The Street of the Cold Fountain (Terry)

The Street behind the Hagia Sophia takes you back to the old days of the city. Soğukçeşme Sokağı (literally: Street of the Cold Fountain) is a small street with historic wooden houses in the Sultanahmet neighborhood, sandwiched in-between the Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Palace. The car-free zone street is named after the fountain situated at its end towards Gülhane Park.

Wikipedia has a reference

We were walking along the street looking for a Geocache placed by a friend from Istanbul.  Tricky little cache, as it's placed in an alcove right outside a unit occupied by the street’s guards.  The street is iconic – there are 10 old Ottoman style houses in it, 9 of which are owned by the Turkish version of the RAC.  The 10^th is a library owned by a Foundation set up by an Istanbul lawyer, who also donated the other 9 houses to the Touring and Automobile Club of Turkey.  (he was President, board member etc for years.)

Each house is named after a flower and has that flower planted outside it.

 

Wikipedia again

We couldn’t find the cache and gave up, walking down the street towards the bottom of the hill.  We stopped outside the library and I was reading out loud to Carol from the cache notes about the library.  Out of my view, but in Carol’s view, was a man in a window of the library.  He heard me reading and motioned to Carol to come to the door, which we did.  He invited us in to the library and gave us a private impromptu tour.  What a wonderful place to live! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were two floors that we were taken to and they are packed with reading desks and superb built-in bookcases, photos of old Istanbul and of a Greek church a little ways out of town.  He gave us old books to browse, showed us the charts and generally made us welcome in this very private environment.  His name was Zia and I can’t place the relationship to the library’s founder, Celik Gulersoy, as Mr Gulersoy never married and lived alone. 

 

Zia and Terry

I purchased a book from him on a famous Greek church in Istanbul (called, of course “Chora”) that was written by Celik Gulersoy in 1986.  He wrote many before his death in 2003. 

 

It was a wonderful experience to be able to see the library and the building’s artworks, a chance opportunity not given to many people.

 More Istanbul

 

 

Istanbul

Imagine a city that contains the whole population of Australia, concentrated on seven hills and spanning one of the world's major waterways, straddling Europe and Asia. Over the last couple of thousand years, it has been the centre of three empires, as Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul, centre of the Ottoman Empire. Apparently Istanbul has been in a state of decay and decline since the fall of the Ottomans, particularly when Ataturk decided to shift the capital to Ankara to break with the past. The writer Orhan Pamuk says the city's mood is "huzun", a kind of collective melancholy resulting from the awareness that one's days of greatness and beauty are all in the past. He says that Istanbulus cannot avoid daily contrasts between the remnants of empire and the ugly realities of the modern city. He was writing a decade ago, however, and for us the city seemed to be full of energy and life, with those glimpses of the past serving to deepen and enrich the experience of walking around the broad streets and steep narrow laneways of the city. You wander down a busy shopping street, for example, and nestled between a phone store and a boutique is a tiny old cemetery, its seven graveposts topped with stone turbans. The man with his golden shoe-shine stand, the simit seller and the sardine fishermen on the Galata Bridge have been there in some form or other for hundreds of years. Great monuments and museums, as well as bazaars, galleries, shops, gardens, restaurants and everything else you can think of, make this Turkey's social and cultural capital, even if the politicking happens in Ankara.


A popular T shirt slogan says "Istanbul: you call it chaos - we call it home". And for an outsider, particularly one from a small town, the chaos reigns supreme. Peak hour is something to behold, with buses, dolmuses, taxis, ferries, cars, bikes, pedestrians and even the odd brave horse and cart engaged in deadly combat, with sound effects. Yet it all works, and a couple of hours later a relaxed crowd is strolling the streets along the waterfront or shopping on Istiklal Street's endless pedestrian mall.


What follows is a short photo-stroll around the city, an attempt to capture some of its energy, contrasts, quirkiness and timeless beauty.

Ancient and modern Istanbul

 Spice markets

 

 Incredible treasures in the Archaeology Museum

 Blue Mosque

 

 Shopping frenzy in Istiklal Street

 

 Flower market, Taksim Square

 

 Layers of the city, overlooking the Bosphorous

 

 Ladies making manti, Turkish ravioli

 

 Beautiful Ottoman houses

 

Barbarossa Memorial

  It's all happening here.

