primordial urge, part of the human DNA. Talk about bucket list.