 

 Fried sardine sandwiches, 7 TL

 

 Hagia Sophia, the Church of Heavenly Wisdom

 

 Fishing from the Galata Bridge

 

Colour in the alleyways

 

 

Classic sunset cityscape

Land Travel (Terry)

We had a very full two weeks, with:-

4 days in the chaos of Istanbul,

a trip to Eskisehir, which was supposed to be to catch a train, but our bus had a minor accident and we arrived late and missed the Ankara YHT.  We found out that it was a nice place so we stayed for 4 days to enjoy it (the town is run by an Economist, which explains why it is so nice J)

4 days in Ankara, which began badly but improved markedly once we found our way around.

6 days out to Kars and back to Ankara.

The fast train from Ankara to Istanbul (which hits 253kph but goes slow for much of the way)

Back to the Bedlam of Istanbul (an hour to go from the Asian side, 15kms from the bridge - just to the bridge!)

On the bus at the worlds craziest bus station and a 10-hour trip back to Canakkale only to find out they had cancelled our ferry and we had to wait 1 1/2 hours for the next one (the whole busload of us)

In to bed at 5.30am.


 Bayrampasa Otogar
 

 

 41° 2.409' N  28° 53.692' E  Each of the buses is an 80-seat touring bus

At the bottom, slightly left, you can see a small semicircle of buses.  These are coming out from the underground sections – there is a whole other level beneath this, with bus washing and bus cleaning, servicing, repairing.  There is the Istanbul Underground line in the middle.  This looks like a quiet day – we’ve been there 3 times and it is wall to wall buses, with the bus conductors and everyone else guiding buses in and out of their parking spots – the only acceptable communication words (to avoid any confusion) are Yes Yes Yes and Yok Yok Yok so the driver knows to keep doing what he’s doing or to stop doing what he’s doing.  Every Otogar in Turkey has a “Fat Controller”, like Thomas the Tank Engine does.  When you go to an Otogar, look like you don’t know where to go and he’ll be on you like a flash, will tell you exactly what bus you need, when it goes, tell you to go sit somewhere and when it’s ready to go, he will come and tell you.  Works well.

Blogs being prepared to detail all the above.

Troy and Gallipoli

I was a committed Pagan as a child. Anglican Sunday School was all about being nice and giving to the poor, but my religious passion was reserved for the Greek mythology that I devoured insatiably from about the age of eight. The myths and legends were like an epic soap opera – gods with awesome power and human qualities like love, jealousy, arrogance, rage, grief; gods who interfered in the human world in vengeful or whimsical ways, wrecking our best-laid plans and mocking human pride. They were great stories. My heroes were Heracles and Odysseus, my personal deity, the goddess Athena. (I think it helped that there were plenty of good roles for women in the pantheon!) A little later I read and reread Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, transported to the ‘wine-dark sea” and the “ringing plains of windy Troy”. And now here we are sailing those same seas, and visiting the ruins of that once-great wealthy city.

                                     The wooden horse from the film Troy, in Canakkale Harbour

 

Troy. Established as a real place rather than just a legend by the German entrepreneur/ archaeologist/ treasure-hunter/ thief Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s, the city is at least 9 cities built in layers on top of each other. The Troy of Homer appears to be about “Troy VII”. The hoard of treasure that Schliemann smuggled out to Germany, that he called “Priam’s Treasure” for publicity purposes, actually seems to have come from a much earlier period. Mustafa Askin, the writer of an excellent guidebook on Troy, generously describes Schliemann as having “the cunning of Odysseus” in his various dealings with Turkish authorities.  From another perspective, however, without his dedication and belief in the project, Troy might still be just an idea hovering in the no-man’s-land between myth and ancient history.

 

The site itself is not so remarkable, after the ruins of Ephesus and Pergamon. It is really not much more than lots of walls at different levels. What is really impressive is to stand at the highest point and to look over the coastal plain to the sea, and the Island of Bozcaada (Tenedos) beyond. This is what Helen would have seen as she surveyed the battle from her tower – the vast Greek fleet beached, with a gated wall and moat constructed to protect the ships (Homer tells us that Poseidon destroyed the wall once the Greeks left), the tide of battle ebbing and flowing as the Greeks pushed the Trojans back to their city gates, then the Trojans pushed them back to the ships. At the end of the siege the Greek fleet was hidden behind Tenedos as they waited for the signal from those who had penetrated the city (by means of a wooden horse or an earthquake, depending on the story you prefer).

Now you can see several large mounds out towards the water, and there is some evidence that one of these could be the funeral mound where the bones of Achilles lie, mingled with those of his beloved friend Patroclus. It is fertile farmland; that, and the strategic position as a trading point between east and west had made Troy massively wealthy – probably the real reason for the siege, rather than the retrieval of Helen, "the face that launched a thousand ships".

 

The coastal plain, with the funeral mound of Achilles (?)

Rereading The Iliad is quite a confronting experience. I think the one I read earlier must have been a children’s translation, as this one is absolutely brutal – definitely in the genre now known as “battlefield gothic” where the emphasis is on extreme violence and graphic descriptions of weaponry and wounds. Because we are also on the site of a twentieth century battlefield, the Gallipoli Peninsula, drawing comparisons and contrasts is inescapable. To me, the clearest comparison is that both wars involved the pointless sacrifice of thousands of young men for a cause that, on the invaders’ side at least, had little to do with them. Then there is the idiocy of command, from Agamemnon’s imperious offence to Achilles, to the criminal waste of life at the battle of the Nek. Then the consequences of both battles: the Trojan War defined “Greece” as an empire and led to the foundation of Rome (in legend, at least, Priam’s son Aeneas flees the burning city and founds a new settlement in Italy.) In 1915, the Gallipoli campaign gave a sense of nationhood to the ANZAC countries and, under the inspired leadership of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, saw the birth of modern Turkey. There are contrasts too, beyond the obvious one that the home side lost the first war and won the second. Homer lovingly describes the armour, weapons and physical attributes of each warrior – the golden horsehair plume of Achilles’ helmet, the fearsome stature of Ajax Telemon, Hector’s famous ringing battle-cry, how their swords and shields were fashioned, the deeds of their fathers and their sponsoring gods. No such testimonials for what Wilfred Owen described as “those who die as cattle”. The mass slaughter of WWI is horrifying and dehumanising.

 

Lone Pine memorial

 



Anzac Cove

 

 



We toured the Gallipoli Peninsula with Crowded House, who offer a well-organised operation and knowledgeable guides. No matter how much you’ve read, how many films and documentaries you’ve seen, it is still an emotional experience to stand on the beach at Anzac Cove, to step the few short metres between the Allied and Turkish trenches at The Nek, to imagine the thousands dead in a day in the small field at Lone Pine, to read the gravestones and feel a world of loss in the simple inscriptions. There were three young guys from Melbourne with us on the tour, all in their mid- twenties. It was sobering to think that 100 years ago, Ryan, David and Jase would have been in uniform, and probably only one of them would have made it home to Australia.

 

 

 

 

Babakkale (Terry)

Where are we?  We are on the Western-most point of the Asian continent!!

 

Too right we are.  We are in the harbour of Babakkale, a remote village in Canakkale Province of Western Turkey.  There’s not a lot here.  However, the town council does go to the trouble of issuing certificates stating that you (insert name) are at the westernmost point of the Asian continent and standing on the shores of the Aegean (Ege in Turkish).  This was extremely exciting for us so we pushed the envelope and walked out along the harbour wall to the western-est point of the breakwater we could find, which is part way around a bend.  (the island of Bozcaada is more west but is not mainland).

On the dock in Babakkale

As little as this town has to offer in terms of luxuries, what it does have in spades is that extremely comforting Turkish hospitality.  We arrived here in rising winds, concerned about the layout and possibilities for secure berthing.  As we were manoeuvring around this very modern but sparse fishing harbour, a chappy with a limp did his best to hurry over to an alongside spot and motion us to come over.  Can’t pass up an opportunity like that so over we went.  He took our lines and we secured.  He wandered away and came back with his receipt book and told us it was TL30 per day.  That’s $15 AUD.  Excellent deal and we were good friends immediately.

We checked out the castle (open 24/7, no locked doors) and the sad small cemetery below the walls for the mariners from here who have lost their lives at sea.  Wandered about town a little, scaring the living daylights out of several residents who exited their houses to the sight of a very large long-haired westerner and a very blonde pretty lady.

We went for dinner up to the first of 3 hotel restaurants on the right of the street up from the harbour and had a satisfying meal.

 

The Octopus

We were convinced by the owner that the octopus was good.  And the Calamari.  And the fish.  And the salad.   So, being tired, hungry and glad of a safe haven, we splurged.  The octopus was indeed good.  Grilled, soft and full of flavour.  The squid was imported but still quite nice.  The fish were the small red mullet you get all over here and came from one of the boats we are tied up near.  The salad was wonderful.  Carol couldn’t resist a small bottle of Shiraz and I wanted my usual 500ml Efes.  Total was a bit higher than usual, $62, but it was a wonderful meal in pleasant surroundings overlooking the harbour and over to the Greek island of Lesbos, some 10 miles away.  It was worth 41 years of hard slog, tension, stress and drama to be able to look out from a place nobody has ever heard of and realise that we could do whatever we wanted to and go wherever fancy took us, albeit at 5 nautical miles per hour.  But it is the westernmost point of an entire continent and we did feel a little special standing out on the breakwater.   I have contacted a Geocaching friend in Istanbul and he’s going to put an Earthcache here (a type of Geocache), one in the Castle and one up in Apollon Smintheon.

The entrance to Babakale Harbour

In the morning, we got on the dolmus to Canakkale.   We were told the bus left at 7:50 but we wandered up at 7:30 to see the brake lights on and the engine running.  Off we went through tiny village after tiny village for the next 2 ½ hours until we got to the Canakkale Otogar.  We could have exited earlier but we had no clue where we were.  Then into town and a wander about this very large city, which is the base for almost all ANZAC tours and also for tours of Troy.  There is even an ANZAC house hotel/pension.

Our main mission was twofold.  1, check out the marina.  Met a very large Turkish marina manager who said sure, come on up, there’s space.  Nice man.   TL1400 for a month’s stay = AUD$700, or under $180 a week.  Walk 50 metres to any number of great seafront restaurants.  A good place to visit the battlefields, Troy and maybe the Black Sea coast. We’re in.

Second was to return yet another dead Kindle.  Carol kills these things with overuse.  I think they are using her as a crash-test dummy.  When she contacted Amazon help, the dude said it was actually just out of warranty but it would seem that as she singlehandedly supports half the authors on Kindle’s list, they decided to replace her out-of-warranty dead one with an upgraded Kindle Touch!!  You can tell who’s their favourite girl. We couldn’t find the UPS office we had to use so we asked in a business if they knew.  The lady thought she knew and then her husband came out and said that they used to be around here but they moved over to the airport.  He rang them to confirm it.  Then he insisted that we get in his car and he drove us over to the new location.  He is a retired Biology teacher who has travelled widely in his lifetime and now works for his two sons – they are engineers and have built a magnificent block of apartments and he sort of runs the office for them while they are being sold off. Once again, Turkish generosity from every stranger you meet.

Day #3 we got on the Dolmus to Assos.  Old, old city.  The ruler of Assos liked to have nice things around so he invited Aristotle to come and stay, and Aristotle did.  The city is very high up, which discourages plunder.  We thought the return bus was due at 6:40 but were not at all sure so we wandered down at 5 just in case.  Turns out it arrived at 7:10.  We sat in the bus stand with an old Turkish dude who was convinced we could speak Turkish, so he kept up a conversation with us.  He sat there all the time we waited but we assume he left when we did.  It’s a fair bet that he wanders down the hill from Assos every day just to sit in the bus stop to watch all the action.  And there’s action a-plenty at this bus stop.  Most cars don’t know where they’re going, because we’re in the back blocks.  So they stop in the middle of the intersection.  Then a guy with a tractor and a trailer comes along and he has to stop.  He blows his horn, so the lost guy in the car takes this as an invitation and gets out to go ask the tractor guy, who must be a local, how to go somewhere.  The old guy in the bus stop finds this endlessly amusing and keeps up quite a banter about it.  He was most taken with an old lady who was not on the normal bus with the other ladies as she tried to flag down car after car without success.  He chuckled away at every attempt.

The Rock at the entrance to Assos

 

Next day, we went to the town of Gulpinar, to the site of Apollon Smintheon, or Apollo, God of Mice (or rats if you prefer).  Apollo can save you from the mice or he can send you a plague of them, depending on the occasion.  Homer's Iliad actually begins here in this obscure place - but more of that  in a later post. This is a wonderful site, full of interesting ruins and fruit and nut trees all over, plus  green grass and running water.  There was a road that has begun to be excavated that ran 30km from Smintheon to Alexandria Troia.  Yes, Troy is just 30km away.

 

Temple of Apollo, Smintheon, Gulpinar

 

 

The Baths, Smintheon

The day after, we went again to Gulpinar to get some supplies (Babakale is a little light on for shopping) and had lunch in the Hektor Restaurant.  The man who owns this has spent something like 40 years working on the historic site – it’s a sort of community effort in Gulpinar – and has old photos of him and his tractor moving huge marbles and friezes around and off to the museum.  He has a superb book on the site, but it’s in Turkish so we could only look at the pictures. 
 

The Hektor Restaurant with Oral Uysal

Exiting the harbour was easy – no wind and no swell and off we went to the beautiful holiday island of Bozcaada, where we arrived safe and sound at around 11am, tied up on the harbour wall and settled in.

 

On the harbor wall, Bozcaada

 

 

Our kind of town

 

Ayvalik, Pergamon and Alibey

 Waterfront warehouses, now restaurants, Ayvalik Harbour

 

A great lunch for a couple of dollars

Settled comfortably in Ayvalik Marina, we gave Common Sense and ourselves a good wash down, and stocked up on essential stuff. Our first day in town was market day, and it was humming. There didn't seem to be a central market area, just stalls, kiosks and mats on the ground wherever a space could be found to display produce or handcrafts. In season right now - apricots, peaches and cherries, ripened on the tree and with about 500% of the flavour of supermarket fruit at home. In the warren of cobbled streets we found a great little Locantasi (I think that's the word for a home-style restaurant where you have whatever they are cooking that day) and a nice café/antique store in one of the old stone houses. Ayvalik is an interesting town. Behind the busy harbour and touristy waterfront, narrow cobbled streets and stone buildings suggest that this was a Greek town before the population exchange of 1923. Many of the buildings are derelict, including a number of big olive oil factories, but others have been cleverly renovated as cafes, shops and boutique hotels. We used the wonderful Turkish transport system to visit a couple of attractions:


Pergamon

Trajan Temple at the top of Pergamon

The ruins of Pergamon crown a hill 275 metres high, with vertigo-inducing views of the town and farmlands below. Famous as the home of Galen, one of the celebrated medicos of ancient Greece, Pergamon was a noted Asklepion (a kind of hospital/ health spa/ temple - the Trojan hero Aeneas was supposedly transported here by Aphrodite to be healed of his wounds) as well as a centre for the arts. After a dolmus ride to the town centre, we took a taxi up to the top of the hill and walked down through its various buildings. It is quite a contrast to the gleaming white marble of Ephesus, being built in huge solid blocks of dark stone. The slender white columns of the temple of Emperor Trajan stand in vivid contrast at the top of the site. Most spectacular is the theatre, where 10,000 people could be seated in the steepest theatre in existence - you can't help wondering how many patrons suffered cardiac arrests on their journey to the cheap seats up the back. Some beautiful artworks are preserved in the Pergamon Museum, but unfortunately it is in Berlin.

View from the cheap seats

Alibey

          Patisserie in Alibey
Named after a notable local war hero, this little island is joined to the town by a causeway and a regular ferry service. It is essentially a crumbling old Greek village, mostly built of attractive pink Andesite, a volcanic stone. There is a large disused church and the remains of an older basilica, and a lovely old restored windmill at the highest point on the island. The harbour is pretty and well protected, with some nice cafes and patisseries serving the local tourist trade. Terry found a couple of geocaches, which I believe took him over the 200 mark.



Andesite stone

Departing from Ayvalik early in the morning, we actually managed a good brisk SAIL to Behrem Kale (Ancient Assos) but once again we couldn't be confident the anchor was holding and we headed on a few miles to Sivrice. Next was a short hop to Babakkale, where we found good shelter from the howling northerly that blew in and kept us pinned to the dock for four days.

Eski Foca to Ayvalik: anchors and jellyfish

 

Setting off from Sarpdere

 



Our overnighter from Sarpdere to Eski Foca, our first night at sea for the season, was quite pleasant. We set off at sunset and had enough wind to get a couple of extra knots from the sails. It was quite a scenic trip with the lights glittering from the hills on the Greek island of Khios just a few miles across the strait.  The channel between Greece and Turkey is quite narrow and we had some hairy moments getting squeezed between a 200 metre cruise liner going one way and a 195 metre freighter going the other way with us in the middle.  At 2am.  Terry said they were lucky they didn't hit us or there would have been hell to pay .

 We arrived in the attractive harbour of Eski Foca and scouted around for an anchorage, but once again we were plagued with a failure to dig in. The bottom in most places seemed to be rocky with thick seagrass and we tried both styles of anchor (Manson and Danforth) without success. Finally we headed over to look more closely at the town dock (which appeared to be full) and a couple of blokes guided us into a berth which they said we could sit in until 4pm, when its usual occupant would return from a day sail. We have found the Turkish people to be unfailingly helpful and kind – they love to help you solve a problem! (Problem ? Problem yok!) Well at least we could fill up with water, buy some provisions and have a rest – we were flagging fast and I was just so thankful not to have to drop and pull in that *!# anchor one more time.

Eski (old) Foca  (that's 'foe-cha') was the home of the ancient Phocians who were famous seafarers referred to in Homer’s Iliad. It is a fishing town and a tourist resort for Turks from the big cities of Ismir and Istanbul – and everything is much cheaper than the resorts that target foreigners. There are some interesting ruins here, but unfortunately we were on a limited time schedule and didn’t have a chance to explore. After a good rest it was off with the lines and up with the anchor (pausing to disentangle it from someone’s mooring line) and off to Tatilkoyu a couple of miles to the north. We set anchor easily in lovely mud and enjoyed the sight of dozens of Hobie Cats, sailboards and sailing dinghies flitting around the huge bay. A comfortable night? Not really – the anchor dragged again with a wind change and we had to do it all again at 2am.

Anchors! They’re giving us hell at the moment, refusing to set, refusing to hold. We take our time and do it right, but I think the seabed must be a bit rocky and unfriendly in these parts. Wherever possible I dive in and check if it’s holding, but you can’t do that in low visibility or bad conditions. And now, as we tried to set off in the morning, the Danforth came up with about half an acre of mud, rock and seagrass attached, which no amount of dunking would dislodge. Bit by bit we cleared it with hands and boathooks. The wind was strong from the north, so it was a hard but uneventful beat up to Bademli Limani.

 

 



     Bademli Limani

This is a very sheltered little harbour, now pretty much silted up so that only small fishing boats have access. Fishing is its reason for being – there is not much here apart from working boats and tough old fishermen mending their nets – but it is a safe anchorage and quite scenic. I swam over to greet the only other cruisers there, and of course they were Aussies, David and Jenny from Sydney aboard Windjammer III. Terry and I managed to locate the only (fish) restaurant where we enjoyed an excellent meal overlooking the shoals and an abandoned yacht, transformed into a reflection pool in the moonlight. A wander around the dusty little village next day, then off early in the morning for the 20 mile hop to Ayvalik.

 

Passing the island of Alibey, entrance to Ayvalik 'lake'

When you enter the enclosed bay of Ayvalik through a narrow channel, the vivid blue of the Mediterranean slowly changes to jade green. The seagrass is lush, fish leap: the water in this bay, known as “the lake”, is biological, full of life. And then you pass a bubble of bright Med blue against the green. Then another … and another. Then one the size of a basketball! Brilliant blue jellyfish surround the boat, their bells hemispherical and glossy, frilly skirts hiding a spray of short tentacles. These are barrel jellies, Rhizostoma pulmo. They are prolific here in the sheltered bay and they really do look like fragments of Mediterranean blue that have strayed into foreign waters. They can grow to the size of a dustbin, apparently. Like slow-beating hearts they make their way purposefully in one direction or another, seeking richer blooms of plankton, perhaps. They are beautiful, like dancing glass, but we take a break from swimming of the boat.

Rhizostoma pulmo

We anchored first in the south easternmost bay, accessed through a very narrow channel, and spent two days dug in firmly for a change.  We dinghied ashore a couple of times, and even went to the far end of the bay to a wrecked twin engine plane that almost made it to the water to land but came up about 50' short.  Of course, there is a Geocache inside it and Terry just had to get it.

Once again, we were alongside Windjammer III with David and Jenny and had a pleasant drinks evening on board their very comfortable Hunter 46. 

The next two days forecast strong north-easterlies, the start of the dreaded Melteme again, so we will head into Ayvalik Setur Marina for fuel, food, water, waste pump-out, hot showers and a safe haven for a couple of days.  We will use the time to visit the ancient city of Pergamon and also the island of Alibey, which we passed on our way in to Ayvalik.

 

Marina bar, Ayvalik